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Spookykou


				

				

				
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User ID: 2245

Spookykou


				
				
				

				
0 followers   follows 0 users   joined 2023 March 08 17:24:53 UTC

					

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User ID: 2245

If it was just America vs EU I would have a simple theory that sounds right to me. American youth have always grown up in 'these' conditions, and so have antibodies and memes that allow them to ignore being mugged or having their bike stolen, in a way that the average European does not, because 'these' conditions, brought on by the refugee crisis, are a very recent change with only the youngest generation really growing up in it. The problem with this theory is the UK, but maybe the global internet means that the protective American memes are actually just protective English memes.

I don't think that only 'technical' contradiction, in which it is logically impossible for two ideas to comport, get to be called contradictions. I think it is very common and normal for people to use the word contradiction to describe an apparent disconnect or incongruity between two things, that need not be completly irreconcilable.

I am not sure if you thought that my argument was, the OP's example is not contradictory, but my example is, but I was not trying to make that argument. I used words like particularly, and compared to. Also, this "'Progressives seem to hold totally contradictory values'." bit was in quotes because it was intended to describe a vibe, that I felt was central to the OP. I just felt like the example the OP happened to be upset by was a kind of weak sauce example of this kind of contradiction.

Entirely from the correctness or incorrectness of the political views themselves, there's no real contradiction between "I support LGBT+/feminism/whatever" and "I am against Israel's actions in Gaza." "I support Hamas".

So, in a very narrow technical sense, I support [Blank] and I support [Group that hates Blank and actively practices violence against Blank] are not logically impossible to hold within the same mind.

Still I am confident saying that not only would most people recognize the incongruity in those statements, if I could ask progressives about a different topic where they were not primed to view it as an attack or a gotcha, most of them would recognize the contradiction in such a statement as well. In fact, just go look at the never ending stream of "if you were really pro-life' memes/posts/articles for a live (and much worse) example.

That's my secret, I have no friends.

I don't see how the example here represents some sort of unique turning point or even a particularly good example of the set of, 'Progressives seem to hold totally contradictory values'.

They have been holding 'LGBTQ+ for Hamas' rallies since October 8th.

Trump disrespected the troops by saying stuff that a 'properly cultured' blue-triber would never say, like calling POWs losers for getting caught.

The people at protests waving flags, still don't like Trump for being uncouth in those ways. Also, I would guess less than half of them even know what Beirut is. Still, even if they did know, they mostly wouldn't care. They are perfectly happy to hold both the idea that Trump says rude things to the troops and that is bad, and also the idea that the American military-industrial-complex is a global oppressor and any and all resistance to it is justified. This isn't even a particularly contradictory pair of ideas to hold compared to their beliefs around gender.

More generally, you are making a liberal complaint to a progressive. Liberals care about being principled and consistent, creating generalizable rules, and all that other great civilization building philosophy junk that got totally abandoned as the internet and government student loans expanded the marketplace of ideas to include midwits.

'People experiencing "internal struggles" and changing their minds, as a result of being attacked(shouted at, protested against, and criticized by their social groups), is good actually.' is what I was alluding to.

Compare.

Changing your mind over a serious or contentious issue as a result of a period of internal struggle is generally regarded as a positive development by most people, and they use terms like "personal growth" to describe it

and

Changing your mind over a serious or contentious issue as a result of a period of internal struggle --after being shouted at, protested against, and criticized by your social group-- is generally regarded as a positive development by most people, and they use terms like "personal growth" to describe it

I am, skeptical, that 'most people' would agree with the second formation.

You seem to have missed...the second sentence?

I could see that something had to give when they started being attacked by what they viewed as their own side.

Unless, you didn't miss it, and "internal struggle" is a totally outta pocket euphemism?

I don't understand most of your comment, I am not a Less Wrong reader.

To try to explain what I said, imagine a person who says that men wearing pants is 'arbitrary'. I think that person is trying to communicate that men wearing pants is random, without underlying reason or cause. I think that person is wrong.

I can't stand Sanderson's work, for, well a lot of reasons, but one of the big ones is that he has really bought into the idea that culture is arbitrary and I am really bought into the idea that culture is contingent and so whenever he brings up some arbitrary cultural practice it brutally murders any interest I might have had in the setting. I can very easily imagine people who do not care about this at all, and hate Sanderson for totally different reasons.

Talking about writing being good or bad is really weird because people want and enjoy different things, and people are sucked out of a story for different reasons. You seem to be very fixated on the extent to which the story was well planned to function as a trilogy, where as that rates pretty low on the totem pole for me. I assume this is why you do not actually talk about the companions or world-building, when those are the two things @urquan brought up specifically as being their favorite parts (I agree with them). If I had to pick between a story that had perfect planning to create an overarching narrative structure for a trilogy, or a book with good characters, it is not even close. They are not even playing the same game. I would burn the narrative structure book just to read the good characters book for the handful of minutes that the fire burned.

Moving on,

And every. Single. Choice. in ME1's critical path amounts to 'Kill person X, or not.'

Mass Effect is a military sci-fi story about a judge dread spy, hunting down a rogue judge dread spy. I feel like within that milieu it is not necessarily an indication of bad writing if the most pivotal scenes are situations where the main character has to make life and death choices. I actually don't really see what ideals of good writing this is supposed to be violating even outside of the military sci-fi genre.

You are obviously correct that there was no plan(or at least not a good one), and that between poor planning, clumsy execution, and format related limitations, the overarching narrative structure as a whole is not good. However I think you go too far when you say this is all locked in by ME1. Kaiden or Ashley die, and it sticks with that. They absolutely could have de-emphasized Wrex's importance to the wider galaxy while simply keeping him as a companion, or not, this would not have been difficult. They could have totally cut the side mission with the Rachni if you killed the queen in ME1. The whole mission is a complete stand alone that takes like 30 minutes. The reasons the Mass Effect trilogy is so disappointing (at least for me) is that it could have easily been better.

Paragon and Renegade get way too much hate. My Tav is 99% head cannon, because even though I have seven responses to every question there is no consistent characterization to any of them. Sometimes I can joke, sometimes I can't, sometimes I can be a hero paladin, sometimes I am a craven coward shuddering in fear (thanks cutscene). It turns out something like 75%+ of people just want to play some variation of Paragon, in literally every single-player RPG, lean into that and you can make better stories.

I agree on ME3, I like it and I think it gets too much hate because of the ending.

but actually Andromeda

I feel like Andromeda has pretty glaring writing problems, the story constantly strains credulity because the world-building totally fails to support the narrative they wanted to tell. A quick breakdown.

There is no reason for you to be operating as a small team. There is no reason for you to ever even step foot on a planet outside of the Ancient Vaults, because your ability to manipulate vault technology is the only thing that is actually special about you. If you do step foot on a planet, there is no reason for you to do so without a shuttle to ferry you from place to place. There is no reason for 2/5ths of a 500,000 person colony mission where 80% of the population is still in cryo-sleep to terraform multiple planets, when they could and should be focusing their efforts on one for at least the next hundred years. The whole setup is horrible for a first person shooter single-player RPG. The vault tech stuff should all be long term research projects. Clearing out the Kett and securing objectives should all be large squad military actions. Honestly, the world-building and setup for Andromeda is wildly more compatible with a base builder game, you could make a reasonable Andromeda mod for Rim world and it might actually be good.

Yes, I had a longer response at first that included how much I enjoy TNG (the bridge crew) and how the Mass Effect crew of fun competent people who work together for a common goal is a refreshing and pleasant experience compared to everything else being 'serious' story telling, which just means everyone has to talk constantly about their trauma and hate each other, while being sarcastic and ironic.

I am somewhat suspect of complaints about 'quality' with writing, just across the board, but also specifically when talking about 'romance' from the male perspective. I think it is mostly an isolated demand type phenomenon. Pull up straight male dating sims and visual novels(tons of games where you are a normal guy trying to get a girlfriend), and most people will say the whole genre falls within the porn to ham-fisted range, but if you look at popular LGBT visual novels and dating sims the writing is basically indistinguishable(and nobody complains). I think that feminists have been very effective at spreading memes about the Problematic Male Fantasy in a very asymmetrical way such that straight male wish-fulfillment is the only kind of fantasy that is quickly and easily recognized as bad. I even think there is a real extent to which some men have been conditioned into finding their own innate preferences icky, or at the very least I know of one case where this is true (myself).

I am not sure exactly what kind of story you are looking for, a male version of Colleen Hoover, Your Lie in April, When Harry Met Sally (the video game)? I am also not sure what 'sensitive storytelling' means. My previously mentioned skepticism around a lot of 'literary critique' is because I think the human impulse to describe personal subjective preference as an objective and legible standard is way too strong(obviously I am not guilty of it though).

A brief defense of Mass Effect, and why I wish more games like Mass Effect would get made.

I grew up a nerd(reading Piers Anthony, playing Samurai Swords, D&D, MTG, etc) who was socially adept enough to pass as a non-nerd. I dressed well, hung out with the cool kids, went to parties, did drugs and had sex. It was all good fun. Sometimes I would also hang out with my nerd friends and go do nerd things. I remember one time going to a Con, dressed well, hair on point, and seeing people walking around in dragon T-shirts and cargo shorts, poorly made cosplay, and the occasional Naruto-headband. As I watched the pockmarked, sweaty nerds, a deep pit opened up inside me. I was jealous. My fashionable sneakers and my tight fitting jeans were all lies, DAMNED LIES. I wanted to be like them, and I was just too scared to admit it, too scared to wear a dragon T-shirt. Well, not anymore.

I enjoy power fantasy. Yes, it is kind of cringy and lame and low-brow, but ima live my truth.

I want to be a kick ass hero who saves the galaxy and fucks hot alien chicks.

I feel like there are a few core concepts to liberalism that are very old and very consistent and the disconnect here is that most modern progressives don't realize that they have almost totally abandoned the ideological framework that they were raised in, so they still hold onto the word liberal despite abandoning the ideology.

It seems sort of amusingly illiberal, to rewrite history so that liberal is just the word that the left uses to describe itself and so liberals who are no longer in-line with the modern left, despite being totally in-line with liberalism, must be conservatives.

The reality is the modern left is not liberal for any coherent understanding of the term, this is not even ship of Theseus territory, it is an almost total abandonment of liberalism as an ideology. The principled liberals who used to be on the left were all collectively shocked(or shocked later when they finally noticed) as the rug got pulled out from under them and their massive wide spread cultural support vanished over night in the face of woke. As I vaguely gestured to above, I think this is mostly a politics as fashion thing, and all the people who would have smashed the like and re-tweet buttons on "I may not agree with what you say but I will defend to the death your right to say it," on a hypothetical 1995 twitter, ended up smashing the like and re-tweet buttons on "Freezepeach" on the real 2015 twitter.

A great place to watch this in the wild is, if you have the temperament for it, any Destiny content. Destiny is basically a liberal, and when he talks to progressives he will make liberal arguments, and you can see the sort of confusion and cognitive dissonance, as they try to square a sort of vague background respect for an under-specified liberalism, with their totally illiberal current positions and thinking.

Possible addition, On the gripping hand.

I am not sure I buy it.

It seems to me that almost every government that was able to pass pro-abortion laws did so directly in the face of this accusation and under the exact same framing you outlined above. That is, they thought abortion was 'wrong' in some sense but the lesser of two evils and advocated for it specifically by presenting it as a rational trade off against other interests.

The recent spread of euthanasia laws seem to have also come about under similar circumstances.

I think the, abortion is a necessary evil, framing was pretty much universal until relatively recently when the ever ratcheting up US centric culture war got to the point that pro-abortion advocacy was specifically calling for no questions asked, no shame or stigma attached, infinite access to abortion, in response to conservative states trying to limit access. If by real world you mean, current moment, then I agree in the abstract that it would be hard to pass national abortion laws as restrictive as the median EU member state (and said as such), but I suspect this has almost nothing to do with the rhetorical tactic of accusing people of supporting murder.

I guess a lot of this hinges on what you mean by 'calling it murder', but the impression I get is that people are very good at and comfortable using euphemisms for murder.

While I am generally in favor of consequentialist reasoning and am I fan of utilitarianism as a way to think about morality, I am pretty far from having rigorously mathed out my various moral/ethical beliefs.

Something like the formula you outline seems at least directionally similar, but insufficient. I tend to value women over men, children over adults (for reasons not fully captured in age), good people over bad people, etc. While I endeavor to formulate principals and consistency in my thinking around issues of morality, I often feel like the complexities of reality are such that I do not trust my ability to construct a formula that would properly capture the shape of my preferences.

One thing that bothers me in the abortion debate is that I personally see a lot of granularity within the worth of a human life. If I imagine a hypothetical where I have to pick between saving two eighty-year old men or one eight-year old boy, I will save the boy every time. More over, I would honestly think less of the two men if they advocated for their own lives while understanding the full situation. I do not see any incongruity with my moral intuitions as outlined above, and the moral intuition that it would be wrong to kill one of those eighty year old men. Similarly, I think a fertilized egg is a human life in a very straightforward and technical sense such that I think it is wrong to kill it, but I would not pick to save a fertilized egg over saving the eight year old boy, either(I also wouldn't pick it over the eighty-year old man). As such I generally find most of the extreme claims about the implications of treating a fertilized egg as a life overblown. I am fine with having a category of thing where I think it is wrong to kill it but which I do not think our entire society must upend itself in an effort to protect. Especially not when that protection would be against what would commonly be understood as the 'natural order' of things.

We currently think of full humans as being ... full humans, and yet 100% of them die. How much of our humanitarian efforts are dedicated to immortality research? I think your hypothetical reflects more than anything a poor understanding of how humans actually behave and the kinds of moral intuitions people are mostly running on. I would propose that a huge number of people would see nothing incongruous in holding a funeral for a miscarriage while simultaneously not donating 50% of their income to R&D on how to reduce the number of fertilized eggs that fail to attach.

Ultimately I find health of the mother concerns to be valid, but I can understand why some would worry about the category being stretched too far. Beyond that, I think abortion is very popular and the best case real world policy I could hope for would be something like, safe, legal, and rare.

And of course, I am a hypocrite who purchased a morning after pill for my girlfriend one time after a broken condom, such is life.

Oh, I didn't really get that it was supposed to be writing consultancy specifically. I feel like the two main complaints about woke in video games that I read here on TheMotte are with ugly female character models, and then random woke signaling (trans characters, pride flags), specifically that it can be hard to have anti-woke mods that remove such things because the mod hosting sites are all ideologically captured.

Still I think that woke ideas can and do make the 'writing' in video games worse in a number of ways.

One example might be illustrated by comparing Mass Effect and BG3, both being games that do not have 'great' writing in the general sense, but I think woke impulses make BG3 a worse story in specific ways. Mshep is far and away the most common play through, and Garrus (who can't be romanced by Mshep) might be the most popular video game companions of all time. Meanwhile people had to make mods for BG3 to turn off the entire approval gain function because it is literally impossible to be friends with any of your companions, they are all romantic interests who tend to get very sexual and often physical with you from the very first approval cutscene. This does not mean that any given scene has worse writing, or that the overall plot is worse, and yet, I think the story as a whole is weaker because of the inability for your character to have deeper friendships.

Then there are the generic ways that woke writing is bad, as it often does things that are just broadly considered bad writing. Being preachy, making the subtext text, and breaking suspension of disbelief by importing modern (American) issues into settings and situations where they do not organically fit the story.

There is a sense in which all video game writing is bad so woke isn't the thing stopping video games from being literary masterpieces, but I am not sure how relevant that is compared with the general complaint that woke makes things worse.

This seems to be hyper focused on writing, which is odd because a lot of the most popular games ever made have basically no writing at all. Surely video game quality is not singularly determined by writing quality, I would contend that writing quality is actually pretty low on the priority list of things that matter when determining game quality.

Japan is a weird example to bring up when a manga like Demon Slayer can out sell the entire American comic industry. Demon Slayer is no The Sun Also Rises, but Japan is clearly doing something right. They are a lot less woke than the west, and are probably the second most powerful cultural exporter behind the US, Korea might be close, but they don't necessarily do better on the woke dimension.

DE feels way more leftist than woke, but it does have some woke elements.

Yes, the vast majority of video games have been made by white/asian men including (all?) of the greats.

I think this is mostly just that you are using a scale for evaluating writing such that 95% of writing is all crammed together in the 'shit' category and then acting like it can't be further differentiated. Shit contains multitudes.

Lae'zel has that wonderful teef-ling bit that is probably the most endearing character interaction in the whole game.

is an unstated up to this point

I am wrong here, you have expressed your human supremist views multiple times. Rather I would say I was confused on the exact shape of those views and what the underlying reasoning was, but here the implication is that there is not an 'underlying' reason, and it is explicitly the human vs non-human distinction that is important. I think this was confusing for me because when I think about assigning moral worth to things other than humans I do it primarily by thinking about how human-like, the thing is. So for example, I care more about chimps>dogs>birds>bugs, etc (in the abstract, I have way more actual contact with dogs but if I was reasoning about hypotheticals where different types of animals are being tortured I think torturing a chimp is worse than torturing a dog, and both are bad). I have not really seen a clear explanation for why this line of moral reasoning would not be applicable to artificial life in the abstract. You seem to hold that just, categorically, it doesn't/shouldn't. Does that sound right?

Again, for the argument here we are assuming that you are convinced the AI is really, meaningfully capable of feeling and experience suffering, not just that some AI ethics person is convinced that it is.

Or at least, it was that position, which I think is a fair reading of the quote/your post, that I was trying to engage with.

Your answer to this is, no you actually don't think they can meaningfully suffer in a humanlike way, and almost everything is resolved.

I have no idea how trying to tease this out of you constitutes a 'trick question' when your answer is an unstated up to this point tautology.

I will maintain that I think my reading of your post (and subsequent posts) is reasonable, and actually far closer to any sort of plain English reading of your post, than your reply here.

If they are capable of suffering, I 1) expect it to be minimized and/or made invisible by design, and 2) in any case will not be stirred by it in the way I am not stirred by the occasional tired whirring my 9 year old HDD emits when it loads things.

My reading, AI can suffer in a morally relevant way, but I don't care.

Your 'intended' meaning, AI are incapable of suffering in a morally relevant way.

As a brief aside, I have repeatedly at this point stated why I actually engaged with your post in the first place. The moral idea that I thought was interesting enough to ask questions about was the idea that the purposeful creation of a thing informs the moral relevance of that thing with regard to its purpose. I already admitted a while ago that I probably read too much into your post and you do not actually have a strong, creator derived moral position, but it was that position that all three of my questions in my first reply were trying to engage with. While my opening sentence attempted to frame my reply around that idea. My second reply was largely in response to your answer to the third question, in which you seemed to be saying that creating and enslaving a sub-species of intelligent creatures is fine and just a default result of a human first morality, which also seemed pretty extreme to me.

I am sorry if I keep bringing up sex, but it seems particularly germane when we are talking about the moral implications of 'intelligent sex robots'. I get it, your position is that they are not actually meaningfully 'intelligent', but I struggle to see how the accusation is an unwarranted stretch for someone who thinks they could be meaningfully intelligent. Especially given my interpretation of your position as outlined above.

Maybe also relevant, I was not at all asking about the actual state of the technology or predicting that morally relevant cat-bots are around the corner. I assumed my, genetically generating an entire slave species, hypothetical, would clearly put this into the, reasoning about the morality of human-like intelligence, camp, and out of the, hypothesizing about near term technology camp.

If you saw in me someone who thinks Human like AI is near, then I must disappoint. I am also not an AI doomer, and personally would consider myself closest to an AI accelerationist. I have no sympathy with AI ethicist and little sympathy for AI safety. I just don't see any reason why I should preclude the possibility of AI achieving an internal state such that I would extend to them moral considerations such that I would object to them being enslaved/abused/killed.

I am not sure what you think I am driving at beyond what I have stated.

I am fine with vague vibes based moral intuitions that are fuzzy around corner cases. I did not see you as having such a position. You seemed to be very strongly of the opinion that there was no evidence that you could ever see and no capability that an AI could ever have that would result in you ascribing it a moral worth such that keeping it in a state of sexual slavery would be wrong.

If they are capable of suffering, I 1) expect it to be minimized and/or made invisible by design, and 2) in any case will not be stirred by it in the way I am not stirred by the occasional tired whirring my 9 year old HDD emits when it loads things.

This, feels like a pretty hard line rule, and I wanted to try and understand just how generalizable this was, or how contingent it was on the various relevant categories, such as, human, non-human, biological, non-biological , the 'created for a purpose' axis that you introduced, etc.

I am not sure why uplift is beyond the pale in a conversation about AI capable of suffering, but if super smart chimps are off the table, what about aliens with similar intelligence to humans? I suspect that you would find enslaving intelligent, loving, crying, songwriting, dream having, despair feeling alien life forms morally wrong even if they are not morally equivalent to humans? Would they hold a different (higher?) moral position than dogs?

How many of those capabilities does an AI need to have before it would be wrong to enslave it? How important is the biological/synthetic distinction?

Again, for the argument here we are assuming that you are convinced the AI is really, meaningfully capable of feeling and experience suffering, not just that some AI ethics person is convinced that it is.

Or at least, it was that position, which I think is a fair reading of the quote/your post, that I was trying to engage with.

I was not specifically interested in the pedo/age aspect of 'child' but the sense in which a person 'creates' another person.

I really was trying to dig into the idea that because humans 'created' something that means something morally. For example, is there a moral difference between two men going into a futuristic IVF clinic and genetically designing a child and growing it in an artificial womb for the purpose of abusing it (waiting till it is 18 years old). Compared with two men genetically engineering an uplifted animal with similar mental faculties to a human for the purpose of abusing it (waiting till it is an 'adult'). For me, if 'creation' is a relevant term, these two things are indistinguishable on that front, they are distinguishable on the, one thing is a human and the other is not, which seems to be the actual point of consideration for you.

The dog fucking was a word replace for android cat girl fucking, dogs and android cat girls seem to be similarly positioned as, not human. I am not sure why you view dog fucking as 'degenerate' behavior given the moral principles you have laid out.

I saw two different moral concepts gestured at in your post, one being human supremacy, the other was a vague sense that specifically because a machine is created by a person to be used by a person, this means that even if it is capable of being abused we are not morally wrong for abusing it.

So I was trying to dig into this idea that there is some sort of connection between the act of 'creating' something and the moral weight of abusing said thing. However with this clarification, I guess I was simply reading too much into your post.

Would you be opposed to someone keeping a dog locked in their basement for the purpose of fucking it? Would you consider that person a bad person? Would you be for or against your society trying to construct laws to prevent people from chaining dogs in their basement and fucking them?

I do not understand the moral relevance of "built for humans by humans".

If I clarify that I am creating a child because I want a slave, does that change the moral calculus of enslaving my child?

If aliens came around and proved that they had seeded earth with DNA 4 billion years ago with a hidden code running in the background to ensure the creation of modern humans, and they made us to serve them as slaves, is it your position that they are totally morally justified in enslaving humanity?

What if humanity is the alien in the hypothetical and we seeded a planet with biological life to create a sub-species for the purpose of enslaving them?

The 90s were an interesting transitional period and personally I feel like a lot of what we see there was both reactionary and sort of shallow. Falling crime and the end of the Cold War, the End of History, created a world without struggle or conflict (at least for someone living in a western democracy). At the same times the last vestiges of religion in education were being defeated, and there was a clear, but also very boring future lining up before us. We just use science to improve everything and make everything better for forever and all the major problems have been solved or are solvable and we are on the path to solve them.

A brief aside, my best friend in high school would go out in the middle of the night, sneak around in the employees only sections of buildings, try to get onto roofs and such, smoked, did harder drugs, and stole stuff. While he was lower-class SES, he had a 'stable' home life and didn't steal out of 'necessity'. He did it because he was afflicted with a profound sense of ennui. He could see the future laid out before him, and he could not see any purpose or meaning in any of it. The supreme banality of a modern existence.

We were the kids who got asked in 3rd grade what we would do when we were president. We were the kids told to be astronauts and scientists and change the world, and we had finally gotten old enough to realize what a great lie all that was. Of course grunge was popular, and gansta rap spread like wildfire through suburbia. It was the wild desperate thrashing of an animal slowly suffocating under the crushing weight of distributed nihilism. Office Space, to use the modern parlance, was a mood.

Eventually you get to generation Z, enough time on the experiential treadmill and their solution was to just reinterpret what it means to be in danger, what it means to hurt, so they could struggle again, so they could fight against something 'real'.

Another film from 1999 expressed the sentiment well,

But I believe that, as a species, human beings define their reality through suffering and misery. The perfect world was a dream that your primitive cerebrum kept trying to wake up from