questionasker
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User ID: 2119
questionasker
1yr ago
Interesting perspective.
questionasker
1yr ago
In the version of the hypothetical where the AI actually can exactly recreate the way a person would look naked in a certain pose, using only a clothed photo of them in that pose as reference, we can agree that the information is 'actually' the same, though, right? One pixel at location x,y, with color #f0d190 is 'actually the same' as another pixel at the same location x,y, with color #f0d190, regardless of whether or not that pixel exists there because it was reverse-engineered by AI, or normally-engineered to be there as a result of being captured via digital photo.
questionasker
1yr ago
However much this might be the case, you're making a point more about how mis-percieved their actions are, more-so than about how poorly received (the common perception of) those actions are in absolute terms, compared to each other.
Maybe both of them are misunderstood generally. The truth is, though, that even some of the worst interpretations of Rowlings 'misdeeds' are not considered as heinous as some of the best interpretations of Louis CK's. If we're talking about 'Why is Rowling not as cancelled as Louis CK?' my point is only that the difference in this perception is indeed a factor.
questionasker
1yr ago
Looking forward to your further answers and elaborations.
questionasker
1yr ago
pedofascism, androsupremacy
I appreciate your in-depth elaboration on what your ideal society would look like, but can you explain to me why this would be good, other than because men would return to 'appreciating and affirming youth' ? Is that goal the only reason you advocate said conception of masculine-feminine relations? If so, what is particularly desirable about that goal to justify what seems to me like the significant cost to the well-being of women to achieving it? To clarify, I am honestly interested in learning more about your beliefs and am not here to annoy you, shame you, or attempt to defeat you in debate. If you care to do so, could you do your best to try and convince me that returning to this full affirmation of youth would be a significant good? To me, it seems like most women probably wouldn't want to be treated as children/pets/slaves. Is your contention that they would actually be happier in this arrangement, or that their wishes aren't morally relevant, or that their wishes are relevant but less relevant than the good that would be done by allowing men to return to this lost appreciation and affirmation of youth?
Thanks in advance.
questionasker
1yr ago
except in the very narrow sense of being able to, for example, coinhabit women's prisons.
Regardless of whether or not transwomen should coinhabit women's prisons, whether or not they do or do not seems like a problem of minuscule ultimate importance. Do you really think Rowling would dedicate as much effort and energy into her activism if she thought problems on this magnitude were the main issues of the trans movement?
questionasker
1yr ago
it's at least information that I wouldn't want to know about my friend's attraction to my wife.
The main body of your post seems basically right. But in regards to this bit in particular, I have to say from a purely anthropological standpoint I'm fascinated with how much unanimity of agreement there is in this thread that 'whether or not one knows that the act has taken place' is a very important element of the quandary.
Are there many other acts for which whether or not they have taken place isn't nearly as important as whether or not the relevant parties know that those acts have taken place?
questionasker
1yr ago
This matches my intuition. For someone to just generate deepfakes they just keep to themselves? I've got no problem with that. For someone to distribute those deepfakes around, possibly (but not necessarily) passing them off as real has the potential for harm.
I'm starting to think along similar lines. It seems like its the actual distribution of the deepfakes that sets it apart in my intuition, not even necessarily because of the images being distributed in and of itself, but because distributing such images necessarily means they will be available publicly, and if they are available publicly that means that the depicted persons might learn that people are doing as much (creating realistic porn about them, 'viewing' them in a realistic way naked) which is what typically seems to cause the depicted persons psychological harm. Being that its wrong to cause people psychological harm, this is what makes it immoral. I'm starting to think a similar distinction would lie between i.e. masturbating while fantasizing about someone sexually (and keeping that you did as much entirely to yourself), and masturbating while fantasizing about someone and then telling that person that you did so.
Yeah, I mean, obviously he has some ideological allies. What I meant is that, right now the CW split on trans issues is almost 50/50 at best, depending on region. Trans people/issues are not popular in many societies. Whereas Kanye's beliefs are touted by are only a tiny proportion of the discourse, widely regarded as crazy extremists. Yes, I'm sure Kanye isn't cancelled among adherents of the Nation of Islam or other anti-semites. That isn't exactly saying much though.
questionasker
1yr ago
Yeah that article was pretty unconvincing. Rhetorical reasons aside, the repeated use of "midwit" alone basically predisposed me to want to disregard the rest of the points. I don't think I can respect the intuition of a person regarding predictions on verbal/linguistic topics like 'is ChatGPT a convincing enough debater to permanently break online discourse' who can't themselves see that they are repeatedly overusing a cringeworthy term.
questionasker
1yr ago
You seem dismissive of your own comment, but the last three paragraphs here seem incredibly profound to me. Thanks for your interesting reply.
questionasker
1yr ago
To clarify before anything else: I want to avoid making a value judgement about what is 'good' or 'just' or 'moral.' For example, I don't have any particular leaning as to whether a multipolar world where, as you've put it, China gets a say, or a unipolar one dominated by American colonial interests, is better or more just than the other. Instead, I'm merely trying to think about what's actually most likely to come to pass.
That's what I took away from your comments regarding 'return to the historical norm;' that you were implying that a world with a major pole centered around Beijing is the likely future, considering it has been such a frequent theme of history, at least before quite recently. This, e.g. that the future will contain a world where China is the suzerain of at least most of East Asia (if by historical example it is we are reasoning) is what in particular I'm not convinced is true. Again, perhaps it would be more fair... but I what I want to try and figure out right now is how likely it is, really.
Do you yourself really have any reason to think a continued Chinese rise is particularly likely, other than because of China's historical global centrality? Again, I'm not solely convinced of the likelihood of a Chinese-centric world (or at least one with a major pole emerging from Beijing) by way of the fact that historically this was often true, because again historically it was also true that the US didn't even exist, and yet, the US does exist. With this in mind, what's your main reason to believe that for example China will eventually continue to rise to such a strength that it can feasibly challenge the US over something like Taiwan, or (perhaps because that is too narrow of scope) anything beyond that, such as the Philipines, South Korea, South Asia, etc. ?
I think that many of the counter-arguments to China bullishness are relatively strong. For example it seems that a significant portion of China's growth has occurred in the exact way that leaves it vulnerable to the middle income trap -- do you think that they will navigate this problem, or that the middle income trap isn't real, or that I'm wrong with the premise, or what? What about the supposed demographic decline? Do you think the birth rate problem is overstated, or somehow fixable, etc.? What about the lack of allies -- i.e. it seems for the most part that given the choice between CCP suzerainty and US-American-UN-GloboHomo colonial apparatus, most Asian nations would actually choose American Globohomo status quo rather than Chinese authority, even including e.g. Vietnam and South Korea, two historical Chinese vassals.
These in general seem like strong arguments as to why, even without directly being decisively smashed/disassembled by the West, the Chinese rise might peter out at around the [Extremely major regional power]/[Second-degree global power] level, e.g. without constituting a major pole of a multipolar world order in their own right. But I very much want to hear what you have to say -- if you think that the GDP/capita of China really can reach even half that of the US, or greater, as I think would be required for them to 'erect' such a pole -- what do you see as the route there? Again, currently they're so reliant on their manufacturing economy that seems exactly like it would be middle-income-trapped -- are they going to shift numbers of people on the scale of hundreds of millions to employment in higher-paying services-economy jobs? For what, 'inward consumption' as Xi Jinping has put it? Is there even really theoretical economic demand within China, or worldwide for that matter, for even e.g. 300 million Chinese services-economy jobs in the first place?
questionasker
1yr ago
China in the Late Qing to Deng period is the only time when it was not the center of the world economy, when global trade did not center around obtaining Chinese goods and moving them West. The ascent of a unified, modern China as the center of the world economy is a return to historical norms, not a new aberration.
I appreciate the wisdom of your comment for the most part, but these assertions in particular seem like the largest flaw.
True, always in world history before late Qing was China in large part the economic center of the world. However, it is just as true that never before during that span of world history did something like the USA even exist. The conditions of the world are different than they were before, in a major relevant way: 330 million people live in a powerful, technologically advanced, industrial, resource rich nation across the ocean from China. I think this idea of 'returning to the historical norm' loses credibility as something so inevitable when you consider how irrevocably different the world is with the USA existing in its current form across the Pacific from China rather than e.g. geopolitically irrelevant Native American tribes (or really, just unexplored ocean).
And this is to mention nothing of India. I think you overstate just exactly how central China was to the historical world economy, not that it wasn't central in a major way. But my understanding is that India shared a significant portion of that economic centrality throughout history, as well. It seems to me that a 'return to the historical norm' would be an economically multipolar world split with China and India as focal points both in their own right, not China alone.
questionasker
1yr ago
I suppose you're right.
I'm sorry if this question has been asked and answered before:
What is the best/steelmanned pro-HBD proposal for the actual evolutionary mechanism by which various populations (i.e. whites) have experienced selection-for-intelligence while others (i.e. blacks) haven't? What unique circumstances and thus evolutionary pressures did the human populations that migrated to Europe or Asia face, for which human populations that migrated solely around Africa wouldn't have faced?
Of course the most compelling explanation I have found is the 'cold winter' hypothesis, that a period of harsher winters in Europe during one of the world's most recent ice ages might have made human populations in Europe select for those with better longer-term planning ability (intelligence) because they could i.e. stockpile food better in order to survive said winters. However, is it then believed plausible that no roughly similar periods of relative food scarcity or famine could have struck (anywhere) in Africa in potentially the same vein, exerting at least a similar selection pressure, albeit with different ultimate causes, on at least one of Africa's many ethnic groups? Additionally, how does this address the IQ differences between ethnic groups when non-european ethnic groups are part of the discussion, such as middle-easterners, indians, south asian or even east asian people? These groups all have for the most part 1. different IQs from each other and 2. mostly higher IQs than sub-saharans. Assuming cold winter hypothesis, in order to explain i.e. indians and middle-easterner's lower IQ than europeans, should one presume that indian and middle-eastern ethnic groups did not migrate through a region of the world experiencing anything resembling a 'cold winter' like europe's? If so, what is then to explain why indians and middle-easterners have higher average IQs than sub-saharans?
Basically, I am in general looking for a steelmanned version of a logical argument by induction about how HBD might have actually occurred in history based on what we know about evolution, in a way that accounts for some of the difficulties I intuitively think any such argument must overcome. In other words, why do both i.e. Javanese and Irish have higher IQs than sub-saharans; Which evolutionary pressures could have plausibly faced the historical ancestors of the Irish as well as the historical ancestors of the Javanese, but not the historical ancestors of any sub-saharan populations? Or am I just thinking about this wrong?
I'm very open to seeing links to research about various mechanisms of evolution, or that put forward potential answers to some of the questions I'm asking via i.e. archaeology or anthropology, and in general I actually hope that there might be elucidating research to read among many contexts relating to the subject. However, please note that I am not particularly interested in seeing links to research of any type that claim to either prove or invalidate HBD that broadly falls under the category of "testing modern day ethnic groups' IQ and then trying to control for environmental factors." My adventure exploring that realm of the debate, in the form of stuff like genetic admixture studies or twin studies, I have found frustratingly inconclusive. So if you care to answer, please limit discussion the areas discussed, that is, steelmanned argument for a plausible mechanism by which evolutionary pressures to select for intelligence were exerted on the world's ethnic groups in such differing magnitudes.
questionasker
1yr ago
Interesting perspective, thanks for the response.
questionasker
1yr ago
I don't believe him to actually be a virulent racist or antisemite or whatever. I don't even think he is a particularly political person.
Can you explain your thoughts on this?
questionasker
1yr ago
What's in your head (or on your hard drive) is nobody else's business. Putting it in public is like telling your neighbor's daughter that you jack off thinking about her. If you make it public, you make it her business.
I'm amazed at how succinctly this delineates ethical boundaries that appear basically airtight to my intuition (my intuition being where the problem lay in the first place). I'd go as far as to say that this essentially resolves the topic for me.
questionasker
1yr ago
societies that are supposed to mimick medieval ones
Harry Potter is set in basically the modern day (the late 90s to early 2000s, to be exact) and the main setting is meant to evoke the experience of students at a mid to late 20th century British boarding school, one perhaps a few decades 'behind the times' of the actual year during which the story takes place. I agree that more fiction that mimicks historical societies in setting should try not to transplant modern morality onto said setting, but that is not the situation of Harry Potter. The existence of slavery and the idea that a person who is basically a young millennial going through high school is so nonplussed by the widespread slavery that exists in his world actually is almost funnily bad.
questionasker
1yr ago
Interesting. I hope the trend continues.
Sub in any trait you like for coin flips, and it's obvious that a little bit of variation is to be expected, especially when conditions are different. On close examination, the idea that all 5 would come up with exactly the same result is a strange and unjustified supposition. The real question is how much variation there is, and whether or not it matters.
This doesn't make much sense for a few reasons. The first is that, when it comes to evolutionary lineages, we're not flipping a coin 100 times and expecting it to come up heads 50 times. An estimation closer to the magnitudes would be more like flipping a coin 1,000,000 times and expecting it to come up heads 500,000 times +/- a reasonably small difference. However sub-saharan IQ scores are more or less a full standard deviation lower than white ones, a difference so large that, if genetic, I wouldn't really expect it to be just the random result/chance given the massive scales of evolution and human populations.
It also doesn't make sense for a second reason: a commonly cited-fact about sub-saharan populations is that its actually the region with the widest range of genetic difference between its various ethnic subgroups. Wouldn't one expect that, if the supposedly genetic difference in intelligence is due to something like random chance, the large amount of genetic differences in Africa would offer plenty of opportunities for at least a handful of their ethnic subgroups to have 'lucked out' in the same way? But the reality is that IQs in the sub-sahara are low across the board. No ethnic subgroup across the whole continent has managed a lucky roll, in fact, all of them independently managed unlucky ones.
There is a ribbon of trade running from the tin mines of Cornwall to the silk plantations of China that has existed since the Bronze Age, and along that ribbon you'll find all the most advanced civilizations that have ever existed.
As far as I'm aware, India lies along this ribbon, yet (depending on who you ask) the national IQ on the Indian subcontinent is almost as bad as some places in the sub-sahara, and (regardless of who you ask) certainly worse than Europe and China. Is the assertion that this is mostly due to environmental differences, and that Africa suffers from both environmental and genetic ones? If not, what's the explanation for the difference in IQs between India and other regions like Europe or Africa?
In general I guess I also basically do not buy the assertion that civilizations were altogether more complex along a roughly europe->china silk-road-esque continuum compared to elsewhere, at least until the last six hundred years or so. However, even if I was to accept that, I would definitely dispute that human civilizations along that ribbon were measurably more complex i.e. at least 3,000 years ago (to be generous) and before, and I'm skeptical of 3,000 years being enough time for humanity to speciate into the sheer scale of IQ difference between ethnic groups that we know today.
questionasker
1yr ago
Populations incapabale of planning many months into the future died off any time their migration crossed a temperate climate.
Did the path taken from africa to europe really pass into 'cold winter' areas? Africa -> the Levant -> Turkey -> Greece ends in europe without passing through any places that even really receive snow. Plus there are temperate climates in Africa. Are there really any climates on the way to Europe from Africa that you couldn't find i.e. in the temperate regions of south africa? If so, why aren't i.e. Zulus as high average IQ as white europeans, considering their ancestors would have had to make similar migrations? And furthermore, 'cold winters' aren't the only source of long famines. Couldn't there be plenty of (and different types of) causes of famines in the tropical parts of africa to encourage selection toward individuals capable of long-term planning?
questionasker
1yr ago
100 year copyright
This seems to me like we're far past the point of copyright-life-extension singularity. Examining past trends, it seems like almost a certainty that before the next 100 years is up copyright will have been extended by at least another 100 if not a factor of 10. This is especially exacerbated by the fact that to some extent copyright is based on years since the death of the creator, and surely human lifespan will soon start benefiting as we approach a medical singularity (especially considering rich and successful creators will have access to many of these benefits earlier than the average person) Thus excepting for the prospect that copyright law reform might one day place, (unlikely) most works currently under copyright will probably never enter public domain (unless all possible inheritors of the copyright are somehow killed/destroyed).
Has this group had any discussion regarding AI use in pornography, specifically, 'deepfakes?' Its come out recently that a major up-and-coming twitch streamer 'Atrioc' (who was recently married, and ostensibly very pro-feminist, but while funny these facts are technically irrelevant to the matter at hand) had been viewing porn 'deepfakes' of multiple major female twitch streamers, including possibly his best friend's girlfriend (last part unconfirmed but highly possible). He's come out with an apology and its a whole thing but I'm sure this community is more interested with the moral/ethical questions therein than internet-celebrity drama so I won't bore you with it.
The following are my perspectives on a few of the potential questions regarding 'deepfake' porn, and AI porn in general. I'd love to hear what other people think about these perspectives, because my thoughts are currently very incomplete on the issue.
First and foremost, I have a strong intuitive feeling that it is deeply wrong, perhaps tantamount to some form of sexual harassment/assault (but of course the non-violent sort) to make 'deepfake' pornography of other non-consenting people. For example taking a picture from a celebrity's instagram and using AI to transform it into a high-fidelity (but technically fake) nude picture of them seems functionally the same as i.e. spying on them in the shower or when they're changing, which are actions I think we can all agree would be some form of wrong or illegal sexual violation (or perhaps we can't? you tell me). The way I think about this is by considering that a strong enough AI program would be theoretically capable of using a clothed picture of someone to actually reconstruct the way the exact way they look naked, which would be quite literally equivalent to the aforementioned situation/looking at them with x-ray glasses, etc. which again (I think) we and most people agree would be wrong. And so, less-powerful AI capable of doing something similar seem to be at least on that gradient of wrong, if not exactly as bad.
Furthermore, AI that actually transplants people's faces onto video depictions of sexual intercourse (which is ostensibly what 'Atrioc' was caught doing) seem worse, or maybe just bad in a different way. I don't have a similar thought experiment to justify why I feel that way but the wrongness of it is my strong intuition nonetheless.
However, I can also sort of see the argument, at least abstractly, that it's a victimless crime. On the other extreme of the spectrum, fantasizing in one's own imagination about the way people look when they're naked, or how it might feel to have sex with them, is not only generally recognized as a very benign behavior, but is also known as something almost everyone does, men and women both. Sometimes, people do this even completely unconsciously, i.e. in their dreams. And what's the difference between looking at a very (or fully) realistic recreation of the way someone might look with their clothes off, and using one's own imagination to do so? What if one's own imagination was very vivid, and you had seen many naked people before thus making your training data very good, and so you also could reasonably expect to make a relatively accurate recreation of the way someone looked while naked, only in your own mind's eye?
The thing is, acknowledging these potential similarities between an action I find morally acceptable and the one I find morally wrong, still doesn't make my intuition about the wrongness of 'deepfakes' any weaker. I feel like there must be some thing that I haven't considered about it yet, which is where I'm hoping you guys might have insight. The only distinction I've found somewhat convincing so far is maybe that the mass-distribution via the internet is what makes it wrong? In other words I find it less wrong (but still wrong somewhat) to make a highly/fully realistic nude of someone and keep it entirely on one's own computer, more so than I find it wrong to make such an image and then distribute it online. This is especially weird because the former is even more apt of a comparison to i.e. peeping on someone in the locker room which is obviously (?) wrong. So why does it seem more okay to me? Help!
I have a few potential explanations that I'm considering as candidates for the source of my cognitive dissonance here:
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Perhaps in reality none of the aforementioned actions are wrong. It's not wrong to spy on someone in the locker room, and so it's not wrong to use 'x-ray glasses' to see through their clothes, or use an AI to edit a picture to do functionally the same thing.
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Perhaps instead, in reality it actually is wrong to imagine or fantasize about what other people look like while naked. The reason this is so commonly accepted as benign is because its so unenforceable to prevent. But if sexual mores are so arbitrary/constructed that something that would otherwise be wrong can just be arbitrarily agreed-upon as acceptable just because its unenforceable, how really wrong can any ('victimless') violation of sexual mores be said to be? And thus how really wrong is the other situation, where one uses AI?
This kind of segues into 3. which is: Perhaps in reality the ultimate causes of this dissonance are that modern-day sexual mores are completely stupid, so deeply incoherent that acceptance of any one of them will necessarily lead to cognitive dissonance when contrasted against some other. Is the solution to the 'deepfake' issue then to try and change our society's sexual morals/ethics into something more internally coherent?
None of these really address why I feel different about 'turning a clothed photo into a nude' and 'transplanting, in a realistic way, a non-consenting individual's face onto an actor in a depiction of sexual intercourse.' I have no concrete ideas as to why the latter feels overall worse, but also in some other (minor) ways not as bad. And the latter situation is what the whole controversy with the streamer is all about AFAIK. Very confused about all this.
What's right here, and why? What should even be done? Should 'deepfakes' be illegal because of these potential moral/ethical concerns? Should the act of making a deepfake be illegal, or just distributing it? (I think if we wanted to, we could make both of these things illegal. We might not be able to enforce preventing anyone from making them considering the AI-cat is out of the bag, but it still might be worthwhile to have its illegality on the books if it really is wrong. In other circles I'm seeing the claims that a ban would be unenforceable (motivated thinking?) but it seems trivially easy to functionally ban at least the distribution of 'deepfake' porn in a way that would almost certainly actually reduce the dissemination of such porn if not completely eliminate it. Just as i.e. child sexual abuse imagery or zoophilia porn.
I also see a lot of people in other circles being prompted by this discussion to argue about the ethics of AI image generation in general. I generally think this is basically stupid. The arguments which claim that AI image generation is tantamount to plagiarism (of the dataset images, I suppose) are all basically worthless as far as I can tell. But people who have bought into this line of thinking are thus now going as far as to say that i.e. photorealistic porn (even that depicting completely synthetic likenesses) that is generated with AI is a sexual violation (of all the nude or semi-nude women in pictures in the dataset I guess?) Either way I am wholly unconvinced by these arguments and think they basically all stem from a bad understanding of how the AI work, so I don't think I'm super interested in discussing this axis of the debate. But I mention it because this community sometimes surprises me so if anyone here has a really strong argument as to why this might make sense that they think I haven't seen before, feel free to mention it.
You're right that many female streamers cultivate an audience in this way, but some female streamers do not and yet still have deepfake porn of them made. So to avoid getting caught up in this we can just restrict the discussion to solely what is right or wrong regarding the porn made of the latter group.
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