raakaa
1yr ago
Cancellation (political persecution let’s be honest) relies on the vast majority of people believing they’ll be okay if they just stay quiet. With the invention and deployment of a sufficiently powerful heresy detector, this no longer holds true.
I might just be missing something obvious here, but I’m having trouble seeing why that would be the case. Even in a world with an anti-heresy detector in every smartphone, as long as you don’t do anything too egregious—say, make racial jokes with your buddies, or talk about how you think feminism is harmful, etc—then you have nothing to fear. This would especially be the case if there end up developing clear answers to what would get you cancelled, in contrast to today’s situation where cancellation thrives on ambiguous boundaries.
raakaa
8d ago
I’ve heard good things about A Sea of Words: A Lexicon and Companion to the Complete Seafaring Tales of Patrick O'Brian. Full disclosure though, I’ve never read it, nor any of the original books themselves.
raakaa
1yr ago
Regarding demographics: I’m well-aware of who the target audiences of CGDCT series are, versus the target audiences of shounen mags. The point I was making that your median, “normal” guy is probably going to be watching/reading shounen series rather than CGDCT. Even if P(adult male | enjoys CGDCT) is high, I imagine that P(enjoys CGDCT | adult male) << P(enjoys shounen | adult male). The latter distinction is what I was originally referring to. This matches my experiences in real life (albeit in the West), although maybe statistics collected on manga consumption in Japan across a broad demographic would differ.
As for your latter point, I agree! My vision of an ideal life contains a lot less oneupmanship and putting-your-friends-down-when-a-girl-walks-in-the-room than real life does; to that extent, it’s more similar to CGDCT. But I’m unsure that I can speak for the median man in having this vision.
raakaa
1yr ago
I’m not Catholic, don’t know one whit of Catholic theology, and what I am about to say is therefore pulled directly out of my ass. But one possibility — to me — is that when the Eucharist is consecrated, Jesus consciously experiences sense data through Eucharist in some way analogous to how normal humans experience sense data through their bodies. So when you touch the Eucharist, Jesus feels it as if you’re touching his body. This concludes my exercise in developing what is most likely a new brand of heresy.
But if you are using these websites to share your views, then you are engaged in shaping the opinions of others. Maybe you’re not being paid for it, but you’re still doing it—and if your opinions are racist or hateful, then you are thus contributing to a more inequitable society. Beyond this, even if you weren’t participating in public discourse, simply harboring toxic and harmful views cannot help but leak into your everyday interactions with others. That’s how implicit bias works.
This is why your average Joe ought understand that it is not the case that he is safe to spew toxicity and bigotry simply because he doesn’t have a five-figure-follower Twitter account. Hence the cancelling of the OK-sign truck driver, or that of Justine Sacco. I predict that once AI gets powerful enough to scan through petabytes of Amazon Alexa data or conversations surreptitiously recorded by TikTok for bigotry, it is precisely “average normal people” who will face a wave of cancellations. Once the current barriers of inconvenience that prevent general members of the public from being cancelled en masse crumble, all that pent-up energy will be released.
ETA: Actually, a potential counterargument against this vision of the future is that we don’t see people getting cancelled en masse currently based on voting records. Of course, counters against that counterargument include the arguments that many people are listed as unaffiliated, that being a registered Republican is still within the Overton Window, etc….
raakaa
10mo ago
If the Wikipedia page on “Stalinist architecture” is anything to go by, then communists have produced some things of beauty. Although a quick wiki skim suggests that the communists pre-Stalin were just as strongly married to their hideous architecture as our own architects of today are.
raakaa
11mo ago
We are already exerting an extraordinary level of control over the thought processes of current AIs - they are entirely written by humans.
Do you mean this in the sense of “AIs are trained on human creations and human preferences, so their thought processes are derived from humans’”, or in the sense of “humans have explicitly written out or programmed all of the thought processes of AIs”?
If you mean the latter, then this is wholly false. There is no (legible) correspondence between the intention of any human and, say, the ninth column in the layer 20 self-attention weight matrix of a modern LLM. It is an entirely different situation from that of traditional programming, where even a line of machine code can be traced back through the assembler and compiler to a human who had a specific intention.
If you meant the former, then that’s a lot more sensible. But if that’s the case, then “give birth” seems like a very apt analogy. When one sires a child, the child derives its phenotype, its character, and its thought processes largely from the parents, while the vagaries of chance (environmental factors) introduce novelties. The same seems broadly true with modern AI systems.
raakaa
1yr ago
But I’ve seen reports that the average age of cars on the road in the U.S. is ~13 years old. Assuming that this is referring to the median (and despite finding countless articles repeating the “13 years old” statistic, I haven’t found one that specifies if the average in question is a mean or median), then this suggests that post-COVID-lockdown effects on the distribution of colors among cars on the road can only be marginal at best. And even if the statistic refers to the mean, I doubt that outliers have too much of an effect here.
Of course, your explanation does perfectly answer the other part of your interlocutor’s question, why new cars only come in grey.
raakaa
1yr ago
Couldn’t this stat just be explained by members of the Chair Force brave pilots having far too much time on their hands at the airbase? I’m not incredulous of the idea that political or governmental actors are attempting to manipulate consensus via botting and astroturfing (it’s been confirmed that the feds have done this in quite a few cases IIRC), but I don’t think that that’s what we’re seeing in this particular statistic from 2013.
raakaa
1yr ago
So the Index or the Vive Pro is the best headset? Got it. As for the “VRChat Newbie Flowchart”, is it something like this?
-
Hang around out-of-the-way places (public worlds with low pop. count) and events
-
Meet the occasional fun person
-
Join the friends/friends+ worlds that said fun people are hanging out in
-
…
-
Profit
I also bet that in general, the wheat gets separated from the chaff pretty quick in these sorts of environments. People who put up with trolls and screaming children eventually find others of their sort, and they end up coming together. This sound about right?
(As for the Asian languages point: thankfully, my 日本語 is not nearly good enough for me to feel confident about barging into some JP world and mucking up the place. Unfortunately, I fear that your timeline for when Western culture war cancer metastases to Japan is probably too optimistic. Already, there are hints in various places of Western culture-war concepts being imported to Japan. I might make a top-level post about this at some point, but I probably won’t.)
raakaa
1yr ago
Yeah, I’ve heard of DSL before but never got around to looking into it. Probably worth at least a lurk given your description. Thanks!
raakaa
1yr ago
Judging from the links, I don’t know if -1 is correct — it seems that 0 is the correct value for monochrome display. But I’m just going based on those two pages, not based on any actual experimentation with a real device, so YMMV.
raakaa
1yr ago
Your view regarding memetic antibodies is far more reasonable than my initial knee-jerk take; I repudiate my original comment (since although I don’t doubt that it’s happening in parallel, that’s not the correct reading of the tweet posted).
raakaa
1yr ago
I feel like the attitude of Americans, a few decades after the Civil War, might be summed up in this picture.
To steelman the progressive position here, that picture can be analogized to this meme: sure, those two groups of Whites are able to amicably reconcile, but isn’t there some other group that they forgot to ask? What “Reconciliation” means, in this context, does not include reconciliation between Blacks and the Whites who subjugated them for centuries and then continued to do so for yet another century after the conclusion of the Civil War; rather, it’s just two sets of oppressors shaking hands while their victims remain subjected to their combined racist legacy. The recent wave of statue-toppling and iconoclasm, on the other hand, is true reconciliation: racist Whites being forced to acknowledge the consequences on their actions on Blacks whose considerations were left out of all previous farcical attempts at so-called “reconciliation”.
Do I buy that this noble idea is fully responsible for the recent push for iconoclasm? I wouldn’t say that I do (I wager that a good deal of it is, at least subconsciously, motivated by plain-and-simple outgroup-targeted antipathy in addition to any purer moral concerns). But I believe that it is a very reasonable explanation of the progressive opposition to the “truce” that’s existed for so long.
raakaa
2yr ago
It looks like on Firefox, there’s this extension that supports Google Translate and DeepL. Never used it, though, so I can’t vouch for its quality.
raakaa
2yr ago
In the article is a quote from the LARPing group’s own self-description:
"Our LARP explores the mythos of the American Dream - or more so the Broken American Dream. Players experience human stories, portraying characters with unique backgrounds. They face their daily life and the issues that come with it. Some are universal or similar to the ones in Poland (such as struggling to provide for your family or combating addiction), and some are specific to the U.S. (such as reliance on private health care or the prevalence of firearms). We wanted to create an immersive experience about facing those hardships both as an individual and as a community, about making impossible choices, about finding your place in your small homeland.
Emphasis mine. Whether it’s outright mockery or something more sympathetic isn’t so easy to tell from just the article (the quoted description makes it seem the latter, the donut-wielding cop provides evidence for the former), but even if the LARPers talk about the universality of the American redneck struggle, I still don’t read this as an identification with redneck culture itself. And it’s certainly not a celebration.
raakaa
2yr ago
I don't have a good grasp of what would be necessary to demonstrate qualia
One key point in the definition of qualia is that there need not be any external factors that correspond to whether or not an entity possesses qualia. Hence the idea of a philosophical zombie: an entity that lacks consciousness/qualia, but acts just like any ordinary human, and cannot be distinguished as a P-zombie by an external observer. As such, the presence of qualia in an entity by definition cannot be demonstrated.
This line of thinking, originated in the parent post, seems to be misguided in a greater way. Whether or not you believe in the existence of qualia or consciousness, the important point is that there's no reason to believe that consciousness is necessarily tied to intelligence. A calculator might not have any internal sensation of color or sound, and yet it can perform division far faster than humans. Paraphrasing a half-remembered argument, this sort of "AI can't outperform humans at X because it's not conscious" talk is like saying "a forklift can't be stronger than a bodybuilder, because it isn't conscious!" First off, we can't demonstrate whether or not a forklift is conscious. And second, it doesn't matter. Solvitur levando.
raakaa
11mo ago
Yeah, I think that’s true in a lot of cases. But I also see a decent number of posters who seem to be absolutely “OBSESSED”, as it were, with “trannies” in a qualitatively different way than the former crowd. Working it into unrelated posts, bringing out barrages of buzzwords…. (Using your example, there’s a difference between your average anon who replies “tits or gtfo” to a low effort “as a girl, I don’t see why guys like these stupid cartoons so much” post, and an /r9k/ native.) At the very least, these latter anons’ actions are best described by conflict theory.
raakaa
11mo ago
The Home Depot lady, like many liberals, likely believes that Trump is a threat to democracy and that he is responsible for the current state of political affairs. […] Trump fucked around and found out (almost). It would have only been fair.
The problem is that our current political situation is not the fault of one single ex-real-estate-mogul-cum-reality-TV-star-cum-President. It is the fault of the sum of the actions and reactions of millions of Americans (and foreigners) on both sides, spurred by concerns material and ideological. Part of the blame rests on Trump. Part of the blame rests on liberals who are so quick to condemn democracy to save Democracy that they encourage assassinations of former Presidents/current candidates.
So going by the Home Depot lady’s logic (or rather, your logic): she is part of the problem responsible for the current state of political affairs. She fucked around and found out. Her losing her job is only fair.
Do you see the problem with this sort of approach to politics?
raakaa
1yr ago
Before going further, I would like to note that I am broadly on your side: in addition to any personal squeamishness regarding the idea of mass executions (which may equal morality or weakness, depending on how you view it), I deeply distrust a state of affairs in which the State has the capacity to carry out such executions, and I fear that if vigilantism is encourage instead, it would lead to a general rise in violence.
But what I am mainly skeptical of is the original claim of Outlaw that Hoff would be a bad neighbor to a similar degree as a psychotic bum (note, by the way, that “psychotic” here is a qualifier rather than a descriptor). I also remain skeptical that your Marxist-Leninist is as bad a neighbor as the psychotic bum or as good a neighbor as Hoff. Even if “exploitative landlord monopolist” reads as clear-cut to you, it doesn’t to me, when compared to a definition of “psychotic bum” along the lines of “repeatedly makes direct/immediate threats against person or property”. (I do realize now, rereading the original comment chain, that Hoff might’ve been using a more expansive definition of “bum”, in which case I recognize that I might be sanewashing here.)
Anyway, like I said, when it comes to homeless hunting season, I’m more on your side than Hoff’s. So, returning to my main disagreement, here’s a question: whom would you rather live next to? Hoff, your Marxist, a palette-swapped online Turner Diaries fanboy wignat, a non-psychotic bum who’s still intrusive (e.g. Hoff’s upthread example of a guy who blocks your entrance/exit to your home with his encampment), or a psychotic bum? If we’re engaging with this question as a serious hypothetical (e.g. you’re searching for your next apartment; how much more would you pay to live next to each group), then I would personally much rather live next to Hoff than the rest of the options. (My full ranking would be Hoff >> Marxist > wignat >> non-psychotic bum > psychotic bum.)
raakaa
1yr ago
The confounding factor is that most of those DFC-loving perverts are probably also ped—ah, sorry, lolicons.
Go on anime-styled erotic art websites and you’ll find heaps of drawings of girls with massively oversized chests (and somewhat less universally, legs and posteriors). Of course, the dichotomy you proposed was “flat and thin versus round and fat”; if that’s the case, then flat would probably win simply because fat is so repulsive. But for reasonable values of the thickness coefficient, I wager that curviness wins out.
This assessment is largely based on my own lived experience (although does looking at 2D porn really count as living?), but I remember one guy (who roleplays as an Orientalist slave trader—weird shtick) who did a more thorough analysis of popular tags on these sites and came to a similar conclusion.
raakaa
1yr ago
It’s addressed in the link. If I understand correctly: if you reply to a comment, then you “endorse” it by default, allowing people who whitelist you to see the comment. But you can also choose not to endorse a comment you reply to (in which case neither comment is seen, I think).
Prefacing this response by stating that I am on the side of Team Nerd rather than that of your interlocutor: this statement in particular seems false. In particular, it seems false in a quokkic, mistake-theorist’s way. There are absolutely many right-wing nerds who want to make e.g trans people’s lives worse. For example, when a poster suspected of being trans on 4chan is met with countless replies of “you will never be a woman”, I doubt that those replies’ authors are not intending to cause pain. Granted, one can say that this is a defensive reaction to an SJW takeover of nerd hobbies—hence that old “why did you make us do this? We just wanted to play video games” image. But if that’s the case, then this is just arguing that the conflict is justified instead of arguing that there is no conflict.
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