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joined 2023 January 21 15:54:29 UTC

				

User ID: 2119

questionasker


				
				
				

				
0 followers   follows 0 users   joined 2023 January 21 15:54:29 UTC

					

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User ID: 2119

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?

Interesting perspective.

Women's feelings are not god.

I can maybe accept most of what you're saying specifically in regards to how it answers to the question: 'should these images be illegal?' Perhaps it is a violation of the principle of free speech to have things like this be made illegal, or a slippery privacy slope, or a needless cession to emotional people, etc. That being said, whether or not it should be made illegal, I expect that it will be legally harder if not fully illegal to do this kind of thing in the near future. But I digress.

Many others in the thread are also focusing specifically on the legality dimension, which I regret and for which I bear responsibility. I was generally more interested in talking about what is moral/ethical, and less so in talking about what is and should be legal, even though I indeed asked as much in the body of my post. Even if these things are not illegal, the morality of them is still hugely important, as it determines who gets 'cancelled' etc.

And to that end, in figuring out what is ethical or moral, I think feelings do matter. For example, I think it would be immoral in many situations to do an action that I knew would make a person "feel bad" just because doing that action gave me sexual gratification, legality of the action notwithstanding. If I was trying to design the fairest US government, I might not make deepfake porn illegal. But if I was trying to be as morally/ethically upstanding of a person as I could be, there are plenty things I shouldn't do that are still legal.

I'm of the relatively firm belief that it isn't immoral to fantasize about having sex with someone, even if they haven't consented to you having such a fantasy. I'm not sure what I think when it comes to making highly realistic porn of them. If you were superman and had X-ray vision, would it be unethical or immoral to look into the women's locker room? If not, why does everyone seem to think it would be? If so, what's the difference between that and having a vivid, realistic imagination and using it for sexual purposes in the same way?

Another commenter prompted me to believe that a significant amount of how unethical it is lies in whether or not deepfaked person knows about the porn being made of them, because knowing that it exists is what inflicts psychological harm on them. I think I agree about this. However, the women in the shower into which you're peeping might not ever know that you've peeped at them, so is it not wrong to be a peeping tom (as long as you never get caught?) Teen coming-of-age movies from the 80s didn't seem to think so (the shift in attitudes between then and now might be pertinent to the discussion). Regardless, currently I do indeed think that i.e. spying on the womens locker room would be unethical, and I think most people today would agree that its probably wrong to do such a thing. This is the angle that I'm really trying to disentangle here, the moral and ethical angle, and less so the legal one.

Yeah I'm pretty willing to forgive the streamer guy specifically, especially considering your points as well as that I have little-to-no horse in the race. As to your other points:

This can cause psychological harm in a person — humans are not designed to see something like that, I don’t think it computes properly in the brain. An AI scene of being sexually victimized (in essence, arguably) is fundamentally different than making a photoshop with a person’s face due to the sheer realism.

By this do you mean to say that the main reason that these videos might be unethical is because knowledge of the existence of the videos causes psychological distress in the people whom they depict, not necessarily because i.e. the depicted people's consents have been violated?

So knowing that someone you know, that part of his mind remembers the scene when he thinks about you, is truly disgusting.

This example prompted me to think, though on a tangent only somewhat related to what you're getting at. I'm not sure the 'part of the mind thinking the AI video really happened' thing is what sets it apart. But I think that the knowledge of whether or not someone thought about you in that way is definitely part of what matters. Whether or not someone made an AI porn of you isn't relevant to you unless you know about it -- this fits with my intuition, because re: the completely imagined sexual fantasies point, even though I and most people consider those benign, the calculation changes if person A who masturbated to an imaginary fantasy of having sex with person B then went and told person B that they had done as much. Suddenly that becomes immoral/unethical to me in a way almost similar to the AI nude situation. So I think this might be getting at the distinction for me: what really matters most is if people know that this stuff is being made about them. And in the case of these popular female streamers, the fact that the pics/vids are being distributed basically means they are being forced to know that such content is being made of them. It would be like if 10,000 weirdos were constantly whispering in their ear that they jerked off to the thought of them naked, which is different than those 10,000 weirdos jerking it but not telling anyone.

So is imagining what someone looks like naked/fantasizing about having sex with them a similarly non-coercive crime, then? Either way probably 'victimless' is the wrong word to use, but I'm not sure how much effect that has on my problem.

here doesn't seem to be a principled distinction between good impressions/drawings/etc. and deepfakes.

Maybe really good drawings of a non-consenting person's likeness having sex/naked are wrong to make as well, and should be illegal.

You seem dismissive of your own comment, but the last three paragraphs here seem incredibly profound to me. Thanks for your interesting reply.

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?

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.

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.

I suppose you're right.

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.

Thanks for the interesting response.

The law, what is legal and what isn't, I suppose isn't as much of what I'm interested in rather than what is moral/ethical. Plenty of countries have already at least de jure banned deepfake porn, the US probably will too eventually. So my bad for including that question in the body of my post.

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.

Looking forward to your further answers and elaborations.

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.

Along those lines, I'd say the only context in which the information that you've generated (hence your information) of a perfect prediction of the appearance of my naked body can become equivalent to the actual information of the actual appearance of my naked body is if you can see me naked and can confirm that it's a perfect prediction.

I suppose you're right about this.

Not of anyone aware of the fact that a single neuron can have thousands of dendritic spines that undergo constant remodeling.

Neurons are capable of responding to both frequency and amplitude of nerve impulses they receive

This just means that neurons don't work in binary like most artificial electrical computers, it doesn't mean they aren't components of a digital computer. Digital doesn't mean binary.

underlying biology is 100% analog.

From your comment I'm afraid you might just have no idea what a digital computer actually is. Whether information is transferred electrically or not isn't what separates digital computers from analog ones, but rather the fact that information is represented symbolically in digital computers and not in analog ones. Information is represented symbolically in the form of action potentials in neurons in the brain meaning it is a digital computer.

"otherwise uniform computational substrate of the cerebrum to otherwise be able to process such a variety of different things from simple sensation to the considerations involved in complex planning etc." is gobbledygook that explains nothing as far as neuroscience is concerned.

When you want to be a dick, you should at least try and know something of what you're talking about so you don't come across as both needlessly overconfident and a dick. The fact that neurons can process both sense information as well as consider things like complex planning means that by definition they must be the components of a digital computer. What is uniform about the substrate is that it is all composed of neurons, not whether the architecture happens to be similar or not across various cortical layers (just as the architecture of different computer processors is not uniform despite all being made of transistors.)

Appreciate the lesswrong link. I'm interested in conjecture and wild predictions and I don't particularly care about accuracy so its exactly what I'm looking for.

I'd advise to forget all the stuff about "the brain is like a computer".

The brain is a computer and I'm not sure how you can meaningfully argue that it isn't

Thank you for your thorough explanation. I don't think the lengths of your posts were inappropriate (I at least read them all without becoming bored, if that means anything to you.) I'm also not sure there needs to be much back-and-forth here, either, as you consider there might need to be at the very beginning of your writing: it seems as though you have been sufficiently thorough in your explanation of your idealized conception of sex relations to the extent that I have no further questions to ask you, at least on that topic. However, I have some further questions about your other beliefs.

  1. You mention a belief in God. Although I appreciated the lengths of your earlier posts, can you explain somewhat briefly how you justify a belief in God in the first place, and how your spirituality plays into your beliefs? I suppose I can imagine how traditional Christian doctrines would actually quite firmly support what you are mostly already saying here but if you could be specific that would be very interesting. I'm not exactly interested in having a theological discussion and if you believe in God I doubt either of our points regarding its existence or lack-thereof will be particularly convincing to one another, so I wouldn't mind if you kept your response to this point relative short and more explanatory rather than persuasive. I enjoyed the persuasive nature of your other posts though just to be clear, so I would not be opposed to you continuing that persuasive approach when addressing my points/questions beyond this one.

  2. In your bio you mention an endorsement of anti-semitism and also being a (libert)Aryan. Can you explain how your conception of race relations relates to your beliefs? Similar to the previous point, I can assume how Aryan supremacism based on HBD might quite naturally play into your beliefs. But if having the most socially productive organ of society sit in the captain's chair is how you are orienting your idealized conception of society, how do you approach the fact that most IQ studies list east asian and jewish IQs as superior to those possessed by the traditionally 'Aryan' races? Should east asian and/or at least ethnically jewish men, assuming they are religiously Christian, be the ones we try and promote to the highest decision making positions in our society?

  3. Also in your bio you mention 'natural femininity replacement.' By this do you just mean 'replacing' the set of currently acceptable female gender roles with those that existed before the 1960s? Or is this some other thing that perhaps you think I might be interested in hearing about from you more in depth, considering I've been very interested in hearing about your elaborations on your other beliefs?

  4. You mention a lot of theory as to why it would be better if men and women reverted back to some more traditional conception of gender roles/sexual relations, but do you have any proposed praxis as to go about achieving (and preserving) this reversion? For example, if women came to wrongfully desire equality in our present world, and they hold some meaningful measure of political power now, is there really any feasible way they could be convinced they are wrong about this? Are women too far gone as a demographic, and it would be more-so a task of red-pilling all men and then having them seize back what is rightfully theirs? If, as you say in your posts, more and more people are beginning to have thoughts such as yours regarding the 'proper' conception of gender roles, is it just a matter of waiting until society self-corrects?

  5. Perhaps most importantly out of any of these five points/questions: Indeed, as you mention toward the end of your post, I would like to hear your best attempt at a defense/endorsement of pedophilia as you might be so inclined to write. I'm less interested in hearing your defense of fascism as I have heard steel-manned arguments for fascism by nominally intelligent people many times before, and in the typical way for most political ideologies, the argument was somewhat convincing and somewhat not. If you really think you'd have something new to bring to the table regarding an argument for fascism feel free to describe it, but if your beliefs are more or less the steel-manned position already held by most neofascists, then feel free to skip that particular elaboration.

Rarely, though, if ever, have I heard a defense of pedophilia from an intelligent and well-spoken person. At least, I haven't heard such a defense of the type of pedophilia that wasn't pederasty. So more than anything I'm fascinated by the prospect of hearing what you have to say about that in general, 'why it would be good,' how it would be justified, how it would be spiritually and morally uplifting -- and how it plays into any conception of a political program beyond the premise that i.e. it would be spiritually or morally uplifting, which even if true seems like insufficient basis for any sort of political program beyond the scope of 'social movement.' Thanks again in advance for taking the time to thoughtfully share your perspectives.

But they can always just not look.

If it's there, though, they'll still know it's there, even when they're not looking at it. Thus they will suffer some psychological harm they otherwise wouldn't have suffered, if it just wasn't published in the first place.

Is it moral for me to publish something, if the very fact that it has been published will cause someone to suffer psychologically? I think unless the value gained by publishing that thing is high (high in a relative sense, as in, greater than zero) it is immoral to do this. And I think the value gained by something like porn is basically zero.

Maybe true, but I guarantee you that the vast majority of people paying money to host websites that distribute deepfakes are doing so for commercial purposes. I.e. the streamer in question had accessed a website which required him to pay 15 dollars to use

Maybe that should have the same moral or ethical implications.

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.