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User ID: 2119

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

					

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User ID: 2119

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:

  1. 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.

  2. 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.

Yeah he apparently was looking at the porn websites on the same computer he uses to stream, despite being more than rich enough to afford a second computer/tablet etc. He left the tab open after viewing, went to stream the next morning, and then when he alt-tabbed between his game and some other application, the thumbnail of the website was visible for like 1/4 of a second in the alt-tab menu. It didn't even come out until 4 days after the stream took place because it took that long for someone to notice it by scouring the stream VOD, which they must have only happened to do by chance. Either way yeah, idiotic on his end to be looking at any kind of porn on his streaming computer, let alone unethical porn.

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.

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.

There is also the whole element of the legal slavery of a race of sapient beings capable of thought, speech, etc. that is nearly unexamined at least as an institution by even the good characters of the universe. That part is so weird/'problematic' to almost be funny.

it looks to be a genuinely good video game,

The whole rest of the content of your post aside, can I ask what you're basing this on? I haven't seen any information one way or another regarding its quality. Both the prospects of the actual gameplay being either very good or very bad would be very funny/entertaining.

Without meaning to move the goal posts, a single one of the main trio of characters (and the perhaps overly socially-conscious/goody-goody one at that) caring about slavery, therefore clarifying that at least in universe its something that the characters could conceivably care about, but for the most part, just don't, is almost funnier.

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).

Social media addiction has clear psychological and societal downsides. It can shrink and monopolize our attention, make us more anxious and lead to damaging fads like stupid "challenges" that kids do.

I guess the whole argument fell flat for me because I am wholly unconvinced by this main premise, that tiktok is definitely bad for people.

First and most ridiculously, we can't seriously believe that 'damaging fads' like tiktok challenges are a serious source of concern. Kids filming themselves doing something silly hardly seems like a phenomenon that will lead to the breakdown of American society. At worst some of the most dangerous fads kill a particularly stupid kid or two on average every year, maybe. So the Chinese have created a superweapon that works by... exerting an extremely slight eugenic effect on the american population? Lol. Is the idea that kids should be studying instead of doing tiktok challenges?? Baffled by this point.

More reasonably, there is the claim that social media might make us more anxious. I was under the impression that sites like facebook and instagram might do this, because people compare themselves unfairly to the 'highlights' of other people's lives which make up the typical facebook feed, and thus feel anxious that they are not having as successful, exciting, etc. lives as their friends. I was not aware that tiktok had this effect. However, if I was to give the original argument the benefit of the doubt, and assumed that tiktok use indeed could play a part in causing anxiety, I'm still not convinced of this in itself as a deleterious effect. What actual downsides (in the sense of, geopolitically measurable downsides, if the assertion is that tiktok is a 'chinese superweapon' the intention or effect of which is presumably to influence geopolitics) is anxiety actually associated with? Anxiety is a potentially less-enjoyable subjective state experienced by an individual. But are individuals with anxiety for example measurably less productive citizens? Why isn't it plausible that they could be more productive citizens? Because it certainly seems that way to me. My intuitive perception is that hippies are the type of person you get when you lower the anxiety in the equation, and people who are struggling harder to get ahead in the rat race are the type you get when you turn the dial up a bit. Either way, I'd like to see an explanation or some data that would suggest societies with greater proportions of 'anxious' individuals are actually meaningfully less geopolitically competitive than less anxious societies.

Finally, there is the assertion that social media can both 'shrink' and 'monopolize' our attention. I'll admit I have no rebuttal for the claim that any sufficiently entertaining product could be a superweapon in the sense that it could 'monopolize' our attention, making people want to use it so much that they forsake other productive things they would have done otherwise. It is entirely possibly that tiktok is this sort of entertainment product. However, I suppose I ultimately doubt that tiktok will really cause people to use it instead of i.e. going to work. As to whether or not tiktok will 'shrink' our attention, I'm not skeptical of this but rather of how bad it is. I'm sure tiktok could cause attention spans to go down. But again, could someone point me to what actual geopolitically measurable loss will be incurred from this? Perhaps attention spans could shrink so small that people will no longer be able to appreciate instances of long-form of high culture such as historically important novels. Will this help China win the new cold war? Is the idea that maybe fewer people will become geopolitically important human resources like i.e. engineers, because they won't have the attention span to study the required material? Attention spans have already been declining for decades, over this timespan has the US produced fewer engineers per capita?

The point that China themselves is demanding domestic censorship of tiktok, or that we should generally appreciate their understanding of which social ills to prioritize ameliorating, is wholly unconvincing as well. Aside from the fact that china is already known for seeking complete control of the online information to which their citizens have access, they are also known for their leadership buying the claims of moral panics. A few months ago they passed a law highly restricting video game time for children under 18, and a few months before that they banned effeminate-seeming men from appearing on TV or being featured on other forms of popular media. Rather than smart, agile avoidance of new potential vectors of social decline, these seem more to me like the laws your asian friend's grandpa might pass if he was the dictator of a large country, i.e. motivated by the vague sentiment that these things are bad rather than an actual analysis that video game addiction or the feminizing of your nations men are serious social problems. Plenty of studies show that playing video games more than the average person is even associated with higher IQ or other benefits, but of course the most visible effects of gaming to an elderly asian man are probably that he thinks his grandson plays too much instead of studying, and that a small portion of people get addicted to the point of actual productivity loss.

Overall I guess I just think the whole 'social media bad' thing might be a moral panic itself. There are plenty of ways to easily criticize of social media use right now by pointing to things like declining attention spans. But honestly I bet there are also plenty of unexamined upsides, too. Reading books for pleasure was once widely regarded as a waste of time (before other forms of media were created to take its place as the 'time-waster' scapegoat). Now reading books is widely regarded as one of the best ways to become smarter. Who's to say social media use won't eventually be this in time? It almost seems to me intuitive that things that shower you with cognitive stimulus like the constant stream of information through a tiktok feed could be an intelligence-increasing activity. To me the jury's still out.

I wrote a long post for this before realizing it was basically stupid.

What is Sam Hyde?

My read on him is that he is basically a very far-right person who sort of realizes you can't be openly far-right even ironically without choosing to sacrifice basically all the benefits of participating in mainstream society. So because his political beliefs, aka, what he thinks is true about the world, need to buried under many, many layers of irony in order to allow him to semi-exist in and benefit from the mainstream, everything he says or does ends up being buried under many layers of irony.

But at a certain point I don't even know. Apparently he was dating a transgender person a few years ago. Not that you can't be far-right politically and do this. But it throws me for a loop. This is also something that Hyde might just make up about himself as a rumor to spread around. Not exactly sure why he would, but I'm not exactly sure why he does much of what he does.

Is he smart? He bragged about being admitted to Mensa on twitter, which strikes me as actually not something that a smart person would do, but also something he would absolutely do ironically. But that aside, he actually did join mensa, meaning he has at least 98th percentile IQ, regardless of how 'smart' that makes him.

Is he a sociopath? His acting ability is extremely good and he's able to avoid dropping character for really long periods of time, to the point if I question whether or not a typical (non-sociopath) person would even be capable of doing the kinds of acts he does.

What's anyone's best read they think they have on him as a person? He's stumps me in a way few other people who nominally don elaborate public-facing facades still don't.

I've always scored around 130

In the interest of calibrating my understanding of this, anecdotal experience by anecdotal experience, may I ask what score you received on the SAT?

My read of the quoted comment is different than yours.

To your point that 'community' is overused to the point of meaninglessness in liberal circles, well, I think that's what's actually going on here. My perspective is that the quoted comment isn't really arguing for any criminal justice reform because it will help mend communities in any real way. They're just pro-criminal justice reform community effects notwithstanding, with a focus on rehabilitation and reconciliation between the criminal and victim (which are goals one could have for criminal justice reform without caring about 'mending the community') and then at the very end of their comment, they merely happen to name-drop 'community' because, as you said, its become such a meaningless term in liberal discourse that they use it almost without intentional meaning.

If someone (not dearly beloved but clinically demented) cannot/isn't willing to distinguish real and fake images based on context, or just has strong emotional reactions to highly-likely-fake images and can change attitude towards me on their basis, that person is a long-term liability and should be discarded.

I think the matter is more subtle than this.

I obviously think most people can, on the abstract level, distinguish between real and fake images. However I'm not willing to use this fact to jump to the conclusion that most people, including many people valuable enough to keep in one's life, wouldn't have strong emotional reactions to some types of even fake images depicting a person, especially images of a sexual nature. And again however much on conscious level they know the images are fake, I feel like the reactions many people have to these images could at least somewhat change their attitude towards the person ostensibly depicted in a real and meaningful way.

I think most people think differently about a person after fantasizing about having sex with them, than they did before such a fantasy crossed their minds. I certainly think that most people would think differently about them, and would almost certainly in some unconscious way treat them differently, after fantasizing about such a thing 100 times. And I think as much is even more true if they've had access to photorealistic depictions of this fantasy that are fake but produced by something other than their imagination, in other words, images that are much easier for their sexual-lizard-brain to believe are real even if they on a higher more abstract level know that the images are fake.

Other than that, you're right that legally these things shouldn't literally be banned. It was a mistake to include that set of questions in the body of my post. And you're right that I think most of the online discourse surrounding the subject misses the mark one way or another, which is nothing new when it comes to subtle moral/ethical issues.

Aside from all this, though, the disconnect I felt existed in my intuition was resolved by another commenter, who described the delineation as such: anything in my head or on my hard-drive, and exclusively in my head or on my hard-drive, is entirely my business. But as soon as I i.e. start to publish online what is on my hard drive, the probability that persons depicted in even fake pornography will find out that someone has done as much starts to approach 1. And, that's where I've started to cross a line. This is more or less what the quoted 'steelman' arguments you found on twitter are getting at, even if still for somewhat wrong reasons: publishing that material, making it highly likely if not certain that the depicted persons will be made to know of it, is what is wrong, at least morally/ethically. By doing so I've made it their business, where previously it was only my own. Regardless of the particular way in which they're affected, that you might personally think shouldn't matter to them, i.e. loss of followers, family/friends potentially seeing it and not knowing its fake, or at minimum, that they just don't like having to know about it -- ultimately it wasn't necessarily my right to make them deal with any of these things, even if I think they shouldn't care about them. The commenter who described the analogy I found so apt likened it to fantasizing about a person sexually, and then directly telling them that you have, in fact, have fantasized about them sexually. Maybe you think they still shouldn't care. But as far as I'm concerned, by doing this you've made something that was formerly solely your business, into their business, in a way I don't think you should.

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.

Eh, Kanye was a billionaire and it worked on him.

Yeah I mean I think its ridiculous to say that cancel culture can't affect billionaires or that it even hasn't affected Rowling. In the sense that, once a person is already rich, only them spending/giving away their own money can stop them from being rich, cancel culture obviously runs into a limit of potential reach. But in basically every domain except money, cancel culture clearly has power even over the wealthy. Rowling's influence over the groups of people she would like to have influence over is clearly less than it would be if she had not taken an anti-trans stance. Perhaps she has more influence over different some smaller, different groups of people. But I bet she would like to express her beliefs and not be 'cancelled,' too.

JK Rowling has ideological allies, because the stance she has taken is one of the main and most divisive culture war issues of our time. She has fallen back to these ideological allies. People who care about the culture war and aren't on her side have cancelled her among themselves -- everyone else, AKA people who either care about the culture war and take her side, or, the significant majority of people, those who do not care about the culture war, have not cancelled her among themselves. Kanye has no ideological allies, because he is taking a culture war stance from two centuries ago, of which one side has already emerged victorious. How much someone will or won't be cancelled and to what extent that cancellation will effect them really isn't anything more complicated of a function than 'how deep does this culture war issue that I deciding to participate in penetrate the public consciousness, and how much of an ideological share of the public who cares is occupied specifically by the side am I taking?'

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?

Interesting. I hope the trend continues.

Animals can't talk and most aren't regarded as sapient. On the other hand, house elves basically have a human equivalent mind in a small body, and are also non-consensual and generally unhappy servants of humans. As another commenter pointed out, this injustice actually is addressed in the books (though practically in passing) when a socially conscious/activist main character starts an organization opposed to house elf slavery, clarifying that it is conceivable to view it as i.e. worse than eating meat in-universe. Just that most characters don't care. This is silly to get into but again I regard it more as odd/funny than anything.

Rowling is above any type of that retaliation.

I understand that the criticisms between them are distinct in a large way but neither of them did anything illegal.

I'm not sure how useful 'neither did anything illegal' is as a way to assert that what they did was or wasn't of similar magnitude. The difference that I am claiming exists between their misdeeds, and thus their levels of cancellation, still holds as a difference between these two examples: Louie CK's misdeeds have no 'supporters' in the culture war. There is no one out there who thinks people should be going around and randomly starting to masturbate in front of women who haven't consented to such a thing. Furthermore the question of whether or not its wrong to sexually assault people is a question with much greater cultural penetration, (especially penetration as a percent of the group of people who would otherwise be buying Louie CK's product). I would venture a guess to say that greater than 95 percent of people who would otherwise be interested in buying a ticket to one of his comedy shows would be turned off by the idea that the guy doing the performance was a sex weirdo who had non-consensually masturbated in front of multiple women.

On the other hand, again as stated, aside from having plenty of ideological allies, JK Rowling's issue just doesn't penetrate that much. People into harry potter are actually for the most part young children, who are too young to care about the discourse, and whose purchasing decisions are made by their parents, who are either too old to care, on JK Rowling's side, care more about satisfying their kid's interest in harry potter than their own interest in not supporting the Rowling estate, etc. Of the twitter-millenial-harry-potter-fan demographic who actually is most likely to care, not all of them do, some of them care but support the anti-trans position in the culture war, some that do care and support pro-trans but can pretend its warner bros that's getting all the profits and not rowling and that level of cognitive dissonance is enough for them, etc.

I think the careful wording of her tactics really does affect the level of retaliation she receives. The fact that she repeatedly maintains she has no hate for trans people etc. is important. That much seems obvious to me. If she started explicitly saying she actively hates trans people, I think its obvious that she would grow to a level of radioactivity at least somewhat more like the other listed examples, Kanye/Louie CK etc. Obviously you're right and that she wields a certain type of power that would insulate her somewhat, but I think overall you're understating the way in which the level of her cancellation is actually at least correlated with actual differences in her tactics, flavor of rhetoric, the specific CW issue she's chosen, etc.

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.

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.

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?

I'll also start by answering the question first: it seems to me like it might be most rational for the US to concede Taiwan to China. Overall, cooperation with China in a broad range of other areas such as economy seems ideal if possible, and excepting that, at least avoiding war or any significant possibility of it. In order to avoid being enemies and thus able to cooperate, at least one side ceding, or at least, accepting something other than their ideal outcome re: Taiwan seems necessary. Additionally, despite many arguments I've heard to the contrary, I haven't been convinced that Taiwan is of significant geopolitical importance to the US in the grand scheme of things, at least enough to justify large risks like nuclear war or even large opportunity costs like not being able to cooperate with China. The biggest obstacles for the US to simply concede Taiwan to China seem to me to be 1. doing so publicly would damage US credibility with its allies 2. control of semiconductor production and 3. ideology/public opinion/feelings. Of these, only 1. and 2. are really rational reasons to attempt to prevent Chinese absorption of Taiwan. It seems to me that if the US could construct conditions where Taiwan actually became willing to join China i.e. anything from encouraging cross strait relations to conducting psy-ops intended to influence Taiwanese public opinion towards reunification, then obstacles 1. and 3. could be abrogated. Obstacle 2. could be abrogated simply by constructing alternative equally-advanced semiconductor plants in places fully within US control. Thus, it seems to me that the most rational course of US action regarding Taiwan might be to construct alternative semiconductor plants, influence public opinion in Taiwan toward reunification, and then permit as much with China. At least, this seems rational in a situation where one expects China not to themselves be willing to cede Taiwan, or continue to be satisfied with the currently-acceptable status-quo for much longer, at least not without the US having to resort to unacceptably-risky brinksmanship or war, or even at the price of significant economic opportunity cost such as fully decoupling the two economies.

Interesting perspective, thanks for the response.