ratboygenius
i came here to be alone
Use your mind! Create new memories! Interact! Don't just add it to a library of forgotten photographs! - Megatron
User ID: 2120
ratboygenius
i came here to be alone
11mo ago
Actually what he really needs is to be pinned down in the playground and have his nipples twisted, for tricking me into reading that terrible fanfic with his endorsement.
ratboygenius
i came here to be alone
11mo ago
Completely forgot this game existed and now I'm remembering losing my mind trying to beat this as a kid, I had an identical reaction to my rediscovery of Speedy Eggbert just a couple of weeks ago. Serendipity might be one of my favorite human experiences, thanks for posting this.
ratboygenius
i came here to be alone
1yr ago
Her putting her best foot forward wouldn't necessarily affect his perspective that much, if I had to guess. I won't try to speak for him but I'm guessing he's happy she's got enough feet that she can have a good one.
ratboygenius
i came here to be alone
1yr ago
I know that I take it seriously, but I don't take it seriously because I think I'm going to be turned into a heap of paperclips or atomized by a T-1000. I take it seriously because I see something else coming, a paradigm shift in propaganda and narrative control powered by LLM's, image/video generators and AI-assisted search engines (I'll confess that I may be a little too unironically Kaczynski-pilled). I don't see how the future I envision is any less apocalyptic than the one our loveable quokkas fear, however.
ratboygenius
i came here to be alone
1yr ago
There were probably people who really, really liked living in Chernobyl.
Incredibly minor nitpick: the major population center was Pripyat, not Chernobyl (which had less than a third the population, at the time).
To more seriously engage you in opposition, the Chernobyl disaster was (more or less) the first of its kind and singularly unique as well, in terms of nuclear powerplants disastrously failing. Three Mile Island is also a weakly cautionary tale in the sense of uninhabitability, which cuts down on the total number of your negative examples.
Admittedly it's a volatile technology whose use holds a potential for truly devastating outcomes, but there's no reason to think we've more or less accounted for the common failure modes. Human error remains the most pernicious (and universal) of potential flaws in the use of nuclear energy but I, personally, believe that the potential negative outcomes of nuclear power are so mollified by current safety advances that I would be comfortable living within ~5 miles of a nuclear powerplant. I say this as someone who does not fall into your outlined demographics.
ratboygenius
i came here to be alone
1yr ago
Since you'd have to actually click through and read the thread to see, I think it's worth asking: @ZorbaTHut are you aware that permabanned users still get to participate in janny duty? Should probably be fixed if you want this system to work the way I assume you intended.
ratboygenius
i came here to be alone
1yr ago
I've recently found myself coming to the conclusion that though I prize my own values very highly, I do not value them nearly as high for other/foreign cultures - it feels like it would negate what makes them different and useful to my own.
ratboygenius
i came here to be alone
1yr ago
I sincerely don’t know what “coding class signals as political” means, otherwise I would answer that question.
I think it's likely you are confusing the urban/suburban/rural cultural divides with political allegiance: while these things map to each other to a degree, these are far more likely to signal class allegiance as opposed to political (e.g. "conservative", "progressive"). Since we're discussing anecdata, I happen to know a great many pro-lgbt, pro-public healthcare, pro-prison reform, all around fairly leftwing types who also exhibit every sign you likely find repulsive (religiosity, "traditional" families, regularly hunting every autumn, drives a pickup truck daily for no reason). These are overwhelmingly lower class markers, not political. In fact there's almost no commonality whatsoever between the "cultural" practices of members belonging to any given political group, these commonalities are far more accurately mapped onto stuff like Red Tribe/Blue Tribe, lower/middle/upper class. If you've (perhaps) had trouble figuring out just why the chuds voted against their interest in 2016, perhaps view it through the lens of "the proletariat sending a message to the petit bourgeois". Hopefully this helps you understand my meaning, I wasn't attempting to be cryptic and apologize for not making myself more clear.
“Would I not hire someone if I knew they were conservative?” To answer that, I would, yes.
Thank you for answering, it's pleasing to see my assumptions born out by reality, at least so far as this place is a reflection of it. How do you reconcile your overt and clearly stated reactionary behavior and bigotry, that appears of the same order (if perhaps a differing flavor) with what you proclaim to despise? It's hardly an original observation, but could you please tell me where and how your desired institutional discrimination differs from historical redlining, women being unable to vote or legally own property, or exclusion of lgbt from marriage/adoption/surrogacy? Or that this discrimination will catch only bad actors and not simply the poor, working and lower classes?
This is not a gotcha to be clear, I find quite literally everything you've said to be objectionable but I'm genuinely curious what your worldview is that consolidates and synthesizes what appear to me to be contradictions and am hoping for an explanation. Or do you simply not feel that these are contradictions, and that conservatives are so uniquely repugnant and valueless as a group their ultimate extinction (not via murder or violence of any kind of course, just the inexorable push over a generation or two down and out of our shared world) is a net benefit to society?
If you are asking me if I would hurt a conservative in real life when you say “real harm”, no.
I think that you and I have differing thresholds for what we consider "harm". I think someone being denied the opportunity to fulfill their natural talents or chosen course in life, not by insurmountable failure or poor fortune, but rather by a conscious and conscientious human being deliberately putting their finger on the scales to be harmful. Consider that others may share my definition of harm, and that some quantity of the hostility you see might be a normative reaction from fairly standard-issue human beings towards perceived contempt and deliberate depredations. Consider that the Morlocks also know how to read, and have recognized, rightly or wrongly, the parallel between your course of action and the UN definition of genocide, specifically Article II.c. Consider that someone otherwise entirely sympathetic to your motivations and lived experience would still look at your proposed course of action and consider you "a baddie".
I know you've stated already that you aren't interested in discussion or debate (here, at least) so if you don't want to respond then feel free to ignore me, I won't take it personally and am happy to indulge your wishes.
Bonus points:
but one attended their college’s Turning Point club
You and I may be in agreement with your direction on this specific example, if not your destination. Mere attendance isn't quite the mortal sin to me as it would seem to be for you, however.
ratboygenius
i came here to be alone
1yr ago
While I find the sentiment of maximizing the purity of your social bubble somewhat loathsome, in this instance I would be entirely content providing you as much assistance on this front as I could. I even think that I could do this in good conscience, given that your stated premise is to
steer clear of them in IRL interactions
The rules I have, personally, for total removal of an individual from my life before I even know them have been invoked a few times in my life, but not often enough that I feel the need to nervously genuflect towards the Paradox of Tolerance when I do.
That said your somewhat duplicitous presence would lead to my wondering whether your [statistically likely presence somewhere along the chain of decision-makers in the hiring/firing process, for instance] motives in this are entirely pure, or at least not intended to cause real, actual harm to real, actual people while offline. Could you please tell me if the stakes being there was a consideration to you, when you wrote this comment?
Would you consider asking yourself as well, if coding "right-wing" to danger or at least avoidance isn't just coding class-signals (your presumed outgroup) as political?
ratboygenius
i came here to be alone
1yr ago
Would you please explain to me the thought process behind including this in your reply? If you genuinely believe this to be a bad faith actor then the appropriate response would either be to ignore and move on or to publicly register them as such first. Actual engagement, while an enticing option, is their intended goal - granting it to them just doesn't make any sense.
Alternatively you don't actually think that but you want to call out their belonging to a group/antisemitic signalling, in which case you may want to address that (e.g. Are people of differing ideological beliefs allowed to post here? Are they capable of posting here within the rules? Are usernames even useful for anything other than marking a continuous personality across conversations/threads?).
ratboygenius
i came here to be alone
1yr ago
I'm personally not at all afraid it'll break society; that would be one of the better outcomes. Personally I'm much more disturbed it may bend it into something unrecognizable before it breaks, at least in my lifetime.
ratboygenius
i came here to be alone
1yr ago
Thanks for the link, I haven't kept up on lesswrong for a while now. Glad to see stuff in this direction being discussed, at the very least.
ratboygenius
i came here to be alone
1yr ago
My response to your first question.
As for your second, I really couldn't tell you - I can't think of a place off the top of my head I would feel comfortable exposing to this place.
ratboygenius
i came here to be alone
1yr ago
I'll report in as a datapoint.
ratboygenius
i came here to be alone
1yr ago
The fluttering hands and stressed murmurs that pass around rationalist circles every time the subject of "unaligned AGI" comes up has always confused me somewhat, and I think what you're describing is essentially the root of my fears as they relate to AI. Alignment isn't the issue we should be worried about, the whole human species is unaligned; different nation-states, corporations, religions, regional cultures and local flavor are all in contention with each other to some degree. An unaligned AGI may be an existential threat, but who cares? The third impact is mercurial, and the when/why of its arrival will be in a manner of its own choosing.
AI is dangerous because, as with all things technological, it acts as a force multiplier, amplifying the intentions and actions of its users (to a lesser degree, its creators; the author of new tech effectively dies the moment it slips into the world) to superhuman levels - users who are motivated along overtly tribal and ideological lines. I'm not afraid of Skynet, and honestly I think it's rather silly to obsess over the imagined cataclysm du jour. I am afraid, mortally so, of my fellow man's darker impulses and the paths they will walk to manifest them. Insert that one C.S. Lewis quote here
There's a wide spread, perhaps universal (in America at least), sentiment that everyone is lying to you, on some level or another, whether these are government agencies or news orgs or scientific journals. True or not, doesn't matter. What matters is these latest innovations and the timing of their release seem primed for the environment they find themselves in, where uncertainty and a dash of extraordinarily naive credulity (just look at the quantity of people who will share a screenshot of !person/thing I don't like saying something unflattering) have attainted the dream of a free flow of information.
The thing-in-itself has never been less valued, its representation more revered. Maybe I'm weird for maintaining what I view as a moral objection to AI rather than an ethical one, it just feels like so much of the discussion around this stuff avoids the obvious cultural and societal impact this will have (e.g. Replika).
ratboygenius
i came here to be alone
1yr ago
I had the impression that was due more to Dionysus' status as a deity of, in part, madness (introducing a degree of unpredictability) and because his power was vastly diminished due to his now-miniscule base of worshippers. Other god-believer relationships are portrayed somewhat differently, though this is primarily in Pale and are arguably non-central examples. Point taken though.
"Faith" in the Pactverse clashes somewhat with the Biblical definition, at least as laid out in Hebrews 11:1. When you can perform a given ritual, utter the right words, and invoke the might of a higher power it can be difficult to frame that as "belief". One doesn't need to believe when you can know, a problem inherent to the setting and as such one I'm willing to forgive.
The POV of that particular chapter is also one belonging to a literal apostate, so I can accept there being no deference paid to the Supreme Creator, whether he thought there was one or not.
ratboygenius
i came here to be alone
1yr ago
I can't find the source for this, as the internet is dead and all I can sniff out are the fumes of its rotten carcass, but back when I still listened to NPR I recall hearing one of their self-promoting bumpers using glowing language to inform me that they (and I am paraphrasing from memory) "give you not just the news, but the context of the story". I thank God for those practitioners of the dark arts who speak the quiet part out loud.
In America, political positions are often... mercurial, to say the least. The "facts" (a word I wouldn't have expected to lose so much meaning even a few years ago), such as they are, are immaterial. The purpose of these facts and their position in your given tribe's narrative, is what is truly important.
Near as I can tell these narratives now serve as a kind of post hoc justification for where and how our collective nannies must childproof our shared world; the Blues/Dems want things like absolute female liberation (including from the strictures imposed by external forces e.g. the function and purpose of the womb or any extant cultural understanding between the sexes), comprehensive public assistance, aggressive tax rates increasing exponentially by bracket, explicitly uncritical social mediation on topics of sexuality and family structure. Reds/Reps want things like universally available individual armament, enshrining the social mores of a previous generation, walling off educational institutions from social movements, a more generous taxation structure for high earners1.
The particulars shift across time as well, which can safely be atrributed to the constant influx of younger generations with their own inhereted versions of these positions, as well as their shiny new takes on such topics2.
Is it now right-wing to signal distrust of Big Pharma, corporate media and opposing desert wars?
Not exactly, but a principled position held consistently across time these days is interpreted as witchy behavior, at a minimum evidence of not being a REAL Scotsman. So, in practice, yes.
1These should by no means be considered comprehensive or precise lists, but the vagaries introduced by this fractious political pantheon are inexhaustible, and I am not.
2My cynicism and hard-earned paranoia wishes to point towards an occluded cabal pulling the strings, but there's little need when simple value drift will suffice.
ratboygenius
i came here to be alone
1yr ago
What's funny is, in the loose pantheon of supplemental writing and even a brief mention in one of his interludes, there are actually "paladins" or Christian style priests who hunt down and bind and/or exorcize literal demons in the name of God. It's just never been brought up again or made relevant to his Pactverse stories.
ratboygenius
i came here to be alone
1yr ago
A book review of Twig sounds kind of fun and might even be within my capabilities (I might have to reread it, so if I were to work on this it'd be a while before posting). And I agree more or less with
I think it will invite more interesting discussion and less bashing.
though my intention with critiquing his recent works would be to have something constructive, coming from a place of love, and most importantly IMO from a perspective I'm pretty sure he doesn't have in his life (could be totally wrong about that, don't know him personally and it is better to not assume stuff like that) that could be shared with him in a digestible, non-wordpress-comment format.
The apocalyptic nightmare scenarios of his books are fine; it’s seeing shitty people make worse interpersonal decisions that gets to me.
Agree, I think that accounts for approx. 40% of the problems I have with his recent stuff.
ratboygenius
i came here to be alone
1yr ago
Are you talking about Wildbow? I remember him saying something along these lines a little while ago, specifically his breakdown of the backlash he received for
Also, if there's sufficient interest in it, I have a jumbled mess of thoughts I might be able to kludge together into a top level post describing why I think he peaked with Twig, from the angle of someone who is very much in the visible1 minority (not trans, not a furry, not squeeing over various characters, not socially liberal) of his fans.
1Based purely off of a cursory examination of the online communities that bother discussing his writings in the first place.
ratboygenius
i came here to be alone
1yr ago
This reminds me, in many ways, of The Wire (one of my favorite television shows, comfortably in my stranded-on-a-deserted-island list).
The Wire is a tv show produced by HBO that's explicitly about a diverse cast (one which fairly accurately depicts the demographic makeup of the real life setting), the cycles and epicycles of violence, ethics, and both the failure modes and successes of community. Its message, from my understanding of its author(s), is intended to be a hard look at a serious problem (or set of interconnected ones, presented as one block) as written from a progressive perspective; something like the politically mirrored image of the likes of Death Wish. It achieves its goal, in my opinion, not by highlighting the absolute worst or best hypothetical examples (caricatures, if I'm being unkind) of one side or the other, instead it shows the viewer what these things and their consequences look like in reality.
I understand that TLOU is fiction, that it's a deliberately "fake" depiction of reality in a fantasy setting, that it's a post-apocalyptic narrative centered around an explicitly lesbian young girl and a damaged, morally gray aging man. Stories that focus on [pain or loss or evil or guilt] lose some meaning, value and impact when they rely on caricature and exaggeration to tell their stories. Their messages are more effectively delivered when you can understand the why of each characters motivations, even if you might disagree with the actions those motivations inspire.
Gallons of ink has been spilled on this specific property, the original game attracted a sizeable amount of discussion and praise for its story and execution. If I may attempt to cut the Gordian knot? The narrative from the very get-go was sloppy and low quality, it received orders of magnitude more praise than was deserved, and Neil Druckmann has already demonstrated time and again that he has little ability in writing compelling stories or multifaceted characters. The story here is sold through manipulating low-hanging emotional fruit, and basically all entertainment made since GamerGate which carries some sort of message isn't intended for you the individual, it's meant to to appeal to one specific tribe or another's sensibilities (not to hail back to the halcyon days of yore, exploitation movies have been around for decades).
TL;DR it's not bad because it depicts something I find categorically objectionable (though it does), it's bad because most stories told these days aren't any good.
ratboygenius
i came here to be alone
1yr ago
It might be a distinction without a difference, but I categorize visuals (the use of movie magic, set/costume design, mattes/CGI/miniatures) and cinematography (camera work, lighting and framing) slightly separately though I also lump them together for most purposes since they go hand in hand, and while TWBB has excellent cinematography it only has a couple setpieces (the oil Derrick, the church) that elevate the visual aspects of the film for me. Not to say PTA isn't an accomplished director for a visual medium.
Fraser's performance was great in The Whale, but I also found myself really appreciating the set as well. I've personally known people who've failed in life, and they all lived in a place like that, with a similar sensibility towards housekeeping (though his apartment was still too neat to be true to life, I'll accept it as necessary to keep continuity from shot to shot, hard to do if everything is covered with loose wrappers and empty food or drink containers). I've found that I have a soft spot for stage plays adapted for film, The Sunset Limited is an example of my being pleasantly surprised by such a movie.
Hard agree on Banshees, people that bemoan the state of the film industry these days just aren't looking in the right places, I think. Many of my favorite films I've ever seen have been made in the past 10 years.
Haven't seen The Assassin but I'll check it out soon, and report back. I'm always excited to watch good foreign language films, I don't have near enough of a knowledge base to start working through the best of what's out there. I'll take a look at Neptune Frost as well, looks like I might possibly receive it as well as I did Beyond the Black Rainbow (an example IMO of a movie with ZERO story or high quality performances but heavy on the visuals: I shut it off after 45 minutes, I suppose I'm not a purist for visuals) but I'll give it a fair shake. Thanks for the recs!
ratboygenius
i came here to be alone
1yr ago
An absolutely surreal post to to read while stoned. Thank you so much for sharing this.
I will refrain from posting this until morning to see if I've passed muster.
It says nothing about ulterior motives and very little about how they see their children. It seems like many if not most parents find having children to be a source of fulfillment and happiness, so it would follow that this would be an experience said parents would want to share with their children (as they would for any number of positive choices made in life, a key component to generational success). Unless you mean to suggest your negative view of lineage or fecundity is/should be the baseline moral position for all humanity, and deviation from it is malicious/self serving?
More options
Context Copy link