official_techsupport
who/whom
No bio...
User ID: 122
official_techsupport
who/whom
2yr ago
Any amount of alcohol temporarily reduces intelligence and precision in your physical movements - a tiny bit if buzzed, a lot if drunk.
Not true, alcohol is considered a PED and is banned in shooting competitions: http://www.faqs.org/sports-science/Sc-Sp/Shooting.html
official_techsupport
who/whom
2yr ago
This reminded me of a note from the Talos Principle:
You know, the more I think about it, the more I believe that no-one is actually worried about AIs taking over the world or anything like that, no matter what they say. What they're really worried about is that someone might prove, once and for all, that consciousness can arise from matter. And I kind of understand why they find it so terrifying. If we can create a sentient being, where does that leave the soul? Without mystery, how can we see ourselves as anything other than machines? And if we are machines, what hope do we have that death is not the end?
What really scares people is not the artificial intelligence in the computer, but the "natural" intelligence they see in the mirror.
official_techsupport
who/whom
2yr ago
"Never let me go" is very fucked up, I'm not sure there's another book that touched me so deeply. Actually, when I try to recall anything similar, certain moments of "The Talos Principle" come to mind, in how it builds a very relatable world and then force kicks you into the Acceptance stage of grief about it while you're utterly unprepared.
official_techsupport
who/whom
2yr ago
My insight was that intuition is analytical thinking encoded.
No, absolutely not. You can train intuition (think, reflexes, like playing tennis) without any analytical thinking at all. Animals do it, no problem.
The main point of analytical thinking is to provide a check on intuition for when it goes wrong. Like, you encounter an optical illusion, a fish in the water appears farther than it is, so to spear it properly you need to aim closer, "wat in heck, my eyes deceive me" is where the improvement starts.
official_techsupport
who/whom
2yr ago
Pirate metal is pretty upbeat. Alestorm - Fucked With an Anchor for example!
official_techsupport
who/whom
2yr ago
OMG THANK YOU! It's been bothering me literally for years!
How did you find it?
official_techsupport
who/whom
2yr ago
Baba is You in the puzzle category, no contest.
official_techsupport
who/whom
2yr ago
Muphry's Law strikes again LOL.
official_techsupport
who/whom
2yr ago
It's Kisilev btw, you keep misspelling his surname.
official_techsupport
who/whom
2yr ago
I spent a lot of time observing these sorts of groups a while back and in the end they come across as, I guess, sad, since they never end up creating much of anything useful and for many of their members it seems to eventually become a damaging obsession.
So you're saying that you spent copious amounts of time cataloging instances of events you believed made such things or groups look bad. Endlessly.
official_techsupport
who/whom
2yr ago
It's exactly what someone who wants the non fertile eliminated from the future would try to persuade you of. A sane and sensible person will dismiss such words as munitions fired in a 5th generation memetic war of genocide in all honesty.
Exactly. There's a powerful drive to remove leftist genes (yeah, yeah, I'm extremely oversimplifying it) from the gene pool, and that's a good thing that we all should support bipartisanly.
official_techsupport
who/whom
2yr ago
An argument you can make against mail in voting is that voting is a proxy for a civil war without the associated costs and so requiring people to get off their asses and vote in person is good, while letting anyone with a heartbeat vote is actually bad.
This of course must be understand in the context of trans- and cis-democracy.
official_techsupport
who/whom
2yr 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
2yr ago
Not quite what you're asking about, but Stephen King's N. allows for an extremely fitting alternative explanation where the protective circles are actually summoning circles. Imagine that you're Cthulhu and you can send some mortals nightmare visions trying to get them to summon you: obviously you should convince them that what you want them to do prevents you from being summoned.
official_techsupport
who/whom
2yr ago
Yeah, it's unfortunate that the whole thing kinda got forgotten due to the Iron Curtain, so I haven't heard about any attempts to replicate and further investigate it these days.
This stuff meshes very well with a lot of stuff when you begin to look at things from that angle. Consider for example this cute video of children subjected to the marshmallow test: https://youtube.com/watch?v=QX_oy9614HQ&t=16 . Forget about the controversy about whether it actually correlates with important life outcomes all that well, the interesting thing is that we can see how the children want to avoid eating the marshmallow, how they employ various external (to the mind) willpower aids like covering their mouth with their hands etc, and how we know that as adults we wouldn't need to.
official_techsupport
who/whom
2yr ago
what is the likelihood that humans are the only animal that can trick themselves with a non-contingent reward?
Humans are also the only (or one of the very few) animals that can solve the Buridan's Ass problem. Lev Vygotsky in collaboration with Pavlov ran a series of experiments: a hungry dog was put in a room with food, separated from it by a section of metal floor giving it mild electric shocks. Dogs behaved according to Behaviorist theory: since at every moment the hunger stimulus is weaker than the stimulus from the electrified floor, so the dog cannot cross it, despite the fact that the unpleasantness of hunger over long time massively outweighs the unpleasantness of crossing the floor. IIRC dogs responded by either getting into a catatonic state or getting enraged, which sounds like second best possible responses to such kind of situations.
An adult human of course solves the problem with remarkable ease: you just decide that you want to cross and this internal stimulus adds its weight and lets you cross the electrified section. Vygotsky also claimed that we can see development of this ability in children or primitive peoples, where it first requires an external stimulus like divination (flipping a coin), but then gets internalized.
NCRs seem to fall into roughly the same category of external willpower amplifiers. So not surprising that it's not only uniquely human but also that highly successful people don't need it any more.
official_techsupport
who/whom
2yr ago
Yay! Funnily enough I made a thread too, but I guess you beat me through the moderation queue.
Mine had more comments because people kept finding it via search =) Also, nepotism helps!
official_techsupport
who/whom
2yr ago
Glad I searched before making my own.
I didn't so we now have two FFTs stuck in the modqueue lol.
official_techsupport
who/whom
1yr ago
He rambles on for paragraph after paragraph, smugly self-assured, and at the end of it I come away with literally no idea what he's trying to say.
As in you read the whole linked article and have no idea, or gave up after the first ten or so paragraphs? Because while undeniably excessively verbose, containing frequent tangents, and actually being less about the Climategate and more about how the Climategate is yet another example of how power corrupts, it presents clear points with solid justifications.
If you're interested in something much more concise and aimed at someone who is not already on the same wavelength you might want to read the AGW section of this: https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/2009/01/gentle-introduction-to-unqualified_22/ . It is not, strictly speaking, about the Climategate, because it predates it by a few months I think, but it predicts it presciently.
official_techsupport
who/whom
1yr ago
Everyone in the USA still believes that the USA is the first etc etc. The only thing that matters is the domestic response to foreign posturing. "I'm against America First" is a viable posture in America because nobody in America really believes that America could be anything but first.
official_techsupport
who/whom
1yr ago
IMO Pact and Twig were more or less unsuccessful attempts at putting novel twists on Worm's awesome formula.
There's a foolproof way of keeping the reader captivated: by having a bunch of nested quests and subquests. Pact actually starts very formulaic in this respect: Blake is fighting a goblin because he was sent to do something in a graveyard by the Lord of Toronto, because he needs help getting back into his grandma's house, because he needs to read up on and figure out what's up with the karmic debt thing. Each blow in the fight is meaningful because it advances all of these quests.
One of the most fascinating things about Worm was how it repeatedly added new Main Quests, on top of and sometimes directly contradicting previous Main Quests (the infamous four word chapter comes to mind). So we start with a girl whose Main Quest is avoiding her bullies and end with literally cosmic scale stuff. And it worked perfectly!
With Pact Wildbow tried to see what happens if instead of the Main Character having to make greater and greater sacrifices to complete the new grand Main Quests, the quests themselves get progressively canceled, like, OK, this problem is beyond fixing, OK we no longer even hope to achieve that thing. Well, it turned out that the second half of the book, where the author started doing that, was just depressing and pointless.
With Twig Wildbow tried to see what happens if instead of the Main Character having all these grandiose quests, it's actually someone entirely else. Well, it turns out that the first half of the book, until the Main Character and his posse acquires enough strength and purpose, was just boring and pointless.
That's the price of doing daring experiments, more often than not you discover that there are good reasons for why nobody does this thing that seemed so cool on paper.
official_techsupport
who/whom
2yr ago
If I were trying to invent a leftism capable of handling a workerless future I think I'd go along the lines of some of the recent questions as to how copyright interacts with the output of LLMs. Namely that these things are sampling out entire culture and to some degree we all have some claim to the output, even if it's only through the influence we exert on someone who exerts influence on someone who exerts influence on someone who directly produces lots of the training data.
Longposters shall inherit the earth, yay!
official_techsupport
who/whom
2yr ago
Have you seen the orchestral version of "Dragonborn Comes" btw? Your comment reminded me of it: https://youtube.com/watch?v=hnXD6FRZtn0
official_techsupport
who/whom
2yr ago
The ST can give you the same Savant info, welcome to the Groundhog Day. Fortune Teller and the like which get to choose what info they get, get a bit OP. On the other had, the evil get to redo their actions too, in the light of what's revealed. Or kill the Timekeeper if it's too scary.
Imagine the world as a reinforcement learning environment that's intended to produce Good Servants of God. Emphasis on willing to serve God. Now the thing is, God doesn't care at all about punishing anyone, it only cares about burning out whatever parts of one's personality that prevented them from obeying His rules. An evil person who rejected God completely will have only a few parts of his personality lifted into the Godhood. A nice person who sinned occasionally and was upset about it will have the sinning part of himself removed, as he wanted all along, and get uploaded mostly intact.
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