sun_the_second
No bio...
User ID: 2725
sun_the_second
2mo ago
In that case, I can assure you there is definitely less pointlessness in Pale.
sun_the_second
2mo ago
I wouldn't call Worm too grimderp, but Pale is definitely much brighter. Maybe 25%? The most grim elements of the setting that were on full display in Pact, the other work in the Otherverse, are pretty much out of the way.
That being said, if you dislike a few horrific displays of torture and violence sprinkled here and there, those do exist in Pale. As I said, there is slavery and the associated mechanisms of suppression.
sun_the_second
2mo ago
Reverend Insanity does have plenty of flowering descriptions, the issue I find with it is that the narration is about 99% tell, 1% show. It will explain at every moment what a side character's inner thoughts and motivation were and why they acted like they did, as well as every intricacy in the magical system that facilitated a difference in power between two characters.
sun_the_second
2mo ago
The people who get invested into moving beyond Earth seem to generally not be the kind of people who trust Elon to do anything about that. Anymore, at least.
sun_the_second
2mo ago
This reads like modern neogender theory.
sun_the_second
2mo ago
Yes, there's been definition fuzziness/creep between "a UFO is, literally, a Flying Thing we, the general public, are Not Sure What It Is" and "a UFO is an alien encounter".
sun_the_second
2mo ago
Of course. If Bigfoot and UFOs were both real and capturable on camera, I'd hear about it from CNN and the like, not no-name Youtube channels.
This still leaves the "it's faked from one level above them" out, as you've noted.
sun_the_second
2mo ago
Once again I'll trot out Pale by Wildbow. I think it captures both "anti-slavery campaign" and "slavery does not instantly disappear".
I think you're vastly overestimating the consideration the average aggressor gives to the "but they will go to prison if they attack me" thing.
Being intimidating works because most people will not cold-bloodedly evaluate the costs and benefits of you actually using your offensive capability.
sun_the_second
2mo ago
I don't see how "you can carry a weapon" would come off as significantly less civilized to Canadians than "police can beat you up because they deem you a socially acceptable target (and socially acceptable targets include the homeless)".
sun_the_second
2mo ago
I think you are taking someone obliquely implying you picked your namesake for his cuckoldry entirely too seriously. This is an internet forum for witches, not the UFC ringside. Profuse defense of masculine honor looks out of place here, IMVHO.
sun_the_second
2mo ago
I know my arguments sound dreary, but just because I think I know why I have certain beliefs and preferences doesn't mean I don't have them, or that I wish to be rid of all of them - merely some. Conversely, many religious people who have achieved the supposedly most fulfilling things in life look quite sad to me.
It is a common misconception to think nihilists are worse off than you just because they're less uncritical of their feelings, or perhaps less evolutionarily fit.
sun_the_second
2mo ago
I think you don't recognize that such a difference could even exist, which seems to me very... empty and sad.
Is it sad that I don't recognize that a set can both have members and be empty? That two could be the same as one? That yes could be the same as no?
It is in this sense that I do not recognize that "good" and "bad" are things that exist outside of moral agents.
No, it would not matter whether or not it was observed or imagined by me, or you, or anyone.
But you are imagining it. It would be literally impossible to "morally sense" something you do not imagine.
most people don't believe this. They believe that they have a moral sense (perhaps imperfect) and that through the exercise of this moral sense they can discern right and wrong. Almost everyone believes this unless it is deliberately taught out of them.
I'm aware. Curiously, in all societies I've seen including the most robust ones, children are deliberately taught to discern right and wrong in the correct way as described by the society, often significantly differing per society.
You can't seem to disentangle your own belief that everything must merely boil down to meat preferences in the end. It has nothing to do with feeling good or feeling bad. It has everything to do with being good or being bad. Feeling guilty doesn't feel good. It actually feels quite shitty. It would be much, much easier and more pleasurable to simply decide that the thing you are feeling guilty and shame about is actually not bad at all and it's just your irrational guilt/shame that's the problem, not your bad actions correctly causing them. Believing this would feel a whole lot better, it would feel good, but it would be bad.
You seem to either be bluntly reasserting your belief or pointing out a contradiction. I see no contradiction. Wicked men feeling shame is good for others, not them. Of course the shamed person is not supposed to feel good.
I'm still awaiting your method for discerning the shame you feel at having done bad things from the shame you feel because a part of your correct (obviously) moral sense has been deliberately taught out of you.
My method, if you were curious, is that there is no difference and that exaniming and understanding the source and mechanism of shame is important if you want to reach anything that could be described as "good".
sun_the_second
2mo ago
I believe it because I observed it. I believe being aware of this truth has utility to me. "What if it doesn't" - well, what if it does. You certainly haven't convinced me yet that it doesn't.
I don't spread it widely because of the reasons you stated, that if everyone thinks there are no real rules then I won't have a nice society to live in and many people I like will have an existential crisis. I don't fear accidentally turning the whole society subjectivist and suicidal because societies are resilient to that, since as you said societies need to have most people believe in their cosmic justice.
I'm aware that some beliefs I have are not the best for reproducing genes or societies, but I do not care. In creating reason, the blind idiot god that is evolution has created, finally, a rock that it cannot lift. I'm more interested in seeing with clear eyes whether we can, after all, create a god to replace evolution than I am interested in caring whether society persists after me.
Actually, my culture is more valuable, and I pay taxes to support my country's military against Muhammad. In any case it is useless to scare me with the extinction of my culture even if I cared about its persistence after my demise. If it goes extinct, nothing says another like it won't be able to exist again.
sun_the_second
2mo ago
It is not good. There are many times where I would prefer not to have my preferences culminate in "what is, somehow, predicted to make more of those specific genes or at least some of those other similar genes". It merely is. There is no cosmic scales in it, however, of justice or otherwise.
The difference in our beliefs seems to be that you believe the world is just and balanced. Maybe you even believe that even if it's not true, it is best for you to believe it is.
Why is pleasure good?
Our reward systems, as evolved from those that reproduced best, respond to certail stimuli with seeking more of them.
Why is pain bad?
Our reward systems, as evolved from those that reproduced best, respond to certain stimuli with avoiding them.
Why is fulfilling preference good?
It's not always good. For example, many people prefer to do hard drugs, but fail to predict and conceptualize that they will develop a tolerance, overdose and die an early death in a ditch, which they don't prefer now and wouldn't prefer later.
Punishment may result in net higher pleasure and/or net higher reproduction for the punished individual, but whether it does is quite far removed from whether the punishment was actually just. This leads us back to incentives.
It is simply obviously good to me that this occurs. It is good when evil and wickedness are punished. It is bad when they are not.
The very fact that it is "simply obviously good to you" betrays that what we're observing is the retributive effect of punishment, not a cosmic axiom of its goodness. You imagine evil being punished, you feel good. If you imagined good being punished, you would not feel good even if it was, unknown to you, actually evil. It would be the furthest thing from obvious.
The incentive societies face is to indoctrinate their constitutients with the idea that punishment has a cosmic axiomatic importance, along with their particular definitions of wickedness, of course. This is to persuade the members of society to act according to the rules even if they are sure they will not get caught.
Sometimes shame is good for the immediate survival of the individual. Sometimes it is good for the immediate survival of the society, which usually benefits individuals and their reproduction long-term. Other times, shame is an instrument that only serves a particular layer of society at the expense of others.
Examples are left as an exercise to the reader. Given the role shame plays in the toolbox of the left-dominated society you wished destruction upon, the exercise shouldn't be hard. Your compatriots who were shamed by leftists have felt the exact same shame that wicked people supposedly must feel for understanding their own transgressions. Shame does not have a hash code that decyphers to "good" if it was a wicked person feeling shame for wicked deeds and to "bad/fake/wrong" if it was a righteous person misled into feeling shame. It is the same mechanism.
And since it is important to the overall calculus, if you are a calculating sort of person, I would be remiss if not to mention the obvious. If you believe in an afterlife where all imbalanced mortal scales are finally put to rights, any wrong someone does where they do not suffer the appropriate punishment in this fleeting life will surely be addressed in the long run.
Because I'm a calculating sort of person, I do not believe in the kind of afterlife where finite wrongs done in life are punished infinitely/many times over what would be the punishment in life. This is exactly the kind of afterlife I would have people believe in if I wanted them to voluntarily seek punishment in life, because I actually only cared about what they do in life. I would also be susceptible to believing in that kind of afterlife if I wanted to cope with wickedness not being punished on earth by imagining how it's punished in hell (and then, because I wanted to be a righteous person, convince myself I feel sorry for them and regretful for them not repenting earlier). But as it happens, I want my enemies punished now, and I want to avoid letting them run amok by convincing myself they'll get their due in the afterlife.
sun_the_second
2mo ago
It's a good novel, this is the hill I'm ready to die on.
Not to worry, I'm on the ten year blizzard arc right now so you can let out the breath of turbid air you've been holding. I imagine a modern LLM would have done a great job even just adapting the English translation into something that doesn't feel like the author's paid by the line.
sun_the_second
2mo ago
Being punished when you do wrong is good for you and just good, full stop.
If punishment is not merely an incentive or a corrective, then what else is there, particularly in the "good for you" scenario? Suppose I'm an incorrigible psychopath who already did wrong, you punish me in secret so that it is not a counterincentive for others and does not provide catharsis to anyone - how is it good for me? (I imagine it would still provide catharsis to you, the thought experimenter, but that can't be helped.)
If you're tempted to answer with something like "God" (paraphrased), first recall your rage when a trans person told you the definition of a woman is whoever wants to be a woman.
I get the feeling that many on the left would feel this was a sufficient "punishment" to, say, child murderers
This would not be sufficient punishment because it does not deter potential criminals from first doing the crime and then being force-repented. If this was the sole punishment for murder, I believe the Luigis of the world would be many more in number. This example of yours demonstrates the importance of the deterrence part of punishment, not the esoteric goodness you're hinting at but haven't explained.
sun_the_second
2mo ago
Even so, who said pure brute strength is the only legitimate way to fight? If you win, you win. Even outside complete changes of frame or dirty tricks, there's plenty of space for "superior speed" or "technique"-style workarounds.
sun_the_second
2mo ago
I'm not big tech currently, and I don't feel like wasting the rest of my youth on a mad rat-race from one (predicted to soon be an) island of employability to the next, nor do I have the money or the passion for prepping in the countryside. If I ain't gonna make it, I ain't gonna make it. I think the worst scenario is that the singularity comes, but I fall just short of being saved by virtue of not affording the life extension with all my savings.
sun_the_second
2mo ago
I suspect they just haven't tried hard enough (the people tuning the LLMs for their customer service, that is). The bots installed in customer service that I've seen were much worse than even the basic Gemini or Deepseek or whatever is the newest conversational model.
In most cases of tech support the precise thing the AI has to do is to... recognize the pattern. It can already do better than an Indian reading a script in that regard. The remaining 5% of people with bespoke problems that it can't immediately pattern match can be referred directly to humans.
sun_the_second
2mo ago
Slop is already enough. Slop is something that can satisfy the lowest common denominator, and if /u/self_made_human believes he is close to being able to enjoy AI writing, so will be the common Joe. Then again, that same man recommended a Chinese web novel with atrocious writing style to people, so maybe his bar is lower than many.
Even if AI can only output quality up to 80th percentile, that's putting 80% of people in that area out of a job.
sun_the_second
2mo ago
hello would you like to pick between my position and random bullshit that's nowhere near your position
sun_the_second
2mo ago
Is owing something to people who are dead and to people who will live when you're long dead a thing that helps you or a thing that hurts you, and why?
What you wrote looked like you meant to write Russians are proud of being conquered by Poles, not of kicking the Poles out.
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