self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
I'm a transhumanist doctor. In a better world, I wouldn't need to add that as a qualifier to plain old "doctor". It would be taken as granted for someone in the profession of saving lives.
At any rate, I intend to live forever or die trying. See you at Heat Death!
Friends:
A friend to everyone is a friend to no one.
User ID: 454
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
1d ago
This reads like someone who's had some really bad experiences and is painting with an incredibly broad brush
Like yeah honor/face culture exists in lots of places but acting like 1.4 billion people all operate exactly the same way because of one cultural concept is wild. I've worked with plenty of Indians who were just normal colleagues, not scheming honor warriors plotting my downfall lmao
The greentext story especially sounds made up as hell. Most of these examples feel cherry-picked to support a pretty harsh generalization
Someone in the thread, and I agree with him. When I first ran into this copy pasta, I was like, what the fuck is an izzat? I've lived in India for well over 20 years without running into it outside of cheesy Bollywood music played over a radio. I know it's originally an Urdu/Persian word, and it's not commonly used here.
Hell, the Wikipedia page is barely worth the TP it's printed on.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Izzat_(honour)
Maintaining this societal reputation by all necessary means is considered obligatory upon every man and woman, as is revenge or punishment upon those who have or are perceived as having directly or indirectly violated it.
The fuck? Obligatory? Where?
The idea of reciprocity, in both friendship and enmity, is deeply embedded in izzat. It is required, for example, that a person goes to any lengths to come to the assistance of those who had previously helped them in their time of need,[5] and to fail to do so is to dishonour one's debt and thereby lose izzat.[5]
If anyone here belongs to a culture that doesn't have the concept of friendship or the concept of reciprocation, I pity them. Let me know so I can hear about it.
Seriously, this is about as useful as that meme of someone going, "oh yeah, in my culture, we loooove our family and food is very important to us."
In other words, the original description of izzat is not a good description of the majority of the country. Honor culture exists in many parts of India, particularly rural and conservative backwaters, but it's fuck all like that in general. I'm not sure if anyone should except better from a KiwiFarms thread called "India is a menace".
Edit:
There was a greentext from 4chan (I don't have it so bear with me). Anon knew an Indian. This Indian would make outlandish claims (he could benchpress 500kg, he was a billionaire, he did arms deals with the US government). Anon said he didn't believe the Indian. The Indian reacted with righteous indignation. The situation escalated to the point where the Indian was emailing Anon death threats. Anon responded by forwarding the emails to the police. The Indian killed himself. Anon was left baffled at the whole situation and had no idea what the fuck just happened.
The fuck? I think the antics of one compulsive confabulist or mentally ill isn't grounds for sweeping statements. Does anyone know >1 Indian?
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
1d ago
Very good post. I hope you've shared it on the subreddit.
While I'm more of a Xianxia than Wuxia guy, I get the appeal. It's honestly impressive how much effort went into the game, and even the great deal of jank is the charming kind. I am not sure if I'm going to ever play it, but I'm glad it exists.
Speechcraft as a form of medical treatment? Well...
Dr. Yuan is absolutely spitting facts. If he has an AI bot, we need to put that thing in charge of the NHS.
And why not have a fucking comment section with quests? Good, devs with balls. I know that Amazing Cultivation Sim has a full on in-game forum. Fuck Western devs and their pussy ass takes on it, when they deign to allow it. They can try finger but hole. The Chinese will eventually eat their lunch.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
2d ago
Yup, I've got the same issue on Chrome for Android.
Some Arma Reforger, and Rimworld.
I've also been dipping my toes into RW modding. I can't play without the Combat Extended mod, which makes the two blind guys in an alley shootouts in vanilla into something respectable.
I wanted to start small and make a mod that adds a single gun, namely a railgun that's effectively an MG and shoots 6mm tungsten sabots. I wanted to be maximally lazy and use AI to write all the code, but had very little success. Rimworld modding is a relatively niche topic, and CE submods even more so. Especially since there was a version update and DLC since the knowledge cutoff. I was tearing out hair before giving up on that approach as a wholesale solution and ended up taking an existing mod as the starting point and stripping it down and building back up by myself.
So far? I've got a 6mm railgun! It shoots!
Unfortunately, it only fires single rounds and doesn't seem to need ammo. The former is a consequence of starting off with a mod that added a sniper rifle, but the latter perplexes me. I'll figure it out eventually, especially with help from the CE dev discord. It's cool that it's working at all, even if it's a tiny project on well-trod ground.
Edit:
I've got it working! It's out on Steam, with 3 railguns that fit your needs regardless of the enemy you need railed. I'm officially a modder, and I've returned something to the community and game that I've enjoyed for an ungodly number of hours.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
4d ago
Little known fact, the Scouts were a thing in India, a leftover from British colonial rule. I was a member, and I got fuck-all out of it. I think I joined because someone vaguely promised me that I'd get to shoot a gun at some point, but that never came about.
I found it immensely boring, but the Indian version had very little of the "scouting" that Americans enjoy (or did). Going for a week long hike in the woods? What woods? It was urban living and farms for several hundred miles till you ended up in a national park or a mangrove swamp. I think it was wise not to make a bunch of kids into (big) cat food.
We didn't do girly arts and crafts as far as I remember, they taught us a few knots (which I was never good at and have entirely forgotten), lit fires in the middle of a field, marching and so on. The only highlight was the one time an excursion had a lunch, and I got extra servings for helping prep food.
Masculinity? We had the fruitiest troop master known to man, who was our kindergarten teacher at some point. He became a she at some point, which I suppose is something.
Ah... Good times, it beat being in class, but not enjoying my summer vacation in front of a TV.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
5d ago
My condolences. At least it's the whole company going down the drain instead of you being fired after 20 years of work. I hope you land on your feet and your buddies get you a good word elsewhere. Good luck!
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
5d ago
I'm an atheist, and an antitheist, but I don't bother with being militant about it.
I feel like we reached the heat death of the theism debate sometime around 2011. Every argument has been deployed, countered, steelmanned, mothballed, and then resurrected as a zombie argument so many times that the marginal utility of another forum post is effectively zero. I am happy to report that life as a Western atheist is actually quite pleasant. I leave them alone; they generally leave me alone. It is a functional equilibrium.
I am so confused by this conversational mindset. What could someone perceive as the value to themselves of jumping into a discussion among Christians, with Christian premises, to declare that actually Christians are morons who believe in a "sky fairy" or whatever? If you truly believe that Christians are benighted superstitious freaks, then surely you're wasting your time yelling at them on the internet. Or if you think they're ordinary people with mistaken beliefs, then it seems like the attitude should be one of polite curiosity and question-asking?
But I want to push back on the quoted dichotomy. It suggests that if I believe religious people hold fundamentally absurd beliefs, I must either view them as raving lunatics worthy of scorn or simply be politely curious about their worldview.
This assumes a unitary model of the human mind which psychology tells us is almost certainly false. The correct model is that humans are world-class champions at compartmentalization.
The average religious believer is not a caricature. They are behaviourally indistinct from the general population. They take out thirty-year mortgages. They trust the FDIC to insure their deposits. They accept the efficacy of amoxicillin. They engage in normal signaling regarding movies and electoral politics. They are hosting a parasitic memeplex, yes, but it appears to be a commensal organism rather than a fatal one. It is not metabolizing their ability to function in a modern economy.
I have an uncle who is a highly credentialed microbiologist. He spends his days applying the scientific method to bacteria, running PCRs, and adhering to rigorous evidentiary standards. He also believes, with total sincerity, in homeopathy. If you tried to model this as a consistent worldview, you would fail. But he doesn't have a consistent worldview. He has a work-mode partition where dilution removes active ingredients, and a home-mode partition where dilution increases potency. I have tried to bridge this gap in debate. It does not work. It only generates heat, not light.
The peace treaty works both ways. The religious generally grant that despite my lack of a divine command theory of ethics, I am probably not going to eat their babies or harvest their organs for the black market. I am a Cooperator in the Prisoner's Dilemma of civilization.
In return, I acknowledge that their "God module" is just an unfortunate quirk of their hardware. It is a glitch, perhaps a spandrel of our evolutionary history that makes them susceptible to hyper-active agency detection. Maybe they genuinely do have a God-shaped Hole, which I fortunately lack. But outside of that specific theological blast radius, we share a surprising amount of epistemological territory. We can agree on the price of tea in China. We can agree on the laws of thermodynamics. We can agree that the new Star Wars movies were disappointing.
I feel a certain distant pity for the condition, the same way I might pity someone with a benign but annoying tinnitus. But since they are otherwise high-functioning members of the tribe, I see no utility in screaming at them until they admit the ringing sound isn't real. We can (usually) just ignore the noise and watch the movie.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
6d ago
I don't know of any meds that can help, he's not psychotic, he's just a dick. Can't cure ASPD.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
6d ago
I hope you can appreciate that an atheist watching a thread devolve into bible study would be miffed.
I'm an atheist/antitheist. My stance on the Bible study threads is bemused tolerance, sure, it's not for me, but I'm sure that my passion for AI alignment research isn't what others are looking for. In both cases, the sensible thing to do is collapse the thread and look for something else to read. Perhaps appreciate that this sub has a diversity of opinion and discussions!
I certainly don't see an assumption of Christianity in general, most of the discussion is usually found away from the CWR threads, and where it does come in, well, topics like abortion or immigration and one's attitudes towards the same do hinge on religious beliefs or lack thereof.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
6d ago
Hugbox for fundamentalist Christians? Nobody told me.
Thanks for defending our honor, and hopefully some new people will follow the links over.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
6d ago
So is this book's Modern Age at least a couple centuries delayed relative to reality? I'd hope so, as the alternative suggests an untenably-strong view of historical inevitability.
Nope. Not in the least. It moves in lockstep, we get the Middle Ages, a Renaissance+Industrial Revolution, and a 20th century that's pretty similar to our own. At the start of the 21st century, they're practically identical, barring a reduced prevalence of consumer electronics since they use standalone desktop computers instead of mobile devices.
Damn it. I'd written a full review of the novel at some point, but I can't find it. I guess I'll have to do it all over again:
I really wanted to love this book. In the grand calculus of my reading preferences, it scores a solid 7.5 out of 10. But the experience was less like a perfect meal and more like being served a top-tier Wagyu steak in a kitchen that has just failed its health inspection. The texture is savory, the preparation is skilled, but there is a lingering, bitter aftertaste suggesting that the underlying infrastructure is infested with pests. I felt compelled to turn the pages, but I could not bring myself to love it.
Here's particular aspects that turned me off, and some of the good:
The novel opens with a masterful depiction of the end of days. We see the final days of Europe and Byzantium through the eyes of a Mongolian soldier, and it effectively conveys the sheer scale of the Black Death. It feels like a genuine apocalypse, a wholesale deletion of cultures where the map is suddenly wiped clean of territory.
And then, inexplicably, the point of view shifts. We leave this fascinating post-apocalyptic landscape and barely return to Europe until centuries later. This feels like a massive failure of resource allocation. I would have happily read five hundred pages detailing the logistics of recolonization and the emergent order of new societies filling a vacuum. There is a smattering of this, but nowhere near enough to satisfy the premise.
This is compounded by the fact that several chapters/hundreds of pages dwell on civilizations in South and East Asia that were practically unchanged by the catastrophe. This is plausible, since I doubt Imperial China would notice or care about the death of all the gweilos. But that makes it boring to dwell on them, Akbar is the same Akbar, the Ming/Ching/Ding-Dong dynasty does their usual stuff. Another missed opportunity.
Then there is the Buddhism.
I generally try to be charitable to an author’s metaphysical framework, but the inclusion of the Bardo and literal reincarnation strained my suspension of disbelief to the breaking point. The book frames these not as poetic metaphors or cultural delusions, but as real events interacting with the material plane. Characters experience déjà vu and, in some cases, regain actual memories from past lives.
This presents a serious world-building problem. If Buddhism is literally true to the extent that personality continuity survives death, this is a much bigger deal than the geopolitical maneuvering of the Chinese Empire. It is the discovery of a new law of physics. To include this high-fantasy element in an otherwise grounded alternative history feels jarring. It is like reading a hard sci-fi novel about Mars colonization where the astronauts occasionally cast magic missile spells, and nobody treats it as unusual. It makes the story feel a bit like a sitcom, oh, what are B and K getting up to this episode? How will that scoundrel P fuck things up again?
My biggest gripe mirrors the standard rationalist critique of deterministic history. KSR seems to subscribe to the "Civilization Tech Tree" view of scientific progress. We spend long, dense chapters watching a group of reincarnated souls invent the scientific method and discover new paradigms. There is a commendable depth to the description of their rational analysis and use of period-accurate tools.
And then they die of the plague.
The narrative result is that nothing comes of their work. I understand the literary impulse to show that the universe is uncaring and that nature does not respect narrative arcs. However, the subsequent eras simply reinvent the same things. It feels like rail-roading. The author assumes that scientific discovery is a single narrow path that must be walked exactly as we walked it.
Where is the divergence? Where is the serendipity? I can conceive of a timeline where the plague pressures lead to a biomedical boom, resulting in the discovery of penicillin in the equivalent of the 19th century. Instead, we get a reshuffled version of our own history, implying that the history of science is inevitable rather than path-dependent. It is a missed opportunity for genuine speculation.
The geopolitics were acceptable, if somewhat safe. One might describe the author’s sociological framework as "Standard Blue Tribe Consensus," completely bypassing any engagement with human biodiversity or more controversial anthropological theories. That is forgivable, or at least I couldn't read most fiction if I expected authors to acknowledge such facts. That said, there's no way in hell that the Iroquois end up in control of North America when faced with Islamic and Chinese colonialism. I would have been okay with some kind of weird syncretic mix, but other than the Chinese holding California, the Native Americans won the rest.
I did appreciate the depiction of the Chinese imperial system. By positing a world with no external peer competitor, the author plausibly argues that an autocracy could persist much longer than it did in our timeline, avoiding the specific trap of making it just a reskin of 20th-century Communism.
The scale of that war also completely stretched my credulity: look at how exhausted all the combatants were by 4 years of WWI, and how absolutely destroyed the USSR, Britain, and Germany were by 6 years of WWII.
Here I personally disagree.
World War 1+2 in a single package, a grinding forever war that ran for decades and killed over a billion people? I actually liked that, it made sense in context. The technological level seemed to be at about our WW1, with a massive theater that seemed to span half of Siberia, the Himalayas, Burma and a front in the Americas. The individual blocs were also much larger, and China in particular was an autocratic state that very much could throw a lot of meat into the grinder. The novel does make clear that the war pretty much wrecked all the players, Arab Europe was practically depopulated. Especially since nukes weren't invented till much later (and never used because of some kind of weird cabal of peacenik science hippies), there simply wasn't any decisive engagement and the core lands were unthreatened till the end of the conflict. We don't have to assume it ran at maximal intensity for the entire duration either.
Finally, the scope. If you are going to write a history that spans millennia, why stop at the equivalent of our present day? I found myself wishing KSR had extrapolated past the turn of the millennium. A three-way space race between a neo-Arab bloc, China, Greater India and the indigenous American federations would have been fascinating. This is Kim Stanley Robinson, if he won't do it, who will?
I give points for the deep historical research and the richness of the cultural flavor. KSR clearly did his homework. I only wish he had used that homework to explore new territory rather than simply walking a slightly more scenic route to the world we already live in.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
6d ago
I wish, I really do. Unfortunately, this place is best described as rationalist-adjacent, which is the next best thing.
LW? The ur-rats.
Scott himself? Of course.
SSC/ACX and the subreddit? Mostly the case.
Us? The blood is a bit diluted.
Of course, this is my personal opinion, but IMO, a real "rationalist" forum includes more explicit discussions of the tenets of rationality itself, which we really don't do very often. We have high standards for discourse, we have people using Bayesian arithmetic when they feel like it, but we are a more general interest kinda place. And that's fine!
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
6d ago
I don't see where "rationality" even comes into the picture here. If we were modding people for being "irrational", we would have far fewer participants left.
As it stands, your comment is a non-sequitur. To assess the rationality of armed resistance to what you perceive as a hostile state is not in my remit as a moderator. Questions of rationality don't even come into the warning/tempban here. He was building consensus, being a culture warrior, and so on and so forth. Fedposting isn't in the sidebar rules last time I checked, but we frown on it because:
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It goes against the culture and ethos of this forum. Doesn't get much more heated than that.
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Zorba prefers the FBI don't kick his door down. We're all here at his behest, and on his sufferance.
You want to discuss your to natural rights to defend yourself against a state? Buddy, that's half of all we talk about over here. But if things have gotten so bad across the pond that you feel the need to form a militia and shoot the AG, then take it to Facebook. And if everyone else feels that way, I think moderation guidelines will be a less than pressing concern during a civil war.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
6d ago
You're not going to get far with a consistent habit of booing the outgroup and clear consensus building. I note multiple previous warnings, so I'm going to extend a 3 day ban to make this one stick.
That's very kind of you to say, but I still think that "izzat" is a poor descriptor for the average Indian.
Almost all of the things described in the original essay are not normal! India is poorly described as an honor culture. It is not like Afghanistan, even if we have regions that are closer to those norms. It would be like coming up with some kind of term for the honor culture in the Appalachians, and using that to draw sweeping conclusions about the rest of the States. Or using SF fent zombies as examples of the average American.
"When two Indians get into an argument, the stakes are always deadly due to izzat"
????
The post takes a small Motte and uses it to defend a ridiculously huge Bailey. Haggling with a merchant on the street or an Uber driver doesn't result in knives or guns coming out.
India is poor and corrupt, but it's not because of izzat. It's for the same reasons as any other poor third world country. Izzat is applicable in Afghanistan, less so in Pakistan, and nigh useless in India itself.
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