sodiummuffin
No bio...
User ID: 420
sodiummuffin
2yr ago
Speaking personally, I have no redneg identity whatsoever. Although born as male, I feel neither as a nam nor as a namow, much like atheists who no longer feel as a believer.
That's just normal, it doesn't set you apart from the general public. It's only unusual in that most people who encounter the concept of gender identity aren't introspective enough to think about whether they actually have an internal sense of such a thing and don't have enough contrarian tendencies to call bullshit. To quote a comment I made a year ago:
The concept of "cis gender identity" wasn't created because anyone investigated whether such a thing actually existed and found that it did, it was created by trans activists as a deliberate mirror-image of their model of transgenderism. Someone who believed in the concept hard enough and was introspective about it would probably notice that he doesn't actually have any internal sense of what his "gender identity" is and decide that makes him "non-binary" or something, when really it just makes him normal. Or look until he interpreted random noise as a sign of some gender identity or other. After all, as the British charity Mermaids has taught us (and taught the organizations like schools and police that have taken their training), not being Barbie or GI Joe means you're towards the middle of the "gender spectrum", and by the way gender dysphoria can present as any and all problems you might have.
sodiummuffin
2yr ago
Some people are asking whether people who accepted FTX money should have “seen the red flags” or “done more due diligence”.
I find this stuff really obnoxious. Since when has it ever been the job of charities to investigate the businesses of the people donating them money? EA or not, what charity does this? It would be a ridiculous waste of time and money, it's not their job and specialization exists for a reason. People are talking like it's some deep failing that they didn't find him suspicious and refuse his money, but just how many legitimate donors should they be willing to refuse as "suspicious" for the sake of avoiding a criminal? Not that it would have been practical anyway, EA-endorsed charities are not some unified group and a lot of his "EA" donations were stuff like directly supporting political candidates who promised to do something about pandemic preparedness
We're not talking about Sequoia Capital, the venture-capital firm that has now written down $214 million in FTX equity, had access to internal information, and actually had a duty to their investors to try to avoid this sort of thing. Similarly we're not talking about their other institutional investors like Blackrock, the Ontario Teacher's Pension Plan, Tiger Global Management, Softbank Group, Lightspeed Venture Partners, and Temasek. We're not talking about the state of Miami selling them the naming rights to a stadium for $125 million dollars, giving them a lot more advertising than some blog posts saying "this billionaire supports EA, great!". Somehow EA is held to a much higher standard than any of these, even though it seems obvious to me that accepting donations should be held to dramatically lower standards than investing teacher's retirement money. EA should focus on effective charity, that is already a sufficiently-ambitious specialty, it shouldn't focus on doing unpaid amateur investment analysis trying to beat institutional investors at their own jobs for the sake of refusing donations that might turn out to be from a criminal.
sodiummuffin
1yr ago
Because democracy isn't just an arbitrary principle, it's a political technology for nonviolent resolution of unrest. People who live in your country but don't vote can still riot, can still strike, and can still join insurgent groups. There are ways to suppress the majority, but they are much more difficult and costly to the country than simply having them continue to live far away outside your borders where they can't readily do those things.
In democracies those tactics are mainly relegated to groups with minority political views that can't win at the ballot box, and sometimes they get their way by caring more than the majority or having elite sympathizers, but most of the time it is advantageous to just participate in the democratic system instead. This has made democracies remarkably stable compared to other political systems. Your proposal, on the other hand, seems like it would fall to a Ghandi-style resistance campaign or violent revolution the first time there was a serious dispute between the natives and the disenfranchised descendants of immigrants.
sodiummuffin
2yr ago
Both. Mostly I was contrasting to the obverse case against it, that risking nuclear escalation would be unthinkable even if it was a purely harmful doomsday device. If it was an atmosphere-ignition bomb being developed for deterrence purposes that people thought had a relevant chance of going off by accident during development (even if it was only a 1% risk), then aggressively demanding an international ban would be the obvious move even though it would carry some small risk of escalating to nuclear war. The common knowledge about the straightforward upside of such a ban would also make it much more politically viable, making it more worthwhile to pursue a ban rather than focusing on trying to prevent accidental ignition during development. Also, unlike ASI, developing the bomb would not help you prevent others from causing accidental or intentional atmospheric ignition.
That said, I do think that is the main reason that pursuing an AI ban would be bad even if it was politically possible. In terms of existential risk I have not read The Precipice and am certainly not any kind of expert, but I am dubious about the idea that delaying for decades or centuries attempting to preserve the unstable status-quo would decrease rather than increase long-term existential risk. The main risk I was thinking about (besides "someone more reckless develops ASI first") was the collapse of current civilization reducing humanity's population and industrial/technological capabilities until it is more vulnerable to additional shocks. Those additional shocks, whether over a short period of time from the original disaster or over a long period against a population that has failed to regain current capabilities (perhaps because we have already used the low-hanging fruit of resources like fossil fuels) could then reduce it to the point that it is vulnerable to extinction. An obvious risk for the initial collapse would be nuclear war, but could also be something more complicated like dysfunctional institutions failing to find alternatives to depleted phosphorous reserves before massive fertilizer shortages. Humanity itself isn't stable, it is currently slowly losing intelligence and health to both outright dysgenic selection from our current society and to lower infant mortality reducing purifying selection, so the humans confronting future threats may well be less capable than we are. Once humans are reduced to subsistence agriculture again the obvious candidate to take them the rest of the way would be climate shocks, as have greatly reduced the human population in the past.
Furthermore, I'm not that sympathetic to Total Utilitarianism as opposed to something like Average Preference Utilitarianism, I value the preferences of those who do or will exist but not purely hypothetical people who will never exist. If given a choice between saving someone's life and increasing the number of people who will be born by 2, I strongly favor the former because his desire to remain alive is real and their desire to be born is an imaginary feature of hypothetical people. But without sufficient medical development every one of those real people will soon die. Now, wiping out humanity is still worse than letting everyone die of old age, both because it means they die sooner and because most of those people have a preference that humanity continue existing. But I weigh that as the preferences of 8 billion people that humanity should continue, 8 billion people who also don't want to die themselves, not the preferences of 10^46 hypothetical people per century after galactic colonization (per Bostrom's Astronomical Waste) who want to be born.
sodiummuffin
2yr ago
Back on the object level of the issue at hand, for all it's worth, reports of Russians abusing or executing PoWs so far - especially after the chaos of the first few days - are very thin on the ground, despite what I assume must have been a very large number of people looking very hard for evidence.
I think the main reason you haven't heard about it is that Russia's torture of both POWs and civilians is so routine and well-known that it isn't considered very newsworthy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_torture_chambers_in_Ukraine
sodiummuffin
2yr ago
You're claiming rationalism thinks that philosophical debates about "free will" are meaningful and have relevance to assigning personal responsibility? By "rationalism" meaning LessWrong people? I don't believe you. And sure enough, I searched on LessWrong and found that not only does Eliezer Yudkowsky not agree with those like Barbara Fried, in 2008 he called it so trivial that it served as a "practice question" for aspiring rationalists, then later elaborated on his solution at further length.
https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/free-will
It's not like this is even restricted to one of the more obscure "sequences", I've seen "Dissolving the Question" cited elsewhere. Look, I'm sure there's people on /r/badphilosophy who would mock the arrogance of thinking you have easily dissolved a famous philosophical dilemma, and that would be annoying in its own way. But at least it would display at least some surface-level engagement with what was said. Grouping LessWrong in with a philosopher arguing that some inane sophistry about "free will" means we should adopt her preferred criminal-justice policy positions reflects an incredible lack of understanding of what they believe and how they think. Barbara Fried is engaging in the exact sort of thing that makes LessWrong people have such a poor opinion on the health of philosophy as a field.
sodiummuffin
2yr ago
I am discussing only #1, which is true by the definition of "gender"
Well, not really. In standard usage it is a synonym for "sex".
https://www.etymonline.com/search?q=gender
The "male-or-female sex" sense of the word is attested in English from early 15c. As sex (n.) took on erotic qualities in 20c., gender came to be the usual English word for "sex of a human being," in which use it was at first regarded as colloquial or humorous. Later often in feminist writing with reference to social attributes as much as biological qualities; this sense first attested 1963. Gender-bender is from 1977, popularized from 1980, with reference to pop star David Bowie.
Most people are not engaging in feminist academic writing, and so they usually do not imitate their confusing use of "gender". Everything from conversations with normal people to news articles to government/corporate forms will use "gender" and "sex" interchangeably. Meanwhile the "identify as" definition is sufficiently new that it isn't even mentioned. Needless to say, people are not obliged to use that one either, especially since it is typically used to smuggle in the contested assumption that people have an internal feeling of "gender identity".
It that they identify as male.
Then how does that follow from defining gender as "a set of roles, behaviors, etc, generally expected by society of the members of each sex"? Under this definition is it meaningful to say things like "Andriy falsely identifies as a man, since by fleeing Ukraine as a woman rather than staying she is refusing her society's able-bodied male gender role of staying in case she is needed to fight and die against Russia"? Or does it mean that gender self-identification is true by definition, in which case it is not a reflection of society's gender roles but of the "gender identity" definition?
sodiummuffin
8mo ago
So my question is... why? If they're not hiding anything then why not just let us see for ourselves?
I don't know the specific briefing or photos you're referring to, but I'd assume it's because footage taken by military aircraft/etc. can reveal military capabilities or activity and is thus classified by default. You don't want to give away information about the capabilities of your cameras, for example. Meanwhile the footage which has been declassified is consistent with alternative explanations such as glare from a distant jet.
sodiummuffin
1yr ago
Bloomberg: ASML and TSMC Can Disable Chip Machines If China Invades Taiwan
About the size of a city bus, an EUV requires regular servicing and updates. As part of that, the company can remotely force a shut-off which would act as a kill switch, the people said, speaking on condition of anonymity. The Veldhoven-based company is the world’s only manufacturer of these machines, which sell for more than €200 million ($217 million) apiece.
It's unclear how irreversably they can remotely disable the machines, but they are by all accounts extremely delicate (as expected for something operating on a nanometer scale) so it's possible they would be difficult or impossible to repair. Spare parts for the machines, like the machines themselves, are only manufactured in the Netherlands.
EUVs require such frequent upkeep that without ASML’s spare parts they quickly stop working, the people said. On-site maintenance of the EUVs poses a challenge because they’re housed in clean rooms that require engineers to wear special suits to avoid contamination.
ASML offers certain customers joint service contracts where they do some of the routine maintenance themselves, allowing clients like TSMC to access their own machines’ system. ASML says it can’t access its customers’ proprietary data.
TSMC Chairman Mark Liu hinted in a September interview with CNN that any invader of Taiwan would find his company’s chipmaking machines out of order.
“Nobody can control TSMC by force,” Liu said. “If there is a military invasion you will render TSMC factory non-operable.”
They would also be trivial to destroy for those on-site of course - I saw a suggestion that spraying them with a powder fire-extinguisher would do it, as would a bit of smashing stuff with a heavy object. Even if Taiwan gives up without a fight, and TSMC doesn't decide to destroy them, and ASML in the Netherlands can't or won't do it remotely, and the U.S. decides not to do it openly, and none of the TSMC employees decide to do it on their own, U.S. intelligence might have at least one TSMC employee ready with a plan on how best to destroy them before fleeing. And even undamaged they require the expertise of TSMC employees who might flee the country, and a whole supply chain reliant on various western countries.
sodiummuffin
1yr ago
The established institutions of our society — government, academia, media, NGOs, etc. — are filled top-to-bottom with true believers who hold this as a terminal value, and it’s not going away until they all do (which is a problem, because there’s no voting them out).
This isn't how ideological groups work. They do not hold power by being all fanatics who would support the same policies regardless of their factual beliefs about the world. Nor do they have unlimited ability to hold onto power if public opinion turns strongly against them. There are some people like that, but they rely on support from the much larger numbers of people who buy into mainstream "anti-racist" arguments premised on factually incorrect beliefs. Most supporters of any ideology are aligned with it by some mixture of traits like factual beliefs, trusted information sources, formal principles, and informal biases. Many of them can be persuaded by chipping away at their factual beliefs and their trust in their current sources of information. If mainstreaming HBD failed it would be because the vast majority continued denying it, not because people accepted it and then just shrugged. Affirmative action doesn't have majority support already, it hangs on through disproportionate elite support, but that doesn't mean it can continue to do so even if you persuade a large chunk of public/elite supporters.
Compare to libertarians. In theory principle-based libertarians shouldn't even care how effective libertarianism is, right? The justifications are stuff like Freedom and the Non-aggression-principle, not effectiveness. But of course it's not a coincidence that they generally believe libertarianism is effective as well. There's presumably some libertarians who would, for instance, oppose conscription even if they sincerely believed it was the only way to prevent being conquered by a communist nation, or support open-borders even if they thought it would result in statists taking power or otherwise end in disaster. But most wouldn't, and in fact I've noticed a notable number of libertarians and ex-libertarians online who became alienated from hardline libertarianism based on stuff like believing that open-borders would end disastrously for liberty. And once you get into actually trying to set government policy alongside people who don't care about principled libertarianism, of course "Privatizing X will end terribly for everyone, but we should do it anyways because Freedom" isn't an argument anyone makes.
sodiummuffin
1yr ago
I think you're missing the point of her analogy. A law that restricts trans behavior is an "anti-lgbt law" regardless of the truth value of the underlying premise and how good the law is.
Is "white people aren't allowed to run red lights" an "anti-white law"? Would it become an anti-white law if it was overruling a lower level of government, like if some municipalities were allowing white people to run red lights and the state government passed a law saying they couldn't make racial exceptions? Yes white people are more restricted than if they got an exemption from traffic law, but nobody describes the lack of such an exemption as anti-white, not even white supremacists. But this means that describing a law that restricts X group as "objectively an anti-X law" is just a way to smuggle in assumptions about what laws are reasonable. I think Folamh3 assumed the implicit argument was that those laws were unreasonable, not that they were anti-transgender in the same way that "Chinese-Americans need to pay income tax" is anti-Chinese, because otherwise the argument doesn't make sense.
Notice that guesswho didn't describe segregation of sports by sex as anti-male, despite men and boys being the overwhelming majority of those restricted, likely due to believing that the segregation is reasonable except for when it applies to people who identify as transgender.
sodiummuffin
1yr ago
The U.S. produces 51.5 million acres of hay and 37.3 million acres of wheat per year. So setting aside all other forms of animal feed, more land goes to producing hay alone than to wheat.
However, I think that Zeke was referring to small mammals getting killed during harvesting, which my googling suggests is more due to increased predation from loss of cover than getting chewed up by machinery.
Which is why I'm pointing out that raising cattle at scale involves harvesting even more land. Estimating the effects on animals from cropland is difficult, but it's not a comparison that favors beef to begin with.
sodiummuffin
1yr ago
What does it mean for an organization to secretly know something? Is the idea that organizations like the ADL have internal emails and fundraising plans where people write "Here's what we're doing to make people more anti-semitic so that our fundraising goes up"? But if there was such communication it would be leaked. Is the idea that this is instead a plan kept entirely secret within the minds of key leaders? But not only would that make it difficult for the plan to perpetuate itself across generations of leadership (as those in on it are replaced by true-believers), why would those leaders have such a goal? You mention that it benefits ADL fundraising, but the ADL doesn't have a mind and doesn't want things. People act in the interest of organizations insofar as they want it to succeed or are incentivized by the organizational policies/structure, but if nobody is writing "Fundraising by creating anti-semites" fundraising plans and promoting/firing people based on adherence to them it's hard for that sort of coordination to function. Meanwhile there are people who want the ADL to succeed independently of organizational incentives, but mostly as a subgoal of promoting their ideological goals.
Now, it's more plausible that individuals might hit on a strategy like "troll the Nazis to show how much we're needed" because they think this helps their ideology. But they aren't going to do it to "increase ADL funding by increasing the general level of anti-semitism" because that's not a goal of the individual people who are inclined to join the ADL. At most some fraction might believe that increasing anti-semitism encourages Jews to move to Israel and thus ultimately makes Jews safer. And while it's possible for evolutionary forces on organizations to shape them in ways that their individual members aren't aware of, the ADL is old and one of a handful of prominent Jewish groups, that doesn't sound like very strong evolutionary pressure.
Similarly I am always skeptical about claims like "[Company] is cynically doing [controversial culture-war thing] as a secret profit-maximizing strategy, nobody involved really cares." Even when they openly claim it is a profit-maximizing strategy this is often bullshit reasoning backward from ideological demands, like companies citing dubious "Diversity improves decision-making" research as an excuse for affirmative-action policies. Culture war is strongly driven by true-believers, not cynics weaving intricate plans to maximize corporate profits or non-profit fundraising. When subversion happens it is almost always members of a formal organization subverting it on behalf of their memeplex, not the other way around.
sodiummuffin
1yr ago
One of the problems with excusing misrepresentations that you think are directionally correct is that many of the people doing so don't know how their own views have been shaped by lies or misrepresentations, building a new layer of bullshit on top of the old one. For instance:
It is undeniable that the Canadian government in association with the Catholic Church basically kidnapped tens of thousands of native children and stuffed them into places like Kamloops, where the conditions were pretty awful (though perhaps not so awful by the standards of the time).
This is how it is often described, but sending your children to residential school was optional.
https://fcpp.org/2018/08/22/myth-versus-evidence-your-choice/
Even the Truth and Reconciliation Commission has helped spread erroneous information. At the final National Gathering in Edmonton, one of the Commission’s information displays stated that, after 1920, criminal prosecution threatened First Nations parents who failed to enrol their children in a residential school. This falsehood, one frequently repeated by supposedly reputable journalists, is a reference to a clause in the revised Indian Act that said children had to be enrolled in some kind of school, a clause that was little different from the Ontario government’s 1891 legislation — nearly 30 years earlier — that made school attendance compulsory for that province’s children up to the age of 14, with legal penalties for failure to comply. Other provinces had similar laws.
And the “criminal prosecution”? The penalty specified by the Indian Act for the “crime” of not sending a child to school was “a fine of not more than two dollars and costs, or imprisonment for a period not exceeding ten days or both.” And as with provincial laws regarding school attendance, there would be no penalty if the child was “unable to attend school by reason of sickness or other unavoidable cause... or has been excused in writing by the Indian agent or teacher for temporary absence to assist in husbandry or urgent and necessary household duties.”
Now if you lived in a location without local schools residential schools were the only ones available, and the percentage of natives living in such locations was higher. But conversely getting out of sending your children to school was easier than it is today, and indeed native enrollment was low:
In 1921, when the revised Indian Act solidified the compulsory attendance of Indigenous children in some kind of school, about 11 percent of First Nations people were enrolled in either a residential school or a federal day school. By 1939, that figure had risen to approximately 15 percent of the First Nations population, but the total enrolment of 18,752 still represented only 70 percent of the 26,200 First Nations children aged 7 to 16. Not until the late 1950s were nearly all native children — about 23 percent of the First Nations population — enrolled in either a residential school (in 1959, about 9,000), a federal day school (about 18,000) or a provincial public school (about 8,000).
And absenteeism among those enrolled was high:
For most of the years in which the IRS operated, between 10 and 15 percent of residential students were absent on any given day
Day school attendance was far worse. In the 253 day schools operating in 1921, only 50 percent of native students were showing up, and until the 1950s, these poorly-funded, inadequately-staffed schools consistently had absentee rates in the 20 percent and 30 percent range. In the 1936-37 academic year, to choose just one example, attendance in Indian day schools sank as low as 63 percent. The only residential school in Atlantic Canada, at Shubenacadie, Nova Scotia, was established in part because two previously-established day schools had been forced to close due to poor attendance. Some of the reasons for this absenteeism — the movement of families to areas where seasonal work beckoned, the need to help out at home during the Depression, and the opportunity to take labouring jobs left vacant by servicemen — are understandable, and it is worth noting the the TRC Report acknowledges that very few parents were ever charged or convicted for keeping their children out of school. But children who aren’t in school aren’t getting an education.
The punishment for your children being truant was mild, seems easily avoided by giving an excuse like chronic illness, and most importantly hardly ever enforced to begin with. That is not the sort of coercion required to get parents to send their children to a concentration camp. Native children didn't go to residential schools because they were "kidnapped", they went because their parents believed it was better than the alternatives, including the alternative of not going to school at all. That is compatible with them being low-quality schools, it isn't compatible with the insane rhetoric about them that is prevalent today.
Many deaths resulted.
Many deaths resulted from native americans being biologically more vulnerable to diseases like tuberculosis. Is there even any evidence that the death rate of native children at residential schools was higher than the death rate of native children elsewhere? Skimming chapter 16 ("The deadly toll of infectious diseases: 1867–1939") from the report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, it looks like the closest they come to an overall comparison instead of talking about individual outbreaks is this:
https://publications.gc.ca/site/eng/9.807830/publication.html
In response to the issues Tucker had raised, Indian Commissioner David Laird reviewed the death rates in the industrial schools on the Prairies for the five-year period ending in the summer of 1903. He concluded that the average death rate was 4%. He compared this to the 4.4% child mortality rate for the ten Indian agencies from which students were recruited for 1902. On this basis, he concluded that “consumption and other diseases are just as prevalent and fatal on the Reserves as in the schools.”
sodiummuffin
2yr ago
It's pretty annoying that 16 years ago Yudkowsky wrote a blog post that was deliberately unintuitive due to scope insensitivity (seemingly as some sort of test to spark discussion) and as a result there are people who to this day talk about it without considering the implications of the contrary view. In real life we embrace ratios that are unimaginably worse than 1 person's torture vs. "3↑↑↑3 in Knuth's up-arrow notation" dust specks. People should read OSHA's accident report list sometime. All human activity that isn't purely optimized to maximize safety - every building designed with aesthetics in mind, every spice to make our food a bit nicer, every time we put up Christmas decorations (sometimes getting up on ladders!) - is built at the cost of human suffering and death. If the ratio was 1 torturous work accident to 3↑↑↑3 slight beneficiaries, there would never have been a work accident in human history. Indeed, there are only 10^86 atoms in the known universe, even if each of those atoms was somehow transformed into another Earth with billions of residents, and this civilization lasted until the heat-death of the universe, the number of that civilization's members would be an unimaginably tiny fraction of 3↑↑↑3, and thus embracing a ratio of 1 to 3↑↑↑3 would almost certainly not result in a single accident throughout that civilization's history.
A more intuitive hypothetical wouldn't just throw out the incomprehensible number and see who gets it, it would make the real-life comparisons or try to make the ratio between the beneficiaries and the cost more understandable. The easiest way to do this with such extreme ratios is with very small risks (though using risks is not actually necessary). For instance, lets say you're helping broadcast the World Cup, and you realize there will shortly be a slight flicker in the broadcast. You can prevent this flicker by pressing a button, but there's a problem: a stream of direct sunlight is on the button, so pressing it will expose the tip of your finger to sunlight for a second. This slightly increases your risk of skin cancer, which risks getting worse in a way that requires major surgery, which slightly risks one of those freak reactions to anesthesia where you're paralyzed but conscious and in torturous pain the whole surgery. (You believe you have gotten sufficient sunlight exposure for benefits like Vitamin D already, so more exposure at this point would be net-negative in terms of health.) Is it worth the risk to press the button?
If someone thinks there's something fundamentally different about small risks, the same scenario works without them, it just requires a weirder hypothetical. Let us say that human civilization has created and colonized earth-like planets on every star in the universe, and further has invented a universe-creation machine, created a number of universes like ours equal to the number of atoms in the original universe, and colonized at least one planet for every star in every universe. On every one of those planets they broadcast a sports match, and you work for the franchised broadcasting company that sets policy for every broadcast. Your job consists of deciding policy for a single question: if the above scenario occurs, should franchise operators press the button despite the tiny risk? You have done the research and know that, thanks to the sheer number of affected planets, it is a statistical near-certainty that a few operators will get skin cancer from the second of finger sunlight exposure and then have something go wrong with surgery such that they experience torture. Does the answer somehow change from the answer for a single operator on a single planet, since it is no longer just a "risk"? Is the morality different if instead of a single franchise it's split up into 10 companies, and it works out so that each company has a less than 50% chance of the torture occurring? What if instead of 10 companies it's a different company on each planet making the decision, so for each one it's no different from the single-planet question? Even though the number of people in this multiverse hypothetical is still a tiny fraction of 3↑↑↑3, I think a lot more people would say that it's worth it to spare them that flicker, because the scale of the ratio has been made more clear.
The point is that "gender" meaning "gender identity" and "gender" meaning "gender roles" are different and incompatible definitions, and applying them to individual cases gives very different results. Under a gender-role definition of gender (which approximately nobody actually uses except in a motte-and-bailey fashion) Andriy is not a man due to defying the strict gender-role currently mandated by Ukrainian society with unmanly flight. Under a gender-identity definition of gender Andriy would be a man based purely on self-identification, even if the only difference from a stereotypical woman is a Twitter bio saying "he/him". Whatever definition is used it cannot coherently be both, and so "non-binary gender identity" is not meaningfully based on defining gender as "a set of roles, behaviors, etc, generally expected by society of the members of each sex".
Nevertheless, when pro-trans people use the terms, they mean them in the senses I have described.
The "difference between gender and sex" argument has actually fallen out of favor in trans-activist circles in recent years. It's now fairly common to see explicit arguments that trans people are whatever sex they identify as. But even before it was never really used consistently. For instance various governments have implemented plans to be more inclusive of non-binary people by letting people choose "SEX: X" on their driver's licenses, and apparently nobody involved in this process takes the opportunity to make it say "GENDER:" or even notices the distinction.
sodiummuffin
8mo ago
Okay, the images on page 9 of the briefing are from the declassified Tic Tac video, the ones on page 12 are from the declassified Gimbal video, and the one on page 13 is from the declassified Pyramid video released in 2021. So they censored every image that hasn't been specifically declassified and released previously. Note that 4 videos including Gimbal were leaked before being declassified, so it doesn't seem like they're cherrypicking the least convincing videos to release.
If you follow those links there's plausible non-alien explanations for each of those videos. For example, in the Pyramid one (the only one I hadn't seen before), the shapes are because of the bokeh effect on an out-of-focus light combined with the triangular shape of the aperture (which the Navy already knew when they talked about it in the Congressional hearing). However only one of the triangles was an actual plane/drone, the rest were clearly stars belonging to the constellation Sagitta. The flashing of the non-star also matches the timing of a plane's collision lights, and the USS Russell was directly under a flight path at the time. Which seems like a good reminder for anyone who puts a lot of weight on evidence just because the government is taking it seriously. Their job is to fight wars, not figure out all the weird-looking things that might seem alien-like, and classified information is going to be viewed by a lot less people than information released to the public. Naval Intelligence isn't nessesarily going to be very good at things like "checking if the UFO drone swarm happens to be the exact shape of a constellation plus one actual plane".
sodiummuffin
1yr ago
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ASML is Dutch, not Chinese. Though I guess if TSMC higher-ups were sufficiently dedicated to protecting the machinery in case of invasion (contrary to their public statements) they might decide to cut them off from the internet before ASML decides to trigger the remote killswitch.
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If a minority of people are capable of doing something, "generally" isn't good enough to ensure it doesn't happen. We're talking equipment so delicate that 1 TSMC employee with physical access could do hundreds of millions of dollars of damages in a matter of seconds, and many billions in a matter of minutes. If one or more employees flip out and the reason the others don't is because of "pragmatism", are they willing to get hit by a fire-extinguisher for the sake of limiting the damage? There's presumably also plenty of stuff they could do more covertly by messing with configurations.
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Even without anyone deciding to do it organically, given the known geopolitical importance the U.S. could easily be paying a couple TSMC employees in case of such an eventuality. Or some random guys who live in the area and have guns stashed away. I remember when the invasion of Ukraine started Russia had people planting devices that shot green lasers at the sky to help with targeting. It doesn't seem like a stretch that even if the U.S. was completely unwilling to confront China openly, it could easily destroy the fabs covertly and blame Taiwanese patriots deciding to do it on their own. The Nord Stream pipelines weren't even being used and they still got sabotaged.
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Even completely intact equipment is reliant on a complicated supply chain scattered across western countries that would be near-impossible to replicate in case of sanctions. The machines themselves and their spare parts from the Netherlands, ultra-pure quartz that is nearly all from Spruce Pine, North Carolina, etc.
sodiummuffin
1yr ago
I do not think you are being nearly skeptical enough towards the account, not just regarding the possibility of deliberate lies but regarding how distorted memories can get regarding emotionally-charged events from 20 years prior. Have you ever had the experience of someone telling you a story regarding a grudge repeatedly over the course of years, and noticing it increasingly differ from your own recollection of the original story until you're pretty sure it's complete fiction? The way that, for instance, "X said Y, I bet that means he was thinking Z" becomes "X said Z"? (And then sometimes, upon further rumination, "X said Z, I bet that means he was thinking A" becomes "X said A".) If you haven't, trust me when I say it happens. Records like emails can tell you the actual contents of the email if you assume they weren't fabricated, but a lot rests not on them but on the context of the narrative surrounding them.
misrepresenting himself as having a "Don't ask, don't tell" arrangement with his wife
As an example, this is a description of the arrangement between two other people 20 years ago. It could easily mean that, for instance, she had agreed to the arrangement but exhibited some amount of jealousy, or something Dawn interpreted as jealousy.
lying to affair partners about having multiple simultaneous affairs
Meanwhile this could easily mean "had sex with me without mentioning that he had already had sex with someone else".
Or take this from the excerpt you tweeted:
From 2002 through 2020, all of Singer's female co-authors were women with whom Singer had been sexually involved, or to who he had made clear his sexual interest.
How the hell does she claim to know this about all his female co-authors for almost 20 years after their supposed relationship? For reference here are his publications. This made me curious enough to download the original complaint, but there's no elaboration or evidence provided that I can see. The language of "made clear" is of course great material for distorted interpretations and memories, all sorts of meanings become "clear" when you're nursing a grievance for 20 years.
sodiummuffin
1yr ago
There are immigration policies other than "white ethnostate" and "open borders". Mass immigration sufficient for your concern to happen would presumably come from countries that suck to live in, and countries that suck to live in rarely have many high-quality immigrants. Even under the current U.S. immigration system, demographic replacement has little to do with the small numbers of highly-selected immigrants, it's the reproduction rates of the population groups already in the U.S. and the ways for low-quality immigrants to bypass that selective system.
sodiummuffin
1yr ago
I do not know of any polls about how many Ukrainians believe people born with a "non-binary gender identity" exist, or that people should avoid "misgendering" them, but I doubt it is a significant number. I do not even know if anyone has invented "non-binary pronouns" in Ukrainian, I assume a few Ukrainians on Tumblr have done so but I do not know of them successfully convincing major Ukrainian institutions that their adoption is a civil rights issue. Searching finds an article about a soldier who identifies as "non-binary" and says that "some even used my she pronoun", with no mention of "non-binary pronouns" as a concept. Ukrainians are of course not using singular they as a pronoun to indicate "non-binary" people, since less than 30% speak even "some English".
By comparison, in a 2023 poll 44% of Ukrainians supported common-law same-sex marriage and 30% believed same-sex couples should be allowed to adopt children. I do not think it is useful to base your understanding of major world events on bizarre gotchas against conservatives from /r/politicalhumor.
sodiummuffin
1yr ago
Anyway, I have literally never seen this mythical Western pro-Palestinian pro-Hamas "liberal".
He might be thinking of polls like this Harvard-Harris poll:
In general in this conflict do you side more with Israel or Hamas?
48% of those 18-24 said Hamas. Of course siding with Hamas more than Israel doesn't necessarily mean approving of Hamas or of the attack. However there is a question about the attack:
Do you think the Hamas killing of 1200 Israeli civilians on Israel can be justified by the grievances of Palestinians or is it not justified?
51% of 18-24 year olds (and 48% 25-34, and 24% overall) said it can be justified by the grievances of the Palestinians. That said, I am suspicious of these poll results and wonder if they might be because of the specific wording of "can be justified", if some interpreted it as meaning "someone could theoretically make an argument trying to justify it" rather than "I personally think it was just".
It's a bit of a stretch, especially because it corresponds to the general lower level of support for Israel among the young. But some of the other results also call it into question. The prior question had a lower percentage siding with Hamas over Israel. 54% of the same age group (45% overall) answered "Should law firms hire or refuse to hire law students who supported Hamas and the attacks on Israeli civilians?" with refuse to hire, indicating at least 5% who would support blacklisting themselves. (It's pretty striking how support for free-speech in younger generations is so low that support for blacklisting rises even as support for Israel falls.) Or I guess some people might interpret "support" as people donating money to Hamas or something. 62% of those 18-24 say the "attacks on Jews" were genocidal.
I don't know if there's a poll asking about support for the attack with better wording. Best I could find with a quick search was this one which didn't make Hamas/Israel support a binary choice:
22% of college students say they sympathize with Hamas and 26% with the Israeli government
And this one which asks about the attack but again in a potentially ambiguous way, and just college students again:
The poll finds 86% of college students saying they’re aware of the Oct. 7 attack on Israel. And of that share, 67% describe the attack as an act of terrorism by Hamas, versus 12% who see it as a justified act of resistance by Hamas. Another 21% describe it as something else other than an act of terrorism or resistance.
sodiummuffin
1yr ago
Moving to Mars, space
This has virtually nothing to do with transhumanism except insofar as both involve technological advancement and thus feature in science fiction and futurism.
Changing sex
This has little to do with transhumanism except insofar as both involve altering your body with future technology. Transhumanism is centrally about making the human condition better, not sidegrades like becoming the other sex.
Freezing our body, brain to come back later
This is a small part of transhumanism in that it is a specific speculative method for using current technology to survive long enough to take advantage of possible future transhuman technology.
Also, Im puzzled why people want more than the allotted 80 or so. Curiosity is one thing, but living in a different era, what sort of culture shock would that be like, how our if place would you be, and living forever would be equivalent to hell as far as I'm concerned, similar with Rice's vampires.
This is the only part of your post about a central aspect of transhumanism.
When people are dying of some disease like cancer, or when their family and friends die, they don't want it to happen. The longevity aspect of transhumanism is just the same thing but thinking more long-term. Maybe you think you'll gladly commit suicide when you hit 80, but actual 80-year-olds don't seem inclined to do that. And certainly people don't seem to prefer death to "culture shock". Sometimes people make peace with death, but this seems to have more to do with having to accept something you can't change or it being your only remaining escape from suffering than actually being happy with it. They also don't like it when their strength or eyesight fails them, or when routine parts of life become painful or difficult. Transhumanism says that we should use technology to fix those problems if we can, the same way we have used technology to fix other perennial problems of the human condition like starving to death or nearsightedness or being eaten by wolves.
There are other aspects of transhumanism besides life extension, though as the most pressing concern it is the most prominent. Intelligence enhancement would be the second-most prominent, and is a natural extension of how we value the contributions of genius scientists/etc. and do things like implement universal education to help children be successful and contributing members of society. And then minor stuff like giving yourself extra senses or superstrength or whatever is cool but not actually important, so it often features in fiction but rarely comes up in actual transhumanist writing.
sodiummuffin
1yr ago
sitting members of Congress - who are saying "yeah I've seen some of the evidence, and it's crazy, and there's something here we need to look into", then it makes explanations involving hallucinations and weather balloons less plausible.
It makes hallucinations much less plausible, but I don't think it really does much about misidentified balloons, glare, something on the camera lens, camera image-sharpening algorithms combining with those others, etc. See the videos in this Metabunk thread for examples. I don't think congressmen have any special skills to distinguish whether a fast-moving blob on an aircraft camera is a spacecraft or a visual artifact. And while people like pilots and intelligence agents might be better, it isn't really their area of expertise either. They're focused on dealing with real planes, not every weird visual artifact that can happen. On the scale of a country you can cherrypick enough things that coincidentally seem alien-like to be convincing to many people, including many government officials. But if it's ultimately all formed out of random noise you'll never get that definitive piece of evidence, just lots of "that blob was crazy and we couldn't figure out another explanation", which is the pattern we've seen.
The title of that article is laughably false. The underlying point it is based on, that under normal operation a nuclear plant releases less radioactive material into the environment than a coal plant, is technically true but grossly misleading. Under normal operation nuclear plants release essentially no radioactive material, the radioactivity concern is concentrated purely into the possibility of something going wrong. Sanity-check I did after encountering this argument a decade ago:
This doesn't mean that nuclear power is overall a bad idea, but it's definitely not because coal is a worse radioactivity concern. From what I've heard this particular misleading talking point has been going around even before it started circulating on the internet, I remember someone telling me that it was going around Stanford decades ago. People should be cautious with counterintuitive factoids like this, because often they spread because they are too good to check.
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