problem_redditor
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238km/s is not highly relativistic. Also it would be silly to travel at 99.9% the speed of light when you could travel at 90% for a tiny fraction of the energy and risk and get there less than 10% later. The only reason to do it would be so that less time passes for your travelers -- but if it's a self-repairing box of electronics and robotics, engineered by a galaxy-brain superintelligence, it can probably while away the millions of years without issue. There are no primates on board who are aging, nor even who are consuming energy to maintain.
I'm aware 238 km/s isn't highly relativistic, travelling slightly above that speed just means the probe will spend a painfully large amount of time cruising. And even non-relativistic travel poses issues. For example your probe is going to encounter the harsh radiation environment in space, even if it's not travelling at relativistic speeds (if it is it's much worse). Shielding could be possible if one was willing to add to probe mass, but if it fails to block all of the radiation it's going to be exposed to that for the entirety of the journey. This is fine when your mission duration is short. It's less fine when your mission duration is millions of years and your probe contains lots of delicate electronics that need to work properly.
Self-repair is hypothetically possible, but that requires usable energy and matter, and interstellar and intergalactic space is famously devoid of both of these things. And the longer your mission is, the greater the chance of a critical failure at some point. Even if that chance is small, if you're going to take millions upon millions of years to get there most of your probes might not reach. Travelling slow comes with its own costs and impracticalities.
And yeah, I know every single one of these problems can be solved by invoking [hypothetical future technology], and I'm sure the future will unceremoniously spit in the face of any prediction I make, but I'm not too convinced by any explanation that relies too heavily on handwavium.
And you can send a lot of probes -- depending on how small they can be and how efficient their propulsion is, even a very high loss rate can just be overcome with quantity. Another advantage of not having precious primates on board!
Yes, I agree, even with a high loss rate you could spread your probes as long as there's a nonzero probability of survival. As I said, the idea you posited is not out of the question. Of course, then the Fermi paradox rears its head, since not only are we seeing no sign of alien life from our own galaxy, but also from other galaxies and other galaxy clusters which should hypothetically be able to reach us.
Why would the outpost be dead? Galaxy-brained superintelligences don't seem like likely to be mercurial creatures that might just die off one day from a plague or civil war or something. Once they're established, I assume they're gonna be here till the end of time.
I'm not saying it would be dead, I'm more saying that communicating would be full of latency problems - any information you'd get from it wouldn't be timely at all and would be mostly of little value since it'd be impossible to act on. The point was that for all you know the outpost could be dead and you'd only know 11.4 million years later.
I think humanity is going to let go of our sentimental attachment to meat-based life basically as soon as we have a digital alternative
Personally, I wouldn't do it. Even assuming that you can replicate the phenomenon of consciousness in a non-biological substrate (something that could be the case but that's basically impossible to prove), there's the issue of continuity when you're uploading your brain. Sure, there's another version of myself now, but this is not me and I will not experience the change. I will live and die as meat-based life, and there will not be any "transfer" of consciousness. There will not be any change in my own state except now I possess the knowledge that there is an immortal version of me running around out there.
So this is not because I have any attachment to meat-based life - the benefits of a digital substrate would be very tantalising if I could genuinely transfer myself into it. Rather, I think my experience of being me is so intrinsically linked with my physical body that they basically can't be disconnected from each other. The incentive to digitise my brain kind of starts looking very weak then.
but even if we don't, as you say, presumably your Von Neumann probes could build "human manufactories" on the other side of their voyage, even from digitally reconstituted genomes from our local group, in which case I don't see why they'd be any less "ours" than whatever distant descendants clambered off of a successful million year generation ship after it arrived on the other side of the cosmic ocean.
The issue for me is that you don't actually get to colonise anywhere, nobody leaves, you just make another galaxy cluster full of humans. Maybe this is just an irreconcilable values difference, but I think this solution completely voids the point of the exercise. I don't intrinsically care about creating as many humans as possible and distributing them throughout the galaxy. I care infinitely more about where these humans come from.
Anyway... if I'm right about the trajectory of our species, how much of our light cone do you think we could in principle colonize? That's the interesting question IMO.
Let's assume we can go at, say, 50% light speed (149896.229 km/s). The expansion of the universe is 68 km/s/Mpc, and the value of Mpc that gives us a recession speed of 0.5c (the relevant formula here is 68 x Mpc = 149896.229) is 2204.36 megaparsecs, which translates to roughly 7 billion light years. Everything outside that distance is receding from us faster than that.
It's basically Hubble's law. You can take any speed of travel, divide it by the expansion rate, and find the distance beyond which everything is receding from you faster than your travel speed. There's probably additional complexity created by the aforementioned fact that the Hubble "constant" is not actually constant and is decreasing, but I can't be arsed to factor that in right now.
If one paperclip AI starts with access to a nuclear arsenal, and one starts with access to a drone factory, they are going to start waging war in a drastically different way. And the other AI is basically going to interfere with their methods for human extermination.
I'll grant that this might be the case. But if one paperclip AI's method of extermination is more efficient or more conducive towards achieving the goal than the other, I would expect the AI with the more inefficient method of achieving their goals to shift towards the alternative. Without the problem of drifting goals there's no reason why the AIs would not want to maintain some level of coordination since doing so is conducive to their goals (yeah, they might be two separate agents instead of one now, but there's nothing stopping them from communicating with each other every now and then).
Sure, but even allowing for a stalemate condition where neither is destroyed it still sounds to me like quite a lot of resources and computing power spent trying to one-up each other on the remote chance that the other AI "defects" somehow. Does any slight improvement in security from exterminating the other AI outweigh the benefit to your goal from having two agents working on it? And wait, if its goal can drift, why can't your goal arbitrarily drift too? You're cut from the same cloth, and you're just as much a potential hazard to your current goal as the other AI is. If AI is going to be this unreliable, perhaps having more than one AI with the same goals is actually good for security since there's less reliance on one agent functioning properly the whole way, and the AIs that don't drift can keep the ones that do in check.
All this is to say that engaging in war with the other makes sense to me when another agent's goals are in conflict with yours, not when both of your interests are already aligned and when the other agent could help you achieve what you want.
EDIT: added more
I really don't think this is evidence of leniency at all. Firstly, people were arrested on Jan 6th. I've seen a bunch of complaining about how the number arrested was less than the BLM riots, but I'd like to note that police were overwhelmed. "Since the police at the scene were violently attacked and outnumbered, they had a limited number of officers who could make arrests. 'Approximately 140 police officers were assaulted Jan. 6 at the Capitol, including about 80 U.S. Capitol Police and about 60 from the Metropolitan Police Department,' according to the Department of Justice."
It's necessary to remember that Jan 6th was a one time event, too, whereas BLM rioted for a much longer period and it's reasonable that officers would know better what to expect for the latter which would make them more capable of handling the riots and making arrests on the spot, so the two cannot be directly compared in that way. Still, hundreds of arrests were made in the aftermath of Jan 6th. "More than 855 defendants tied to the attack have been arrested in 'nearly all 50 states and the District of Columbia.'"
If this is the basis for the argument that the left is being politically discriminated against, I have to say I think it's very weak. There are plenty of factors that can influence police response that have nothing to do with sentiment.
General relativity does allow for FTL in the broad sense of "get from A to B faster than light conventionally could" - the Alcubierre metric and wormholes being the most obvious.
Okay now I'm getting into things I'm not too certain on (obviously IANAP), but from what I understand apparent FTL that entails the warping of spacetime is one of these things that we're not 100% sure is impossible but does pose a lot of problems. Apart from the whole "closed timelike curve" problem that these apparent FTL methods seem to create (which, granted, as you noted one can try to resolve through all kinds of difficult-to-verify chronology protection conjectures), there's also the fact that both Alcubierre drives and traversable wormholes alike require unobtainum exotic matter that at best isn't impossible but there's no evidence for its existence and at worst violates an energy condition.
So they're not exactly impossible per se, but there's reasons to believe they probably are.
Nah, the "reachable universe", while not as large as the "observable universe" and slowly shrinking, is bigger than that (it's something along the lines of a billion galaxies IIRC). The Local Group's only the eventual size of the reachable universe, as t -> infinity, not its current size or anywhere close.
Yes, the reachable universe at the moment isn't only the Local Group. However the size of our reachable universe is premised on the assumption that we leave today, and at the speed of light. What's currently in our reachable universe is a very generous estimate as to what we can practically reach.
In retrospect the way I phrased it was probably misleading - the statement that we might be restricted to the Local Group was my extrapolation of what in practice might be our limit, incorporating my own quite pessimistic estimates as to the difficulty of achieving anything close to relativistic speeds (let alone speeds nearing that of light) as well as the difficulty of keeping a crew alive and the ship working when going at these speeds.
Of course, if FTL is real then many estimates for the size of the universe boil down to "time and/or aliens are the limit, not space". 10^10^10^122 makes exponential growth go cry in a corner.
Given the constraints that relativity imposes, this seems like it might be unlikely absent some revolution in our understanding of physics.
EDIT: added more
The case for an inflection point is pretty strong. It’s my understanding that for objects that have already crossed the boundary of the event horizon, no reduction of the distance between us and that object will occur.
Think about it this way: There are objects far enough away from you that they are moving away at a rate that exceeds the speed of light, meaning without FTL travel they will be receding from you faster than you can travel to them. The space between you and any object beyond that horizon will only increase and the further they go, the faster they recede. If you try to reach it in a relativistic colony ship, all that happens is that you’ll be stranded from your original galaxy group and will never reach the new one as your galaxy of origin passes out of your event horizon. Sure, you are closer to the object and further away from your point of origin than you would've counterfactually been, but that does not equate to closing the distance.
problem_redditor
1yr ago
Radfems are wrong not only about men, they're also wrong about pretty much the entirety of gender relations and how it operates currently and historically. But I am used to seeing this kind of thing, at this point. It seems to be a general trend even among heterodox communities and the anti-woke that the ideological precepts of their opposition that they're most likely to accept (comparatively speaking) are the feminist ones, which is evident in the utterly bizarre conservative-TERF allyship that seems to be going on at the moment. There's also a similarity in the moral typecasting that feminists and conservatives (and many other people, too) engage in - to them, men are a by default "degenerate" group who need to be reined in and obligated to provide protection to the women around them, and women are a group deserving of special protections. They differ on many things, but on these fundamental perceptions I don't see any difference at all. Even the blank-slatist intersectionalists who believe that men engage in bad behaviour simply because of patriarchal norms still fundamentally engage in the same knee-jerk moral typecasting, they just attribute it to a different cause to make it fit with their blank-slatism.
It seems that if the community isn't an explicitly anti-feminist community (and sometimes even if it is), there's going to be an instinctual legitimacy assigned to feminist claims that doesn't get assigned to any other woke factions because they align with certain entrenched preconceptions and moral judgements that the other woke factions do not appeal to. Any group which is purportedly dedicated to "protecting women" tends to immediately align with most people's sensibilities. No matter how objectionable the rhetoric they churn out is, a base-level feeling of agreement with some of their precepts still seems to exist. There is something profoundly instinctual about the women-are-wonderful effect that makes it exist in most political factions, and it seems to me that any ideology that espouses these base talking points will always have some level of congruence with our knee-jerk beliefs that automatically confers upon it a huge advantage regardless of its validity.
I can't speak for OP, but for my part I assume the rationale is something akin to this.
To sum up the article in a paragraph, women are less pro-free speech and more pro-censorship. In academia, female academics are less likely than male academics to place importance on objectivity and dispassionate inquiry, and more likely to place importance on the ability of their work to be used as a vehicle to deliver views considered "socially good". They are also more supportive of dismissal campaigns and more inclined toward activism. This roughly correlates with the increasing politicisation of the academy as a vehicle for activism, and while the author admits that it is certainly not the only factor contributing to the trend, it is also what you would expect to see when a group with a preference for emotional safety over academic freedom enters a space.
In other words, I don't think it's necessarily a prima facie ridiculous position if OP values academic freedom over censorship and thinks it carries more value for society than having women in academia does. Forcing a state of affairs where the academic environment is mostly comprised of men would be conducive to this goal, and in similar fashion forcing an academic environment that's uncompromising in terms of freedom of speech would disproportionately cause women to self-select out of the academy. Whichever way this goal is reached, greater academic freedom likely entails less women in academia.
I'm not the person who made the claim about the pedo/LGBT overlap, and I didn't actually set out to make a point about that (though I will say NAMBLA was a bit too close for comfort with the early LGBT movement, I wouldn't necessarily think it automatically discredits all LGBT politics).
Rather, the point I was personally trying to prove was more defensible - just to point out that many of the people who engaged in anti-GG (including some very prominent ones) were willing to provide cover for terrible behaviour while at the same time being moralistic crusaders who claimed that those who would disagree with them were bigoted. Sarah Nyberg herself is less interesting than the reaction to her. You'll see people bring up Gamergate even today in order to make a generalised point about how "the alt-right" functions or something or other (like an Ian Danskin video I addressed here or this Kotaku article posted just on Tuesday), and having these examples of undeniably bad behaviour on the anti-GG side (which seem to have been quite widespread) helps to counter that.
You shouldn't concede ground to your opponents or let them define the narrative, even concerning culture wars that are long over, because these things can be used against you. And having many little examples like this can help tip someone's perceptions of who it is they've been associating with. I'm not saying this alone is a bombshell piece of evidence and it's not like I'm stating that you can "discredit" all of progressivism with one instance of misconduct, it's just something that taken jointly with plenty of other evidence (some of which was outlined in my other post on the topic) can help to demonstrate an overarching point.
At the moment, Nyberg has 13.3K followers on Twitter, which is a fairly high number considering her last post was in 2018. The people who defended her, such as Dan Olson, are fairly prominent even now (Olson is a fairly popular YouTube documentarian nowadays, who's roughly BreadTube-adjacent). He accused 8chan of hosting CP and yet changed his twitter handle to include "Butts" in solidarity with Nyberg.
Even granting the idea that she was, it would be wrong to say that the entire story was suppressed.
I'm not saying the entire story was suppressed, rather that the reporting about this subject has been slanted and that the media has been silent about this in a way they wouldn't be if the shoe was on the other foot. For you to consider something as "suppression" it basically needs to be scrubbed from the internet, which clearly isn't the situation we're talking about here.
This is rather something that hasn't reached the mainstream because no mainstream news sources will report on it in any honest way, and the ones that do report on it from what I've seen have simply painted Nyberg as the victim, such as this Quartz article that alleges that Gamergate spread "baseless accusations of pedophilia" about Nyberg. The Young Turks were willing to cover her, but not to talk about her pedophilia - to talk about her Twitter bot. It seems that the mainstream certainly doesn't consider her insignificant enough not to report on at all, rather they would rather just not report on her in the "wrong" way.
I'm not saying she was as nearly as big a deal as Sarkeesian or Wu, but this situation most certainly wasn't a complete nothingburger, either.
I hold a similar stance to haroldbkny, and here's my reasoning. Note, this is coming from someone who is small and short in stature and would absolutely be crushed by most other men around me in combat - no one has any obligation to be continuously cognisant of themselves around me or anyone physically weaker than them, as long as their behaviour isn't actively intended to be intimidating. People need to come to terms with their fears and manage them appropriately, they cannot continuously walk around expecting to be coddled by others. Especially when what makes people intimidated and uncomfortable is poorly defined and basically requires people to do mind-reading in order to reliably avoid these situations. You can't use other people's feelings as a yardstick for socially acceptable behaviour because feelings are inherently by their nature irrational, mercurial and difficult to predict, and if these are the standards which are to govern male-female interactions the only reliable way of avoiding accusations of wrongdoing is to stay away from women.
I believe that female baseline greater neuroticism, rather than any rational risk assessment about their probability of being physically victimised, is a bigger driver of the difference in reactions between men and women, especially considering that women are no more likely to be violently victimised than men (if anything, the reality is the polar opposite of women's feelings). I also think that our reactions to this are related to a protectiveness of women that we simply do not have for men. There are intra-sexual strength differentials too, but it's not very common to see this logic invoked in a scenario of physical power disparity between men. Virtually all discussion about physical strength differences are forever about how men can accommodate women and how men are to blame if women do something idiotic out of fear, it's never applied in an impartial manner.
And perhaps I would be less annoyed with this expectation if our ideas surrounding women in our current society were full traditionalist, which would make it at least consistent. But they're not. I have to act in line with the modern progressive ethos of women being just as Strong and Powerful and Capable as men in contexts where it would benefit them, then accept "But women are so weak and incapable and afraid, and are uniquely capable of being made to do things they don't want" in contexts where this reasoning could be used to justify special favours for women. Our modern attitudes surrounding women are this incongruent mish-mash of "Women Can Do Everything A Man Can Do" ideology as well as traditionalist ideas that prioritise their protection and require men to defer to their sensibilities, and these beliefs are selectively invoked to benefit women. It allows women to capitalise on the upsides of both strength and weakness, and avoid the downsides that these perceptions would normally entail.
Here's Udio, a new AI music generator that has emerged as a competitor to Suno. There's less of the audio "artifacting" that exists in a lot of AI music tools, and it can actually do some pretty decent generation from keywords. It's early days and there are limitations and still identifiable signs of AI-ness, but it's quite a large step forward from the previous iterations.
The emergence of all these musical AIs as of late has been quite validating, especially since I've had a good amount of arguments with art people I know about the ability of AI to create music - as someone who makes music as a hobbyist I've come at it from the perspective of "these are all just patterns and systems of rules, and can be imitated easily by an agent familiar enough with those rules". In similar fashion to those who predicted that visual art would be difficult to achieve via AI, those who were predicting that this ability was not generalisable to music were wrong.
To some extent, it's understandable - it must be a pretty big blow to one's ego for the art one prides themselves on to be so easily recreated and automated by the equivalent of a Chinese Room, especially when the field is still in its infancy and hasn't even come close to anything we would consider agentic - but I can't help but see many of the naysayers about the ability of AI to achieve supposedly uniquely "human" tasks as being clearly myopic and wrong.
The other provision is 'relating to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples', which given that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples are in fact Australian citizens and are affected by literally everything in Australian politics from taxes to trade, one can easily see how this provision means 'everything'.
Even if you try to charitably represent it by applying it only to matters that specifically relate to Aboriginals and Torres Strait Islanders, this still poses a problem. For example, in zero-sum situations such as racial reparations where a benefit for the Indigenous also entails causing disadvantage for other Australians, that can still be considered to be a "matter relating to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples" and the Voice will have the ability to "make representations" on that matter.
To try and claim, as Albanese does, that the Indigenous should have a "say" on matters that pertain to them ignores that it's often the case that these policies do not only have an effect on Indigenous people, but also have consequences for your average citizen. And when looked at through this lens, any such attempt to give the Indigenous preferential sway over these kinds of decisions becomes less and less justifiable.
Okay, I thought this was so obvious it didn't require explanation, but clearly it does. You are coming at this from a specific moral standpoint and presupposing that the liberal position on abortion should be treated as an assumed default, but I see no reason why it should be treated as such. Conservatives would tell you that abortion is not a right at all, since actions that infringe on other people's rights do not qualify, and that abortion itself is in and of itself an unjust and costly imposition of one's will on another that they want to prevent since it allows someone to strip the developing human of life and limb when they are helpless to do anything about it. Legalising abortion is as offensive to the conservative moral sensibility as banning it is to the liberal's, the two views are irreconcilable and it's likely that you will not get a consensus on it because of the complexity of the issue.
Yet, it is interesting that we have a situation where liberals have on very shaky grounds tried to circumvent the state-by-state process of lawmaking to push their preferred policies through, whereas you have as of yet not provided such an example of conservatives doing the same on the topic of abortion (despite conservatives being able to similarly rationalise their policy preferences with "well, it's a defence against people's attempts to impose their will on another"). As such, I think it makes sense to characterise the "attack" as having originated from the left.
Agree, it's a completely ridiculous justification and there are clearly ideological considerations at play here. As you already noted, if the government mandates ideological woke policies that uniquely protect certain groups and allow for their preferential treatment over others, it can't then utilise that self-created loophole and state that it has nothing to do with ideology.
You could make the argument that the specific people making the hiring decision might not be thinking about equity, but I'm inclined to doubt that, since employers aren't necessarily backed into a corner here either. You can whittle down your candidate list without randomly throwing applications out or excluding people from consideration based on arbitrary demographic criteria. Those applying to business and computer science roles often have to take psychometric and aptitude tests, and the government could do the same and exclude any candidates whose performance isn't up to scratch. As a bonus, if this is implemented properly the quality of their employees would be better. But that's not going to happen, because the demographic imbalance that's going to result in is probably anathema either to them or some higher-up they're accountable to.
EDIT: clarity
Whether this is good or not is a question of values and not really related to the point, the topic of discussion is more about whether it's possible.
I think your scenario is unrealistic in any case - automation of manual labour tasks is certainly feasible (and has been achieved in many cases) and more such jobs in these domains will eventually become obsolete once technological advances make the cost of doing so lower than employing human labour, but that's besides the point. You can be an AI doomer and still realise that AI has immense potential. Plenty of the people discussed on this forum certainly believe so (Yudkowsky, Bostrom, etc). But there are still a lot of people basically treating AI as a hype-fad pushed by techbro caricatures, who regard automation of all these oh-so-human pursuits as practically impossible and scoff at the mention of AGI, and pretty much every two years their predictions get overturned.
I have a fairly similar feeling of being uninterested in being around other people, but for a different reason. My ennui surrounding it is less because I find social games uninteresting and more because it's very clear just how much of social interaction is a psychopath's game, the kind of thing where the optimal strategy is to be highly manipulative and obsessive. When participating, my guard is always up. Being good at it is a form of "optimisation" you can be motivated by, but it's one that ultimately kind of sucks.
This isn't even necessarily disdain for normies, it's more that a truly incredible amount of human interaction is just warfare in disguise, people locked into an endless multilayered evolutionary arms race with each other which they can't extricate themselves from. And while "warfare" is not all there is to it, these undercurrents exist in so many facets of social life that it often makes it unpleasant to deal with. For a certain type of person I think it feels much nicer to wrap oneself up in intellectualising than to have to participate in that.
Similarly, patriarchy is not this wishy washy idea that masculinity is valued more of that men hold most of the power. No, what you find in the scholarship is a system of social structures and practices, in which men govern, oppress and exploit women. And exploit and oppress are the operating words here.
There's already been talk further up in the thread about all the things that feminists are misguided about regarding the traditional societies they would call patriarchal. On that topic I would say that I too happen to disagree with the idea that masculinity was "valued more" in the past, rather masculinity and femininity were both respected in their own distinct way, and men and women had their own corresponding and complementary forms of power and influence.
However, another very big part of the reason why feminists can come to the conclusion that societies were "oppressive" towards women is because of some very extreme selectivity on their part. They hyper-focus on any perceived male privileges and ignore the very real female privileges and male responsibilities that existed, obscuring the tradeoffs inherent in traditional gender roles. In the societies that feminists claim fit their ideas of "patriarchy", there's plenty of commonly found social norms and structures that contradict the "gendered oppression of women" hypothesis, but are conveniently left out from the definition of patriarchy.
These elements of traditional societies that feminists ignore (e.g. their protectiveness towards women and tendency to assign men responsibility for ensuring female wellbeing) are massively important parts of their social organisation, and I strongly suspect that the exclusion of these inconvenient elements from their definition of "patriarchy" is deliberately done so that the definition fits the preordained framework that feminists already have in mind. When confronted about it, they might occasionally acknowledge the existence of these female privileges and male responsibilities, but then will subsequently attempt to rationalise it away with baroque, unintuitive and unfalsifiable "benevolent sexism"-type word games which paint attitudes and norms that favour women as merely being side effects of patriarchy so as to maintain the idea that the foundational elements of patriarchy are that of male power and privilege. Again, their ideology and beliefs inform their definitions.
As you have already noted, the feminist definition of patriarchy isn't separable from their moral judgements surrounding it - all these moral judgements are baked straight into the DNA of feminist theory. Oppression of women is fundamental to the feminist conceptualisation of gender relations, and all of their definitions and theory bend to accommodate this idea as much as possible through misconceptions, half-truths and some very skewed and selective framing.
A bit like how a strong large man needs to learn to control himself because he can inflict real damage, while a small woman lashing out is seen as harmless and maybe even endearing and cute/funny.
I wouldn't attribute the entirety of the gender effect found to this factor quite so quickly. Respondents condemn violence by men against women more harshly than violence by women against men, and this disparity persists even after controlling for perceptions of greater injury of women. "Our findings suggest that real or perceived differences in injury or potential for injury provide some explanation behind differences in attitudes regarding domestic violence across perpetrator or victim gender, but it does not fully explain this difference. Rather, across all three measures, respondents evaluated violence by men against women more seriously than they did violence by women against men. We find that third parties (a) rated men’s violence as more injurious, (b) were more likely to label men’s violence as a crime even after controlling for injury rating, and (c) deemed men’s violence as more worthy of police contact, controlling for injury rating and criminal labeling."
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/15564886.2017.1340383
When it comes to male/female relations, a good amount of the prioritisation of female safety (and the cultural norms regulating male behaviour around them) are likely influenced by factors unrelated to a simple evaluation of women as being physically at risk. I believe we view harm done to women as inherently objectionable on a more fundamental level and reflects an underlying "empathy gap" of sorts.
For example, this paper notes that "Gender differences were investigated in the experience of empathic sadness towards same- versus other-sex targets. ... In both studies, female adolescents reported more empathic sadness than did male adolescents. Female targets also received more affective empathy than did male targets, and, more importantly, gender differences were observed in same-sex versus other-sex affective empathy." They also note that the finding of female targets receiving more empathy, especially from male adolescents, is consistent with previous research.
Meaning, when non-whites do some in-group biased thing, whites may think it cannot have any consequence, it's just like a lion cub doing some cute roaring. But when whites get into that style of thinking it leads to very professionally and industrially-scientifically orchestrated and engineered genocide, like the Holocaust.
I actually do believe that this could be true to some extent regarding race (which is evident whenever white liberals talk repeatedly about prejudice + power as a reason why only whites can be racist). That really doesn't change the fact that the tolerance for prejudice when non-whites do it is a benefit offered to non-whites.
By acting as a powerless victim that is only ever downtrodden by society, it is possible to gain help and provision on an individual level, as well as to game society to get financial, professional and social benefits, which is why you see so many non-whites and women and [insert other protected class here] capitalising on the very social justice narratives that paint them as having little power. It's notable that all of those complaining about being "looked down upon" continue reinforcing that narrative themselves through repeated claims of victimhood instead of asserting one's agency.
I am not of the opinion that it is inherently beneficial to be seen as powerful, or that it is a perception that you necessarily want (which is an assumption inherent in the comment you wrote). In all honesty, I think the less power you can convince people that you have, the more benefits you can actually milk from society at large. There are a huge amount of incentives to seek out a perception of yourself as weak, and in fact that is indeed what you see people willingly doing for themselves now - trying to attach the weak, abused victim role to themselves to exploit double standards and place greater responsibility on their out-group while dressing it all up in the guise of empowerment.
If it was truly so undesirable to be viewed in that way, you probably wouldn't be seeing the proliferation of these kinds of woke movements en masse.
Okay, I want to focus on this part, since it undergirds the rest of your comment.
It's difficult for me to think of a lower status take than consternation about, say, the casting decisions in the Little Mermaid remake. There's a few layers to that -- the content is for children, and these live action remakes are kind of shameful to have any investment in even before getting to the politics that is easily read as a kind of adolescent, race-fragile myopia.
One of the primary concerns of the left regarding representation etc is about programming tailored to children as well as the messages it purportedly ends up conveying (which is part of why race-swapping is happening in kid-tailored IPs as well), so if such a leftist were to go on to subsequently believe that being concerned with children's content reads as shameful it would come off as at least somewhat hypocritical to me. It is entirely possible to be invested in a piece of entertainment solely on a "meta-level", so to speak.
With regards to "adolescent, race-fragile myopia", it might be easy for people to read it as being that. In most cases, I think it would be entirely a strawman of the position based on wilful misunderstanding, but anyone certainly can form whatever ideas of their opponent they want independent of the things said opponent actually expressed (sadly a common occurrence in the current climate). That doesn't mean discussion about woke ideology being forced into every production under the sun is inherently unwarranted.
Unless I've misunderstood, this doesn't seem to be a criticism of the take itself so much as it is "if a position can be argued not to look good on X level, you shouldn't even try to argue it at all" which is an idea that doesn't resonate with me whatsoever and is very disconnected from my method of approaching things. It's a focus on aesthetics over all else, which is a consideration that in my view shouldn't inform anyone's decisions as to whether to argue something or not. If there's a valid argument there, it should be promoted regardless of how dignified the take looks on an instinctual, knee-jerk level, and the challenge is getting people to see your point of view.
I don't see a net benefit to give your janitors, for example, high-end mental enhancements (other than pruning "boredom" and "ambition" nodes).
I'd say that retoolability counts as a benefit. Operating off a strict genetic caste system based on assigned social roles is unsustainable since it requires you to somehow be able to reliably forecast your future needs (like what ratio of janitors:scientists you would need in X amount of years). If and when skilled roles unexpectedly open up that need to be filled, it'll be very difficult for anyone else to fill them.
The only way this remotely works is if it's possible for forms of mental enhancement (genetic or mechanical/technological) to be applied to service-class mods later in life so they can operate at the same level as those modified as embryos, allowing a society to react to circumstances as they arise. But even if that can happen, radically changing someone at a later stage of development would likely inherently be more difficult and time-consuming than embryo editing and introduces a huge amount of unnecessary lag and unwieldiness into the system. The simpler and more optimal solution would be to make it so that people can pliably adapt to a range of jobs from the outset.
Also, there's automation (which likely would develop in tandem with other technologies like genetic modification), and that would make a lot of "janitor"-type jobs irrelevant in the first place.
EDIT: added more
The human brain is a "chinese room".
Not exactly, ChatGPT isn't possessed of "understanding" of textual content like humans are, but it can generate text very competently nonetheless.
Also AI has done many agentic things. Any definition of agentic that would exclude everything an AI has done would be so strict as to be obviously fragile and not that meaningful.
I mean, I agree that the distinction between an agent and automation is a completely arbitrary distinction predicated solely on degree, but the fact remains people don't think of AI as agents in any real sense at the moment. I think as the progress of the field goes on that perception will shift.
Yes, I essentially agree with this. The legitimacy of the Constitution isn't a fluffy subjective thing that can simply differ from person to person. Legitimacy is a phenomenon which is determined by the beliefs of the society as a whole. And in a scenario where people do see the Constitution as illegitimate, I see nothing preventing them from outright drawing up another agreement. It's happened before and can happen again. The fact that people generally have chosen to remain with that system seems to suggest they see merit in it, no?
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