magic9mushroom
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User ID: 1103
magic9mushroom
If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me
23d ago
Far Cry 2 released in 2008 was a gameplay demo. What narrative there is, is paper thin, but what Far Cry 2 did was codify the genre of the "3D open-world action game with crafting and collectibles". Blazing the trail that games like Skyrim, the Assassin's Creed series, Batman Arkham City, Ghosts of Tsushima, and Cyberpunk 2077, would all follow.
Um, no. Skyrim isn't copying Far Cry 2; it's copying Morrowind, which came out in 2002. Like, come on, I know Arena and Daggerfall are pretty obscure (and don't fit that description), but Morrowind is pretty well-known and Skyrim's literally a sequel to it.
magic9mushroom
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25d ago
· Edited 25d ago
I'd agree with lactose tolerance and should probably have included it; skin colour isn't all that recent AIUI (I believe Native Americans are a lot more uniform with latitude than Old Worlders, for instance; I'm also not 100% sure whether Neanderthal admixture might have played a part in introducing the light-skin alleles, though certainly there's been selection before and since). @SkoomaDentist I'm not fully convinced on alcoholism resistance; there's a fair bit of evidence, enough to make me seriously consider the possibility (though I'd be mostly suspecting livers rather than brains, at least for this), but I haven't yet seen a smoking gun (have there been wide-ranging studies on Aboriginal liver function? I think you could trust universities to report that accurately).
magic9mushroom
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25d ago
· Edited 20d ago
Cracking open my hardback of "If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies" (for the first time, actually; I originally read it as a pirate PDF because of Australia getting the physical book late):
Even if you feel desperate, we caution against acts of violence and destruction. We don't think they work. Unlawful behaviour just makes it harder for the political forces trying to set up the sort of international coalition that could actually un-write our fate.
He suggested state violence, not terrorist violence, and has made that quite clear in his writings. He admits elsewhere that he would go out and be a terrorist if he thought it would actually work, but also notes that he does not think it would (in, I believe, every such mention) and that the bad PR would be counterproductive. I don't think that that constitutes culpability in terrorism. If you advocate for the reintroduction (or continuance) of the death penalty in the criminal justice system, and some fuckwit hears that and blows up the local prison, I don't think that's your fault; allowing fault to attach for something like that is BETA-MEALR-levels of safetyism.
(To be clear, I am in 100% agreement with Eliezer on this point; I have spent a long time idly considering how one could go about fixing the AI problem via terrorism, and while over the years I came up with some plans that might have an effect, I can't see any way to actually execute those plans with realistic levels of resources for a terrorist organisation.)
If they later give Ziz et al the EA equivalent of a tenured university position, or platform people that say (paraphrasing) "yeah I wouldn't do it personally but it's a good thing," so on and so forth, yes, they should be blamed.
Jack LaSota belongs behind bars for life; you'll get no argument from me. I will note that none of the Zizians' kills were actually in service of broader-Rat goals; most were of people who got in their way in some fashion (witnesses, cops), and while there were a couple with some ideological backing (both parents of one of the Zizians, and the Zizians' landlord), opposing "transphobes" and landlords is really more SJ-aligned than Rat-aligned. Hence, while there probably are some fuckwits who'll praise them, I'd expect them to mostly not be Rats on purely-banal grounds.
EDIT: Wait, I forgot. Slimepriestess defended the Zizians offing the landlord. Slimepriestess is a Rat and justified it in terms of decision theory. There's a caveat on this, which is that Slimepriestess is, itself, one of the Zizians (if apparently outside the inner circle); hence, it's not exactly uninvolved Rats/EAs praising the Zizians.
magic9mushroom
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25d ago
A massive increase in executions would certainly decrowd prisons without needing to decriminalise anything, and @Southkraut did implicitly include this via "non-prison punishments", although I'm not sure @Celestial-body-NOS would be up for that.
(Personally, I think it's at least worth considering for prison gangs, since imprisoning them apparently hasn't stopped them committing violent crimes.)
magic9mushroom
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25d ago
· Edited 25d ago
HBD is not really my area of expertise - it's questionable if it's anyone's, given the extreme political distortion of the field for at least the past two centuries - but:
I'm very sceptical of claims of recent large evolutionary changes. There's one that has definitively met the high bar, which is the terrible disease resistance of Native Americans and Australian Aboriginals due to not having plagues until colonisation (of course, this wasn't a change in them; rather, Old Worlders were massively selected for better disease resistance than the prehistoric norm).
I'm more open to claims of difference based on long timescales - the divergence of Homo sapiens sapiens within Africa (note that everyone besides sub-Saharan-Africans basically descends from one lineage of Africans that crossed into Arabia), and the hybridisation with other human subspecies (all non-Africans have about 3% Neanderthal admixture; the Austronesians of Maritime South-East Asia and Oceania have very large Denisovan admixture, sometimes over 10%; there may be some admixture from another subspecies in sub-Saharan Africans).
So from where I sit, this basically leaves only two groups with major question marks over them due to long separation and/or different subspecies makeup from most of humanity - the sub-Saharan Africans (including differences among them), and the Austronesians including Aboriginal Australians. These areas have been notoriously-far behind for most of history, so my best guess is that both of these question marks are probably negative in terms of cognition. My wild guess, if I have to give a number, would be 3-5 IQ points on average; not enough to swamp individual variation, but noticeable on population scales. As noted, though, probably some variation within Africa, and of course there are massive effects from nutrition.
Indians aren't far from being white with dark skin; the gene flow through Persia was always pretty significant. East Asians are more different, but are still basically Eurasian (there's detectable Denisovan admixture, but it's orders of magnitude smaller in China/Korea/Japan). Arabs are white except to the degree they've had recent sub-Saharan African admixture, which is usually minimal AIUI. "Hispanics" are heterogeneous; usually they're some mixture of white, Native American and sub-Saharan African, although the proportions vary drastically and many are outright missing one or two of those components. Native Americans can be treated as North Asians with shitty immune systems and don't have the question mark. Those with substantial sub-Saharan African ancestry have some portion of it (proportionally; do note, of course, that one-drop classification is a pile of shit, as generally everybody has a tiny bit of everything - the human race has never been fully sundered, and the most recent common ancestor may have lived within the span of history).
Obligatory disclaimer: I don't think slight statistical differences in cognition merit massacre or explicit discrimination in everyday life. They're still human beings, and the bell curves have massive overlap! About the only policy choice where I think my opinions are significantly influenced by this is the native birth rate vs. immigration question in First-World countries, but I should note that there are other, non-racist, reasons to prefer native-borns (native-borns get put through a better education system, and there are also cultural-continuity issues with massive importation from Third-World countries that are not secular, liberal, stable democracies, particularly with salad-bowlers around sabotaging assimilation - and in the case of the PRC, there's an outright security risk from those who've been through its education system and/or have family in Mainland China as potential hostages).
magic9mushroom
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26d ago
You don't even run into non-trans SJ busybodies about the trans issue? "Allies"?
magic9mushroom
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26d ago
· Edited 26d ago
You know, I have a very hard time believing that a heterosexual male (that is, a member of the sex responsible for a good >90% of indecent exposure arrests and unsolicited photos of their genitals sent to people they barely know) has wholly innocent reasons for inviting a female person to inspect his genitals within an hour of meeting her, even if he has maimed said genitals beyond recognition.
We could always take the Brave New World/free-love-hippie view of "the sex taboo is bad actually, sex is a fine topic of casual conversation".
(I am mostly sold on that view, although I'd like to see it studied a bit more before rolling the full system out worldwide.)
magic9mushroom
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26d ago
I didn't say that all SJ inquisitors are trans
And from a non-trans person, if someone is annoying me with their pet hobby horse, I might be free to say "Give it a rest, come on," or if that would be overly aggressive for the situation, I would at the very least only suffer a smirk and a snort if I were to roll my eyes. But with a trans person... Tag.
*scratches head*
This is what pegged my Wrong on the Internet instincts, because the people I've met on the "Tag" end of things haven't been trans.
magic9mushroom
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26d ago
Tag.
I think the category you're basically talking about is "social justice inquisitors". This is a real category, and it is not unreasonable to be angry that hostile inquisitors exist and one must (in many areas of life) hide from them to avoid massive retaliation. But not all social justice inquisitors are trans (indeed, my understanding is that most aren't), and not all transfolk are social justice inquisitors - the correlation's positive and even large, but it's not 1.
magic9mushroom
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27d ago
· Edited 27d ago
I mean, Chesterton's Fence in its original form refers to something that was put up with a purpose but whose purpose has been forgotten. Technically, that doesn't apply to things without telos, but the basic conservative principle underlying it does. The lack of greater-than-OMG-available-energy particle collisions on Earth doesn't seem to be purposeful, but I'd still recommend against ending it until one knows what will happen (doing it in space would appear safer).
The conservative principle here actually is satisfied in the case of "substantial excess of women"; male mortality from combat has reached very high levels in the past, such that there have been large female excesses without apparent issues. This is why the objection I made was a purely "it looks like the political consequences of this could be dystopian" one, because doing this with women's suffrage would translate to full political matriarchy, where values that are mostly only held by men are totally shut out of policy, and AFAIK that is unprecedented with perhaps some hunter-gatherer exceptions. I suppose the social justice movement does try its best to centre women's values, so it's kind of a prototype, but it's not a full society, and it's not exactly reassuring.
(I hate staring into this abyss.)
There's definitely been more than one human migration out of Africa, the first one ("Out of Africa I") being the source population for the Neanderthals and Denisovans (that's why sub-Saharan Africans don't have significant Neanderthal blood and why non-Austronesians don't have significant Denisovan blood: the Neanderthal hybridisation events occurred in Europe and Asia, and the Denisovan hybridisation appears to have occurred on the islands of the West Pacific). I was referring to the non-Africans' Homo sapiens sapiens forebears ("Out of Africa II"), which do seem to be singular (to be clear, there are no full-blooded Neanderthals or Denisovans anymore; all non-Africans are hybrids between those two migration waves).
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