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
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
Seeing Ilforte call Yud a "bloviating chuunibyo" was the precise moment I fell in love with themotte over SSC.
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 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?
ratboygenius
i came here to be alone
1yr ago
Endlessly fascinating to me how hard the internet has accelerated the life cycle for nostalgia, I've noticed myself pining for the good ol' days of the internet with newgrounds, YTMND, SA, 4chan or even what YouTube used to be. These things disappeared or underwent fundamental changes to them not so long ago (a similar timeframe to paying off a car loan or meeting, courting and marrying a stranger) and yet everybody who remembers the internet before Facebook (at least those I've spoken with) all seem to share a similar sentiment. My favorite quote that encapsulates this was from a post from 2014 on one of 4chan's now-defunct text boards saying "2012 was so long ago, was i even alive back then. who knows."
ratboygenius
i came here to be alone
1yr ago
My feelings towards Russia carry a number of ambiguities, but I will say I feel a definite sense of approval toward its existence as the global cultural counterweight to America, even after the fall of the Iron Curtain. Describing it as Samizdat in the form of a modern cultural "black market" (at least for westerners) is an interesting framing and lines up nicely with a lot of my more nebulous ideas of where the global powers sit.
ratboygenius
i came here to be alone
1yr ago
Prioritizing for cultural impact/relevance would have my list looking something like this:
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The Dirty Dozen
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The Matrix
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Full Metal Jacket
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Apollo 13
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Terminator 2: Judgement Day
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Who Framed Roger Rabbit
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Mary Poppins
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The Great Race
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Good Will Hunting
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Any of Steven Seagal's earliest works, Above the Law or maybe Marked for Death (this can also be swapped for Death Wish)
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
people that didn't have any apparent drinking problem proudly announcing that they've quit drinking and feel so much better
This makes sense on an intuitive level if you assume HBD (in a less CW application) is correct. Alcohol is basically poison and causes widespread if minor damage to every system it touches, and if you're a descendant of a culture or lineage of teetotalers then you might not have the same degree of resilience to/recovery from the holistic harm dealt by booze (HBD isn't necessary for this, variation amongst individuals is an equally plausible explanation).
sleep certainly has downstream effects, but I also think that you have to drink a lot for these to be all that noticeable
Speaking only for myself, I went through a period of heavy (.5-1L of cheap bourbon daily) drinking some time ago. The main reason I stopped was the general malaise that I felt, but the thing that kicked it over the edge for me was how frequent my more intense nightmares became when I would crawl into bed wasted. I still have this problem now, more than 6 drinks in a day (with very little correlation to how close to bedtime I've been drinking) is almost guaranteed to have me visited that night by the very worst my unconscious mind has to offer. As a result I don't really drink that much, when I even bother to in the first place (still enjoy the sensation of being drunk, but I have enough consistently bad dreams already that it's just not worth being haunted by myself, the hangovers have gotten significantly worse as I've gotten older too).
I love Freddie, in the same way that I love my more mindkilled friends. He's clearly a sweet, genuine dude with a desire to improve both himself and what he feels is his community. Like those who I know personally that have loyally turned themselves in as tinder for the Culture War, his grip has slipped on timing, scale and scope. The internet or technological advancement didn't (and can't) change things in this manner, these things at their most fundamental are force multipliers. This was a purely social shift.
The timing is off too, which begs the question: is there a more appropriate explanation for the change in values and cultural temperature in America, around the turn of the century? We were coming off the post-Cold War cultural windfall, rejoicing in our new lease on life. No more forever wars in places we'd never heard of, no more paranoia towards our actors and neighbors, no more looming threat of nuclear Armageddon. What was this significant event, that pushed us one direction over the others? Some readers may have already clocked what I'm talking about. 9/11 broke the collective mind of America.
We were like a smug toddler yanking the cat's tail, utterly convinced of our moral superiority and basic goodness. We're the city on the hill! Don't you understand we're the most tolerant? Human rights and freedom are our guiding principles! That's why we've been attacked! Are you suggesting something? (I am ignoring the obvious lies that were peddled around the events leading up to and during the hijacking, I don't believe any particular conspiracy is more likely than the official narrative but I don't think they're any more likely to be false, and have the benefit of being formed in the absence of the truth meaning at least it isn't dissembling)
What started as the unremarked-upon regime feng shui in the Middle East began to be taken personally by the unwashed goat herders, and sure enough they organized the bloodiest attack on American soil in living memory (all of this being enabled by actors and assets that we had armed, trained and put into place a few years earlier). We were scratched, like the people whose job it is to anticipate these things could've (read: good chance they had, in this particular case) predicted. No need to check we had our story straight, as a people America threw a fit (not to say that the slaughter of innocents regardless of allegiance should be given a placid response) and the hysteria never relented. We just got used to it.
This, along with the panoply of other factors that weigh in on large-scale features like culture, has unmoored the preeminent world power from reailty. Now we act confused as NGOs, LLCs, nonprofits, legal structures and the more numinous elements of sociological terraforming begin crossing finish lines with speed, rather than finesse.
In my opinion.
ratboygenius
i came here to be alone
1yr ago
Every devout Christian is going to say they love Christianity; they just hate those heathen apostate Baptists or papists or Eastern Orthodox. Most nations have an ethnically rooted "state" religion, even it isn't one officially, so for most places I would imagine you'd find that approval of Christianity would mirror closely the approval of whichever sect prevails in that locale. Few places have the diversity of cohabiting beliefs that the USA has, and Mormons in particular are pretty universally reviled or at least discounted by most major Christian religious institutions, since they have fundamental dogmatic disagreements that most other Christians consider fundamental tenets to true belief. Additionally LDS and its offshoots as well as JW have, in my experience, the most vituperative exbelievers of any (US at least) semi-mainstream religions. Whether that's for good cause or not is left as an exercise to the reader.
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.
https://www.themotte.org/post/383/wellness-wednesday-for-february-22-2023/68713?context=8#context
First of all, I hope this poster has read https://www.themotte.org/post/195/what-to-do-when-you-get
Second of all, I'd like to express my disappointment in nearly every response I've seen them receive. The fact that their question, which appears to have been made in total good faith, is still getting dogpiled and drive by downvotes is vicariously embarrassing. This isn't a culture war issue. It's a person in the life advice thread asking for life advice on interpersonal relationships as it pertains to their trans friends concerns over a tendentious CW item. prof xi o isn't even stating a position, only that they have trans friends and like Harry Potter (apparently this justifies an accusation of trolling, to the tune of a 45 [edit: 30, my back of the skull hangover sums aren't great] updoot difference. An uncharitable read might see some of the responses from prof xi o as sealioning. Cool. Take your uncharitable reading and keep it under wraps). If I was feeling extreme, I might posit being told you shouldn't be friends with my outgroup is not a valuable remark.
If I want to dunk on wingcucks I can go to arr drama. If I want to dunk on globohomo I can go to /pol/. If I want to dunk on chuds I'll join Hasan's discord. If I want to dunk on MAGAts I'll head over to /r/news. If I want to dunk on libtards I'll join the Mug Club. This is it, as far as I know, for frank and civil discussion between people, whose only commonality on themotte are their shared, seemingly intractable differences. This is unbelievably important to me, because there exists a reality where I am wrong. There is a chance that you too are wrong. Having a place where I can be presented with the absolute best argument against my pet philosophy (and those of others) is valuable, and it's valuable because it can if nothing else, diminish the evil I do as I navigate a confusing and confused world.
Overt forum-wide bias of any particular flavor or stripe, in my opinion, is the most pressing threat to the long term health of this site. Please don't fuck it up for everyone.
P.S. I will be appropriately embarrassed if the OP turns out to be another d*rwin, until that point try leaving the internet at the door and treating everyone as if they are, in fact, sincere.
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
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
Most Americans haven't read Hemingway, many haven't read Kipling, and I think you'd be hard pressed to find in most environments someone who would be able to tell you the title of more than one of Conrad's books (I only know two off the top of my head but the second is due to my naughty sense of humor, not because I'm well read). Your degree of familiarity with these subjects is likely unusual even if you want to roll in the highly educated. Most modern westerners (Americans specifically, speaking anecdotally and with a fuzzy understanding of the numerous studies done on literacy here) simply don't read and when they do they pick YA lit or the latest in ex-SOG power fantasies. I genuinely believe you might be typical-minding the motives of your outgroup. Even if I'm completely wrong about that I would remind you of the admonition of TLP, "If you're watching it, it's for you" as well as Scott's addendum "It's bad on purpose to make you click".
Engagement with minor egregor-level organizations or corporations makes you legible to them and opens you up as a source of sustenance to these entities. Don't feed the (metaphysical) trolls, they live on the psychic plane and should be forced to come out and visit you in the waking nightmare of life if they want to eat your joy for breakfast.
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
Fascinating, very much not my analysis of what TLP was attempting to convey. When I read his piece originally and read it now, my takeaway is that if a given piece of propaganda found its way into your hands, it's not by accident. If your reaction to it is (an execrable) Wholesome 💯, consider that was the intended response. If it results in frothing rage, consider that to be the intended response.
We live in an era of superstimuli: I'm willing to bet that companies (or a Company) with small-nation-GDPs for market caps and a specialization in marketing have heard of shibboleths before, and maybe they're releasing scissory material on purpose.
I personally assume that anything which tries to hijack my emotional train of "thought" is a weapon of some sort; maybe deployed by my tribe, maybe deployed by another, doesn't matter, the point is the reaction. Who cares if they're cringe or factually incorrect, even if it is, dare I say, based? You saw it and you felt a certain way. Mission accomplished.
ratboygenius
i came here to be alone
1yr ago
I don't use any type of warez to cover myself (besides a VPN where good hygiene is advisable), due in part to sloth and also a lack of wherewithal. My justification for this is probably cope, but my layman's view is that, these days, unless you have a pretty comprehensive suite of software and are unrelentingly fastidious with your choice of hardware/setup, any government entity or motivated individual/group who wants to find you will.
As a result I try to keep myself clean with burner emails, use a new handle for every new platform (and password, which should go without saying. That said I know an embarrassing number of people who use the same pass for everything, up to and including using their ATM card's PIN for their phone) I find myself on and semi regularly (1-3 years) change up the primary screen names and PFPs I use. My last trick and the one I use the least because it discomfits me some is lying consistently about minor identifying details. The consistency of it is important as the purpose is to generate a false positive that'll show up in the kinds of datasets you were demonstrating in your previous post.
Gwern's incredible analysis on Death Note was the primary inspiration for these practices, not that I'm familiar with opsec/digital fingerprints or anywhere near important enough for someone to look for me. The idea is to just throw enough obstacles in the way that, contingent upon an amateur getting ants in the pants over my presence online, I have time to scrub what I can from the 'net (not much, in practice more than you think, so long as you aren't notorious or prolific, as you said). Then I can move my daily business over to a set of cutouts made a while back that I keep the credentials for in my safe.
I'm not anonymized from serious players but I can't play at that level anyway, so fuck it. If things get that far I'll have bigger fish to fry than that time my teenaged self wrote the n-word on a BBS for a kids show fifteen years ago. Would love it for someone with actual expertise in this field to chime in, maybe let me know how if my prophylactics are stupid or not.
ratboygenius
i came here to be alone
1yr ago
Further viewing for anyone who cares about the phenomenal acceleration of nostalgia as much as I do. ALERT! YouTube link! (also contains what can be considered a very annoying pop song)
Go ahead and read the comments below; from what I can tell these are actual children, or at the very least young adults, waxing poetic on the halcyon days of their youth. This, to me, is just incredible. Literally! Imagine if you had told just about anyone across history that the unblooded youth of society would reminisce over their shared childhood, before they had even stepped into adult society proper. Maybe my priors on this are skewed by my neophyte-tier Cynicism and a knee-jerk tribal desire for RETVRN, but I can't help but wonder if this is something very, very new.
A fascinating topic to me, and one I don't have the requisite familiarity or ability to trawl through academic literature on this subject, or even know if there's been anything published that would cover this.
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
Agree that a sense of entitlement is pretty universal, and I assume is socially mediated rather than caused by one's sex. That said I think it's an easy case to make, however, that this is split along gendered lines. (I will try to pull only from my understanding of the literature surrounding psychological differences between the sexes without leaning on any evopsych mumbo jumbo)
Men resent and will misrepresent, to themselves and others, in no particular order and by no means exhaustive, their immaturity/narrow shoulders/weak chin/small stature/small penis/wispy facial hair/flabby body or physical weakness/getting outskilled in sport.
Similarly, but sitting on the other end of the binary, women resent and misrepresent their current or historical romantic partner(s)/or lack thereof/social status/getting old/looking shabby/compensating with make-up/small breasts/thick waist/narrow hips.
All of these things are in common as they're all measures used (often unconsciously) to judge reproductive and general fitness (I'm certain the specific features in question vary from one culture to another, and I don't think there's a good reason to obsess over at least the immutable ones) in a sexual dimorphism-specific context. An introspective or anxious person paying close attention might notice themselves automatically running this sort of checklist against themselves (or their friends/enemies) from time to time, without ever appearing in your "cone of consciousness". Any perceived attack along any one of these vectors is almost guaranteed to provoke an angry or upset response, and rightly so. It's taken, whether knowingly or not, as a direct challenge to one's own viability as a lifeform. If the charges are legitimate then one is offended multiply, if only because it rings in your own ear as the truth and should be taken to mean that you are, in fact, less fit along some dimension than your peers.
ratboygenius
i came here to be alone
1yr ago
It may very well have been a legit (above) average neurodivergent slav who had a bone to pick with our Russian friend. As a group, they seem to be quite handy with computers.
ratboygenius
i came here to be alone
1yr ago
I remember the 90's fondly, but I can understand finding the aggressive Dutch angles, howling FM radio bumpers peppered in across media and the practice of over cranked footage from a camera zooming into a person's face to be an off-putting aesthetic.
are all both unnecessarily antagonistic and call-outy, superfluous to what I believe to be your intended point. Even if you feel that this might be a shot at your own ingroup, there's always https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/30/i-can-tolerate-anything-except-the-outgroup/, entirely about how your ingroup might not be what you think it is. If I felt strongly that I fell into one of those three examples I, personally, would be seething at your post and wouldn't engage with anything you had written.
That said, I'm very curious as to what you meant when you wrote
I can't find the original article from a cursory google search, but I'm reminded of Fred Reed's (I believe it was him) screed on Liberalism as a movement sowing the seeds of its own destruction, as high-asabiyyah "un-Enlightened" cultures integrate into egalitarian ones. Is this what you meant?More options
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