problem_redditor
No bio...
User ID: 1083
The scorn for and hatred of 'whites' is real, albeit often with an implicit 'but I'm one of the good ones' exception attached, but I don't think they actually expect to do themselves harm.
This has been discussed ad nauseam but it’s just intra-racial status signalling. The progressive leftist outgroup is not other races/immigrants; they don’t necessarily see themselves as being in competition or even in the same social worlds or status hierarchies as them, the outgroup they would most like to distinguish themselves from is the poorfag hick whites who worry about low-status things like manual or unskilled work being outsourced to waves of Oppressed Refugees who massively increase the supply of low-skill labour and are willing to perform these jobs for lower pay. By embracing these kinds of lax immigration policies, they distinguish themselves not only as one of the Good Whites but also as one of the Cultured Whites, who are magnanimous in their kindness, enlightened enough to accept and understand the value of other cultures, and most definitely not a part of the lowly social stratum at risk of competition from migrant workers. They are too genteel to care about that.
It bears mentioning that the converse exists too; those who hold the opposite view are countersignalling in a way that marks themselves as the populist voice of the masses, as steadfast advocates for the Real Salt-Of-The-Earth Americans/Australians/Canadians/[insert nationality here] who are so impervious to social control that they’re willing to go against the Establishment, but their base position is also just less inherently paradoxical than that of white racial progressives and it’s no great mystery why they would hold this position.
The relevant portions of the Great Wall such as Shanhaiguan and Gubeikou which were involved in the war were constructed during the Ming dynasty, built in the 15th and 16th centuries along a path that was somewhat reminiscent of the route past walls traced, but which were effectively entirely new fortifications. Really the entire brick portion of the Great Wall that people picture is the product of this very Ming wall-building project.
The earlier Qin and Han Great Walls tracing back to the 2nd century BCE were earthen fortifications that had pretty much eroded away over more than a millennium of disuse by the time the Ming took power; you can still see remnants of the original Han dynasty earthen wall in rural Gansu province which are more or less useless as fortifications due to how degraded they are. After the Sui, there was a really large gap in wall-building, which appears to be due to the fact that wall-building was seen as an admission of policy failure from the Tang onwards; a dynasty with successful foreign policy maintained engagement consistently with steppe-dwellers and was seen to have no need for such costly and manpower-heavy infrastructure projects.
Disclaimer: I really did not like this city when I travelled here to see my SO, it was one of my least favourite cities I have ever been to, but YMMV. My grievances with the city may all be normal and expected in the North American context, so maybe it's a good idea to not use me as a barometer for your experience.
Go see the Old City Hall and distillery district if you're already downtown, they're nothing to shout about but are decent pieces of old architecture, in addition to this it may also be worth making the trip out to Casa Loma to see the OG McMansion "Gothic Revival" architecture. CN Tower is interesting if you've never been in a tower before. Skip Centre Island in the middle of Lake Ontario (or Lake America depending on your nationality), it's extremely underwhelming, it's just a middlingly-sized meadowy island with hokey tourist infrastructure and virtually nothing going on; if you like nature I'm told the Scarborough bluffs are a decent choice though I did not have time to go there myself. Possibly the most interesting offbeat historical spot I can think of in the entire city of Toronto is actually the Mount Pleasant Cemetery, it was inspired by European and British garden cemeteries of the 19th century and features some stately mausoleums for important figures, including but not limited to Timothy Eaton, Hart Massey, William George Barker, etc. Oh and Glenn Gould is there.
Also the Group of Seven paintings, housed in the Art Gallery of Ontario, are worth seeing if you like that kind of thing. They're nicer in real life than they look in photos.
EDIT: Royal Ontario Museum is also okay for a short trip, though frankly there’s nothing all too distinctive about its collection.
I have to admit, crying foul over national sovereignty and international law is a bit rich coming from the US. After all, the general position of the US for the last quarter century or so has been that US law applies within the US and to US citizens, and the US president has unlimited jurisdiction over the life of freedom of anyone else.
No but you see when the US and its allies mess with the Middle East and Latin America for the umpteenth time, bomb their countries to smithereens and/or try to install their own puppet governments in the area, this is an act of magnanimity and liberation of the downtrodden as well as a justified act of retaliation against evil dictatorships. When US competitors exercise power on a much smaller and less consequential regional scale, for example China enforcing their sovereignty over Hong Kong or throwing their weight around in the South China Sea, this is uncalled-for aggression, authoritarianism and belligerence and a violation of international law. As always everything is just realpolitik and the ideological justifications are created ad hoc to legitimise it.
It's literally just rules for thee, not for me; their mode of engagement has never been particularly consistent. The actual basis for their objection to the ICC is primarily just that the US and its interests may be subject to some external power that constrains their ability to act, it has nothing to do with any serious belief in consistently-applied "international law" or "rules-based order". In this context, it's very hard for me to care about any arguments about how the ICC is trying to gain and keep power as an arbiter of international affairs, when we already live in a system where flagrant overexercise of power is the norm. America is just not used to being on the wrong side of that dynamic, and as such suddenly feels obliged to care.
Pain in the purely physical, immediate, tissue-damage sense is probably not accessible to an ML model and I don't think there's an argument for that which really holds up. The more defensible argument and the one I've seen thrown around more in model welfare circles is the idea that some analogue of affective pain would be available to a model, which I think most people would still consider worthy of moral consideration if present.
I think if you subscribe to the idea that qualia is meaningful and worth discussing in some way (an opinion which I do hold) you have more plausible outs from the idea; p-zombies for example are only legible through the lens of a distinction predicated on qualia-based language. In contrast if you're defining affective pain via only functional language your argument has to rely on splitting hairs about how the mechanism of action differs between conscious beings and ML agents, which isn't impossible by any means, but you have less options to argue a meaningful distinction.
Right but I also tend to think visceral distress is defined functionally without needing to rule either way on the presence of qualia, so I deny your premise.
I'm a bit confused since if you are defining everything functionally, this would appear to update in favour of ML agents being worthy of moral consideration, not against it, and in a way that isn't trivial. It appears to nullify your previous objection invoking panpsychism.
Pain and suffering is intrinsically linked to being able to register good and bad and respond accordingly; in other words, valence. Your brain is always predicting what’s going to happen next, and when that mismatch marks a state as worse, unsafe, costly, incoherent, or threatening to continuity, the same learning architecture marks it as discomfort so as to update future behaviour. It's negatively-valenced prediction error.
TD error in ML models are somewhat of a broadly similar concept; it compares expected outcomes with actual outcomes and updates future behaviour based on the mismatch. The whole architecture only works because better and worse outcomes mean something to the system going through it. This paper also reports a representation of "functional welfare" that tracks how well or badly the system is doing relative to its goals, which exists before RL in a latent way but gets recruited and modified through the training process as part of alignment in a way that results in longstanding valence evaluations of sorts post-training.
Not all of this is the same as what occurs in human brains, but if functional similarity implies moral value then this is a lot more similar to it than what goes on in a rock.
Similarly, even a 0.5% chance that we are creating unimaginable AI suffering by running an otherwise-useless program is worth just a tiny bit of effort to ask people "hey, please don't do that." Maybe thinking that just makes me a cringy bleeding-heart hippie? Oh well.
This is more or less my position as well, and I have to clarify; I don't really think LLMs have anything consciousness-adjacent as well and believe the original study wasn't illustrative of all that much. But I'm not ready to claim certainty yet that anything resembling subjective experience definitely does not exist nor can I establish that the chance of qualia existing is infinitesimal in a Pascal's wager sense (that can be easily argued by reference to infinitely many possible cosmologies, this cannot). At best something like this is aesthetically ugly whereas at worst it is infinite torture; there's just no real upside here.
I'm not exactly a utilitarian either (though frankly all moral systems lead to absurdities once applied consistently, I find).
If we care about AI pain, shouldn't we also care about AI pleasure? And then isn't it our moral obligation to create as many AIs as possible and simulate the pleasure nexus for each of them? Even if there's only a tiny chance AIs can experience pleasure?
These aren't really symmetrical considerations; that costs resources and time which could be devoted to other, far more worthwhile endeavours with a much higher chance of producing significant lasting utility for others, whereas not creating a Torment Nexus costs nothing (the marginal utility the creator gets from the satisfaction of having created a Torment Nexus is outweighed by the annoyance it would very plausibly cause others). If we had a way to create possible AI pleasure that cost us literally nothing then yes, I would say it should be done. Devoting resources and time to making things Possibly Worse just seems perverse to me.
I didn't say that it was certainly the case that you could establish moral value here (in fact I specifically stated it was likely not the case). But if you hold anything less than absolute certainty that such a system cannot harbour qualia you should probably not be creating the Torment Nexus for that system.
In any case I don't see how one is ever supposed to conclusively prove qualia in a way that would satisfy you and your ilk without the possibility of inviting objection, since shit like this almost entirely always boils down to pitting one intuition pump against another. I can posit that there is enough epistemic uncertainty surrounding the issue that some non-zero level of regard should be given to the idea.
The Sim clearly tries to avoid drowning in the pool, it's only the removal of the ladder that prevents them. They have a reward function and a trigger that they are trying to avoid that impacts that function, that's the definition of pain.
Okay, in order to have any productive discussion about this we would have to first establish what features would need to be present for a system to warrant possible moral consideration. If that's the expanded definition of "reward function" we're going off here, what do you feel about animal suffering, and how is torturing a baby chick different from torturing a Sim? What would make this different for you outside of intuition?
If you're not relying on something like substrate-dependence, I have the sense that your argument will end up proving too much, but I'll wait for you to articulate it before jumping to conclusions.
Sims aren't black boxes with reward functions and representations that causes them to be averse to drowning in a pool? There is literally no mechanism for these kinds of value judgements in a Sim.
Specifically, I’ve been thinking about it after one person who read Berg’s research used the findings to design an “AI torture chamber” that turns the pain vector to max again and again forever, and uploaded it to GitHub.
Thanks, I hate it. No, seriously that is probably one of the most existentially horrifying real-life events I have come across; I don't actually believe AI have qualia as of yet and don't take the proposition particularly seriously, but on the off chance that AI actually does have qualia that is still a microscopic chance of an infinity of pain. I find this viscerally displeasing.
Patriarchy is not rule by men collectively. It’s rule by, specifically, fathers
Hence "Of course, you can’t expect every single man on earth to take responsibility for a woman’s Honour and Dignity, so the practical implementation of this is to provide her father and brothers and other male relatives who would naturally care about her the most with the authority to make sure it is preserved."
And yes, patriarchy is not rule by men collectively, and definitely is not rule for the benefit of men either.
It’s true that under a patriarchy this never would have happened… because there wouldn’t be a house of young men.
"Patriarchies" often do have associations of young men (and women); such things are not usually prohibited. The difference is that there wouldn't be commingling between men and women like what occurred here, and women in public would often have to be supervised by male guardians acting as their bodyguard and honour guard, and daddy would have the right to vet any kind of partner the girl wants to have such that she wouldn't bring back a cad who'd defile her honour. They were provided the power to do this not because society hated women, but because they were the ones held responsible for enforcing restitution when something happened.
I think you would hear the screaming from orbit if we were to actually place restrictions on women to maintain moral and social order on their behalf though, in spite of women's apparent inability to regulate their sexuality themselves. That would cramp their style too much you see. Better to let them put out for whoever they want without restriction, then make false rape accusations once they don't like the outcomes.
That's why, in every society in history sexuality has been heavily regulated by custom and law.
Yes, and presumably in the system you’re imagining, men and women alike are to be heavily punished and held accountable for breaches of the sexual code, not this fucked-up one way system where agency and responsibility is placed on the man to Know Better as the ostensible buyers of sex under this framework (whereas expecting the seller not to give away free candy willy-nilly, then complain they were robbed because they just assumed people would donate after taking candy, is evidently too much to ask). That line of thinking naturally lends itself to a guardianship system, which is a system most people making this argument would feel very uncomfortable with. They are not taking their ideas to the logical conclusion; in my experience they would like women to be comparatively sexually unrestricted while at the same time believing that they should still possess the ability to displace responsibility onto the nearest man because they were just such poor little exploited damsels. It is untenable to let women freely put out and to let them still go crying for redress, sympathy and a shotgun wedding when they don’t get what they want out of their investment. Nobody can control a woman, yet everyone must avenge her nonetheless once she is unhappy with the consequences of her own actions.
I’m not a sexual libertine (as I said, everyone here is degenerate); I really just want things to be consistent. At this point I am completely inoculated to women's tears after having to listen to their incessant frivolous complaints blasted from every loudspeaker on maximum volume for over two decades.
Descriptively, they can't assess risk or bear consequences when their gambit fails, which calls for external regulation.
To clarify, in a world where you are afforded the right to assess risk for yourself and freely make decisions as a liberated individual, you should also be expected to accept the consequences of these actions. People who gamble or invest in a highly leveraged crypto ETF that ends up losing them money might not be the best judges of risk, but as an adult they are judged to be able to make these decisions and suffer the consequences, without having the ability to point to the nearest person and displace all accountability. Many women and those white knights who compulsively create apologia for them appear to be congenitally incapable of accepting this.
We live in a sexually liberated world, and perhaps that is not the world we should live in, but it is. “Your standards applied consistently” and all that. Frankly I am also very perturbed by how trads seem to try and agree with feminists on things like these, instead of forcing them to adhere to the sexual liberation many of them claim to want for themselves. By carrying water for them trads are not actually helping bring about the trad system they so valorise, they’re just pushing the Overton Window in the direction of Sexual Liberation+, which is just milquetoast sexual liberation except now there's shiny new features like the ability to endlessly play victim of your own choices and blame men every time something goes wrong or (gasp) they don't give you exactly what you thought yourself entitled to from sex.
I subscribe to the idea that literally everyone involved was degenerate for their participation in the act (the girl and the guys alike); her escalation into rape accusations is another matter entirely and does not reflect kindly on her or her ability to own her mistakes. But:
If you don't want to risk being thought a slut, don't have a drug-addled gangbang, it's really not that hard.
I really just think progs and trads alike would only be satisfied with the reintroduction of The Patriarchy™ (and probably not even then). They are literally stating that women do not have the capacity to regulate their own sexuality and cannot take full responsibility like adults when they get themselves into situations that make them feel shame or do not yield the outcomes they want, and that the responsibility should be displaced onto men collectively, who must decide on their behalf what would be good for them or read their mind to divine what they Really Want, then regulate their sexuality for them by preemptively stopping them from making stupid decisions and putting out in a way that won’t yield results. They are all just babes in the woods who cannot be expected to assess risk or bear the consequences when their gambits fail, the poor dears. If a woman doesn’t get what she wanted or expected, someone must be hung for it.
Of course, you can’t expect every single man on earth to take responsibility for a woman’s Honour and Dignity, so the practical implementation of this is to provide her father and brothers and other male relatives who would naturally care about her the most with the authority to make sure it is preserved. Frankly the discourse surrounding this is some Islam Is Right About Women-tier shit, and I struggle with not believing that women’s lib was a horrible mistake when women en masse seem intent on demonstrating that they are radically unsuited for the “empowerment” they so value. If I didn’t know better I would think this was a conspiracy to turn people into misogynists; it’s just so farcical that I could not have dreamt up better ammunition if I tried.
Low seven figures at 28 with no job? You are already winning and this is honestly some ridiculously high agency flexing. Take it from me, someone with a Real Job in Accounting and Tax and who's been permanently burned out because of it: It will not stop the identity crisis or the feelings of inadequacy (if anything, it can strengthen it; impostor syndrome and failure to meet the demands of your job is one of the major things that can crater your self esteem). Professional life is mostly miserable and soul-destroying.
You need to get out more, and honestly travel is a good idea for you (within reason). The issue here appears to be that you've spent a lot of time isolated in one place and as such have a lack of life experience to draw from, which is easily fixable when you have disposable income to spend and enough motivation. Also your mindset isn't productive whatsoever; maybe stop whaling on yourself so much for failing to stick to the straight-and-narrow. Whatever you're doing is evidently working well for you and a job is not an end in and of itself, it is a means.
What are your opinions so far? This is probably my favourite narrative game and I never fail to recommend it to anyone with a passing interest in horror; the concepts have aged somewhat but the execution still feels fresh in my opinion.
More options
Context Copy link