georgioz
1d ago
Sure, what they share with porn is that they are age restricted and represent health or other legal risk to customers and in general are mired with similar web of local/regional/state regulation. Similar issues exist if let's say small craft beer company wants to open webshop and searches for payment processor. Nobody wants to be on the other side of a lawsuit when kids get alcohol poisoning by buying booze with mum's credit card.
georgioz
1d ago
Porn is a huge liability as some subgenres are risky or even illegal. From relatively small things similar to other content platforms such as copyright issues but to wacky stuff like gore and bestiality to outright illegal content such as child abuse or revenge porn. There are other items that are similarly problematic be it "bath salts", gambling-like businesses, legal drugs and so forth.
Hoe_math actually has a very good chart where he describes male attractiveness for women as two dimensional matrix. The "nice guy" axis is how much resources is the guy willing to provide the "bad boy" axis is about physical attractiveness, assertiveness, dominance and confidence.
If you are ugly nerd like Aaronson, then you either literally not a person to any random woman, or if you attract attention by some lame attempt at niceness such as holding the door then you will only creep them out. It will take some grand gesture of generosity - such as a nice gift or some such - in order for a woman to suppress her disgust and keep you around in eternal friend zone. Also women do not give a shit about "success" such as solving Rubik's cube or winning MtG competition. Math and science is of similar significance. Women of course care about success such as athletic prowess, ability to exert one's will over other people such as being top salesman or politician and so forth. What matters is status, money, power and respect of other manly men and envy of other women. Math and science is good only in as much as it translates to these things. Grigori Perlman may be the most accomplished and important mathematician alive, but to any normal woman he is is nonexistent.
In a sense nerds like Aaronson are even more lame and pathetic as they feel their general niceness is supposed to humanize them in eyes of women. What they actually express is incredible lack of social awareness that they do not even understand their own deficiency and instead of being quiet in the corner and contemplating strategies of how to make themselves, they dare to creep them out. That is what I think @DaseindustriesLtd talks about.
Nicely put post, it also touches one of my findings years back that basically all this fuss about utilitarianism EA style is mostly for its aesthetics and as an intellectual pastime, but potentially dangerous if somebody takes it too seriously. Yud himself even used the concept called Adding Up to Normality, he likes to use eating babies as such an example - if your utilitarian train of thought leads you to eating babies, then stop. Except of course this begs the question of why eating babies is such a sin? Child canibalism was considered as normal in some cultures, it is not as if an angel with fiery sword shows up and stops you if you think about it. But I like this example as you have these enlightened thinkers like Harris or Pinker and others - who already have some implicit moral system - and then just use utilitarianism to rationalize it, because Christianity or Judaism is so cringe. One issue I have here is that I am not sure if three generations down the road - when this background morality of "normality" disappears - we actually won't end up eating babies as the new normal. In the end we already consider flushing unborn babies down the drain as a normal thing in order for people to enjoy nice things in life without burden of parenthood - net positive for utils, right? Eating aborted fetuses for benefits that stem cells provide for human wellbeing is not as far fetched in this context. See, we are nicely getting there eventually.
Another issue I have with rule utilitarianism is that it is often indistinguishable from deontological moral system. In general most people don't have time, inclination or intellect to deeply investigate all their moral intuitions, so they end up just following some "utilitarian rules" like Christians follow ten commandments. Donate 10% of income also called tithe to your local church Effective Altruism where priests experts know best how to use it. Always ask yourself what would Jesus Peter Singer do. There is a lot of weird stuff going on, to me it feels as if we are just reinventing the wheel all the time, because traditional thinking was so backwards and we are now much more refined and sophisticated. Heck, St. Augustin did not even know who Bayes was. And after all this innovative thinking more often than not we just find out, that as in the spirit of the saying tradition is experiment that works we end up reconstructing it, often worse and clunkier.
An act is good if it follows the rule that leads to "good" outcome. Good outcome means maximizing utility, which according to Harris is described as "maximizing human flourishing" or at least "minimizing human suffering". Am I the only one who sees it as very religious style of thinking? Maximum flourishing is literally heaven - or at least heaven on Earth - and maximum suffering is literally hell. So if you want to be a good person then act so that you will bring about heaven as opposed to hell. And this is supposed to be rule utilitarianism as opposed to Christian deontology, mind you.
If NATO, with cca what, 900 million population, GDP (ppp adjusted) maybe 4x of Russia, cannot somehow manage to have conventional forces supremacy in Eastern Europe to prevent Russia from attacking, what use is NATO?
Exactly, and Putin may put this into a test, especially to test how will let's say countries like Portugal or Italy or even Hungary or Slovakia or Finland or Romania react to the situation when their soldiers will return in cardboxes by thousands in peer-to-peer warfare. And we already see the pathetic situation we are in right now - US cannot get a bill of $60 billion passed to support Ukraine, and even that has some Israel support as well as organizational support for European theater inside. And we are still talking about 7% of US military budget and 0.2% of US GDP. And let's not forget that USA and UK actually have some obligations towards Ukraine as part of Budapest memorandum where Ukrainians gave up their nuclear arsenal in exchange for guarantees of territorial integrity from US, UK and Russia. Of course Russian word is as usual not worth the paper it was put onto and US/UK try to weasel out of it by saying it was actually "assurance" and not "guarantee". Anyways even besides that, this is still seems crazy to me - you are supposedly willing to pour trillions of dollars to build up defense against hostile power threatening NATO but you are unable to spend comparatively infinitesimal fraction of money to actually fight it? To me it seems like an invitation for Putin to test the resolve.
Plus the reality check of actual efficacy of all that GDP put into military. Fucking North Korea who is economical dwarf was able to send 3 million shells to Russia. US production is around 30,000 a month so North Korea was able to send years of production to Russia. And we are not even talking about what Russia was able to do since the war started - triple the production of artillery shells to 300,000 a month.
So why am I now hearing this defeatism ? Eastern European countries joined NATO because they were told it'd make them 'safe' against Russia ? Was that just a bluff ?
I actually see it as the opposite. The ultimate defeatism is things I reacted to such as "too many Ukrainians are dying, let's give Putin what he wants" or "don't support Ukrainians by 0.2% of GDP when they are in hot war against an actor that threatens NATO, it is too much money that can be spent on social security". So if we care about non-NATO soldiers dying and spending on level of peanunts, then how is NATO going to absorb tens of thousands of their own citizens dying or spending hundreds of billions or even trillions on potential hot war? Will it not be too tempting to again give Putin what he wants and effectively dissolve NATO as a defensive alliance? These two things are related in my eyes and I bet that those new NATO members are watching it in disbelief, they may have been hoodwinked by mushy allies. Also it is not as if this happened for the first time, Czechoslovakia could talk about that a little bit
Czechoslovakia does not exist for almost 32 years, maybe you meant Czechia? And if yes would you care to elaborate what is going on? It seems interesting to me.
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