official_techsupport
who/whom
No bio...
User ID: 122
official_techsupport
who/whom
8mo ago
Because then it doesn't have a moral authority, and you're no better than Yazidis, who believe that Satan doused the fires of hell with his tears and escaped and now rules the world, so you'd better worship him if you know what's good for you.
official_techsupport
who/whom
11mo ago
Turn the switch on, and people who are ordinarily perfectly reasonable are frothing at the mouth saying you're killing grandma, you're a menace to society, you're a dirty plague rat.
Do they really?
One thing the pandemic taught me is that people's experiences vary a lot by the country or state or city, but still, do they really?
Here, we had everyone masking in shops etc without much grumbling, like, all right, why not. But I remember exactly one case of a guy asking me to keep the distance and it was so weird, like dude, you actually take it that seriously? And he was apologetic asking me to step back, rather than frothing at the mouth.
So: it's entirely possible that my experience is completely different from your experience. But on the other hand I can't help but suspect that my IRL and online experiences respectively are actually very much the same as yours, but I'm better at discriminating between the two and dismissing online crazies as not representative of the people.
official_techsupport
who/whom
1yr ago
"Conspiracy" is a complicated concept involving several different attributes. Consider for example CIA did 9/11 the Iran-Contra affair:
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It's coordinated and centralized.
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When/if exposed most people agree that it was immoral and bad.
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People perpetuating it know that it will be considered immoral and bad.
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It's executed in secret, so people assume that its effects (such as the crack epidemic) are exaggerated or caused by natural processes or whatever.
There are also secondary attributes, for example there's a solid argument that (1) + (2) + (3) together mean that it's hard to run a large conspiracy because every person involved increases the chance that someone snitches.
But there are also semi-conspiracies that lack some of the attributes. The Great Replacement doesn't require coordination or centralization (though people like Soros act as coordinators within their significant spheres of influence). People perpetuating it think that they are doing a good thing, they just stop at the very last step: diversity is good, we are increasing diversity of western countries, but we don't admit that more diverse = less white (which is trivially true, not a snark even) at least not when those racist white people might hear us.
The only conspiracy trait that is really fully present here is that ordinary people are not aware that there are forces working towards a particular end purposefully and industriously, and so will be surprised when that end is achieved. Oh well, most of the conspirators delude themselves about that too.
There's a lot of progressive semi-conspiracies that work like that. One can't help noticing the pattern:
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this will not happen
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this is not happening
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this is happening rarely and for random uncorrelated reasons
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this is happening and it's a good thing! (or if it's obviously bad then nobody could've predicted it, also it's a part and parcel of the hustle and bustle).
(2) beholden to an anti-white “conspiracy”, which (2a) is influenced by anti-white academics sometimes
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Immigration massively benefits poor, non-white immigrants themselves, so it's our moral duty to promote it.
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Unfortunately the white majority is racist in various ways, from passing racist laws limiting immigration in the first place, to systemically exploiting illegal immigrants, to whites oppressing nonwhites on an individual yet systemic level (for example, managers are likely to be white, white managers are likely to have unconscious biases against nonwhite subordinates).
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Asking whites nicely to stop being racist hasn't worked yet and is unlikely to suddenly start working, therefore it's our moral duty to seek other solutions.
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Decreasing the proportion of whites in the society will gradually strip them of their democratic and societal power and improve the situation. Note that things improve on the margin too, we don't need to wait until the white population drops below some magical fraction to see results, every percent of fewer whites makes things better for nonwhites.
Therefore a moral duty of every person who believes in (1), (2), and (3) (which is every liberal/progressive/left-leaning person) is to support (4) as a goal, support things like increased non-white immigration and oppose any attempts to increase white fertility, with an explicit purpose of making western countries less white.
There's no need for a "conspiracy" if everyone with certain beliefs pushes for certain political actions that follow from those beliefs with a near mathematical inevitability. Of course if you ask a progressive white if they really want to make whites a minority they would vehemently deny it, though without any principled argument for why not. And they sure do act in ways that are consistent with them believing in the moral necessity of (4), at least unconsciously.
(2b) is influenced by Jewish groups that benefit as they retain strong in-group biases while everyone else de-homogenizes.
https://web.archive.org/web/20181107090043/https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/17/magazine/george-soros-democrat-open-society.html is a very interesting article, not only it's a respectable journalist writing for a paper of record unlike some lunatic rambling for hours on youtube, but also rather than being hostile to the conspiracy he wholeheartedly supports it; rather than exposing it he boasts about it. How can we not believe him?
(you probably want to read the intro of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theodor_Herzl for some context)
official_techsupport
who/whom
1yr ago
I think that his point is not "you aren't allowed to criticize a billionaire unless you are a billionaire" but "you aren't allowed to criticize people swindled by a scammer when there's some billionaires swindled by them unless you are a billionaire".
official_techsupport
who/whom
6mo ago
For starters, I think the way to go is to start a regional, anonymous group chat. As people become friendly, and reveal more of their true selves, then perhaps it can move to in-person meetups.
That sounds extremely glowy.
official_techsupport
who/whom
8mo ago
We manage to cooperate surprisingly well given that one third of the players are secretly demonic entities!
official_techsupport
who/whom
8mo ago
Check out this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hedge_(finance)#Agricultural_commodity_price_hedging
The original purpose of futures etc was (and remains) to allow productive sectors of the economy to manage risks: if you're a farmer planning to sell some wheat, you can short wheat to limit your losses in case the price is lower than expected; if you're a baker who will need to buy some flour in the future, you might go long on it in case the price rises. Speculators provide liquidity--they compensate those farmers and bakers when things go south and buffer the losses. Some prediction market component is applied automatically, as some speculators would physically stockpile resources.
official_techsupport
who/whom
8mo ago
One thing unique to DNA/RNA is that they can be used in two distinct ways: directly copied or interpreted as instructions for building stuff. This is a pretty fundamental property because it allows constructing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quine_(computing) , with the cell corresponding to the program and the DNA corresponding to the text constant in the program that the cell uses to construct a copy of the cell and also copies and inserts directly. Also it avoids the issue of, how do you replicated a hammer without using a stronger hammer to disassemble it -- instructions for building a hammer don't possess the strength of a hammer and can be examined and replicated easily.
I'm not sure that something that doesn't have this duality can be a somewhat general purpose replicator, not by default at least, and I'd expect any good paper proposing some replicator mechanism to be aware of this.
official_techsupport
who/whom
10mo ago
O, tick bites are a great example because they do not itch pretty much at all (and don't swell at first either), while mosquito bites start itching within minutes. So it is possible to anesthetize the bite location without immediately causing an immune response: why don't mosquitos do that, do they simply not care (evolutionarily speaking) or maybe there's some non-obvious benefit to it?
official_techsupport
who/whom
11mo ago
I asked Bing's Sydney. Btw, I am now pretty certain that she does in fact use GPT4 in the Creative mode. Anyways, she had some suggestions:
The Crow Girl by Erik Axl Sund: An example of a modern take on the noir genre, The Crow Girl is a violent story with an unreliable narrator. Detective Jeanette Kihlberg has the requisite messy personal life and cynical worldview for noir stories, and the crimes she finds herself investigating, involving mutilated, mummified children, explode into a horrifying and exhilarating mystery that spans decades and continents
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson: A bestselling and acclaimed novel that introduces Lisbeth Salander, a brilliant hacker and investigator who teams up with journalist Mikael Blomkvist to solve a decades-old disappearance of a wealthy heiress. The novel explores themes of corruption, violence, misogyny, and revenge in a dark and gripping way.
The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency by Alexander McCall Smith: A charming and humorous series that follows Precious Ramotswe, the founder and owner of Botswana’s first and only female-run detective agency. Precious uses her intuition and common sense to solve various cases, from missing husbands to wayward daughters, while also dealing with her own personal issues.
Tart Noir edited by Stella Duffy and Lauren Henderson: A collection of short stories by various female authors that showcase the subgenre of tart noir, which is characterized by strong, independent, and often sexually assertive women who are involved in crime, either as detectives, criminals, or victims. The stories range from dark and gritty to witty and humorous, but all share a noir sensibility
official_techsupport
who/whom
1yr ago
I hear you about the existential angst though.
I haven't read "The Three Body Problem" yet, so idk if I'm talking about a similar feeling, but Charles Stross' "Palimpsest" put me into a very strange state of mind closer to the end. It begins as a straight up rewrite of Asimov's "The End of Eternity" (which Stross freely admits) but then goes elsewhere.
official_techsupport
who/whom
1yr ago
https://lleo.me/arhive/other/palindro.htm
This is awesome!
official_techsupport
who/whom
1yr ago
Especially in comparison with the whole raising from the grave stuff lol.
official_techsupport
who/whom
1yr ago
Check out Medusa's Coil, the ending is so racist it's actually hilarious!
official_techsupport
who/whom
1yr ago
Bing tries to provide references.
official_techsupport
who/whom
1yr ago
I noticed it myself though. Like, browse the webs on the toilet, make a mental note to look up something when back at the computer, completely forget because of the doorway on the way.
official_techsupport
who/whom
1yr ago
Australia is famous for its large number of venomous species. It also doesn't have any mustelidae. Honey badgers would be very successsful.
I really don't think honey badgers will be able to evolve resistance to the entire palette of Australians venomous critters, much less come pre-equipped.
official_techsupport
who/whom
1yr ago
official_techsupport
who/whom
1yr ago
A lens does a Fourier conversion: it maps directions (of the incoming rays) into locations (on the focal plane), summing stuff up.
official_techsupport
who/whom
11mo ago
For the record, IIRC my back of the napkin calculations produced like 10MJ/kg released and 2MJ/kg required to evaporate the water when burning a corpse. The holocaust denier never engaged with these numbers.
official_techsupport
who/whom
3mo ago
How do I know that "bloxor-1 is greeblic" is elementary, if I am totally uncertain about this proposition, and I don't even understand the terms?
Skill issue.
What do you mean "correctly"?
That I, doing Bayesian math about some bets against you, will leave you poor and destitute in the long run, unless you're using Bayes too. What do you want to use instead of Bayes for the record?
the Allais paradox
My point is not that the poors are always instinctively right. My point is that they have well-honed instincts for when someone is trying to take advantage of them, and the usual Bayesian reasoning like the above rightfully triggers it, even if they don't have the concepts or the introspection to communicate to us what was that, that triggered them.
My point is that a Bayesian megamind is entirely justified in asking the yudkowsky what fraction of his prediction came from the data, and basing his bet amount on that, and grumbling about the yudkowsky being useless if he refuses to answer.
Nobody actually has arguments against assigning a symmetric prior to a coin bias
How many of the arguments in probability theory have you read to come to this judgement? Because I can think of large parts of the literature dedicated to exactly this point.
Huh?
official_techsupport
who/whom
1yr ago
There should be a word for the kind of situation where people who profess their love for intellectual diversity in practice prove incapable of perceiving any viewpoints outside of a narrow range as legitimate.
From what I know of the Count, including private communication, he was pretty much sincere here, at least in the "I contain multitudes" sense. If that triggered someone that's entirely on them; and especially given the everpresent concerns about our intellectual diversity the administration of this forum probably shouldn't strive to protect the feelings of the white supremacist-adjacent users in particular.
official_techsupport
who/whom
1yr ago
I think that what you're looking at is https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/03/04/a-thrivesurvive-theory-of-the-political-spectrum/ but the "thrive" side are not chill hippies, but the people who compete with their fellow man rather than with sabertooth tigers etc. So "survivalists" like small rigid hierarchies because they are good for surviving a zombie apocalypse, while "thrivists" like huge social hierarchies where they can backstab their way to the top with utter disregard for external reality.
From that point of view "First it's Protestantism (Conformist) vs Catholicism (Conscientious)" gets it exactly backwards.
Yeah, that's one of my points (excepting parents, parents feel the pain of their children to some extent), you can tell that this sort of forcing people to have skin in the game can't work because they are forcing the wrong people, the children and their parents, while everyone else would actively stop any attempts to improve things and they wield the power.
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