rolfmoo
22d ago
I also believe intelligence gives rise to moral worth, I'd happily eat a chicken
I technically agree, but there's such a huge difference between even the least intelligent 1% of humans and chickens that it doesn't matter. Everest is a lot higher than Ben Nevis, but they're both obviously mountains and not molehills.
rolfmoo
3mo ago
Large-scale medicine is a good example of anarcho-tyranny. Malaria vaccine to save untold thousands from a painful death? Not without years and years of exhaustive development and trials and the WHO sitting with its thumb up its arse for no reason! Fuck around with lethal untested experimental viruses? Why, of course, no problem there.
rolfmoo
3mo ago
Bicarbonate of soda (baking soda in American, possibly?), not baking powder.
rolfmoo
7mo ago
It might not even be dementia. Elderly people have less physical stamina and "slack in the system" in general. A bad night's sleep (not uncommon for politicians), mild food poisoning, a dizzy spell, whatever - they're all going to hit an 80-year-old harder than a 40-year-old.
People do vary a lot, so I don't find it inconceivable that there might be some octogenarians who are perfectly fit to be senior politicians. What's eerie is the increase in politicians now being so elderly. Whether or not they're fit for the role strikes me as secondary to working out the reasons for the change. And simply banning them seems very unlikely to solve the actual core problem that's producing this phenomenon.
rolfmoo
7mo ago
Rationalist credo "That which can be destroyed by the truth should be" is deeply abnormal for human beings.
I am a very weird human being. When I first read this stuff on LessWrong as a teenager I remember being very annoyed by how smug they seemed about "hey, breaking news, you should believe true things and not false things." As an adult, yeah, fine, if anything they were understating it. I'm not pretending to be some kind of rational agent, but I don't explicitly come out and try to believe false things, what the fuck?
But I still don't understand how people can do this and it still frightens me that it's not even uncommon. They still know on the inside that it's still not true, right?? There's no Men-in-Black neuralyzer that comes along if you pretend you don't know it long enough... right?? Why does he want to believe something that isn't true?
rolfmoo
9mo ago
The UK has an ongoing COVID inquiry. It's probably not going to come to much, but the general consensus I sense now was that the lockdowns and the general pandemic strategy were a bit foolish, yet another error of the Tory government.
It's no longer verboten to criticise the lockdowns, as it was for years. I still haven't heard a remotely sane answer for why vaccines had to be agonisingly slowly tested while the bodies piled up, because mumble mumble bioethics consent, but the whole population could be placed under house arrest on a whim, but there you go.
Realistically, there's not going to be a huge revelation. It's just going to quietly fade away, at best they'll be generally seen as a mildly bad response, and we'll forget all about it.
+1 for my general belief that the lockdowns were motivated more by panic, and monkey-see-monkey-do-ing China, than any actually coherent policy.
rolfmoo
7mo ago
It's very different. The fact that sometimes you have to take into account that people are wrong about things doesn't change a damn thing about whether or not those things are, in fact, true. You shouldn't try to argue theology with a schizophrenic who thinks they're Jesus, but they still aren't.
rolfmoo
9mo ago
I'm not clear on how this differs from "I could be happy in Heaven despite knowing there are people in Hell because my mind would be rewritten to consider this justice". A divine entity reshaping you like that could make you think of anything as justice. How would you tell the difference between this, and the Hypothetical Reverse God who condemns all Christians making you think you perfectly deserve misery?
...Also, I can't help but notice that this whole "without these specific rituals and beliefs, you suffer forever" business feels a lot more like an idea maximising pressure to spread it than the kind of thing you'd expect from the Almighty. It seems very petty, very suspiciously human, for an entity with the majesty and sheer greatness of God to hold that kind of a grudge.
Who am I to teach God mercy? Well, I don't have a torture-dimension for my enemies, so I have that going for me. I sort of feel like the Almighty should be able to outdo me here, rather than the opposite.
rolfmoo
7mo ago
It concerns me that "believe" and "pretend to believe" aren't very obviously flagrantly different things.
rolfmoo
7mo ago
I don't know when the common understanding became that TTRPG rules are supposed to represent the in-world laws of physics, but that is not what they do and isn't in Pathfinder and never has been, going right back to OD&D. TTRPG rules are there to assist the DM in running the game, that's all. The rules for diseases are not necessarily reflective of what disease is actually like in the world and certainly don't exclude the possibility of things like acquired immunity.
Is germ theory true in Golarion? That's for the DM to decide if it ever comes up, not something to be gleaned from the rules.
Also, more importantly, the setting here is lintamande's fanfic Golarion, which differs in a few ways from the RPG setting.
Iomedae comes from a world where mass immigration and the state capacity to control it don't exist - of course she finds modern mores on it strange and horrible, it would be weird if she didn't.
rolfmoo
7mo ago
Convincing yourself that God exists - or convincing yourself that you have convinced yourself - won't make there be a God. There just is one or there isn't. All you'd be doing is lying to yourself.
Wanting to believe things is a type error. Beliefs aren't about what you want, they're about what you think is true.
rolfmoo
1yr ago
They might be hoping to reframe the whole issue. Nobody blames Photoshop when people make fake naked pictures of celebrities: maybe by making it a tool like Word and Excel, they're hoping that people will see it as neutral in whatever it's used for. I doubt this will work (if Photoshop were released today, would naughty pictures be blamed on Adobe?) but they might be willing to take the risk, gambling on Office's existing image as a neutral suite of tools.
rolfmoo
7mo ago
The things you're complaining about are... The central conflict of the story. Iomedae comes from a mediaevalish world, of course she has fucked-up ideas about consent, that's the whole point! If you don't like a writing style, fair enough, if you don't want to read something before you complain about it, fine, but come on.
rolfmoo
1yr ago
this issue becomes legally significant when there are laws that apply differently to "men" and "women."
Another excellent reason why there shouldn't be such laws.
Frankly, I'm not even sure there should be sex-segregated prisons in the first place. A prison is a place where privacy is suspended and the rule of law can and should be total. The rate of prison rape should be zero.
In reality, of course, people don't really care about prison rape and abuse when trans people aren't involved. "Don't drop the soap" is a harmless jest, unlike all other rape jokes. But the possibility that a trans person might perpetrate such a crime?
I'm extremely sceptical of the notion that the law should discriminate on the basis of sex or gender at all (isn't Justice blind?), but this particular controversy is missing the key issue.
rolfmoo
7mo ago
Just download songs and put them on your phone? How hard is that?
I used to do this, and then I got a trial Spotify subscription and never went back - what they really sell is convenience. The value to me of my time and attention is greater than their fee.
rolfmoo
8mo ago
I'll happily take that trade! Pure mathematics is nice, but I'll trade it for all the other beautiful things in a heartbeat. Political views: dissident SJW/liberal, strongly pro-trans-rights, anti-racist, pro-freedom of speech, pro-vaccine/anti-lockdown.
I never understood why building ugly things was supposed to be a left/liberal position. It's not the highly-privileged architects who have to live in the damn things.
And yes, aesthetics are technically subjective, but this is one of those weaselly things. Perhaps there really are architects who deeply appreciate the local Concrete Abomination and find it transcendentally beautiful and aren't just saying that as part of a complicated signalling equilibrium! People are weird sometimes! But the public in general overwhelmingly prefers beautiful things in the polls, and they're almost never built any more.
It's an undemocratic injustice foisted disproportionately on marginalised groups by a predominantly-white elite. Tear down the brutalist monstrosities and replace them with cathedrals for social justice.
(Also, they're ugly as sin and I hate them.)
rolfmoo
1yr ago
What gets you fiercely activated, beyond what you can rationally justify?
Covid lockdowns. Vaccines? Very sensible. Vaccine mandates? Extreme, but I can imagine taking that position on the balance. But the idea of total loss of the most fundamental freedom - in my country, needing an excuse just to leave my house? I find it very hard to have any more sophisticated response than "fuck you and fuck your excuses", and on some deep emotional level that I can't shake it feels like everyone went completely insane at once on just this one issue.
It's especially weird because I'm pretty woke on most things. But in this case the mainstream feels totally insane and its viewpoint feels totally opaque to me, and inspires that kind of rage-and-panic reaction (which is not a pleasant thing to nearly constantly feel for more than a year).
If it destroys countries or even the whole humanity, then it should be destroyed, right? The cold truth is defined as the highest value so what is the problem.
I think you either misunderstand or are deliberately misrepresenting the point to dunk on the nerds here. Obviously you shouldn't post nuclear codes on Twitter just because they're true - we're talking about the nature of beliefs. "Dangerous information exists" isn't incompatible with the idea that you should try to believe true things, and not random shit that would be convenient. That's just common sense!
Anyways, there are many ways how one can save "belief in untruth"
Nothing you said here is even remotely like belief in untruth. Trust authority figures? Also a means of determining the truth, because the whole reason you're trusting them is that you think they're right! Be sceptical of clever-sounding arguments? Don't rush to believe weird things just because you think you have evidence? That's literally just Yudkowskian rationality stated informally! He would probably say something more like that in Bayesian terms, your odds of hearing a good argument for X are not that much higher given that X is true, and also that prior probabilities exist, but it's the same damn thing.
All it takes for me to defend any belief is to set my prior to very low value so it is incredibly hard for it to be flipped in my lifetime.
I can't find it on a cursory Google, but one of the Sequence posts on this is about how confident it's reasonable to be in your priors, and "so low no reasonable evidence could ever make a difference" is, obviously, too low. Again, common sense.
Now given the utilitarianism of rationalists I do not trust them at all, there is nothing preventing them to lie to me to reach their goals of maximizing utils or whatever.
Gosh, it sounds like being so willing to lie could have bad consequences that a consequentialist might want to avoid. Seriously though, there's whole reams of decision theory stuff about how you shouldn't lie! Partly in fact for exactly this reason. A good basic sketch from the Olden Days of why in rat terms you should not in fact abandon all ethics to be "utilitarian" is here.
which would be logical step if they really believed in the Truth of apocalypse so firmly and unshakenly.
See above. It's not actually logical.
I think dropping the guru sounding shit or weird stuff
Yeah, agreed, it bothers me a lot too. Yudkowsky in particular seems to just not have much sense of... PR, image, not seeming weird, and it's very annoying. The only thing that annoys me more than LessWrong rationality is how terrible the criticisms of it are. I'd take a hundred weird mystical descriptions of common-sense reasoning over one "these people are weird and cringey which is of course equal to 'wrong' because 'wrong' is just another word for 'bad'" dunking.
rolfmoo
1yr ago
You... do know this is primarily a reactionary forum and is consequentially going to have a right-wing skew
You were the Chosen One, /r/TheMotte! It was said that you would destroy the screaming tribal shit-flinging, not join in! etc. etc.
This place is way to the right of me in some directions I find really weird, but I'm still here because it's supposed to be a place for the grown-ups in the room, where you don't get targeted for a difference of opinion. If it's going to just be another reactionary forum with a slightly higher average IQ for a while, what's the point?
rolfmoo
8mo ago
I think there is a hopeless/nihilistic/no-heroes streak in some parts of contemporary culture, but mostly surrounding climate activism. (It's a narrative that flatters my prejudices to suggest that it's a cautionary tale about distorting the truth for rhetorical power "for the greater good": the exaggerated claims that global warming will end the world, rather than just be very bad, didn't galvanise people to action but created a kind of numbing despair.) "Only we are the heroes" might be a better phrasing of the problem.
I've always thought that a sequel trilogy should be about Luke starting his own Jedi order that is less oppressive than the original one, but running into the same problems that those harsh rules were created to solve. (Kids missing their families, questioning the Jedi ways, potentially creating new Anakins.)
For what it's worth, the old Expanded Universe novels were exactly this. Luke's New Jedi Order is founded on a much healthier basis and succeeds in bringing together a new Republic and creating some of the greatest Jedi in history... and also runs into some spectacular disasters, because solving problems is hard actually.
rolfmoo
1yr ago
I have a novel hypothesis / wildly unfounded cloud-yell on this: we are seeing a shift away from stories and towards content.
Let's take your Star Wars example. Original Star Wars was supposed to be a childlike fairy tale, and there's nothing wrong with that (see C.S. Lewis). But it had some kind of coherent sense and consistency. It had the Hero's Journey. Its creators imagined a world and told a story of what happened within it.
Contrast Modern Star Wars. What is it supposed to be? It's certainly not a fairy tale, and it's not even really much of a story: there's no internal consistency. Characters don't really do things for reasons: Luke Skywalker almost murders a child not because there's any way that makes sense, but just because the Mentor needs a Dark Secret. Rey wants to redeem Kylo Ren not because she has any personal motive to do so, but because we need a Redeemable Villain. The world doesn't exist as a fictional setting: stuff just happens, the First Order appears out of nowhere, the Republic vanishes, now the Final Order exists, now it doesn't.
What it is is Star Wars content. There are people on a screen with lightsabers and blasters and spaceships - are you not entertained?
Just so with current-Phase Marvel. Does anything about Thor: Love and Thunder make a lick of sense? Does it have a solid plot? No - but look, Thor is here! And Valkyrie!
It's not really about it being for children. There are plenty of good stories for children: some of the best stories are age-agnostic. Great literature is not necessarily particularly highbrow or intelligent: Shakespeare and Homer were optimising for making good stories, not for showing off how clever and grown-up they were.
But it is really reminiscent of the rise of streaming as a phenomenon: when you watch a stream, there's no narrative, no coherent set of ideas coming together, just stuff happening. It's easy to procrastinate with it and to have it on in the background because it's not a story, it's just stuff. And so with a lot of modern cinema. No stories, at best a couple of Big Moments (that you can React to and talk about on Twitter!) strung together with content.
rolfmoo
1yr ago
Literally exactly zero isn't necessary - it just has to be a rounding error, like "it happened because the CCTV camera just happened to explode while all the guards were sneezing" or whatever, as opposed to the current rate of "who cares".
rolfmoo
8mo ago
I don't think it's true that hideous modern architecture is just the genuine aesthetic vision of a different culture. Most people hate it, Texan or Californian: it's the taste, or apparent taste, of a small number of highly privileged people (architects and their sponsors).
Most people do care about their tribe, but it's really historically weird for your "tribe" to be "a population of millions of people who happen to share some genes in common with you".
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