fmaa
11mo ago
I in no way want to endorse scolds going on moral crusades, but I do think that the boobs+butt torso twist pose is stupid, and that mage is very clearly drawn in said pose.
Also, agreed on wingspan.
fmaa
2yr ago
I didn't say "lots of people", I said "basically everyone actually living in the countries involved". (including security analysts, politicians, pro-Russia people etc.)
Motteposting does have a point, though. Putin's literal words don't actually convey worry, but are also clear bullshit. Therefore more significance should be given to their negative valence, which does indicate worry.
fmaa
18d ago
Ok, I don't believe we have metaphysical free will. That in no invalidates any choices I have made so far or any choices I'll make in the future, because their importance to me has never been based in metaphysical free will, see also the litany of Gendlin. That an algorithm is deterministic doesn't make the work it does any less real or avoidable.
If you want to call this belief something else, go ahead, but then also replace all instances of "free will" in FCfromSSC's posts with that same word, because we're both talking about the same internal feeling of making choices.
fmaa
1yr ago
Does it not give you any pause that you've now likened these real and existing Canadian doctors to five fictional characters and zero real people? In fact contrasting this fictional archetype with two actual people.
fmaa
2yr ago
The problem with this narrative is that McFaul and Person omit crucial context about those statements that totally undermines the conclusion they draw from them. First, while the statements they quote make it sound as if Putin had no problem with NATO expansion, he made it very clear even at the time that he thought it was a bad idea. For instance, in the same November 2001 interview they quote, Putin also said that he didn’t think that expanding NATO “[made] any sense” because NATO had been created to deal with the threat posed by the Soviet Union and “there [was] no Soviet Union anymore”, so NATO expansion wouldn’t increase anyone’s security. Similarly, during a press conference in 2004 with Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, then Secretary General of NATO, he stated that “Russia's position toward the enlargement of NATO is well known and has not changed” and repeated his view that it wouldn’t increase anyone’s security, but strangely those statements and many others like them didn’t make it into McFaul and Person’s article.
You'd be hard pressed to find a single person in the Baltics who thinks joining NATO didn't increase their country's security. The only difference of opinion is that some soviet Russians living in the Baltics think this is a bad thing, stopping Putin from restoring their rightful place as part of the Russian Empire.
fmaa
2yr ago
The first analogy doesn't really work, the fire is entirely separate from the clown's job or attire. Whereas to a modern atheist, the christian faith (among others) is the circus, and there's no fire. Or, if the fire is some modern moral failing, any theological arguments on preventing it are like the clown, instead of breaking character and pleading for help, hoping that if he's just funny enough the people will do what he says. Whether or not you also dress up in millennia of navel gazing is secondary to that base disagreement.
fmaa
2yr ago
The linked essay is so extremely shoddy that I'm not sure who you imagine would be swayed by it, at least in your direction. And the last paragraph just reminds me of Asimov's relativity of wrong.
fmaa
2yr ago
I think the atheist/agnostic distinction (outside of models where an explicitly unknowable god has meaning) is special pleading. Denying the existence of god, unicorns, Santa, Russel's teapot and Sagan's dragon are all in the same category of statement. But only one of them is so frequently met with "well, technically, you're only saying they probably don't exist".
fmaa
2yr ago
I get that. I'm saying that the analogy doesn't work because their beliefs and theology are directly linked, unlike the fire and the circus in the analogy. Not relating to the specific theological trappings isn't the fundamental cause of not being taken seriously by nonbelievers. They might be if the analogy is to converting non-catholic christians (back) to catholicism, though.
fmaa
19d ago
The pretense is in ignoring compatibilism. The sole evidence against materialism isn't the experience of free will, which feels the same under materialism (and determinism, for that matter), it is the conscious experience and the hard problem. Which is why all the evidence that conscious experience is materially based is so interesting.
We can work mind-to-mind to communicate, teach or persuade. We cannot work mind-to-mind to read or control.
I am communicating with you right now, and from my perspective no part of this communication is based on assuming non-determinism.
And same as the last time we had this conversation, I genuinely do not care what other people did under the label of capital m Materialism before I was born. Like, you keep going on about this, both with me and other materialists in this thread (Perhaps because your conception of your own Christianity is so deeply based on you feeling like you're continuing millennia of tradition?), but this is not a motte-and-bailey on my part. I'm not trying to be part of a Movement here.
fmaa
1yr ago
Literally the single actual point anywhere in this article is that the very vague and informal metric that is Moore's law is slowing down. It doesn't even attempt arguing for the past's importance, letting alone doing a great job at it. It just lists off a series of applause lights and hopes you don't notice it never puts forth any actual arguments.
fmaa
3mo ago
That is a very generous answer to something that seems a lot more like complete gibberish. A single neural structure with known classical functions may, under their crude (the author's own words) theoretical model, produce entangled photons is the only real statement in that article. Even granting this, to go from that to neurons communicating using such photons in any way would be an absurd leap. Using the entanglement to communicate is straight up impossible.
You are also replying to someone who can't differentiate between tunneling and entanglement, so that's a strong sign of complete woo as well.
This part is confusing two entirely separate things:
The last I checked, the distance between the equator and the north pole doesn't have any reasonable relationship to my everyday life, why should I expect units of time to?
One is the need for an independently verifiable definition of your measures, these days generally based on fundamental physical constants. Instead of building your system on a prototypical example and then accumulating measurement errors outward from it. Every system needs this, and in fact your current imperial units are defined as fractions of SI units, piggybacking on the definitions work of metric.
The other is the scale of the default unit, which is completely independent from your method of definition. After deciding to base the meter on the earth's circumference the actual fraction can still be freely chosen. The meter was picked specifically as a length useful in everyday life, it's pretty much the same scale as a yard.
Again with this shit. Because humanity hasn't solved all its problems and answered all questions, it has actually stagnated for centuries. Millennia!
Natural selection is very much evidence against god that didn't exist a 1000 years ago. People used the inexplicable miracle of life as evidence for god right up until it was explicable. Of course an implication directly leads to its contrapositive, not the negation, but I'd say the negation is usually implied in a Bayesian sense. Of course, Bayes himself is a lot more recent than a 1000 years.
Every aspect of the mind that gets explained and controlled by physics and chemistry is evidence against the existence of a soul. As people learn to measure and control your every impulse and emotion by manipulating your brain, you'll continue to shift the goalposts as long as they haven't solved the hard problem. (Which religion doesn't either of course. One the most beautiful aspects of materialism is that "I don't know" is an acceptable answer where religion pretends to knowledge it doesn't have or goes for "it is unknowable", a statement with an impossible burden of proof that has been shown wrong on innumerable topics time over time.)
Edit: and mormonism and scientology among others are new evidence against Jesus being the son of god. Any new cult with nonsense supernatural claims taken just as seriously as the old ones is evidence against the old ones being true by giving more data on the patters of how such beliefs form.
fmaa
2yr ago
https://ourworldindata.org/ethnographic-and-archaeological-evidence-on-violent-deaths Proportionally less than in any previous century from violence. Or in early childhood, thanks to modern medicine. Or from starvation, thanks to industrial fertilizers. As for happiness, Ted might have had a better point if he went for the invention of agriculture. But pre-industrial agricultural society meant that the vast majority of humanity were subsistence farmers subject to frequent violence.
fmaa
7mo ago
Gifting keys to sympathetic people is free, you can just generate keys for your own game. But those don't count towards the review score. Review manipulation requires buying the game from dummy steam accounts with actual money and probably obfuscated payment methods. Which is not to say it doesn't happen, but there is a pretty clear line between marketing and probably steam tos violating review purchasing.
fmaa
7mo ago
I feel like you just keep describing systems the Steam review score already has.
It a positive/negative aggregate which only counts steam purchases (hard to game review numbers when each review requires giving money to Valve), weights the descriptive categories based on the total number of reviews, has a recent reviews subcategory to downweight early reviews.
Since it only counts paid Steam purchases, it works especially great with niche genres. The steam review percentage doesn't correspond to what fraction of people like the game, it corresponds to what fraction of people who looked at the game and thought it interesting enough to spend money on liked it. (it works less well when the game has a divisive feature that doesn't neatly cleave across genre lines, such as any game with timers getting like a -10% to the review score)
My one big issue with the steam store is not with the reviews, but that recommendations of similar games seem to weigh popularity way more than similarity. Though I don't think there's a magic fix to discoverability, there is just too games coming out for that.
fmaa
1yr ago
First, this use is entirely controlled by Gucci and is therefore served by a regular database and regular accounts on their servers, no blockchain required.
Second, I think you understate how big a problem it is that your nfts are actually completely divorced from the bags. What this use case is actually looking for are PUF (using manufacturing variance for unclonability) RFID tags in the bags, compared against a centralized Gucci database. Looking it up, they're apparently already doing RFID tags, though it's unclear what anti-cloning technology is in them.
fmaa
1yr ago
It's debatable whether quantum physics is actually contradictory with determinism, but aside from that, I don't see why randomness is any worse than determinism. Either way our actions are ultimately governed by external forces.
I think it is a fundamental misunderstanding of the materialist position to call these external forces. Your mind is the processes in your brain, these processes not violating the laws of physics doesn't make them external.
fmaa
2yr ago
Why a non-sequitur? Earlier parts of section IV show a higher steady state for asians than for whites, then they get dropped from the comparison. If they were included in this graph, it would either show that their advantage is also mostly male and asian women match white women, in which case maybe this graph says a lot more about gender than about race. Or the asian over white advantage is maintained for both genders, which would make for a much stronger anti-HBD argument. Because one of the more appealing HBD talking points imo is that by Occam's razor the black/white gap and the white/asian gap have the same basis.
fmaa
2yr ago
That's not "the same for Black girls as for the White population", it's the same for black women and white women, the white male curve is noticeably higher. And on a meta level, it's always suspicious when a paper drops categories midway through. Whatever conclusions you want to infer from this graph, they would be much firmer if it also had asians.
fmaa
2yr ago
Yes, psychedelics are consistent with the soul-radio model. Dissociatives and deliriants seem a lot more like the sort of brain damage that's evidence against it. The different consciousness part was mostly a joke.
I was going off what I remembered of Scott's review. Rereading it now, my memory of it was wrong, but it seems not very relevant to this conversation. Quoting the review,
I think he is unaware of (or avoiding) what we would call “the hard problem of consciousness”, and focusing on consciousness entirely as a sort of “global workspace” where many parts of the mind come together and have access to one another. In his theory, that didn’t happen – the mental processing happened and announced itself to the human listener as a divine voice, without the human being aware of the intermediate steps. I can see how “consciousness” is one possible term for this area, if you didn’t mind confusing a lot of people. But seriously, just say “theory of mind”.
But this thread is entirely about the hard problem.
fmaa
2yr ago
With community servers, there were plenty of cheating horror stories of a different kind - people excusing/turning a blind eye to the cheating of a popular member of the community, or people turning to cheats to keep up when they care more about the community than the game.
Though I guess they were still rare enough to be stories, instead of business of usual.
fmaa
2yr ago
I'd like to be able to say, for instance "computer, match me with someone who is a about equal to my my baseline skill level," or "computer, match me with someone who will push me to my limits" or "computer, I don't really care who I match with today."
This can achieved by having multiple accounts and switching based on your level of intensity. It is often frowned upon because it can be easily abused, of course. The computer can't really tell whether you're honest or just asking for the first one but actually planning to go all out and stomp people worse than you.
I genuinely can't tell what you mean by this, though I'm assuming it's part of your usual pretense that compatibilism doesn't exist and materialists deny the experience of free will. But how can a method of action possibly operate off an untestable assumption?
While determinism is currently unfalsifiable, we do fact have a significant amount of empirical evidence that the mind in materially embodied in the brain. But we've been over that before and, no, whatever new evidence has appeared since then will not meet your absurd standards (iirc, literally no connection between biochemical processes in the brain and observed or self-reported mindstates counts as evidence until people have fantasy story mind-control).
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