site banner
Advanced search parameters (with examples): "author:quadnarca", "domain:reddit.com", "over18:true"

Showing 25 of 111251 results for

domain:natesilver.net

Anthropomorphising animals is natural, it’s probably fundamental to the way humans see and comprehend the world around us, it far predates civilization. We are animals and they exist in the context of our shared environment.

In the same way that we assign some moral value to human strangers far away (even if it is less than we assign to ourselves, our families, etc), we assign some moral value to non-human animals too.

Just as with people, their behavior is obviously part of this. Even independently from their interactions with humans (a dog that bites vs a dog that doesn’t), those ‘closer’ to us intellectually (dolphins, elephants) and both intellectually and physically (great apes) have greater moral valence because we know that they have greater reasoning faculty, and therefore that the kind of moral standards we apply to young or intellectually impaired humans might begin to apply.

General free will debate acknowledged, it is fairer to describe a chimpanzee as ‘cruel’ than a mallard. The dismissive might say that each is acting within its nature when it does something nasty, but the same is true of humans. With greater reasoning ability comes more understanding of consequence and empathy, which is seems likely many of these animals have in some form.

827.04 Contributing to the delinquency of a minor seems to apply to dirty old men offering teenage girls cash for sex-adjacent acts.

home-cooked French-Mexican fusion food made with wild game

I would like to humbly submit a request for you to share a recipe at some point.

On one hand, you and 4bpp give accurate and reasonable reasons to oppose anthromorphizing animals by applying human ethics to them.

On the other hand, topical dolphin memes.

So. Many. Topical. Dolphin. Memes.

Dean's official photo unrelated.

Why? No matter how successful a company has been in the past, any dip can be a long-term re-evaluation or even the start of the way to bankruptcy. Especially if you consider the average person asking for investing advice, thinking they can reliably tell apart an irrational panic that will soon be corrected, or a genuine problem that will have long-term impact seems foolish to me.

On the other hand, index funds can't really go bankcrupt. At most, it just stays lower than expected for an extended period of time before going up again. The risk/reward for buying into the dip seems much better here for the average low-knowledge investor.

I second @4bpp - this anthropomorphising of animals is and pretty much always will be extremely suspect. Mallards are one of these infamous species that supposedly participate in gang rapes - several males will pursue a female and attempt to forcibly mate with her, and as a result males' penises can shoot out with surprising speed, whereas females' vaginas will be corkscrew-shaped so as to make it more difficult to mate. Clearly something to feel disgusted about, right?

Except that female mallards will covertly elicit this behaviour by intentionally flying over the territory of other males and initiating a chase, letting them fight over her, and the corkscrew turns of female mallards' vaginas actually are meant to let her influence the males which get to fertilise her egg.

Do mallards deserve death for this? Does the concept of "rape trauma" exist in such a species? Should the very emotionally-laden human concept of rape even apply? If it doesn't, how can you even tell what is rape and what is not in the animal kingdom? Animals in many cases are basically alien species and should be treated as such.

The lost the intra-right culture war - BADLY, which means that if the right wins the big Culture War then the suit-and-tie crowd don't get the prize.

This is tied into actually dressing well being correlated with education/IQ/high-status white-collar work and so becoming left-coded as a result of the latest iteration of the Sort. Hence @die_workwear. The same is true of any high standard that requires consistent moderate effort to maintain - increasingly even ones that are explicitly right-wing like regular church attendance. (The most MAGA demographic is people who tick the Evangelical box on the census but only darken a church door at Christmas and Easter.)

In the world where MAGA have won the culture war, only faggots and an dwindling minority of aging churchladies wear tailored clothes or talk in complete sentences. Idiocracy was non-partisan, but in the current year Richard Hanania thought is correct on how the Brawndo-drinkers vote.

Yeah, consigning them to death over that seems like a pretty wanton projection of human values onto animals where there is little evidence that they would or should share them. By that standard, we would have nothing to say back if AI/aliens/some bizarro tribe of humans condemned our civilisation for some unknown-unknown moral failing such as encouraging paternal investment in daughters, or not engaging in performative child sacrifice as in that old Yudkowsky story.

What's a "chit"? I think that's an Americanism.

Oh damn, it looks like a month ago chutes stopped being unlimited due to abuse. The deepseek api is already very cheap (and yeah, faster) so I switched to it for insane rp, I should have guessed it couldn't last and checked.

Dolphins practise gang rape.

Your classification of honorable/dishonorable is totally foreign to me. Out of all the animals you list, I would have classified dolphins as the most "honorable". Is there really a major culture/ethnicity that thinks eating dolphins is okay but eating octopus is bad? It's hard for me to imagine.

I'm 6'2" and was 155 for a long time. I look skeletal in those pictures. I don't look much better in later photographs where I was 170. That's a 20-22 BMI.

BMI is a flawed metric to begin with, but especially so for tall people. And the medical establishment knows that, too, because it's pretty obvious. If you take any random population and plot their weight vs. their height, you won't get a height^2 parabola as your best fit. It's much closer to height^2.5. Which is entirely unsurprising to me, I never understood why anyone would assume that width/depth of the human body correlate strictly linear with height...

But classic BMI has momentum now, people know it and understand it. Most of them don't carry a lot of muscle, and aren't significantly more than a standard deviations from the mean in height. So I guess it's fine.

Still, using the waist-to-height ratio instead is probably an easy fix, and gives more reliable results, even for tall and/or muscular people.

There's a limit per day, you can hit it. Also the speed is quite slow. Really not good for chatting.

(though I have yet to find a good way to medicate its big brother R1)

WDYM, florid schizowriting. I've seen R1 do it, but not reliably.

Uncensored..what are you talking about? How is it a 'first' ?

People have been gooning to Deepseek since it was released.

https://old.reddit.com/r/JanitorAI_Official/comments/1ij1d3w/how_to_hopefully_use_deepseek/

lmao thanks for the link, it brings me joy to know I wasn't the only one who immediately thought to subject a simulacrum of Yud to the topic of android catgirls.

I wouldn't mind perversely optimizing your utility function uwu

thanks I hate it

I don't think many people would disagree with the idea that it would be great to have all sorts of power, but I'm not sure I see that as addressing the issue raised? The question isn't so much about raw ability as it is about the sorts of life-contexts that make those lives morally worthwhile.

As empowered posthumans we probably could entertain ourselves endlessly with exotic video games, but then, today people are entirely capable of entertaining themselves endlessly with video games. Posthumanity adds nothing to the moral question. Is it a good life if you dedicate your life to video games? On what terms could such a life be considered good? Does it make a difference whether we're talking about gaming as competition (i.e. devoting your life to pro gaming, to excellence in a particular competitive endeavour), gaming as entertainment (i.e. something like a streamer, the gamer as professional entertainer for an audience), or just gaming for pure private enjoyment? I think the moral questions one asks there are the same regardless of whether we're talking about you or I today or whether we're talking about superpowerful virtual demi-gods.

Among those few other intelligent species, there are honorable animals and dishonourable ones. Honorable animals are both intelligent and have moral worth. Dolphins are dishonorable. Orangutans are honourable. Chimpanzees are dishonorable. Elephants are honorable. Humans are mostly honorable, especially for omnivores.

Among the meat animals, octopuses are morally neutral, although they are regular cannibals, and I have no qualms with eating an animal that eats its own kind. That said, I consider octopus the least justifiable regularly consumed meat to eat. Likewise, pigs (including wild boar) are often honorable, but are also cannibals at high frequency, and if even they eat each other all the time, then so can I.

Most other meat (and other) animals are not intelligent, and so lack the same moral valence in either direction.

Those number are just bonkers, and makes reasonable people want to just write off environmentalists (if true).

I was personally just making up high numbers, but over the long term (meaning I make no prediction about if it will be 5 years from now or 500), I do believe these things to be true.

But despite the failure of environmentalists to implement their preferred policies, capitalism has brought down carbon emissions in the US quite a bit. So this part is just them screaming that reality is wrong. And actually, its easy to use the market to monetize reducing carbon usage. You put a carbon tax at a per ton basis and then you cut taxes elsewhere to make sure that the carbon tax doesn't cripple the economy. Notably when such a proposal was made in Washington State, environmentalists were part of the coalition that killed the proposal. The fact that they have this specific bundle of beliefs appears problematic for your thesis. The central planning thesis is actually strengthened here.

That's easy to square. Capitalism created the pollution, particularly during the industrial revolution when pollution was largely ignored, then government (not capitalism) intervened to force companies to change. Having government push companies to reduce pollution is their preferred policy and was enacted, if not to the extent that they want.

Reading your link, it sounds to me like they believed that if they killed this bill they could get a new, more aggressive version pushed. Progressives letting the perfect be the enemy of the good is nothing new.

Valid to an extent. But, what if this is just another irrational part of their bundle of beliefs. That being that being an environmentalist and anti-capitalist is also highly correlated with being...anti-white/western? Perhaps all these beliefs are in conflict for achieving each seperate stated goal, except as to the part where all the policies trend toward...more central planning.

The reason I'm a Democrat but not a progressive is because I think that progressives are somewhat good at identifying problems (if oversensitive) but bad at solving them. It's the same personality trait that lead to becoming an environmentalist that lead to every other cause du jour.

I don't think brainstorming solutions to problems is bad, I just think they tend to weight real-life problems high and problems with their hypothetical alternatives low. They aren't central planning for the sake of central planning, they're central planning because it is the most obvious instrument that could potentially do all the things they feel must be done.

Lots? There are a bunch of large subreddits dedicated to these beliefs like /r/fuckcars, and the mods of those are typically powermods that also control super large subs like /r/politics and /r/askreddit.

True, I was not thinking of fuckcars. I think I'd only really heard the name once. A quick scan seems to me that their primary issue with cars is the number of people who die in car accidents. I disagree, but that does sound like a motivation that cars are harmful rather than a motivation that because they don't like cars that nobody should have them.

Wild animal suffering is one of the most discussed topics in ethics, it’s not like it’s a dead zone for academic philosophy.

Of course, if America has an ideology, it is the ideology of the American dream. The idea that an immigrant who arrives with little more than the clothes they are wearing can through hard work thrive in the land of capitalism and freedom.

It’s hard for me to see this as other than a placebo ideology – an ideology against any common ideas, a standard against standards. It has no unifying power except that of money. Upward mobility for immigrants is a great thing. But it is not the only thing, and it shouldn’t replace the American heritage.

I remember a clip of a TV interview with a black Alabaman and member of the Sons of Confederate Veterans during the George Floyd protests. He was counter-protesting demands that Confederate monuments and symbols be torn down. He had been adopted by a white family; their heritage became his heritage, and he was defending it. He’d become a true member of a family into which he was not born. But it’s not as though he had somehow ceased to be black. I think about this often as an analogy for immigration.

Some nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century immigrants went further in this direction than I could ever ask – for example, refusing to pass on their birth tongues once they’d learned enough English to raise their children in it; I don’t think I could or would have done the same in their shoes. Or consider the spirited embrace of Columbus Day in some Italian-American communities, because it emphasizes the intersection of the Italian and American heritages.

We could do worse than to prioritize those immigrants willing to respect the culture and heritage of the society they are joining.

Bob Jones is gonna come in extremely handy in the current administration v university dustup.

And if we embrace that conclusion, does that tell us anything about what we think about morality for human beings? You may, if you wish, insert some science-fictional speculation here about whether it would be good for humans to be pampered by more powerful beings, perhaps artificial intelligence, in the way that we have the capacity to pamper rescued animals. Is our own case different from that of the animals?

I think it would be great to have nigh limitless wealth and power. If I want adventure, excitement and risk, there would be all kinds of ways to enjoy myself with elaborate, exotic video games. I think that an aesthetic critique of a post-singularitarian future has crept into people's conceptions, people imagining a kind of skinnyfat, sedentary, drooling heroin addict with tubes in his arm and a VR-headset fused to his skull in a perpetual high. Or a glorified pet micromanaged by Windows pop-ups.

That need not be the case. If it goes well (a very big if), it could be the exact opposite. Perfect, posthuman fitness. Motion and energy beyond anything anyone has ever experienced, variety of experiences beyond our conception. Pure organic joy. Reality remade physically as if it were mere code. De facto deities with ever-shrinking limitations.

The difference between a Tasmanian devil and a human is that the latter is worth more and provides. Humans contribute to humanity whereas most animals do not. There's no obligation to defang lions for the sake of deer because deer aren't doing anything for us. I think that real morality is about reciprocity and potential reciprocity rather than suffering.

On another occasion I was assigned to a GP who was an Indian woman. I went in for one physical and it was one of the most demeaning experiences of my life. Refused to make contact, would barely look at me. She ignored my concerns and fixated on a single skin thing that she immediately referred to an associated specialist for a 10 minute outpatient procedure that billed my insurance as a "surgery". I'm sure she is very good at gaming the system to make number go up, but I'm never booking another appointment with someone who considers me an untouchable, and if I could press a button to have her denaturalized and deported I'd hit it twice.

Are you Indian? Or did she just take you for a lower class person from another race and hate you for it?