vorpa-glavo
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User ID: 674
vorpa-glavo
2hr ago
I think realistically though, we are probably gonna have take a hard examination at the female end of the social contract at some-point, when birth rates and their implications become more severe and un-ignorable.
Will the implications ever become unignorable?
I'm actually a bit confused by a lot of the right wing concern about birth rates. The people who choose to have kids in the current environment have some combination of genes (personality traits, etc.) and memes that lead to them being more successful at reproducing.
If we do absolutely nothing, the whole problem will sort itself out, because each generation will have a higher share of the reproduction-in-industrialized-information-age genes and memes, and the less fit people with inferior genes and memes that don't lead to reproduction will die out. Why would we even want to dysgenically keep around genes that aren't well suited to reproduction in the current environment?
vorpa-glavo
6hr ago
You Are Still Crying Wolf.
I am not "still" crying wolf. I didn't really start being truly, deeply worried about Trump until April 2025.
Before that, I had convinced myself that Trump 1 hadn't been that bad, that despite the weekly outrage articles from the mainstream media, he had mostly governed as any Republican would have. But I really do think Trump 2 has been different.
Where are the criticisms for Biden? Honestly, where are they? Where are the people denouncing the pardons? Calling for them to be overturned, or for the pardoned people to be strung up on things they haven't been pardoned for? Where, in other words, is the action? Where is the demonstration of these values applied to anyone other than Trump? Because I no longer trust anyone who applies standards to Trump due to repeated lessons teaching me otherwise.
I mean, I commented this a year ago.
Biden wasn't really the center of a political movement though, and I think Democrats were a lot more willing to call him out for things like the Hunter pardon. At most, I saw people quietly understanding of Biden breaking with principle to protect family, though I still got the sense there was general disapproval for the pardoning on the Left.
As a third party voter, I have been disgusted by both parties, but I really do think the dynamic is that Obama and Biden did X, and Trump is doing X^2, as /u/lollol put it. It creates a weird dynamic, because I'm happy to condemn them all and say that Trump is still worse in most cases (even if his actions aren't totally unprecedented), but it feels like a lot on the Right are in the position where they both need Trump and are happy that he's punishing the people that they hate, and so they're unwilling to engage in more than light critique with hedging like, "the only difference is that Trump is doing what everyone always did out in the open."
vorpa-glavo
3d ago
Which obviously an absurd hypothetical but how is AI not just another tool?
It absolutely is a tool, but I think that the amount of microdecisions made per artistic subunit matters to a lot of people.
In a human made novel, there are hundreds of microdecisions per page. Choices to use one word and not another.
With AI stories, the nature of prompting is that there end up being far fewer human microdecisions per page. I would guess 10:1 is a good conservative estimate of the typical case in both instances.
Some people want to know that a human being might have consciously or unconsciously used this word in this sentence, which works as foreshadowing for this section later in the book. With an AI assisted story, most such cases are going to be complete serendipity with no greater intention or meaning added by the human author of the piece.
Or if you want another example, recall how kids collected Pokémon cards back in the day. If I told you I had a foil Charizard card that’d be quite impressive. If the guy next to me had a foil, “1st edition” stamp on a Charizard card, the “limited edition” factor makes it much more valuable because of its scarcity.
I actually think most trading cards aren't far off from Bored Ape NFTs at the end of the day. Companies love to put gambling in everything these days from mobile apps, to the random toy boxes that take up an entire aisle at my local Walmart. I think gambling was the first supernormal stimulus that humans discovered - randomness that our brains desperately want to find patterns in.
But like other supernormal stimuli, I think they are best avoided. Play LCGs instead of TCGs, or proxy your TCG cards (or buy singles and play cheaper formats like pauper if you really must buy in to the ecosystem.) They should be game pieces, not another supernormal stimulus like all the phone apps or porn sites try to be these days.
Humans just don’t like seeing replicas and care about authenticity, and it has nothing to do with the aesthetic value of the piece - that’s a red herring.
I think this is culturally contingent.
I have personally cultivated an aesthetic appreciation for imitation and replicas, because I want to feel beauty in my life, and if you cultivate the joy of copies you can always cheaply and non-rivalrously enjoy art. What you lose in the ability to be a snob, you gain in the ability to be content with enough and what you have at hand.
Why not have a print of a beautiful piece of art that you love? Why not get a cheap but beautiful study of a famous piece done by an art student?
If you’re in a museum looking at, let’s say, Palaeolithic stone axes, you might feel certain emotions or a sense of connection to humanity’s distant past. Then if you learned the collection was made by a boomer in the 90s in the Palaeolithic style, you’d be disappointed, regardless of whether the axes looked “good” or not, since they’re literally just crude chipped stones with hardly any aesthetic values on their own.
If you cultivate an appreciation that leads to the causal chain of a replica, then you can get almost the same "big" feelings from a copy of something. I went to the Nashville Parthenon, and I was blown away by it. It may be a copy, but with the right attitude it can be just as mind blowing and interesting as the real Parthenon, since it is causally downstream of the builders of the original Parthenon. It just happens to not share any of the matter of the original Parthenon, but who cares about a silly little detail like that?
vorpa-glavo
4d ago
We can at least be sure that they were proximally caused by people, even if people didn't actually make the comments.
vorpa-glavo
4d ago
If you take two pixel-by-pixel identical artworks, one made by a human and one made by an AI (or at least, the kinds of AI we have today, using the methods that today's AI systems use -- this isn't a simple chauvinism in favor of carbon over silicon as an underlying substrate), the AI image is simply worse, because (very briefly and roughly) human effort has intrinsic value, connecting with other humans has intrinsic value, the total historical and social context of an artwork has intrinsic value, etc.
I am a hobbyist writer (100% human-made), and I have also dabbled in adding AI art to my stories. I can tell you that trying to add art almost doubled the time it took me to craft a story, and if anything I got less engagement on the stories I added carefully curated AI art to. Frankly, I don't think people can "see" the human effort that goes into something, even AI art.
I'm honestly sad that most of the large D&D subreddits have banned anything with a whiff of AI, because I think it would be nice if there was a space for non-slop AI-assisted products for D&D. Instead we have r/dndai which is 50% sexy elf girls, and 100% slop.
vorpa-glavo
4d ago
The sapience/agency thing is a lot of what I was trying to gesture at with "personal." Obviously, God could be personal and non-interventionist, like the God of the deists, or the gods of the Epicureans.
vorpa-glavo
4d ago
but it's unproven any of them exist and as such the epistemic status of these multiverse explanations is actually not quite too far from asserting the existence of a creator God.
The main difference in my mind is whether God is personal or not.
An infinite, impersonal multiverse is about as complex as God, but it is still not a person you can pray to, or who will intervene in your life.
vorpa-glavo
4d ago
I do remember feeling jealous in my younger years of the characters in the Bible who got to test their God against the other gods in a battle of miracles.
Oh, it's much worse than that. I've always been jealous of the angels.
Supposedly, they get to make an informed decision about whether to serve God or not. Even if you say humans have it better because they can be forgiven and reconciled to God while angels never can, I prefer to make a single informed choice for all eternity over the fuzzy uninformed choice most Christian churches implicitly claim I must make.
vorpa-glavo
4d ago
no one, as far as I'm concerned, has a convincing materialist theory of consciousness, or even a sketch of the beginnings of one.
I am partial to Global Workspace Theory as a materialist explanation, but you may find that either unconvincing or too light on details.
Even gods or ghosts seem more amenable to materialist understanding: if real, they would require a distinct, radical change in what laws govern the material world to something far more complex than what seems to, but they could still be made a part of the material.
I mean, you could have a naturalistic explanation that isn't materialist.
You could just hypothesize that there are motes of mindstuff that come together and produce consciousness, but which are governed by natural laws like everything else in the universe.
I just think this is on the level of the old theories of elan vital (the special "stuff" that supposedly makes life possible.) We got rid of theories of elan vital after we discovered the mechanics of biochemistry.
My intuition is that just as science rendered the superlunary sphere and life into ordinary matter, we will someday do the same to consciousness.
vorpa-glavo
4d ago
Regarding the rational arguments, I think that arguments from consciousness are probably the most compelling. Consciousness is really spooky and mysterious. It seems spooky and mysterious in principle in a way that nothing else in (material) reality is. Perhaps this is an indication that other spooky and mysterious things are going on too, like God. (That's obviously a very crude way of phrasing it, but I think that captures the basic intuition common to this family of arguments.)
I'm actually curious why you think they're compelling. Saying Phenomenon A is mysterious, so to explain it I will invoke Phenomenon B - an infinitely powerful, personal, creator deity seems like a nonsense step to me. I think the problem is going to be, God is essentially infinitely complex, so the step jump to God is always going to be almost impossible as a way to rationally explain our mysterious phenomenon. It would literally be categorically easier to invoke some unknown but finitely complex and finitely powerful natural process to explain consciousness, than to invoke God in this context.
It is also a classic God of the gaps argument.
vorpa-glavo
5d ago
Conservative means to keep things how they were.
You need to read more Burke and Chesterton.
While there are certainly debates about whether conservatism is more of a temperament or an ideology, usually conservatism is a little more broad than just keeping things how they were.
In the United States, most conservatives worthy of the name are trying to conserve the founding, little-l liberal ideals of the Revolutionary War. It is part of what sets American conservatives apart from the blood and soil conservatives of Europe.
vorpa-glavo
6d ago
I'm pro gun rights, but I think there are meaningful distinctions between some of the the things mentioned and guns.
Smoking is mostly dangerous to the person doing it. Yes, yes, there's secondhand smoke, but if you're not frequently around smokers while they light up, it's not that much of a concern. Generally, little-l liberal paternalism is okay with "victimless crimes", and tobacco smoking is pretty close to a perfect example of this. You can't even make the socialized healthcare case against smoking, since it actually saves taxpayers money by killing people early.
Speeding is already illegal. However, traffic laws rely heavily on voluntary compliance with the law, since there aren't enough police in the world to catch all the people speeding. In theory, traffic cameras can also solve this issue, but if there were too many traffic cameras, people might genuinely get up in arms about it. Generally speaking, we are dealing with a bunch of trade offs when it comes to traffic laws, and it is unclear that "lock up anyone who speeds" is the best all around solution for society as a whole.
I also think we generally do make pet owners responsible for injuries and damage that are done by their animals. Tort law probably already covers a lot of the things we'd want from a legal code that deals with dangerous animals.
I mean, it could also be fairies if we're going supernatural. There are all sorts of fairy abduction tales like Tam Lin or Sir Orpheo, which have some interesting parallels to alien abductions. And European fairy myths are continuous with things like the Norse Wild Hunt, which involved bands of supernatural beings flying through the air.
Once you reach to invoke one of the more out there options, a lot of things are on the table.
IIRC, the consensus from twin studies is that intelligence is ~80% heritable, though also note that much of the remaining 20% is due to non-shared environmental effects which are likely near impossible to modify via environmental enrichment.
I'm not actually sure most of these people understand the "heritability" that twin studies are measuring. The way the math works, the heritability of number of legs is close to 0 (because there is basically no variation in leg count), even though we are quite sure that number of legs is 100% determined by genetics. And the equation we use spits out different heritability numbers under different social arrangements: the heritability of literacy is different in places where women aren't educated vs. where women are.
And I honestly lost a lot of faith in Twins Reared Apart studies when I learned a lot of them allow for a shared environment until the age of 8 - it isn't all just twins separated at birth (because there are not enough such twins for most studies.) 8 years is a long time in childhood development, and while I think the Classical Twin Design of looking at identical and fraternal twins raised together is slightly better, I still don't think we can rule out that identical twins end up with more similar "environments" because they look more like one another (and like it or not appearance matters for humans.) I think a lot of the missing heritability between twin studies and GWAS studies is probably explained by weaknesses in twin study design.
One of my friends recently "came out" to me as an HBD person, and I was honestly unimpressed with a lot of his examples (though I don't expect every random HBD person to be a Motte-caliber racial scientist.) He seemed completely dismissive of things like parasites and disease burden as a partial explanation of Subsaharan African low IQ, seemed to not fully grasp at all times how averages and standard deviations worked (since a decent portion of African Americans will end up with IQs of 100+ or 115+, and yet he seemed to reason as if they were all dummies, even if he was perfectly willing to acknowledge "outliers"), and I just didn't think he applied the rigor I know HBD people are capable of in general. (He never brought up GWAS studies or polygenic scores even once!) HBD is an interesting hypothesis, I just want to see well-constructed arguments for it.
rather than the latest bespoke localized novelty theory of the sort that a non-HBD person seemingly has to memorize hundreds of to rationalize the world around them.
The goal isn't to find a single, simple master explanation for everything. The goal is to find the minimum number of explanations with the maximum amount of explanatory power.
Pure HBD clearly doesn't serve as a complete explanation. For example, African Americans are about 20% White admixture and have IQs of 85. If we think that 100% of the difference between African Americans and Whites is explained by genetics, we can predict the average IQs of Subsaharan Africans with the equation: (0.80x) + (0.2 * 100) = 85, and predict that their IQ should be around 81. And yet most of the numbers I see HBD people cite for Subsaharan African IQ are far lower than that. I've sometimes seen claims in the high 60's. A genetic difference between African Americans and Whites, implies a strong environmentally-mediated difference for Subsaharan Africans and African Americans.
But if we're already going to allow that environment effects can cause a one or more standard deviation in IQ from what we expect, I think we then have to double back and question our originally granted assumption that the IQ differences between African Americans and Whites is 100% genetic. It has got to be a mix, and if it is a mix, I don't think we can yet say where African Americans will top out.
On the other hand, I think the nutrition + parasites + tropical diseases explanations seem to have a lot of explanatory power. They're not another thing to memorize, they make predictions that I tend to think are born out in the data, even if they can't explain all of the difference with best estimates for effect size.
I never had a sense that painting your nails in general was lower class behavior, and my mom, who is an engineer, often had painted nails when I was growing up (and still occasionally does.) Maybe it's a regional thing? Perhaps looked down on because of the vanity of focusing on your appearance in this way?
Now, what I do consider somewhat lower class is incredibly long nails, or fake nail extensions. My mom painted her finger and toenails, but she didn't keep her nails impractically long. She had work to do.
vorpa-glavo
13d ago
Those exceptions are non-fiction.
I guess I assumed you were talking about something like the War Thunder forum, which always seems to have military leaks and is a fictional MMO.
vorpa-glavo
13d ago
Hot take: anyone who morally criticizes art is wrong.
(Of course excluding "military secrets but art", "private personal information but art", etc.)
This seems kind of contradictory to me. You seem to implicitly acknowledge that there are some kinds of fiction that can have real world negative consequences that are not above moral critique (leaking military secrets or private personal information), but also implicitly take the line that in the entire universe of things art can be about, none of them will have real world consequences that could match those of military secrets or private personal information.
Now, I'm personally fairly pro-icky art, and I think the simple, obvious reality is that icky art doesn't usually cause us to do icky things. Murder mysteries don't make you commit murder, dramas about rape and trauma don't make you go out and traumatize people, etc.
However, I at least find it plausible that there could be subcategories of icky stories, like those touching on suicide in a particular way, that could actually have negative effects on society and result in real world harm, perhaps in the ballpark of leaking military secrets or personal information. I think it has to be much more piecemeal than to simply say that "anyone who morally criticizes art is wrong."
vorpa-glavo
14d ago
A fetus passing away after being separated from the host is as such not the moral fault (if there is any to be found) of the would be mother, but rather an “innocent crime”, more of a natural occurrence than anything you could or should hold a person liable for.
The problem I've always had with this framing, is that it only seems to exonerate rape victims, and perhaps people who never received comprehensive sexual education. Basically everyone else understands that sex can lead to babies, and thus knows that they could be on the hook for that consequence.
To use a slightly whimsical analogy. Imagine a strange lottery, where besides the jackpot and small prize offerings, there is also a widely advertised "downside" of participating in the lottery, where there is a chance your circulatory system will be connected to that of an unconscious, famous violinist for 9 months until they have recovered from whatever disease ails them. The fine print does mention that you can unhook yourself from the violinist at any time, but they are guaranteed to die in that circumstance, as they will have become utterly dependent on you for their continued life and existence.
Unlike the original violinist thought experiment, where a person is hooked up to the violinist against their will, it is not at all obvious to me that it is moral to unhook yourself from the violinist once you have been hooked up in the lottery scenario. You voluntarily chose to take part in a lottery where you knew there was a chance that you would be hooked up to the violinist, and now that their life is dependent on your decision and they depend specifically upon you, I'm not sure that I think it is okay to unhook yourself, purely from an intuitional perspective.
vorpa-glavo
14d ago
I'm actually not sure what to make of humanity's dark impulses in the sexual realm, especially when they get tied up in weird fetish stuff beyond BDSM.
For example, there's an entire niche erotica category of downgrade transformation fetishes. It's people getting turned on by the idea of someone magically transforming into a lesser version of themselves. Popular cheerleader to shy nerd, fitness trainer to fat slob, that sort of thing. It's dark, but it is also goofy because it can never happen in real life.
Psychologically, I think it mirrors a lot of what is happening with BDSM, at least as far as D/s dynamics go. A person's relative status is being lowered, so that other people's relative status is increased.
However, I'm not even sure why we have these kinds of kinks and fetishes from an evopsych perspective. Like, I kind of get the idea of the monkey brain fantasizing about seeing someone getting taken down a peg, but how did magical transformations become a part of it? Is this just where the idea of cursing someone comes from? How many Greek curse tablets were secretly someone acting out a psychosexual fetish of theirs?
Perhaps it is just one of those happy accidents with profound downstream effects, like human's love of gold.
vorpa-glavo
14d ago
As a rhetorical device, anyone who wants to can try to frame something as a right, in order to try and put it beyond the realm of debate and discussion.
As a political reality, unless the government enshrines it in some way, none of the rhetorically claimed rights are truly rights.
I guess I don't understand what you're confused about here. You even cited other non-existent rights in your OP here: food and water. No such right to food and water exists, at least in the United States.
We could do a Spartan-style thing, and only have women "drafted" for the duration of their pregnancy with the ability to give up the child for adoption, with the children being raised communally.
That said, I really don't think any of that is necessary one way or the other.
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