Bombadil
7d ago
I think it depends in how strict we are with our definitions of master morality. If saving children is considered neutral, having possessions is virtuous, and losing possessions means losing virtue then yeah, you are right. But consider another perspective: You will not save every child on earth, but you will save every kid in your local community. This way you are perhaps still losing a lot of possessions. Your nice suit, the money you had in your wallet when jumping into the pond, maybe you invest in people to watch the shores and so on. But in return, you become a pillar of the community. Someone that people look up to because you embody a kind of intrinsic worth. Meanwhile, your community is enriched by the presence of young people which over time can make you more virtuous. They might buy stuff from you and make you richer. You might compete with them and win.
Same goes for the virtuous warlord. From one perspective, the virtue comes from your conquests through slaughter. From another, the virtue is in your ability to best others. In that case, the virtue is there whether you choose to fight or not. If there is no just cause for a war, then you can surely use your abilities in different ways that benefit your people and still shows how virtuous you are in that sense.
Bombadil
20d ago
The effectiveness of agree-and-amplify is context dependent though. It makes sense in dating because the two of you are not discussing the merits of whatever insult the woman throws at you. You are either showing how you handle a curveball, or you are simply both joking around and having fun by making absurd statements.
I would argue it makes a lot less sense when one party is entirely serious about the insult. If the girl genuinely believes that big truck = small dick, agreeing and amplifying will just make her think she is correct.
A debate setting is serious, and it is expected that both parties argue in good faith. In that situation, agree and amplify will either convince the viewers that the accusations are correct or show them that you do not care about the rules of the debate. If one party defects this way, then the intellectual value is pretty much lost. From my perspective, either Nick Fuentes is an actual racist or he is so obtuse that I cannot know what his views are, because at any point he might be joking.
So the only thing he manages to do is show of his authority or his frame, by showing the viewers that he is composed even when under pressure while managing to throw off the frame of his opponent. I admit this is a good goal to have in a debate, but it doesn't do much for me personally when he otherwise comes off as either racist or untrustworthy.
Bombadil
27d ago
I think a lot of people were taught growing up that society is run by a set of rules and if you follow those, if you are a good person in that sense, then you will be rewarded and life will work out. The realization that the rules are not what you were taught, if any hard rules at all even exist, is crushing. Especially if you believe that Bonnie Blue is not contributing much to society at all, even compared to the warehouse worker.
Bombadil
1mo ago
There must be other reasons. I sincerely doubt the average man is that paranoid about false accusations. Most people assume that tragedies always happen to other people, not themselves and I don't see why this should be different for accusations of pedophilia.
Internet commenters tend to be a lot more anxious than ordinary people and thus you see the false accusation points a lot online. But "internet commenters" is not exactly the group I would imagine as volunteering to quite literally touch grass regardless. So the answer should probably be found elsewhere.
Bombadil
1mo ago
Cyrus is elected as king, then performs the exact roles one would expect of a king. The son of Artembares regrets his decision and decides to try and change the game by casting doubt on the king.
I would think that the latter kid shows far more agency than the first, who simply follows the rules.
Now, what did the kids not named Cyrus learn from this game? Did the game make them more agentic or less? After electing the king, didn't they simply follow his commands?
I would suggest that in your example you are not teaching agency to the kids. You are teaching them to fall in line and follow a strict hierarchy that once set cannot be broken. You are creating one king and a legion of servants.
Bombadil
1mo ago
The question is if the AI will reliably do what Grandma wants it to. When she asks it to change the font size, will it do so, or will it suggest she just keeps the current font size because this is the "recommended" setting and thus the best? How much will she have to argue with it to get it to be actually useful, given that she is definitely not a prompt engineer?
You also better hope that your tech illiterate users are still tech literate enough to not see the AI as an actual person with feelings and real ability to learn and grow over time. Otherwise, they might believe everything it tells them, completely uncritically.
Besides, there is the issue that this solution, if it works, will just make people even less tech literate than they already are. Computers are a huge aspect of peoples lives. Why is Microsoft not making documentation good and readily available enough for people to learn how to become proficient at using it?
Bombadil
1mo ago
Oh, I see. Yeah I suppose that is another instance to lay on the pile. I wonder if it would have given a similar answer last year, or if it has been altered to not offend the leadership.
Bombadil
1mo ago
The examples i was thinking of were Mecha hitler, Deepseek refusing to talk about the Tiannanmen square massacre, and Google making it impossible to generate white people with Gemini.
Bombadil
1mo ago
In my experience, the environmentalist concerns plus the association with billionaires means that the vast majority of left-wingers I have met dislike AI and hope it falls apart. On the other hand, people sure do like using it, so I guess it is possible that the hatred is in some cases only skin-deep.
Microsoft is trying to transform Windows into an agentic OS. Apparently, this means Injecting copilot into the operating system to the point where you can just ask it how to do something and it tells you exactly how to do it. Just follow its instructions, no need to know anything yourself.
I guess the argument is that it will make Windows easier to use for non-technical people. Of course, there is a multitude of problems with this:
The culture war angle:
The left absolutely hates AI. It is built by multi-billionaires looking to replace our jobs so they don't have to pay us and can take all the planet's resources for themselves. Every time AI is added to consumer products, the consumer is increasingly placed in the control of its owner. AI is known to be biased, and we have already seen the tech giants attempt to inject their own bias into them. So not only are we seeing a development in the wrong direction, we are becoming increasingly vulnerable to lies and manipulation by the most powerful in society. This is without even going into the monumental costs of training the models, and the opportunity cost from not spending the resources on other areas that would be more directly helpful to humans.
The AI doomers are afraid of AI takeover. This seems like a step towards that. A chief argument against the AI doomer scenarios has been something like "who would be dumb enough to place AI in control of key systems?" Well, Windows, apparently. While it is true that in their add, it is still the user making the final decision as to which settings to choose, it seems to me that a super-intelligent AI would be capable of manipulating most users into choosing exactly the settings best suited for the AI to manipulate them further. Besides, if this becomes a commercial success, then more is sure to follow. At least, you would expect Google and Apple to follow up, making all the mainstream OS's infected with the kind of intelligence that could ultimately destroy us.
The AI skeptics believe that AI is not going to improve much in the near future. As such, this is a misstep of moronic proportions. You even see it in the add: The user asks the AI to increase his font size. It suggests he changes the scale setting, which is currently at 150%. When asked what percentage he should change it to, the AI responds with 150%, as this is the recommended setting. The result? Nothing changes, because the setting is kept at default. Wait no, the user went against the AI's wishes and picked 200%, seemingly hoping that you would not spot this stupid mishap. If the actual marketing material is damaged by AI hallucination, how bad is the final product going to be? Are you going to have to argue with your AI until it finally does what you want? This is probably going to push more power users over to Linux, as the agent does not give them the fine control over their systems that they want. Meanwhile, it might actually make the experience worse for Grandma, who is gaslit into picking suboptimal settings for herself by an unhelpful machine.
Finally, if you are concerned about AI and mental health, you have probably heard of AI-induced psychosis. The usage of chatbots by a small minority of vulnerable people has apparently fed into their delusions, resulting in psychosis-related behavior. An agentic OS that at best requires the user to opt out of AI functionality, places the chatbot right in the user's face. While a therapist today could instruct her patients to avoid seeking out the chatbots, that is hardly possible when the main way to use your operating system is through an LLM. If copilot is on by default, or if other ways to use the system is slowly deprecated making it harder to use without the bot, I would expect this change to result in more cases of diagnosable mental health conditions.
Bombadil
1mo ago
Are there any pre-modern wars where a soldier could be sent out to the front line, and then 2-3 years later in the war, find himself in almost the exact same spot, despite regular bursts of fighting?
Apparently yes, according to this guy: https://youtube.com/watch?v=XQQy5V0jOkQ
The siege of Candia lasted 21 years. Enough time for someone to be born inside the walls, grow up, and start having children of his own. Turns out, medieval castles were very hard to take.
Bombadil
1mo ago
Why do you believe the EU is broke? It is the second largest economy in the world, containing multiple countries with very high GDP's. It seems more likely that it was not a lack of money that caused the hesitancy to spend more on military equipment, but rather that they did not want to divert money from social services, schools, hospitals, and other government expenditures. It is worth remembering that the EU countries generally care a lot more about welfare, pensions and so on than the US. Making these services worse present a huge election risk for the leaders, even if the countries at large could technically afford it.
Furthermore, the EU struggles with making big decisions due to needing a majority of member countries to agree, with some decisions requiring unanimous agreement. As long as a sizeable amount of members don't view the war as a territorial threat, action will necessarily be limited to individual member countries.
Even so, the EU members have largely picked up the slack from the US in monetary terms. The real issue is with actually getting their hands on equipment in a timely manner. As everyone is rearming at the same time, there is preciously little materiel available to actually send. No amount of money can magick guns out of nowhere. Production takes time.
Generally you paint a very dire picture. So in addition to questioning your narrative of "EU poor", I also wonder if any of what you are writing here is correct? You write that newspaper's generally lie, then immediately quote a tabloid without establishing why this one speaks the truth. The rest of your sources are a mixture of newspapers (which you have yourself said are untrustworthy), chatbot conversations (probably trained on social media and newspapers, and known to be politically biased by their training data), and random tweets ("seal of the apocalypse" doesn't exactly sound like a trustworthy source). Without you establishing the credibility of what you cite, why should I believe anything you have to say?
Bombadil
3mo ago
He does a lot of exaggerating to get the point across. In the real world, societies were not created on isolated islands. There was cultural and biological spillover through trade, wars, and conquest. So you wouldn't expect the differences to be quite this stark.
More egregiously, I don't think the implication holds. Europeans are not facing immigration from native Americans or isolated jungle tribes. The "problematic" immigrants are mostly from the middle east. Descendants of mighty empires that once contributed heavily to both science and warfare. Those are people that should by all accounts be just as capable of advanced civilization as anyone else. I guess the US is getting a lot of immigrants from Mexico though. I don't know if the argument holds more true for them.
Meanwhile Europeans, or their American descendants, are hardly genetically wired to be peaceful. Look at history before world war one, and what you find is heavily religious, warmongering, intelligent opportunists and supremacists. People who took no issue conquering those who are weaker and erasing their culture in favor of their own.
If anything, there is an argument that the western colonizers were the actual people that this post is warning about. Aggressive, low-trust opportunists who would start stealing, conquering, and enslaving indigenous people as soon as they reached a critical mass of manpower or weaponry, leaving only the most hardy and lucky ones behind.
So master morality in the end optimizes for the things you own, which means celebrating actions that we consider immoral. Because that is often the fastest way to own as much stuff as possible. Fair enough.
What I really want is not to bring that back then; What you describe seems like society would be regressing by centuries. Instead, I want to hold people and institutions to some kind of standard. Celebrate the people who put in effort, look down on those who do not. Surely that much is possible. In that case, what is needed is for society to agree on a new moral system. One that incentivizes effort and celebrates success and beauty, while still punishing those who gain wealth by trampling others.
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