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Culture War Roundup for the week of April 17, 2023

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Yes identity is highly contingent. This doesn't make it less simple.

The predictive power is extremely straightforward. If you see someone identify some way they are going to pursue being that way until they are deflected from being that way by outside forces.

There is still room here for many different ideological positions on the matter. Such as which methods of moulding and shaping identity are valid.

Its just the ethics of providing training data to and prompt engineering self-aware human minds.

The ethical positions around this do tend to be ideological.

The conservative parent wants maximum control of training data and prompt engineering.

The liberal tends to err on the side of 'it's unethical to censor the training set or mold people with violence until proven necessary'.

If you see someone identify some way they are going to pursue being that way until they are deflected from being that way by outside forces.

This seems to water it down from the lofty heights of post-singularity musings. Instead, it sounds just like regular, boring old desires/wants. Those things could be said to be just in the brain; this is at least a philosophical position that is plenty defensible and plenty defended by many thinkers. But then we already have a long history of thinking on the concept of boring wants/desires and how they can be distinguished from identity, the "I" that is thinking in the classic cogito. In fact, classical thinkers have even considered a whole taxonomy of multiple orders of wants/desires, some of which could satisfy this condition while not being.. uh, identified.. as the "I" of identity.