kky
1d ago
Speaking briefly on ultimata.
The primary purpose of an ultimatum is to force the listener to accept the form of the argument: A or B. The argument then splits out along lines of A-support, B-support, A-opposition, B-opposition... etc. It begs the question on whether A and B are in fact linked.
Take your PATRIOT example. The post-9/11 question is: how can we protect ourselves from future attacks? Supporters of the PATRIOT Act alleged that the only effective method was curtailing the rights of Americans. But this is not obviously the only way to protect ourselves from these kinds of attacks. Suicide terror attacks are, and were, overwhelmingly favored by a certain type of extreme Muslim on the world stage. Governments and mafia (i.e. small governments) don't really like them, as they expend valuable trained human resources on frankly trivial strategic goals. (Unless they can convince a third-party stooge to do it, like Iran.) The only time people favor suicide terror attacks is when they kinda want to die (or have their people killed) as a side effect. Consider Japan's suicide bombers. They were very clearly a statement more than a strategy. So, taking this all into account, you could theoretically solve the problem by tightening the visas you give to foreign Arabs substantially, or some other form of discrimination against the highest-risk group. In practice, I think this is what we did. There were lots of racism complaints during the Bush admin. But as far as the PATRIOT debate went, it was about the ability to spy. It's not obvious that this had any bearing on the real problem, and was instead about the ability to spy itself. Call me cynical, but I think that if there were more guys in the White House with strong prejudices against Islam, we'd have been having a different Constitutional debate, one about outlawing a certain religion.
OK. Taking a look at the feminism/fertility debate, or the environmentalism/survival debate, and so on, I believe the not-so-subtle move is that the two are necessarily linked and we must "choose." I call bullshit. Around the world, patriarchal societies still have cratering birthrates. This is easy to find information. Similarly, a ruined environment has explicit costs to human survival, as we undermine our own productive capacity through poisoning ourselves, wrecking good farmland, denuding the seas, etc etc. The existence of those binaries can only be understood as a deliberate attempt to link these unrelated topics for the purpose of controlling the debate, steering it towards one's desired outcomes.
For feminism/fertility, I think the real move is getting attention off of fertility itself. Lots and lots of women want to have kids, and yet they don't, or put it off until the numbers just go down. Why? The feminist (or anti-feminist) answer is to hide it behind the "right to choose," but it's pretty obvious in context that it's only a (colloquially) feminist choice in one direction. (Not all feminists believe this, but it's what dominates the conversation.) I suspect the real reason is a confluence of factors, mostly cultural (lower respect or understanding for the importance of reproduction) and partially material (increased life expectancy screwing with wealth movement and life stages relative to fertile windows). But as long as it's about feminism, which everyone has already made up their minds on as a matter of principle, we don't have to think about maybe changing our individual values and cultural practices to reflect this new reality. Almost the same description can be applied to environmentalism with some mad-libs substitutions.
That's why I'm so skeptical of simply accepting the frame on these things. OP, for his part, didn't actually frame any of this as an ultimatum. He was actually just negating the antecedent, showing that (for him) the presented argument was insufficient. Sure, I happen to disagree with his stance quite fervently, but reading him closely - he doesn't say that he values certain things above the survival of the species, he says he does not value the survival of the species at all, one way or another. There's no ultimatum there, Therefore, one had to be provided for him.
(As far as the OP is concerned, all I can make is a value statement: that it is ugly and sad to have nothing to recommend one's time on Earth to posterity, be one's contributions ever so humble. We are all destined to die, and pleasures are fleeting, and the march of old age makes the immediate world increasingly bitter, it behooves one to seek value in something a little more distant and external. Say, the future in which one is invested. People who do this seem in my experience to die more comfortably.)
kky
14d ago
I’m not sold by your argument. It sounds like you’re begging the question by substituting the definition of “guy who reads porn about a busty 15-year-old” and “guy who is actually attracted to 15-year-olds.” The most obvious difference is words are just words, you can write whatever number you want down, reality isn’t keeping track. So the guy is attracted to the symbol which is 15, and the signs of an actually voluptuous woman. But then you have a different class which is actually interested in minors, and that tends to be for pretty nasty reasons.
OK, leave the latter group out. The former group is interested in a symbol. Almost always this is because the symbol itself has become a fetish that substitutes for something real so as to deprive it of its reality, to make it easier to digest. How nice are her tits is a complicated question, you have to really experience them to know, there are a lot of details and maybe not all of them are as attractive as the gestalt, and it takes serious concentration to focus on the gestalt and not get distracted, especially if you don’t have much experience actually enjoying tits. How big are they is safer, and you can put a number to it. Now you can enjoy yourself.
So what about age? It could be a symbol for a lot of things. Innocence, transgression, duh. But not a carefree sexual nature. That can be easily written onto a character of any age, and indeed is, in porn. It’s sufficient in itself, it doesn’t need to be laundered through a symbol, the whole point of it is how digestible and convenient it is. (Real sex with a real woman who isn’t infinitely carefree and convenient is great, but can’t really be condensed into a marketable fantasy.) No, what I think age is a symbol for is the reader’s own early feelings about sex. When he was 15 the girls were 15, and nothing can really compare to what they made him feel. Now he’s older and doesn’t really feel the same things, and even thinking about the feelings as themselves is a little much, so he wraps it all up in a symbol that he can find arousing instead. There’s no need to consider why the unmoored sexual energy of his teens has failed to find a mooring, or what that would even mean to him, so long as he has a symbol of his own desire to focus on. 15 means bottomless libidinous desire, to him. And to the people who don’t feel the same way, they can skip to the sections about how voluptuous she is and enjoy all the same.
kky
14d ago
As far as I can tell, the major art movements of the past 50ish years are Apple minimalism and anime. I’ll openly confess that it’s not too inspiring, but both have very definite ideas about the form and purpose of art which have insinuated themselves into the overall cultural moment.
Insofar as I don’t recall many people writing on these as art movements I suppose they could be interesting.
kky
16d ago
Yeah, I think we've seen this coming down the pipe for quite some time. The main limiting factor of the tech is that it relies on IVF, which is pretty unpleasant to use (from what I've heard) compared to the natural process, and is additionally quite expensive. For that reason I expect this particular enterprise to be a very slow burn. Perhaps costs come down over time, but I suspect that reduced costs will march right along with reduced quality, and the inevitable lawsuits for implanting the wrong couple's child are going to be very culture-warry.
That said, I'm of two minds on the overall concept of human genetic manipulation, or rather of one slightly more subtle mind that doesn't take a simple yes/no.
The great advantage of genetic manipulation is that it allows us to clean out bad mutations in the absolute gentlest way possible. For instance, Jews are absolutely loaded down with genetic disease, and currently have to do pre-mating genetic testing to find out if they're at risk. Nature's tender way of keeping the rates of the most serious disorders down is to kill the child, typically in a fairly slow and painful fashion. I would understand anyone who had a recessive gene for those disorders paying to make sure that their children carried none at all, to spare them the heartbreak of having to worry about their own children. To make it more personal, my own eyes are extremely bad and I am currently slowly going blind, although surgery should ameliorate the worst of it. If I could, with a wave of my hand, ensure that my eyes die with me and do not burden my children, then I would. Who would want to saddle their children with such burdens, save that they are (as of right now) unavoidable? Natural selection is a powerful force, but it is not a kind one, and one of man's duties is to rise above the worst of nature.
(For anyone personally opposed to IVF specifically on pro-life grounds, imagine that we develop superb gene-editing technology such that it's possible to replace selected genes in a naturally implanted embryo. Very sci-fi, I know, but I hope the thought experiment explains the above sentiment.)
On the other hand, what I expect the technology to be used for is stupid, arrogant decisions about who the child shall be. This seems to be what Nucleus is trying to offer: height, weight, and even down to eye color. These traits are obviously superficial, and reflect the desire of a parent for a "better" child while only looking at the very vague surface of what that means. But, as anyone here is likely to know, random traits are randomly distributed (often on a Gaussian scale), and the more you filter your results on one axis the more you'll have to tolerate imperfections on the others. So if you filter the child on height, BMI, eye color, you'll have to make some compromises on ADHD and IQ, most likely. Compounding this is the problem that extreme outliers in a given trait are increasingly likely to be compromised in other traits (as the height starts to undermine bodily integrity, say), and so anyone who just picks out the max IQ baby is likely to have some unfortunate genetic weaknesses. Personally, I also have my money on our understanding of many of these traits being much weaker than we think, and whatever we think we're getting is not going to be what we actually want, but that's a different argument.
My central objection to this kind of picking and choosing, however, is that much of the power of natural selection comes from its inherent randomness. Without prejudice (okay, maybe with a little prejudice in sexual selection and some genetic integrity mechanisms), a candidate is randomly assembled and evaluated. Their success is purely on the merits; there is no intelligent force with an axe to grind, there is no finger on the scales. Regardless of what anyone thinks, a given set of traits and genes does or does not work, and the next generation codifies that. When we step in, we are assuming knowledge over the entire enterprise. The feedback loop gets limited to what we think we want, not what works or doesn't. You see this time and time again in any situation where human guidance is put over some kind of development or evolution without external validation, where the decisions made get increasingly fashionable and decreasingly connected with real results. The classic example is military developments during peacetime, where illusions about (say) the efficacy of the bayonet charge or static artillery or the battleship get built up year over year until the actual test of war comes and shatters them. I suspect that human self-selection of traits is going to enter this same internal cycle of arrogance. The feedback cycle for success or failure is so slow that it exceeds the lives of the people responsible for the earlier decisions, and worse yet, the evaluative capacity of later generations is going to be shaped by those earlier generations. Don't get me wrong, feedback WILL come, nature WILL reassert herself, just as she will inevitably do for our current fertility crisis, but the longer the illusions hold the uglier it's going to get for everyone. And what's at the core of it, I believe, is the human intuition that we have reduced to a science a domain that is frankly beyond our analysis. We must be humble, and recognize that the best we have is heuristics, and that going further than that is arrogant and foolish.
This problem is, of course, only compounded by the fact that doctors will be regarded as the experts on human trait selection, when in fact they are only experts on identifying gene clusters and giving vague approximations of what they do. I hope people will not confuse the two, but based on how we confuse doctors' technical expertise for moral or strategic guidance already, I don't have high hopes for the future on that count.
kky
18d ago
I mean, the obvious confounder is that the kind of person who gets involved with a serious relationship as soon as able, progresses it aggressively, and takes responsibility for the natural consequences is different from the kind of person who doesn’t. In Rome those people were required to do their military service. Now they aren’t. But I think what’s actually at the heart of what you’re asking of people is not to make different decisions, but to be different people. Failing to recognize that is the source of most unhelpful advice. If a guy who is not really in the mindset of growing up, devoting energy, and so on has a kid, he will find it very unpleasant no matter his age. An older one might enjoy it regardless.
For your points… yep, childcare matters, and I preempted your point on women. The third point seems like a personal problem more than systemic. Happy parents, from what I see, just take it easy. I sympathize with point four similarly to point one (although the younger parents I know seem to spend an awful lot of time working…), and for point 5… I mean, I hate modernity as much as the next guy, but reading through some older memoirs or cultural histories I’m struck from time to time at how familiar the life of the mind can be. If anything is different, it’s a sense of personal responsibility. Those who blame their circumstances on external forces seem to have a hard time with acting, and boy do we have a lot of explanations for external forces these days.
My own experience is a little different from yours. I’ve got one kid, and am around 30, and am very happy with the situation and want more. If there’s anything I regret, it’s that my circumstances are NOT like my (then) 40-year-old father, who was financially better-established than I am and could spend much more time and energy doing cool things with me over working. But I hope to be in a more secure situation some years from now, and at that point, who knows? Could be a pretty comfortable circumstance. On the other hand, if I’m being frank, having a kid at 20 would likely have been a disaster, most importantly for the kid. I’ve changed a lot in the past decade. Would having a kid a couple years earlier than I did have worked? Sure, but there’s definitely a limit there, as far as my own self is concerned. It was only around 25ish that I really started to become the kind of person who could enjoy being a good father.
Of course, it’s your call whether you trust a word I’m saying. I don’t blame you if not.
kky
18d ago
A lot, and I mean a lot, of men had their first child around thirty, historically speaking. Bret Devereaux:
marriage-ages for men vary quite a lot, from societies where men’s age at first marriage is in the early 20s to societies like Roman and Greece where it is in the late 20s to mid-thirties.
This did not apparently prevent those fathers raising sons who conquered the Mediterranean. Concerns about women aside, this is pretty weak sauce to serve in arguing that men must have children young.
I’m not arguing that men SHOULD have children older. But history does not support your allegations of dire consequences, and that should give you serious pause about your whole line of reasoning.
kky
19d ago
The argument from @Gaashk stands, I think. We didn’t need slaves in the northern states since the founding, in the west since the early 19th, and the south since the mid-19th. Suddenly in the late 20th we discover slavery to be a necessary institution for agricultural work that was heretofore done even by so cushy an ethnicity as the English. Construction, same deal. What has changed? Does nobody sense something wrong in the fact that the Land of the Free is suddenly regressing so far as to demand a permanent underclass? This is why I don’t trust any of the economic statements on this matter. The whole argument has no sense of history to it.
kky
19d ago
Oh, is Asahi Select an actual thing? Whoops, my mistake. The point was that an actual market share would encourage actual importing.
Anyway, I’m not sure how the “completely different” clause is expected to fly. PDO works by obsessively dividing products that are actually quite similar, such that only a few dry sparkling whites are champagne. Something on the same level of granularity would be factory-by-factory, which to be honest would be fairly interesting to have printed on every product, although I suspect that this would be ignored by most consumers if there’s anything more recognizable. Substantive difference, on the other hand, sounds like a 10-year court case with expensive expert witnesses and piddling awards. I’m not sure there’s a convenient bright line there.
Your second point, about brand raiding, I would say is more about the modern high-liquidity stock market rewarding various pump-and-dump schemes. At that point I’d wonder whether allowing shareholders to sue executives for fraud following one of these events would move the needle any, or whether you need different financing plans altogether.
kky
20d ago
How would you accomplish this, per legality? Are trademarks only to be licensed to a single point of production? Otherwise how do you tell the difference between a knock-off factory and a simple expansion of the business?
The way a trademark is supposed to work is by tying a company’s reputation to a product. If the product doesn’t meet standards, the consumer learns to distrust the trademark. In this case it sounds like Asahi made the assumption that American audiences would be satisfied with Peroni and, present company excluded, were right on the mark. If people like you become a meaningful market share, then expect Asahi Select (or whatever name) to find its way from a Pacific tanker onto your grocery store at a significant mark-up from the regular.
kky
20d ago
I wound up using the golden halberd for my entire playthrough because there simply wasn’t anything better along strength/faith lines, except possibly magma sword. To be honest, it wasn’t the most pleasant experience, especially since I got the halberd immediately on starting the game. There was no real progression from then on, outside of some buffs. So I’m not sure I’d recommend it, even though it can certainly carry you through. Jumping heavy attacks are the key, fwiw. They knock the target down fast and give you free hits. I tried a couple of ranged options but never really liked them - the damage really wasn’t there compared to melee, especially considering that you have to drain your healing for the privilege.
If you’re really having trouble, use summons. I used them for the two bosses you mentioned, then tabooed them for myself because I got both of them on the first try and felt like I was missing out, then brought them back for a couple of the later bosses when I found I wasn’t particularly enjoying the game any longer and just wanted to hit the full clear.
kky
21d ago
All of them are within about 15 miles. The farm is regular produce for bourgeois consumption.
kky
22d ago
To college degree requirements? Presumably focused assessment with demonstrable applicability to the job at hand, relatively low-level starting positions with very rapid advancement, and so on.
I’ve worked at a place like that. It was nice.
kky
22d ago
You absolutely are supposed to be stopped for a red, though, aren’t you? That’s the whole point of the yellow. It gives you time to safely stop. Under what circumstances could a light turn red without warning you? Are we positing a small-town setup with a red light camera set up to fleece outsiders with an unacceptably short yellow? I’m pretty confident that “I was going too fast/braked too late to stop at the red” would not win anyone’s favor, and “it’s illegal to enter an intersection on a red” is simply true (outside of right on red, which has nothing to do with the case at hand).
I don’t think this is nitpicking. First you’re saying yellows are a hard requirement to stop, then you’re saying reds aren’t. This is completely the opposite of my experience and understanding of the law and is utterly baffling to me. And it’s pretty germane to the top-level post here, so it’s far from isolated, it’s the whole point of your post!
What? It’s very obviously not illegal to enter an intersection with a yellow light. The light changes from green to yellow with no warning. There are situations where it is physically impossible to brake that fast. I assume you mean “when safe?” But that gives a lot of cover to the defendant.
I’m personally more familiar with the implicit law, which is that yellows are timed such that they stay on long enough for drivers going a reasonable speed to come to a complete stop while braking comfortably before it goes red. So when the light changes, you either don’t have enough time to brake comfortably and smoothly pass the yellow before it turns, have enough time to stop and do so, or break the law by either running a red or jam on the gas to get through - which is, of course, both speeding and reckless driving.
Reading the opinion, Russell was driving above the 55mph speed limit. I’ll allow that his speed was more like 70 than it was 60. He was apparently 200ish feet from the intersection when he noticed the yellow. If so, that’s on the order of 2 seconds to come to a complete stop, unless I’m doing my math wrong. 55 gives you another half second. That’s a slam on the brakes situation, not a reasonable halt. At that point, it seems like either Russell was derelict in not watching for the light until too late, or else he could not stop safely even at the posted limit when the light turned and was totally in his rights to proceed. I’m surprised this doesn’t show up in the opinion. Were they expecting him to burn rubber because it flicked yellow?
@ToaKraka ‘s summary is outright incorrect in one place, in fact, and the truth makes the situation even more redeeming for Russell. The summary says that Jasmine was stopping at the red. The opinion says that SHE WAS ENTERING THE INTERSECTION BECAUSE SHE DID NOT BELIEVE SHE COULD STOP SAFELY, and at time of the crash, was ABOUT TO ENTER THE INTERSECTION (presumably yellow at the time). So why is Russell more at fault here for entering an intersection which the plaintiff was herself entering even later? Reading the opinion, they keep talking about the plaintiff being a young mother and go into great detail on the injuries. I suspect that’s the reason, and perhaps also that they didn’t expect the ex-con who actually caused the crash to be able to pay a cent.
If I were on this jury I’d probably hang it. This looks a hell of a lot like a miscarriage of justice to me. The appeal court, I judge less strongly. They’re right to defer heavily to the jury. But putting 60% on Russell seems crazy. Splitting in reverse would make more sense. But given that the appellate opinion states that the decision hinges in part on the fact that Russell did not testify mitigating factors like whether he considered whether he could stop safely, I wonder whether this whole mess is just the product of a lawyer gap between the parties.
EDIT: spent a minute looking at car crash videos to try and gauge how fast Russell might have been traveling in order to absolutely crush the woman’s car. Assuming he was traveling at 70 and lost half of his momentum hitting the truck, he and she would have collided at a combined speed of 80mph. 55mph crashes with a stationary object are enough to start compromising the cabin. 80 is, as far as I can tell, kill you dead territory. Bringing this down to 70 would probably still be enough. So I’m not sure that the prosecution’s assertion that he must have been driving in safely holds water. But of course that’s right back to the question of whether the lawyers brought proper receipts on the basic math here. Messy stuff, honestly makes highway driving sound a lot less appealing.
kky
26d ago
Good post. Interesting to see how your perspective intersects with the other critics of LLMs, like Gary Marcus’ consistently effective methods for getting the systems to spit out absurd output.
In my own experience, the actual current value of neural network systems (and thus LLMs) is fuzzy UIs or APIs. Traditional software relies on static algorithms that expect consistent and limited data which can be transformed in highly predictable ways. They don’t handle rougher data very well. LLMs, however, can make a stab at analyzing arbitrary human input and matching it to statistically likely output. It’s thus useful for querying for things where you don’t already know the keywords - like, say, asking which combination of shell utilities will perform as you desire. As people get more used to LLMs, I predict we will see them tuned more to specialized use cases in UI and less to “general” text, and suddenly become quite profitable for a focused little industry.
LLMs will be useful as a sort of image recognition for text. Image recognition is useful! But it is not especially intelligent.
Often AI deals require a promise to spend X tokens over Y time period. It’s like promises to spend a certain amount of money on a company’s services without specifying the services to be bought. So if the buyer is under the spend count, they encourage people to use more tokens.
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