domain:eigenrobot.substack.com
The_Nybbler
Does not have a yacht
1hr ago
We have to allow boys to make AI porn of their similarly-aged high school classmates (yes, I see what you did there) because we have freedom of expression in this country. We can resist being stampeded into doing it anyway because "vulnerable women" (or girls) by noting that women (and girls) ain't angels either.
Tomato
1hr ago
We have to allow men to make AI porn of their underaged high school classmates because sometimes women do bad things too? And what are the highly destructive things you have in mind?
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
2hr ago
They didn't even worry about the bodies.
The FBI Behavioral Analysis Unit reviews the case files to establish patterns and idiosyncrasies in the the actions carried out. They do victim profiling, some demographic analysis, and comparisons with other, similar crimes. Their output product is a "psychological profile" of a suspect.
This is compelling because it plays to the trope of "getting inside the mind of a killer" and because it's more or less the backbone for a lot of serial killer related fiction (the Hannibal Lecter canon is a prime example).
The downside is that it might all kind of be bullshit. As my first post outlined, a lot of the time, the profile feels specific because it's long and includes interesting details. If you zoom out a little, however, your realize that the profiles are actually incredibly broad and mostly representative of the demographics of the locality.
Here's a fun example:
"He's probably young. 20-30 at the most. Takes physical fitness very seriously and is also generally highly disciplined. He has a set daily routine and trains with weapons multiple times per week. While able to control himself at work, he'll sometimes let loose on the weekends and drink heavily and/or engage in other risky activities. He can function in a group but is mostly a loner."
Great! But the body was found near a military base. You have just described 80% of the males on the military base. You are not helping.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
2hr ago
This is a classic Motte comment. Demonstrates the complexity and interdependencies of a problem, relative tradeoffs, real world likely impacts and outcomes, and doesn't use any cliche argumentation, sloganeering, etc.
So, of course, my only response is: Defund The Police because Blue Lives Matter.
RenOS
Dadder than dad
2hr ago
On the biological level, paternal age is just weakly associated with birth defects. You have something like a 1.3-1.5x increase of autism spectrum disorder (note, this includes high-functioning individuals!) for older dads (>40), which is already somewhat cherry-picked since there is plenty of disorders not associated with paternal age. For comparison, the risk of major chromosomal disorders such as Down Syndrome are roughly around 10x for age 40, 40x for age 45, and 150x for age 50 (not to mention that becoming pregnant at all becomes more difficult, and no you should never rely on IVF). And if your child gets one of these, it's pretty much guaranteed to be somewhere between low or non-functioning.
But I'll still strongly advice for you to start with it ASAP. Having young kids is absolutely exhausting, and vice versa it's lots of fun being physically active with them once they reach an age where they can engage in typical outdoors hobbies. Both you and your kids will be much happier if you're younger.
In addition, most women want a husband who is slightly older than them, but not by too much. This is especially relevant for you if you're as autistic as the base level mottizen. Sure women love the older gentleman stereotype, but as a default you shouldn't be overly confident to fit the bill. If we assume that you want to have 3 kids, spaced decently apart (ca 3 years) with a low risk of major disorders (<35 maternal age), your partner should ideally be ~29 when you're starting to have kids. If you want to have some time to get to know her, this is more like 25 when you start dating. This is already a slightly awkwardly high age difference with your current age. You're probably not be able to pull off the ideal case anyway, but no reason to make it unnecessarily hard for yourself.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
2hr ago
Zero problem with commitment, not worried about actually meeting and dating a girl (have done this many times, a few that looked like they could go all the way).
My opinion, unfortunately, is that marriage is fundamentally broken in the west. I see this in my own laptop class PMC constantly where the pair got married on nothing more than the basis of "it seemed like the time!" Even if they don't end in divorce - which is common - the day to day subtle resentment between the partners is really astonishing. The hyper fixation on individual achievement or "actualization" paired with the toxic comparative nature of social media means that couples are living not for each other but for their imagined perception of themselves in the minds of other people outside the marraige. That's an insane way to be.
So, just find a down to earth girl who doesn't care about any of that. Maybe go a little more trad-ish, too, right? I (kind of) tried that. Started going to the Young Catholic events at a parish known for being very pro-coupling. The first girl I met was already engaged but we hit it off nonetheless and she became a good friend. A couple months into me going to these kind of events, having a few coffee dates etc. she pulls me aside and drops the truth bomb on me - a lot of the women in these groups are LARPing for a provider husband who they feel is utterly domesticated and low risk of ever straying away .... the men in these groups are pretty much doing the exact same thing but with a weird eye towards "sex on demand" and "thy wife shall submit!" This latter group are pretty much incels who went RadTradCath online, the former group are often party girls who wish to exit the hook-up culture and want to find a guy who is low risk, low dynamism. Both groups are entering relationships with a fundamental lack of respect for the other party. It's self-referential all the way down.
I want to commit to building a life with a partner, that is in no way the problem. I don't care about the leveling off of the passionate attachment phase of the relationship. But I do have sincere concern about the ability of most any firmly "in the matrix" person to really commit to the idea of marriage at the level of depth that I think is necessary for the marriage to last. Simple screening based on religious or political affiliation doesn't guarantee much (see above) and, what's more, I feel that social pressures and relative comparisons to other couples or imagined states of marriage are so omnipresent that they're a constant source of erosion of the commitment to the marriage itself.
I can recognize my own neuroticism here and I am aware that the only solution is to just do it and continue to work at it with a wife who also wants to work at it, but these thoughts persist.
blooblyblobl
Battery-powered!
2hr ago
Doesn't totally answer your question, but consider disabusing yourself of the notion that there's any chance of a robotics revolution in our lifetimes. Costs of robotics go up with degrees of freedom, power density, and sensory complexity. Human hands are the standard interface for all tools used by manual labor. Human hands have 27 degrees of freedom, can exert over 100x their weight, and can regularly sense micron (irregularly: submicron) texture. >75% of all non-industrial grippers in the literature can't operate tools with index finger trigger switches. The bare minimum requirement for replacing blue collar labor is making grippers with close to human hand functionality, mass producing them on a robot that can move and work anywhere a human can, and selling it for less than the cost of a fighter jet. You'll notice that I haven't even gotten to the rest of the robot yet.
If AI is any significant part of the next few decades, your new job will be physically laboring for it. There's rather a lot to do, and plenty of now-unemployed white collar workers to keep occupied...
gattsuru
2hr ago
There's been an American snafu regarding a Texan politician's kid that is kinda hard to talk about because he's an asshole even by the standards of politicians, but if you put a gun to my head and made me bet whether the kid's on hormone therapy in a year or two... and it's not like the alternative would be just, either.
Last update:
Who_Cares
2hr ago
When I watch videos children victimizing others, be that students or teachers, I feel no need to "feign" outrage.
Ah, so you’re consuming outrage porn on Twitter and 4chan. Say no more.
Not at all, I don't think you were able to provide a good argument against it
Then in the future, don't change the topic without further comment, if you don't want to leave the impression you're conceding.
Trans people wanting surgeries is (assuming you think it is destructive at all), self-destructive! Therefore my point was correct!
When applied to trans people requesting the surgeries, yes. When it's applied to gender-affirming doctors providing and promoting it, it becomes completely incorrect.
And it can't be that spreading the ideology counts as harming others because otherwise Jehovahs Witnesses who are famously aggressive about spreading their faith which then causes people to refuse life saving treatment would fall afoul of it.
Yes. It's not just spreading the ideology, it's carrying out the actual procedure that is harmful. Also, Jehovah's Witnesses, for all their faults, stay away from other people's children.
So far your arguments seem to come from a place of disliking the trans movement then rationalizing why it is uniquely bad, when it simply does not seem much worse than things we do tolerate when it comes to self-determination, then tying your arguments in knots about it.
False. There are massive qualitative differences between it, and the things we tolerate as self-determination, which you are ignoring.
(only a subset of trans people!)
You know full well this is irrelevant to the argument. I never explicitly argued against "gernder affirming" procedures for adults. I only argue about the scientific accuracy of how they're being sold, but if an adult wants to do it regardless I'm not against it. When it comes to adults, I only oppose the imposition of the trans worldview. The demands to affirm them as women, by allowing them access into female spaces, etc.
Informed consent is hard because sometimes parents giving consent don't understand and sometimes kids don't understand
"And so I think the more we can normalize that it is okay to not get this right away, it is okay to have questions, the more we're going to actually do a real informed consent process. Then what I think has been currently happening and that I think is frankly, not what we need to be doing ethically."
Is not a statement of "informed consent is hard" it's a statement of admission to failure of getting real informed consent.
I agree thats a tough issue, but its one that happens in medicine all the time. Do you think young kids understand what death is, and it might happen because their parents are against blood transfusions or the like?
No.
Do the parents having been raised into a religion that teaches them weird things really have the ability to give informed consent?
Yes.
And the answer is we basically shrug our shoulders and say yeah, close enough. And its only in the most dire circumstances where courts sometimes decide to override it. And I think thats reasonable for trans issues too. If going ahead is going to lead to death then sure override the parents and kids choices. Perfectly happy with that.
The funny thing here is that this logic justifies completely banning GAC. You've been trying to catch me on an inconsistency, but you're the only one with inconsistent views.
But it seems an isolated demand for rigor to require people to be (as the WPATH person themselves said would be ideal) "tiny endocrinologists" when we do not demand that for people going through even riskier treatments.
What gives you the idea that we do not demand it for other treatments? On what grounds are you claiming they're riskier? If you give a kid chemotherapy, and tell them "we're giving you poison hoping that it will kill the thing hurting you. You're going to feel bad for a while, but there's a good chance you will be healthy after that", they will have a far better understanding of the treatment than anything they give related to GAC. These kids are often too young to grasp the first thing about sex, and even when they do, their notion of long-term consequences is still completely warped. This is when parents are supposed to take over, but the ones that are skeptical are often being outright lied to.
Hell the JW'S have a whole network of people whose job it is to convince the hospital and pressure the parents on behalf of the church to not use blood treatments. And we allow that in 99% of cases with no problem at all. When the outcome is a higher risk of death, we allow parents or patients to make stupid calls all the time, yet for trans issues all of a sudden, it's way too risky?
Again, there's a massive difference between letting someone opt out of a treatment, and letting them opt in. We have mountains upon mountains of books of regulations preventing arbitrary opt-in for medicine. Why is transgender care supposed to be different?
If the parents disagree then absolutely I am on board with restricting trans care. If the parents and kid are on board, well we don't intervene until their actions are about to cause a high risk of death in most cases (and sometimes not even then!) why should this issue be different?
You're the one advocating for treating it different
I notice none of this addresses the previous topic of the conversation. If you wanted to talk about the substance of my issues with transgender care, that's fine (I'm more interested in that than the ethical calculus applied to ideologies. But you started with the latter, and are moving on to the former, while leaving me with no conclusion. Please concede or come back.
SSCReader
3hr ago
Not at all, I don't think you were able to provide a good argument against it. Indeed you conceded it when you said those ideologies only got treated better when the outcome was self-destructive. Trans people wanting surgeries is (assuming you think it is destructive at all), self-destructive! Therefore my point was correct!
And it can't be that spreading the ideology counts as harming others because otherwise Jehovahs Witnesses who are famously aggressive about spreading their faith which then causes people to refuse life saving treatment would fall afoul of it.
So far your arguments seem to come from a place of disliking the trans movement then rationalizing why it is uniquely bad, when it simply does not seem much worse than things we do tolerate when it comes to self-determination, then tying your arguments in knots about it.
Your own post doesn't show there is no informed consent, it says specifically for children (only a subset of trans people!) Informed consent is hard because sometimes parents giving consent don't understand and sometimes kids don't understand. I agree thats a tough issue, but its one that happens in medicine all the time. Do you think young kids understand what death is, and it might happen because their parents are against blood transfusions or the like? Do the parents having been raised into a religion that teaches them weird things really have the ability to give informed consent?
And the answer is we basically shrug our shoulders and say yeah, close enough. And its only in the most dire circumstances where courts sometimes decide to override it. And I think thats reasonable for trans issues too. If going ahead is going to lead to death then sure override the parents and kids choices. Perfectly happy with that.
But we accept that people (or parents on behalf of their children) get to make risky decisions all the time. But it seems an isolated demand for rigor to require people to be (as the WPATH person themselves said would be ideal) "tiny endocrinologists" when we do not demand that for people going through even riskier treatments.
Hell the JW'S have a whole network of people whose job it is to convince the hospital and pressure the parents on behalf of the church to not use blood treatments. And we allow that in 99% of cases with no problem at all. When the outcome is a higher risk of death, we allow parents or patients to make stupid calls all the time, yet for trans issues all of a sudden, it's way too risky?
If the parents disagree then absolutely I am on board with restricting trans care. If the parents and kid are on board, well we don't intervene until their actions are about to cause a high risk of death in most cases (and sometimes not even then!) why should this issue be different?
HorthyMiklosKatonaja
3hr ago
probably because you didn't denounce Trump, or Republicans in general, in vitriolic enough language.
stuckinbathroom
3hr ago
Kto kago is truly the order of the day.
Despite how it’s written in Cyrillic, it’s actually pronounced “Kto kavo” in modern Russian
pigeonburger
3hr ago
It comes down to whether they want the attention; I would be surprised if a smart one could not reliably get visibility by putting culture war bait for the media.
If a killer left a note or sent letters to the media saying he was doing it "for President Trump", do you really think the media would be able to contain themselves from making it a national issue? And the right's reaction when there's hints of a killer being trans or an illegal gives little doubt that they'd be just as impossible to contain if they were in a position of power in the media.
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
3hr ago
The reviewers say he was overly self critical in the early part (there is no record of his murder trial) and, later, told more accurate truths because his later life was rather more a matter of public record. I dunno. I do think it does not strain credulity to imagine he did live most of it One wouldn't make up indulging in slavery or sex slaves, I imagine. Or maybe one would.
So you agree that with informed consent then trans people should generally be allowed to have surgeries and we should only step in, in the most unusual situations? I'm confused by your position here.
Well, the confusion seems to be that you're taking my point about not imposing a medical treatment on someone unwilling, and applying it to turning medicine into a free-for-all where anyone who asks for a particular treatment should get it. The former is how modern medicine is supposed to work in the West, and the latter very much is not. Otherwise we wouldn't have tons upon tons of regulations, licences, and various limits on who is allowed to do what in that field.
While I'm a bit anxious about turning medicine into a free-for-all, I'm not against it on principle. Even in cases like the trans issue, it would be a marked improvement over the status quo, where currently specialists lie to parents about the accuracy of diagnosis, negative effects of lack of treatment, the reversibility of the treatment, and where alternative treatments are sometimes banned as "conversion therapy".
Your own post pointed out the people writing WPATH were concerned about making sure their patients were aware of the risks and potential outcomes
In private. In public they work very hard to minimize the perception of those risks. Compare the videos I linked to, to the article from (WPATH member) Jack Turban, for example.
Given that, then by your own logic above why are you worried about this at all? If the patient gives informed consent then no-one is imposing a medical procedure.
Other than what I mentioned above, that the concept is supposed to prevent unwanted treatment, rather than open the doors to any wanted treatment, the problem is that there is no informed consent, as admitted by WPATH itself.
Given that you completely dropped the argument about "good intentions" justifying different treatment of ideologies, and are now changing the subject, I take it you concede it?
Ethan
Quality assurance
4hr ago
Do you think he was telling the truth about his life? It seems nearly too adventurous to believe, though that may be owing to my shelteredness.
Dean
4hr ago
So I find myself constantly waffling between the expectation that we'll see a new industrial revolution as AI tech creates a productivity boom (before it kills us all or whatever), and the expectation that the entire global economy will slowly tear apart at the seams and we see the return to lower tech levels out of necessity. How can I fine tune my prediction when the outcomes are so divergent in nature?
By recognizing that even if the global economy tears itself apart, there are parts of it that will not only survive, but relatively thrive as islands of relatively stability. Deglobalization is to some degree inevitable- it's already occuring and even accelerating in many contexts, and macro trends suggest further- and as things deglobalize, producers and investments will shift. Investment flows go first where it will be safe, then where it will grow, and the regions that are relatively safely will get injections to grow further. The industries that support hi-technology development will be disrupted, not just destroyed, and then they will relocate.
When they relocate, they will generally consolidate along new lines production less prone to disruption. That is most likely to be the American alliance system as a market-driven model with the most access to the pre-deglobalization market connections, and a PRC state-driven model brute forced with state spending along with its generally mercantilist model.
And more importantly, how can I arrange my financial bets so as to hedge against the major downsides of either outcome?
Diversification is nearly always the safer option, but if you wanted to minimize risk you wouldn't be framing it as financial bets.
If you want to bet, then bet on the west, specifically the North American market. Its political problems are not unique, its security threats relatively marginal, its demographic problems are fundamentally distinct from the depopulation trends of its primary strategic rivals, and its strategic rivals are far more limited than they are often perceived, which is the classical consequence of deliberate propaganda states. It's also likely to be one of the primary beneficiaries of the upcoming deglobalization.
SSCReader
4hr ago
Right the BLM movement is spawned from but not controlled by the black communities that are impacted by it one way or the other. I'd agree there.
SSCReader
4hr ago
Well, when generalizing there will always be exceptions of course. I'm sure there are some who may believe there is more of an agreement than there is, and others who perhaps care less about being seen to be paternalistic. All movements contain variation.
SSCReader
4hr ago
So you agree that with informed consent then trans people should generally be allowed to have surgeries and we should only step in, in the most unusual situations? I'm confused by your position here.
Your own post pointed out the people writing WPATH were concerned about making sure their patients were aware of the risks and potential outcomes. Given that, then by your own logic above why are you worried about this at all? If the patient gives informed consent then no-one is imposing a medical procedure.
magic9mushroom
If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me
4hr ago
· Edited 4hr ago
Literally just don’t make AI porn of your female classmates?
There is kind of an issue here in that Evil Maid attacks are so goddamned easy on a campus (especially the collaborative Evil Maid where one conspirator deliberately creates the distraction) that "beyond a reasonable doubt" is unachievable without substantial resources and any lower standard gets loners expelled by bullies manipulating the system. Admittedly, one can do this with actual child porn anyway, but that's trickier to get and, due to being actually illegal, risks the police coming in and actually tracing it to the bully.
I think I have sampled just about every relevant contender in these domains and come to the belief that Germany has the best savoury baked goods (including in particular bread) and Sweden has the best sweet ones.
There's plenty of greatness in the Mediterranean space but maybe we're excluding it. I concur with appreciating English breakfast; there are also some soups in my native cuisine (Russian) that I would be unhappy to do without. In the US, Cajun cuisine is the only regional one that I found worthwhile, and it's hard to count it as non-Mediterranean Western given how it's largely a fusion of French and Afro-Caribbean. Maybe KFC (which nowadays is good everywhere except for the Anglo countries), or Popeye's for a still-okay-in-the-US substitute, would count?
In general it does seem to be true that northern foods are generally less interesting - even the ones that people praise seem to be more in the "lots of high-quality protein, prepared in a way that doesn't ruin the taste" (steaks, good burgers) class than anything that registers as cuisine. This extends to extreme latitudes elsewhere (Mongolian food is legendarily terrible, and I would consider the outer reaches of commoner Northern Chinese food to be bland in the same way cabbage-and-potatoes Eastern European food is. What I've tried of Chilean food gave me similar vibes). It might be tempting to blame this on a lack of aromatic plants (plants don't have the same need to evolve repellent chemicals in areas where insect activity is low?), but many of the flavourful tropical cuisines (Japanese, Indonesian...) rely heavily on fermented products over spices.
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