somedude
8mo ago
How low does activity here need to drop before things aren't working as intended anymore? Will you be happy with one post per week as long as it's four times longer than it needed to be?
somedude
1mo ago
Tagging @marten too so I don't have to post twice.
Look, I'll be honest: If you're not playing some kind of game that amounts to wanting people to stop snorting when someone brings up god in an intellectual context? If this isn't the usual goofy theist sophistry and you're actually just parsing the differences between degrees of philosophical certainty that no one out in the world ever thinks about when making decisions?
Then I'll leave you to your hobby and continue to be puzzled as to the appeal. Back in the world where people make decisions, the fact that science does in fact produce functional results obliterates every other consideration anyway.
somedude
30d ago
Note to @SecureSignals to make sure he posts a bunch of random bullshit he doesn't give a crap about in between real posts. Just go to the Friday Fun Thread and drop some funny cat videos or something and ignore any responses once you've hit your quota. Just make a complete mockery of this stupid ass non-rule until they reach back into their ass and decide that actually total wordcount per subject was the real metric all along.
somedude
1mo ago
Link? All I can find are an instance where they were friending random people and it turned out to be a bug they apologized for, and various complaints about the algorithm filling feeds up with suggestions people don't care about. Nothing on the order of "it keeps unfollowing Taylor Swift because something something celebrity worship."
More to the point, whatever they're doing, it's not because "Zuckerberg agrees" with you. Firstly because there's no way Zuck gives a shit about redistribution of social capital as a goal, and secondly because there's no reason to imagine that trying to force people to read one another's unwanted spam would generate social capital in the first place.
You seem to have this naive conception that people sit down and say "Time to use social media to find common ground with the rest of humanity!" It's so out of touch that someone in this thread actually had to take more than one post to explain to you why he wants to read about his local football team and not random teams he doesn't give a fuck about. Like... what? I don't think you understand why people use these things.
somedude
1mo ago
I don't think you fully appreciate what an unappealing product you're describing. Social media under US control would quickly become a derelict husk. You would need to either exert Chinese levels of authoritarianism over the internet in order to try and prop up your crummy domestic social media, or else watch American public discourse move under the control of other powers.
somedude
2mo ago
Listen, people who want me to believe X need to be able to put forth something outside of their own skull that points toward X being true. Anyone who wishes otherwise is either a charlatan, or needs to understand that they are indistinguishable from one.
somedude
13d ago
Sure, once some intelligence utility maximalist comes in and decides that in this scenario the guy has an infinite amount of steak to hand out. Also it goes without saying that our hypothetical intelligent wolves won't be clever enough for any failsafe or contingency on their part to make any difference. Nope, our smart dude will just say something so smart it makes them all want him to hold a gun to their heads.
somedude
1mo ago
No matter what example you give me, Natural Selection will always be the correct explanation, because it is no explanation at all.
Listen, this shit you're doing right here isn't going to cut it. You picked the example where you could prevaricate about what a bunch of scientists in the twenties did or didn't predict, and conveniently cut out the other example which elucidates my point in a way that leaves no room to dissemble.
I'll make it really direct this time so that there's no room for misunderstanding: What you're trying to tell me is that there's no way to predict how likely a living thing is to survive based on its traits and the environment it occupies. That it's a total mystery.
You've painted yourself into a ridiculous corner where you have to pretend you don't know whether brown rats are more likely to survive than grey rats on an island where the snakes can't see brown. Because if you do know, then you can predict that the grey gene is eventually going away, natural selection gains predictive power, and this whole silly facade collapses.
Also I still don't know why I should care if true things are tautologies.
somedude
1mo ago
TikTok has competition that consists of viable social media platforms, not government-mandated crippleware, so I feel like comparisons are limited. If you're going to force Americans to use that crippleware at gunpoint in pursuit of nebulous social engineering goals, you may as well just ban everything and make them go outside.
somedude
1mo ago
You're forgetting the part where there needs to be a reason for anyone to care if you expect them to participate. Exactly who do you think the audience is for a social media site that randomly deletes people from your friends list, spams it with total randos you don't give a shit about, and goes out of its way to avoid showing you videos anyone finds too interesting?
YouTube has been doing this thing where they throw random small creators into their suggestions and I hate it. It's gotten to the point where I just immediately block any channel in my feed if the video presented has under a thousand views, because so far they've been poorly produced dogshit 100% of the time.
somedude
1mo ago
Yes, that's what I'm saying.
Okay well in that case it's also hypocritical to criticize Cthulhu and Star Wars lore for not being literally true. Hooray, solipsism. This entire line of argument advances absolutely nothing.
It essentially amounts to a theist's special request for their beliefs to be treated as intellectually serious even though they can't point to any justification for them that exists outside of their own skull, because hey after all, nothing is really certain, right?
Bluntly, request denied until one of these arguments successfully and meaningfully distinguishes Christianity, theism, whatever, from an infinite number of bullshit things I could make up on the spot.
somedude
2mo ago
I'll consider worrying about the other mechanisms as soon as I see them come up in any context other than atheists dragging religion and someone wanting to chastise them without having to actually defend it. In a quarter-century of internet, so far that's literally never happened. Everyone seems perfectly content with logic and reason under every other set of circumstances.
somedude
2mo ago
Yes, I do.
Furthermore, if someone wishes to disagree, they can make an actual claim to the contrary and then defend it with something outside of their own head. Empty metaphysical non-arguments are deeply unimpressive.
somedude
2mo ago
Oprah has way too many skeletons in the closet or she'd have run for something eons ago.
somedude
3mo ago
I'm just going to go straight to another 30-day timeout, and probably a permaban the next time you do this.
You should probably make note in the rules that only Hlynka gets infinite temp bans. People seem to be getting confused.
somedude
9mo ago
Who cares? All you're trying to do is fill the infosphere surrounding the subject with bullshit. If you could somehow create a program where taking pictures of random airborne objects and posting them online earned people free tacos, that would pretty much do the trick.
somedude
1mo ago
I did respond to your other example, I literally said that there are things we can predict (remember the shark example?) - just that we don't need to read Darwin to predict them.
Utterly and completely irrelevant. We don't need to read Newton to know that things fall down when dropped, either. Which principles of a theory were commonly known before that theory was codified is totally meaningless. What a bizarre criteria to try to impose.
But that doesn't change the fact that there are things that we can't predict. Would the brown rats still be as likely to survive in one thousand years? How about in one million years?
So what, things are tautological or otherwise invalid if they don't offer infinite predictive power over arbitrary timescales? Or do you have some kind of threshold of validity? What is it, and how did you arrive at it? Where are you getting this stuff?
On the other hand Natural Selection does not gain any predictive power from stating the obvious, that individuals who get devoured won't pass on their genes.
So now theories are invalid if you think they're too obvious? Okay well, you'll just have to deal with the fact that your claim to being the King of Science is likely to go unrecognized.
Seriously, these are not good arguments. These are all complete asspulls with no actual principle behind them.
somedude
1mo ago
My argument isn't about parsing degrees of certainty
No? Because it sort of sounds like it to my Philistine ears.
Is this like a hypocrisy claim? That since science isn't literally true it would be hypocritical to criticize theism for not being literally true?
Yes, that's what I'm saying.
Except one of these things can produce consistent on-demand results that wouldn't be possible if its claims were false, while the other cannot. By any standard of truth-seeking that doesn't succumb to solipsism and ludicrously rule out observation of the world as a means of understanding it, the former is obviously much more true than the latter.
Ah but while science may contain observable truth, it doesn't meet Nelson Rushton's standard for being "the source code of the universe" and that's important... why exactly? Telling me you have a standard of truth under which apparently absolutely nothing is "literally true" isn't actually interesting.
The reason I keep thinking this is about getting atheists to stop snorting is because I can't think of any other purposes for this whole argument, charitable or otherwise. Like okay, nothing in the universe meets the Rushton Source Code Standard of Literal Truth. Neat, why should anyone care? What decision should anyone make differently now that they've heard this?
somedude
2mo ago
The only crowd I've ever known to take an interest in this sort of thing, outside of academic philosophers, are internet theists who've given up on ever winning an argument anyone else cares about. Imagine busting this out because you saw someone chortling at the idea that Star Wars lore is real, and you'll understand how it looks from the outside. The part where everyone gains so much epistemic humility that they quit snorting whenever someone brings up the will of the Force in a serious conversation just isn't coming.
somedude
9mo ago
I'll be honest, it mostly comes off as word salad. Is there any particular reason to take seriously the idea that being "unchanging" somehow equates to a free pass when it comes to causality, other than the fact that it's convenient for theists?
It just sounds the same as telling me that god has the property of being "fnuh" and that fnuh things don't need to come from anywhere.
Like science has pushed the god of the gaps so far off into irrelevance that the only theistic rhetorical tactic left is to hope they can convince someone that they don't need any evidence outside of their own skulls at all.
somedude
10mo ago
I've been lurking this community since the /r/slatestarcodex days and I've finally registered for the first time just to say that this is absolutely the worst kind of post.
You've been presented with a massive ironclad statistically significant block of data on the relationship between those silly irrelevant IQ tests and real-world competence, and it utterly refutes your position on the subject.
And what's your response to this? A pithy joke, about how McNamara was a high IQ moron, and for what? Disregarding the value of standardized IQ testing? Kind of giving up the game, aren't you?
You would have been right behind McNamara talking about how his morons had hustle and moxy and what do those eggheads know with their tests anyway?
There's absolutely no reason anyone should take you seriously as a poster after posts like this. In any case I'm relurking, enjoy your ongoing career as Libertarian Darwin for as long as the moderators continue letting you rack up infinite temp bans.
Horseshit. Banned for posting badthink too cogently, using a rule that doesn't seem to actually exist and which I've never even heard of outside the context of this particular poster. Completely transparent.
You guys can't even invent a reason that this post breaks any actual listed rule, so you've concocted a rationale out of thin air where you can ban someone for not making other posts that you feel they should have.
Like what's the proportion of X to non-X posts someone is allowed to make? Does it matter how often they post? Does it matter how long the posts in each category are? You don't know because you're pulling this out of your ass.
Massive loss of respect. You'd look less ridiculous just banning him for being a wrongthinker.
Oh man I just went back and had a second look at the exchange where you guys supposedly banned him for "single issue posting" a few weeks ago. Turns out @self_made_human didn't realize which parts of the mod system were publicly viewable and the listed reason for the ban was actually:
But gosh golly gee whiz, I thought he was impartially banned not for the content of his existing posts but for failing to post upon a wide enough variety of subjects? You know, that incredibly important rule about the number of subjects one posts about? The one that totally isn't an excuse to punt people who post about the wrong things.
While I'm at it, here's a reminder of how Zorba phrased it:
Because I figure we're about halfway to the point where "just post a youtube video about goat noises or something" suddenly becomes "ackshually we have to feel like they're good posts with sufficient effort" or whatever.
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