I'm pretty sure he knows that's not how Christian marriage is supposed to work, but also that formal rules are often ignored in practice for various reasons. Is his father's failure in that he didn't raise him to be a turbo-autist who can't distinguish between rules-as-written and rules-as-practiced?

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Culture War Roundup for the week of July 10, 2023

zPvQINBQvfFR 2yr ago

Should we?

As a form of enforcement of a culture's values is a target approach relative to the person's individual failure to meet it not efficient. I know experiencing the opposite where everyone in a group is punished for the actions of one person is brutal.

I think "don't shit on the weak for fun and self-aggrandizement" is a cultural value of the Western civilization, so people violating it should be counter-bullied by Society.

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Culture War Roundup for the week of July 10, 2023

zPvQINBQvfFR 2yr ago

Just because people call something "creative", doesn't mean it actually is.

If we restrict ourselves to the domain of cognitive tasks (ignoring the complexities introduced by physical labor), then I think the speed at which different tasks get automated by AI is a decent empirical index of how much creativity a task requires.

That's the AI effect transformed from a sociological observation into an axiom of some, as of yet unformulated, theory of true intelligence.

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Culture War Roundup for the week of July 10, 2023

zPvQINBQvfFR 2yr ago

2013's middling dystopic sci-fi, Elysium

Oh, that movie was so disappointing. It's by the guy who did District 9, so I was expecting something eye-rollingly heavy handed in its messaging, but at least fun to watch with an interesting premise, and instead got... this. Politics truly is the mind-killer!

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Culture War Roundup for the week of July 3, 2023

zPvQINBQvfFR 2yr ago

I wonder if Canada fares better. I kind of doubt it. It seems like the Chinese and maybe the French are the only ones left who can handle these types of projects.

Aren't Koreans pretty good too?

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Culture War Roundup for the week of June 12, 2023

zPvQINBQvfFR 2yr ago

A bit of a difference between "mind that has been paused and will resume in X hours" and "no mind at all".

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Culture War Roundup for the week of June 12, 2023

zPvQINBQvfFR 2yr ago

Likewise, if you know many military men you know that the name McNamara is a dirty word. There's a reason that his is one of the only red headstones in Arlington.

Wouldn't that suggest that people who think IQ measures something real and useful in real life might have a point? Guy comes up with idea of lowering the threshold on a mental aptitude test to fill a manpower shortage, and now his name is considered cursed for generations. This sure seems consistent with mental aptitude tests mattering in real life.

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Culture War Roundup for the week of June 12, 2023

zPvQINBQvfFR 2yr ago

So what would be an example of a situation in which you'd start non-metaphorically holding up people with Gun and expect it to help?

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Culture War Roundup for the week of June 5, 2023

zPvQINBQvfFR 2yr ago

So it's not actually a simple recipe, because a recipe is something that should give you expected result as long as you follow the steps, and the steps themselves should be simple, mechanical, and not contain any unexplained complexity.

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Culture War Roundup for the week of June 5, 2023

zPvQINBQvfFR 2yr ago

If this is still supposed to be about the unlikeliness of abiogenesis, then this analogy would only make sense if you believed that the conditions necessary for the arising of life happened only once in the entire history of the universe. Then it really would be a miracle.

But it's more like there are a bajillion people about to be executed, each with their own thousand-strong firing squad and we know that at least one of them survived. With so many tries, one of them could have gotten super lucky. (And of course, we don't really know how many marksmen you need to postulate to match the probability of abiogenesis happening in some small volume of the primordial soup at a particular point).

(If it's about the wonder of the fact that our universe can support life at all, then I'm fine with answering "I dunno" while insisting that there's no justification for jumping from "I dunno" to "therefore, God.")

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Morality is Accidental & Self-Congratulatory

zPvQINBQvfFR 2yr ago

Do lawyers commit the majority of moral anti-realism despite being only a minority of the population?

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Culture War Roundup for the week of May 22, 2023

zPvQINBQvfFR 2yr ago

You accidentally.

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Culture War Roundup for the week of May 22, 2023

zPvQINBQvfFR 2yr ago

I suspect many people are classifying the thing you're doing as concern trolling (not sure if I'm using this devilish phrase right, but I think it fits). Repeatedly and insistently noticing that ackshually, the lady might also not behaved perfectly and therefore anybody who insists on strongly condemning the kids is suspect of being an idiot who thinks blame is a zero-sum game doesn't add much to the discussion, other than you being able to put on airs of a wise elder stroking his long gray beard while the vulgar are baying.

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Culture War Roundup for the week of April 17, 2023

zPvQINBQvfFR 2yr ago

Which is consistent. Just like being anti-murder and still believing in a right to lethal self defense. Or having a strong preference for civilization not to end in nuclear hellfire, and yet maintaining a stockpile of warheads and a willingness to press the button, for the sake of MAD.

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Culture War Roundup for the week of April 3, 2023

zPvQINBQvfFR 2yr ago

This assumes that intelligent agents have goals that are more fundamental than value, which is the opposite of how every other intelligent or quasi intelligent system behaves.

Intelligent agent's ultimate goals are what it considers "value". I'm not sure what you mean, but at first glance it kind of looks like the just world fallacy -- there is such a thing as value, existing independently of anybody's beliefs (that part is just moral realism, many such cases) AND it's impossible to succeed at your goals if you don't follow the objectively existing system of value.

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Culture War Roundup for the week of March 20, 2023

zPvQINBQvfFR 2yr ago

"Lol no," said the man after criticizing people who approach the subject with the sophistication of 12 year olds.

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Culture War Roundup for the week of March 20, 2023

zPvQINBQvfFR 2yr ago

No biggie. You just need to materialism more and adopt a pattern-based theory of identity.

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Culture War Roundup for the week of March 20, 2023

zPvQINBQvfFR 2yr ago

Well, we don't have any knowledge of anything if you use such a demanding definition of knowledge.

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Culture War Roundup for the week of March 20, 2023

zPvQINBQvfFR 2yr ago

They simply handwave away the possibility of any form of being/existence that is not squarely within the purview of one specific tool: science.

What exactly do you mean by "science"? Is it the bunch of institutions and traditions known as "science"? In this case there are obviously things beyond its purview and you won't find many (any?) people who'd deny it here. This could explain the lack of mockery you find so puzzling.

Or do you use "science" more generally to mean pursuit of understanding through the examination of experience and use of reason to build models with explanatory and predictive power? In this case, what would atheists need to do so you'd get off their back about handwaving the possibility? Do they need to write long soulful posts about how they can never know the eldritch truth beyond the limits of their experience? The problem is that seems super irrelevant and a waste of time. Why would you expect people who don't see any reason to believe in your religion to pay tribute to it?

Sure, maybe a guy who had an ecstatic vision of Jesus and the angels really got into contact with the incomprehensible Divine and he knows the good stuff, but what does this have to do with me? If I got directly blasted with the holy light, I'd likely join him as a fellow devout co-religionist. But I haven't, so best I can do is conclude that people can be very strongly affected by trippy hallucinations.

Your hypothetical God created a universe in which salvation is conditioned on faith in him, following some precepts, performing rituals, whatever. Then he put people in this world made it look really mechanistic and explainable by reason from the inside, creating strong incentives for using reason as a primary tool of understanding what's going on. He didn't elaborate and left. Very chad of him, but what am I supposed to do about any of this?

Maybe instead of trying to restart obsolete flamewars on Internet forums, you could use the direct line to God you seem to have access to, and humbly ask Him to be less cruel to those less fortunate than you, those who are trapped in this vast soulless machine? Tell him to grant us eyes and deliver us from our beastly idiocy.

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Culture War Roundup for the week of March 13, 2023

zPvQINBQvfFR 2yr ago

Does it matter? Isn't a big part of the reason men care about status is that it's a pathway to ~~many abilities some may find unnatural~~ getting laid? "You can have a convincing waifu that loves you unconditionally, but some people will think you're even more of a loser than they do now" doesn't seem that horrible.

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Culture War Roundup for the week of March 6, 2023

zPvQINBQvfFR 2yr ago

BENs ; WS ; UMC-W ; WWC

You know what modernity really needs? A Strong Leader, one with determination as strong as steel, who'd make usage of unexplained acronyms punishable by death. Nay, we need 50 such leaders.

Other than that little homicidal nitpick, cool post (really).