magic9mushroom
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User ID: 1103
magic9mushroom
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1yr ago
Crap. I DGAF about AI art per se, but as someone who thinks neural nets are a suicide-pact technology, if the MSM goes full pro-AI and uses AI to boost itself we're essentially banking on a failed Skynet to save us.
magic9mushroom
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1yr ago
Because most people put in the amount of work they need to to find a space where they can talk, and no more.
If you're an SJer, you are deluged in places where you can speak your mind. Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, SpaceBattles.
If you're not an SJer, but have no particular interest in politics, then again, the deluge.
If you're interested in politics and oppose SJ, then none of those sites are open to you, because they all ban you for criticising SJ (Twitter less than average, I hear, but still somewhat). So you put in more work, find smaller spaces.
It's like the no-name-university-admissions problem: you aren't picking from the whole cohort, you're picking from Harvard's discards.
Any small space is going to get a substantial chunk of its members from the crowd that can't get into the titan sites but can get into the small space. You can pick to some degree what that differential is - allow stalking and you'll get a lot of stalkers; allow heresy and you'll get a lot of heretics. But the titans pick first, so there's an unavoidable hole where people who are (not trolls ∩ polite ∩ not stalkers ∩ not heretics ∩...) will be massively underrepresented because the titans didn't kick them out.
You can get a somewhat-better representation on any one issue by loosening up the tolerances on other issues - if you allow stalkers and allow anti-SJers, then you'll get large populations of SJW stalkers, anti-SJ non-stalkers, and anti-SJ stalkers (giving less bias on each issue than if you'd only allowed that issue). But this cure does, of course, come with its own downsides.
(I didn't use the word "left-wing" here because it really mostly is SJ the cultural phenomenon that's being filtered on; I don't see people being kicked off Twitter because they want lower taxes, and non-SJ left views do get kicked off.)
magic9mushroom
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1yr ago
There are equivalents to the sort of shady content you note in the more-radicalised SJ circles (i.e. small boards, not the giant social media platforms). I haven't seen obvious "shoot this specific guy please" stuff, but that's a level beyond anything you've mentioned.
I think your last sentence is only partially correct, but my impression from the rules list (I'm new here) is that I shouldn't really go into it outside the CW thread.
magic9mushroom
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1yr ago
· Edited 1yr ago
I would like all posts criticising progressivism to be required to start from the sincere premise that the progressive actors are acting with the earnestly held belief that they are making the world a better place, and for any subsequent argumentation that rejects this idea to be required to explicitly demonstrate it. Far too many posts here are along the lines of 'as we all know, the woke progressive left are trying to force their ideology down our throats and the throats of our children to achieve cultural hegemony, and here's the new way that they're doing it'.
I think your first sentence and the quote in your second sentence are not actually mutually exclusive and significantly coexist. "Conservatives as Moral Mutants" (https://thingofthings.wordpress.com/2018/06/25/conservatives-as-moral-mutants/) is probably the most obvious example I know of both descriptions being 100% true.
I'd certainly agree with "the core SJ movement >99.9% believes SJ is good and conservatism is evil" (this is slightly weaker than your statement to address a couple of boring loopholes; I'll post about those in the CW thread). I just think you picked a bad example of a statement that ignores this.
Edit: Elaboration is here https://www.themotte.org/post/56/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/5640?context=8#context
magic9mushroom
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1yr ago
Footnote to post here https://www.themotte.org/post/53/the-motte-and-the-future/5620?context=8#context
I believe that "the progressive actors are acting with the earnestly held belief that they are making the world a better place" is more true than false, but because of a couple of edge cases I prefer the weaker "the core SJ movement >99.9% believes SJ is good and conservatism is evil". This felt off-topic there and is long-ish (it could be shortened, but only by abandoning my motte) so I'm putting it here.
Edge case 1: There exists a minority of SJers who like dunking on people enough and believe conservatives are evil enough that they will adopt a hostile approach to conservatives even when this is net-negative for the SJ movement. This is separate from SJers who honestly believe that being hostile and censorious is the most effective way to advance the movement's goals; those people (a majority of SJers TTBOMK) do believe they are making the world a better place. Obviously, this is not especially unique to SJ (any moralistic ideology will attract these sorts) and this definitely is a relatively-small minority, but I'm a pedant.
[Citation: I have a tab open of a forum discussion in which I told someone that a non-hostile approach would be better at converting people and he replied "Yeah, but on the other hand, fuck 'em". He honestly believes SJ is good and conservatism is evil, but he is acting in a way that he admits is suboptimal for making a better world due to spite.]
Edge case 2: There are non-SJers who say or do SJ things because they are incentivised to do so in some way by SJers. These people by definition do not believe that saying/doing SJ things makes the world a better place, or that SJ is good and conservatives are evil, but they are not core members of SJ. Again, not unique to SJ (this is almost definitionally true of any powerful paradigm) but I'm a pedant.
[Citation: I turned down being a dorm RA at my university (a paid role insofar as RAs are not charged rent, and a role I was already somewhat fulfilling unpaid because our dorm had no RA) because I would have been required to recite SJ ideology to my dorm. I can imagine that another non-SJer less committed to honesty than I might have taken the job.]
magic9mushroom
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1yr ago
There is also at least one person who wanted to join theMotte for years but wasn't willing to break his "no large social media platforms" rule over it. Hi!
magic9mushroom
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1yr ago
(I am a noob and have no idea whether this is Motte-specific, Reddit-specific, or something else, though I've not seen it in SSC/ACX/ACX comments.)
What does AAQC mean?
magic9mushroom
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1yr ago
· Edited 1yr ago
I generally agree with your first and second paragraphs. The context is in the link; the first quote is from Atomised.
I used to be an SJer and hang out in an SJ space; I remember believing parts of the orthodoxy (some of which I have since renounced) and other people there seemed to believe all of it. While I agree that SJ denies the Principle of Charity, I think of this mostly as an ultimately-self-destructive mistake that we shouldn't follow SJ into making rather than a defection by SJ that we should return in kind.
I am not sure which Darwin you refer to.
magic9mushroom
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1yr ago
I won't go into a full recitation of why I think this of these specific people, but I guess what I'm trying to point at is that there's a breed of SJer that's more motivated by fairness/cheating (bad people should be punished) than by care/harm (make a paradise). Fairness/cheating is a conservative value in Haidt's six-foundation scheme, but The Righteous Mind's research predates SJ and I've seen it hypothesized that SJ is a six-foundation ideology (unlike liberalism proper).
I agree it's kind of a technicality that I don't count "punish the evil people" as "trying to make a better world".
magic9mushroom
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1yr ago
Conservatives aren't actually my ingroup. I've swung a long way, but not quite that far; I'm still a lot closer to libertarian than tradcon.
I also did say "conservatism" rather than "conservatives".
Fair point, though; I should probably have said "bad" rather than "evil".
magic9mushroom
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1yr ago
I think it's more useful to truthfully think someone's sincere than to falsely think she's a liar either for the purposes of predicting her or for the purposes of convincing her. I'm ex-SJ myself; it is possible to talk some of these people out of it (SSC was a big chunk of it in my case). But, like I mentioned above, you need to understand where someone's coming from to do that.
magic9mushroom
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1yr ago
And by the way, why is reason "cold"?
In terms of etymology, I believe it's because when you're physiologically aroused (sympathetic nervous system, fight-or-flight) increased bloodflow to the extremities makes your skin warmer - "hot-blooded".
To do something "cold-blooded", therefore, is to do it outside a crisis, with time for forethought - "cold-blooded murder", for instance.
magic9mushroom
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1yr ago
Bangladesh is probably going to mostly go underwater around 2400 or so, but that's super "not a real year". A lot of it's going to get (more) flood-prone before then, though (the vast majority of Bangladesh is near-zero elevation; it's basically a giant river delta).
There are a few island nations with ~0 elevation which are going to cease to exist; they're rather upset about this.
Some coastal cities are going to need dikes/storm walls that didn't have them already. Some of them are probably going to ignore doing this, with predictable consequences.
Russia/Canada are going to become more habitable and the Arctic Ocean more relevant for commerce.
Some ecological issues, mostly stuff in the Arctic like "polar bears might go extinct". Less in the Antarctic because East Antarctica isn't melting any time soon. Nothing particularly vital for humans, though.
Not a whole lot else IIRC. If you live in the First World, there's nothing super-catastrophic in terms of personal consequences unless you live at low elevation in cyclone (a.k.a. hurricane) country and you are in the aforementioned "no storm wall" category.
Still worth doing some cheap stuff (solar is getting damned cheap these days, and nuclear's always great if you can bulldoze past the NIMBYs) to mitigate the required spending on adaptation, but it's not going to be DOOM.
magic9mushroom
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1yr ago
Note that those are per-year, not per-lifetime risk of suicide. The 2016 numbers per-lifetime sum to something like 1%.
magic9mushroom
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1yr ago
If you're on SSRIs it's not unusual.
magic9mushroom
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1yr ago
I don't really think romance comedies/novelw or whatever are "women's equivalent to porn" and I find that a curious analogy.
With movies, the argument being made is that women want relationships and men want sex. It's a stereotype, but one with some grounding.
Romance novels... in addition to the above, they're full of actual sex scenes. They are literally erotic material, just in a text rather than video medium.
magic9mushroom
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1yr ago
WAIS is significant but not enough for DOOM. That's why I mentioned the dikes/stormwalls.
The only tipping point AFAIK that's actually a potentially-big deal is the clathrate gun. I know about the Gulf Stream, but cooling Europe down is not actually the end of the world. We're not going to wind up like Venus absent somebody spending trillions of dollars on manufacturing fluorinated gases and dumping them into the atmosphere (and, well, come on, even if literal doomsday cultists were to somehow get access to >MbS-money the rest-of-world would notice and stop them; this isn't something you can do stealthily like brewing up smallpox).
magic9mushroom
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1yr ago
I'm flattered by being quoted.
I think the Douglas paper doesn't even go far enough in criticising pure procreative beneficence; there's a real possibility of it leading to societal implosion via "mean chickens" if done on a large scale (https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/KE8wPzGiX5QPotyS8/conjuring-an-evolution-to-serve-you) - presumably by advantaging social-climbing behaviour and what Zvi calls "maze nature". Obviously, "this will literally cause societal collapse" is a pretty good reason to not do something.
magic9mushroom
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1yr ago
Playing against wincon (e.g. in a single-winner game, Vichy-allying with somebody to help him win when you'd have a better chance of winning in a grand coalition to defeat said somebody) I consider to be dishonour*. Kingmaking when you actually can't win is hard to adjudicate because playing to wincon is not well-defined; that's more akin to bad game design.
*The computer game Stars! has a bad case of this in its player community; alliances tend to ossify, so that even if Player X is running away with the game, his allies will just keep helping him and go "yay team" at the end rather than switching sides. I am aware of how strong a term "dishonour" is; I use it deliberately, because of how it makes the game much less fun.
magic9mushroom
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1yr ago
Nah, arjin_ferman's right; there are two DS9 ones. FBTS is the first; the second is Shadows and Symbols and indeed is a followup to FBTS in a mental hospital.
Far Beyond The Stars is a message from the Prophets amounting to "cheer up". Shadows and Symbols is the Pah-Wraiths attempting to mind-control Sisko and stop him opening the Orb that's got the Rapist Prophet* in it.
*By which I mean "the Prophet that possessed Sarah and forced her to seduce Joseph Sisko in order to conceive Benjamin Sisko". DS9 seemingly doesn't notice that she's a rapist, since she's pretty much portrayed as a pure good character, but, well, DS9 glosses over a lot of horrifying things the Prophets do.
magic9mushroom
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1yr ago
How do you insert hyperlinks into words on here?
magic9mushroom
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1yr ago
· Edited 1yr ago
The problem with price-gouging in emergencies is that the combination of "people desperate", "local authorities off-balance", and "apparently-hostile behaviour" very frequently results in the consumer shooting the would-be price-gouger and taking the goods for free.
There are economic costs of price-fixing, certainly, but it has the social benefit of appearing honourable and staying within norms, thus discouraging ballistic discount. In terms of reasons to be coercive about it rather than let the market sort it out, part of it is the price-gougers not thinking that far ahead since emergencies are rare, and part of it is the externalities to society i.e. having people get mugged is bad for social cohesion and economic throughput above and beyond the detriment to the mugged person.
magic9mushroom
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1yr ago
Thanks.
(I don't have a Reddit account. Joined after the move.)
magic9mushroom
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1yr ago
Or saying "it's just pixels" if you were caught with CP.
This one has an obvious full argument that it's short for, basically looking like "child molestation is bad because it (often) directly hurts children; fapping to real CP only indirectly hurts children and fapping to fictional CP doesn't hurt children at all, because the representations of children on a computer screen are not actually children but just nonsentient pixels, so the last in particular shouldn't be subject to the stigma of the first and the second is somewhere in-between". There is definitely some meaning to that word "just".
The copyright one is somewhat-further removed from the full form, which basically looks like "illegalising true and consensual information exchange is an unacceptable compromise of liberty, and copyright near-uniquely does this and indeed almost entirely consists of this". Kind of weaker, though, as it requires a fairly-strong assumption and there's at least one other example of this with pretty-broad societal support (classified information).
The West's only real strategic goals in Ukraine are to avoid looking impotent and to avoid committing enough forces that the PRC could take advantage to blitz Taiwan. Beyond that there's mostly just the ideological goal of self-determination.
There's definitely an element of zero-sum competition in regards to China, but not so much with Russia.
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