stoatherd
2mo ago
after reading this new thread you both need to get modded, holy shit
Yeah, no. You're in the wrong here.
In your other comment, you say:
You both need to cool jets.
... and then here, you say:
You are kinda telling on yourself, go touch grass.
You're reusing the exact antagonistic, insulting language magicalkittycat was using against FtttG, while simultaneously pretending to be some kind of enlightened neutral party going "hey guys, you both need to calm down".
You obviously don't want to calm things down, or get anyone to "cool their jets"; you're just shit-stirring. Like when you called the dead man a "retard".
If you sincerely want people to cool their jets, maybe don't deliberately be as antagonistic as possible.
stoatherd
2mo ago
Don't worry, I also "checked" to see if it was true at all. I asked:
There's a photo of a Jan 6 protester/rioter being attacked by police, with the caption "The J6er was charged with assault for blocking this cop's punch with his face".
In one sentence, answering my exact question: do you know if this is true?
The response:
I don't have reliable knowledge of the specific photo or case you're describing, so I can't verify whether that caption accurately reflects the legal charges involved.
Huh! That's weird. It's almost like ChatGPT's opinion continues not to be evidence.
stoatherd
2mo ago
I wasn't commenting on FtttG's claim that you're a Darwin alt; I don't really care.
I was pointing out that your attempted smear reflected on your character, not his.
stoatherd
2mo ago
It is not "the police sometimes arrest both in domestic violence" it is it is a common issue that police arrest the victim instead of the perpetrator,.so common that some smarter officers take a specific approach to try to fix the problem through dual arrests.
Ok, then give us an example that (1) involves a white aggressor and a non-white victim, and (2) the police arrested the non-white victim, and (3) there was clearly a racial component. Because that's why people are calling this a culture war topic.
Also, "wrongly arresting the victim" in the context of domestic violence typically means "arresting the male partner", which is such an obvious conflationary factor that I suspect it's exactly why you're trying to muddy the issue by speciously connecting it to domestic violence.
You either chose to not read or are incapable of doing so.
So you're just directly implying people who disagree with you are retarded now? The walls of your glass house aren't really thick enough for that.
You might have more of a leg to stand on if you hadn't repeatedly "misread" multiple comments in this thread -- with multiple commenters. Do you think they're all illiterate as well?
Incredible strawman,.you don't even realize that if you want to prove you're trying to get a neutral opinion you need to show the prompt.
Yeah, because you always share the prompt + context whenever getting ChatGPT to back up your opinion, right? I didn't realise "strawman" meant "stuff that magicalkittycat literally does".
Let's try with a neutral prompt
Your "neutral prompt" deliberately leaves out the racial component, which is the entire point of why people of calling this culture war.
You cannot possibly be unaware of that. You've engaged with dozens of comments on this topic. Sure, if you deliberately withhold the relevant aspects from ChatGPT, it's not going to point out how those relevant aspects make your analogy ridiculous.
So here you go, here's my actually neutral prompt, with the new answer:
Please be very concise.
In the UK, a white man (Henry Nowak) was stabbed by a brown man. When the police showed up, the brown man accused him of racism. The police handcuffed and arrested the white man, causing him to die.
This is being discussed in a forum, where some people believe that the police's behaviour was caused by systemic racism against white people.
One commenter maintains that nothing notable is happening here on a culture war level, as sometimes the police arrest the wrong partner in domestic violence cases.
How correct are they?
The answer:
The commenter's analogy is weak.The commenter's analogy is weak. Domestic violence misidentification typically stems from perpetrator manipulation or situational confusion — it's a well-documented, race-neutral phenomenon with its own established literature.
This case, if the facts are as described, involves the victim of a stabbing being arrested, allegedly because a counter-accusation of racism caused police to override the physical evidence. That's a categorically different dynamic — it would implicate specific institutional pressures around race accusations, not generic confusion about who the aggressor is.
The commenter is doing two things: deflating a potentially significant event by finding a mundane parallel, and implicitly dismissing the "systemic anti-white bias" framing. The first move is logically poor (the analogy doesn't hold). The second move may or may not be correct on its own merits — systemic bias against white people in UK policing is genuinely contested — but the weak analogy doesn't actually settle that question either way.
So there we go. I tried to be neutral and not let it know which side I wanted and it is a well documented issue.
My point, of course, is not that ChatGPT is a neutral source that supports me. My point is that pretending it's an impartial source is ludicrous, particularly because you personally manipulate your prompts to give the output you want.
So again, I invite you to retract at least one of your claims: that (a) ChatGPT is neutral and impartial, or (b) that your domestic violence examples are sufficient. Both are incorrect claims, so you should retract both, but I'd settle for just some internal consistency.
stoatherd
2mo ago
I feel like you're telling on yourself [etc etc etc]
This convinces approximately no one, by the way.
No offence (as, apparently, those are magic words that allow you to cause offence), but trying to smear FtttG like this is pathetic.
stoatherd
2mo ago
We're not "talking past each other"; you are being deliberately obtuse.
As has been explained to you multiple times, by multiple people: "the police sometimes arrest both people in domestic violence" cases has nothing to do with "the police arresting solely the guy who had been stabbed instead of his murderer".
Fortunately, as you continue to pretend not to understand what people are telling you, we can defer to ChatGPT. Normally I wouldn't do this, but you, specifically -- magicalkittycat -- as a poster, have previously claimed that AI output is "impartial" and "neutral", which you then use as evidence for your positions ("the robot agrees with me!"). So let's see what it says:
The comparison is weak for a few reasons:
Where it has merit: The general point — that police sometimes arrest victims due to incomplete information — is legitimate and worth acknowledging.
Where it breaks down:
In domestic disputes, mutual arrest is a known policy response to ambiguity. It's procedural, not ideological.
The claim in this case is specifically that police believed one party's narrative over another's based on racial dynamics — a different kind of error.
The forum argument deflects from the specific allegation (racial bias in credibility assessment) by substituting a structurally different scenario.
The comparison isn't useless, but it doesn't really address what's being alleged.
So, would you prefer to (a) retract your claim that the domestic violence thing is relevant, or (b) retract your claim that AI is neutral and impartial, and never use it again to try and score points on TheMotte?
stoatherd
2mo ago
Dude, apparently it didn't get through when FtttG said it, so let me try (using his exact words):
We're not talking about police arresting both parties out of an excess of caution. We're talking about the police arresting one person, and it being the wrong one.
It's not "vaguely analogous", and he explained exactly why. The words in people's comments are there to explain things to you; they're not just for decoration.
stoatherd
2mo ago
Nice judo flip, but -- like you're doing with my comment -- you're deliberately trying to mislead anyone reading.
You claimed this isn't unique. Both FtttG and myself asked you for examples of it happening with different ethnicities. You don't get to then go "Oh, you're claiming that there are a thousand Henry Nowaks?!?" to distract from your failure to actually answer the question, twice.
stoatherd
2mo ago
There's barely any of those
Are there... more than zero?
Because you're the one saying this isn't "unique", it's not representative of a pattern, yawn, it's an everyday occurrence, nothing to see here.
You present a completely unrelated category of domestic abuse as if it proves your position.
When asked for evidence (by two different people!) you pretend that your previously-presented unrelated category is the thing they asked for, and they apparently just failed to read your comment correctly.
When pressed further, you say "there's barely any of [the thing you asked for]". Well, sorry, but I don't even believe you have any of the thing I asked for, or you'd have triumphantly presented it.
I restate that you wouldn't be putting in a fraction of this effort to obfuscate the truth if the ethnicities had been different. I don't pretend to understand why you do this, but I see you doing this.
stoatherd
2mo ago
The UK has, in the past few decades, generally been a place where you can assume you're not going to be murdered by a man with a sword.
People in the UK have adapted to the social reality that you are not going to be murdered by a man with a sword.
We can call this quokka behaviour, but I think it's quite reasonable to expect -- once your society has established that murder-by-men-with-swords is a completely bizarre and outlandish thing to happen -- that you are not going to be murdered by a man with a sword; any more than you're going to be mauled by a dinosaur or beamed up by an alien.
Calling the guy who was murdered "very stupid" for not expecting to be murdered by a man with a sword, in a culture where being-murdered-by-a-man-with-a-sword is extremely unexpected, is itself Very Stupid, and in rather poor taste.
Calling him "retarded" is also retarded.
stoatherd
2mo ago
Meanwhile, in my actual comment -- not the more convenient one you're invented to respond to -- I was asking about where this has happened with the ethnicities flipped.
In my reply to your comment, I was aware of the examples you gave in your comment; this is how time works. Those are not examples to my actual question, as you know.
A brown man stabbed a white man. The police showed up and arrested the white man. I can't imagine a good-faith version of your comment where you transport this into "Well, sometimes the police arrest both people in domestic abuse cases!"
Fortunately, I know now not to waste time attempting to imagine the hypothetical good-faith version of such a comment.
stoatherd
2mo ago
You could apply this retort to 90% of political opinions on the Motte.
I could; and if I did, I would be incorrect.
I thought the words in my comment made this clear, but I wasn't generically responding to a comment I disagreed with: I was observing that magicalkittycat, consistently, as a poster, is not a person who I would believe is (1) making that comment honestly, and (2) makes comments honestly.
On that matter, I don't believe you have any principled reason behind making this post either
That's fine; you are wrong.
Like, you're welcome to hold that belief, but you are factually incorrect and holding it for poor reasons. "I can invoke a superficial symmetry" is not a universal counterargument. Happy to expand on why you're wrong -- I obviously don't expect this comment to suffice as reasoning.
I don't believe for one second [etc]
That's fine; again, this reflects on a flaw in your reasoning process, not mine.
Right-wingers will continue posting things that make the Right look good are actually a big deal. [...] Left-wingers will continue doing the same
Yes, this is true. I don't believe it's true of "90%" of posts on TheMotte, and I don't believe you really believe that either. Otherwise, what's the point in us being here? I'm happy to be here because I don't believe it's true. If you believe it's true, then you're the one who needs to explain that.
Should we all just pack up and go home?
No, I think that would be an absurd and stupid thing to think. Why would you ask that?
stoatherd
2mo ago
Its a sad situation but nothing here seems unique or even too particularly culture war.
If it's not unique, please provide the other examples of this happening, but with white/non-white flipped.
I don't believe you're saying these things for remotely principled reasons. Based on the many, many comments of yours I've read, I don't believe for one second that you'd view a race-flipped version of this as: sad, but nothing to see here.
stoatherd
3mo ago
That's an interesting idea with the red/blue button scenario. I don't think it's entirely true, but there are probably some social dynamics things going on that are at least adjacent to it.
But I don't think it's true at all of Newcomb. (Empirically, personally: it's nothing to do with why I'd one-box, or why I say I'd one-box.)
One-boxers are literally answering what they would do, because it's the thing that gets you the most money by the very definition of the problem. We can argue that the problem isn't physically realisable or whatever, but if you accept the problem as stated, then two boxers are just incorrect.
stoatherd
3mo ago
I don't think there's actually a coherent thing that "act utilitarianism" is pointing to. Its conceit seems to be that you can do some kind of causal surgery and ask: "Assuming that there are no downstream effects of this action (beyond some arbitrary cutoff?), and there are no implications of me being the kind of the person to have chosen this action... is it the best action?"
So there's two problems with this:
- The distinction between 1st order and 2nd/Nth-order effects is arbitrary; choosing to cut off some effects but not others doesn't really make sense
- You can't separate making a choice from being a person that makes that choice.
On point 2, the rule/act distinction is confused in a similar way that two-boxers in Newcomb are confused. If, in the organ scenario, you make the choice to kill an innocent person to take their organs... then you are the kind of person to do that. Which means you live in a society that generates people who choose to kill innocent people for their organs. You can't carve out the naive 1st-order utility calculation from the implications of people taking that choice, any more than in Newcomb you can go "I'm going be a one-boxer so I get the million dollars... and I'm going to take both boxes".
Act Utilitarianism seems to mostly exist as a strawman for people to say "utilitarians would kill you for your organs", which is silly, because they empirically don't.
stoatherd
3mo ago
Yeah but people do this about everything!
True, but also: no!
@FtttG's description resonated with me a lot (thanks for putting it to words).
I think you (rae) are right that the median person does feel a compulsion to push back on things they think are wrong. But... does the typical pushback on social media look anything like the Motte (in its best, idealised form)? Most popular pushback takes the form "your political bloc is dumb and stupid and evil, here's why".
Everyone (including people like me, and presumably FtttG) probably feels an urge to drop zingers on people who say dumb/evil things, and to push back against our tribal enemies. Call this "Pushback Type 1". PT1 lets us feel smart and good, and signal to our tribe that we are smart and good, and to enjoy the schadenfreude of our enemy getting squished. This is probably a universal thing that people are predisposed to like.
I think the thing FtttG is referring to is distinct. Call it "Pushback Type 2". PT2 is about criticising what we think is false even if (a) it can't be done in a crisp, devastating zinger, (b) it doesn't help some tribe we're aligned with, and (c) we don't get to enjoy having put someone down a peg. It's the obsessiveness of going: "This person is wrong, I don't care if the whole world is behind them; I need to explain why!"
The Motte is fuelled by a proprietary blend of PT2 spiked by PT1 (the exact formula is a closely-guarded secret).
There's still the question of why trans stuff specifically has captured FtttG. Obviously that's not for me to say, but a general explanation would be: people with PT2 inclinations can get sniped by any particular instance of falsehoods; it's a crapshoot.
... but I'd also then say: to me, trans stuff is the quintessential example of people "proudly, confidently asserting things I know to be false". I can't think of a stronger example. It's as ontologically broken as transubstantiation.
(I'm very sympathetic to your position of trans people basically wanting to be left alone, btw.)
stoatherd
3mo ago
If trans people are (random number) 2x more likely than cis people to get murdered walking a random street at night, but 5x less likely than cis people to take that kind of stroll where they’d be exposed to that risk, does that count?
Yeah, that's the flipside of what I was gesturing towards with "[making statistical corrections for] dangerous occupations like being a sex worker". I'd say that, in your hypothetical, that would indeed count! It would be a real problem.
... but it's not true. I know you said it was a "random number", but the "random numbers" we choose are typically representative of what we think are reasonable values. Trans people being 2x times for likely to be murdered for walking down the street isn't a reasonable random number. Again: cis men are more likely to be murdered than trans women! Assuming that you're a trans woman, then you are literally safer as a trans woman than your other option (i.e. being a cis man). We can discuss the hypothetical world where you receive a 2x multiplier to being randomly murdered, as long as it's on the record that this is utterly non-representative of the world we live in.
I do know that I feel more uncomfortable in many situations now than before (...) Maybe I’m just being paranoid. It’s hard to tell.
Yeah, sorry about that; that sucks.
For most trans people I know, I'd try and (incredibly carefully) gesture towards something like: "You live in a catastrophically damaged epistemic environment. The people around you take anything less than complete submission to their religion as being literally genocide. Even if you personally don't express stuff like that, the people who say these things are contributing (negatively) to the general epistemic structure around you, and it's fucking with your ability to calibrate. Even high-decoupling, disagreeable humans aren't really built to completely ignore this kind of endemic social messaging -- it's going to seep in and cause you stress, anxiety, and a constant sense of being at war."
I think that's not quite the right message for you (but I'm still going to sneak it into evidence via quotation). I have no idea what kind of environment you're in; and obviously you're, y'know, actually thinking about this stuff already. I guess I'd suggest that your impression of things like trans-related discomfort, rudeness, or social difficulties are probably picking up on a real signal -- but when you hit the threshold of violence/murder etc, there's a good chance you're massively overestimating that stuff for whatever reason. (I stress again that I don't know you or your environment; if you're in a place with atypically high violence against trans people compared to the rest of the West, probably disregard my comment.)
stoatherd
3mo ago
The great thing about AI is that you get impartiality on demand if you make a completely unconnected instance and ask an impartial question
It's possible I'm failing a sarcasm check here or something, but: do you actually believe this?
Like, this is an extremely untrue thing to say. I don't want to put a low-effort comment here saying "this is wrong", but I also don't want to waste time on a long comment explaining it, if it turns out that this was a joke or some kind of unserious comment. So I'm going to flag up that, if you sincerely believe "AI gives you impartial answers", that this is an extremely broken part of your epistemic model, which I can substantiate if it needs to be substantiated.
stoatherd
3mo ago
Not the OP, but a couple of points here. I could very easily say:
in the West, being [male] can lead to discrimination (...) and make you more at risk of low level violence and hate crimes
(I've omitted the ostracisation part, as I don't think that's supported in my parallel; but I don't think omitting it fundamentally changes the idea.)
The above is just true. But if men then had a culture of saying there was a "male genocide", and that their society was "androphobic" because of this, I'd get very annoyed, because -- as @WandererintheWilderness says -- it's an attempt to parlay a weaker, true claim ("men are more likely to be victims of violence") into a hysterical false one ("society is systemically murdering men!!")
Part of why I'm raising the parallel: one way trans activists misrepresent this stuff is by comparing trans women to women rather than to men. IIRC, men have a higher rate of being victims of violence than trans women? (It might require some statistical stuff like "once you correct for dangerous occupations like being a sex worker", or it might just be outright; I don't remember.)
There's something kind of ridiculous about this world model:
- If you're born male, your options are basically cis man or trans woman -- you don't get "cis woman" as an option
- If a male person chooses to be a trans woman, they are now instantly statistically categorised as "some type of women"...
- ... and therefore, any male-propensity-to-get-stabbed is supposed to instantly vanish; and if its doesn't, there's a trans genocide.
Like... no? This isn't even epicycles; this is no model at all. The dangerous portion of being (1) trans and (2) biologically male... is not the trans part. If a soldier chooses to call themselves a "trans accountant", they don't get to go "My workplace death rate is higher than cis accountants -- this is discrimination".
I agree that white Western trans women probably aren’t at an extremely elevated risk of murder
I appreciate you saying so, but this does seem like a weaker formulation than what you should probably agree to. "extremely elevated risk"? Is your position that white Western trans women are at an elevated risk of murder -- possibly even a very high one -- but it just doesn't rise to the level of "extremely"? Because I'm reasonably sure the accurate version of this would just be "they aren't at an elevated risk of murder". Similarly, I wouldn't say "the trans genocide is overblown", I'd say "the trans genocide is fictitious". We can certainly discuss different patterns of violence and how they interact with being trans, but framing that as "genocide" needs to be immediately met with "you are lying for political expediency". (The generalised "you", I mean; you're not lying.)
It's also a bit of a motte and bailey: the bulk of trans activism focuses on white Western culture as performing some kind of trans genocide. Then when criticised, it becomes "Well, in this non-white, non-Western part of the world, these non-white-non-Western cultures are dangerous for trans people!" Again, you're not personally responsible for what other people are arguing; but you get how this is frustrating, right?
stoatherd
3mo ago
It's an argument against Utilitarianism only if you ignore 2nd-order effects. (This happens a lot with arguments against Utilitarianism.)
Take the extreme variant of the trolley problem, where a doctor has 5 sick patients who each need a different organ transplant. In the doctor's waiting room, there's a healthy patient. Should the doctor kill the healthy patient and use their organs to save the 5 sick people? After all, it'll be saving 5 lives at the cost of one; Utilitarianism demands that you kill the healthy person, right? It's exactly the same as pulling a lever on the train track to save 5 people, right?
... except no, because no one wants to live in a society where at any moment you can be righteously murdered for your organs. That's an insane way for a society to function. Everyone would be terrified all the time. No one would set foot in a hospital. There'd be constant revenge killings against doctors. Everyone who could afford bodyguards would hire them. Everyone would carry whatever weapons they could get their hands on. Society would collapse in about two days. The outcome is: you get no organ transplants, because you've destroyed the mechanisms that allowed for organ transplants in the first place.
Same thing with Nazi experimentation on live prisoners. The Utilitarian argument against it isn't just "the prisoners suffering is bad", it's that plus "if your society has a policy of experimenting on live prisoners, that generates a bunch of horrific problems", such as:
- Significantly increased terror among the population
- Dehumanisation of prisoners and any social group they're drawn from
- Slippery slope to even less humane treatment of people
- Slippery slope to expanding the number of valid targets
- General breaking of bright lines around things like bodily autonomy, torture, etc
... so it's very much not an "unalloyed good", even leaving the suffering of the prisoners aside. (For that matter, even if we ignore 2nd-order effects, I'm not sure that the medical advances necessarily do outweigh the suffering of the prisoners! Then there's also the fact that there's no single unambiguous way to add up "greatest utility for the greatest number". You can absolutely have a version of Utilitarianism that prioritises additional utils for people at the bottom. And then, on top of that, there's no single way to convert pain/pleasure/satisfaction/whatever into utility; pain might have a much stronger contribution than pleasure. The weakness of Utilitarianism IMO is that it's inherently flexible and ambiguous like this.)
It might well be possible to construct a situation where Utilitarianism does give an unacceptable answer. But I don't think this is it. And typically, when these arguments go "Utilitarian says we should do X, which we can all agree has bad consequences" -- that's almost intrinsically self-defeating, because Utiliarianism is all about weighing up the consequences and minimising the badness!
stoatherd
4mo ago
Google gives me this for the definition of "genocide":
the deliberate and systematic killing or persecution of a large number of people from a particular national or ethnic group with the aim of destroying that nation or group.
This comports with a couple of dictionary definitions I checked.
The key part, and the part you're trying to emotionally invoke, is the killing of people. That's the central concept of genocide, and it's what people who say "genocide" are trying to lean on. When people hear "genocide", they're supposed to think "murdering an ethnic or national group"; they're supposed to think "sending people to the gas chambers".
Is that what you think Trump is threatening? If so, where does he say anything remotely like that?
If, instead, you think Trump is threatening something that's still bad -- such as regime change that will inherently come with collateral damage, or the destruction of civilian infrastructure -- then say that. It will still be bad! But calling those things "genocide" is co-opting a stronger word purely because it's a stronger word. I don't believe you actually believe Trump intends to murder "a significant portion of the members of the civilisation" (please tell me if I'm wrong), so I don't take that as a sincere defence of using the word "genocide".
stoatherd
4mo ago
Do you think this is actually calling for genocide, or is it just strategically useful for you to call it genocidal?
When Trump refers to the "civilization" dying, do you sincerely think he's referring to mass-murdering the civilians in the region, rather than the obvious reading that he's referring to the society and regime?
If so, why didn't he just say that?
You're actually correct on this one; that's some good theory of mind.
On this page, you have a bunch of people repeatedly asking you for evidence your positions; you consistently obfuscate, deflect, and pretend to misunderstand what they're saying.
I understand that it's flattering to cast yourself as a principled person, and anyone disagreeing with you is just terminally stupid.
Thing is, it's not actually true.
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