domain:shapesinthefog.substack.com
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
2d ago
Well, there's suffering and there's suffering.
A pain signal that tells you to pull your hand away from a hot stove is "suffering".
This, on the other hand, is suffering:
The New Mexico State Penitentiary riot, which took place on February 2 and 3, 1980, at the Penitentiary of New Mexico (PNM) south of Santa Fe, was the most violent prison riot in U.S. history. Inmates took complete control of the prison and twelve officers were taken hostage. [...]
Events spiraled out of control within the cell blocks in large part due to the actions of two gangs. The first were the Chicanos, who protected each other and dished out targeted retribution for specific grudges. The other gang was loosely labeled the Aryan Brotherhood and was led by some of the most dangerous inmates (who by this time had been released from segregation in Cell Block 3). They decided to break into Cell Block 4, which held prisoners labeled as informers. Cell Block 4 also housed inmates who were mentally ill, convicted of sex crimes, or otherwise vulnerable, and held a total of 96 prisoners. [...]
During an edition of BBC's Timewatch program, an eyewitness described the carnage in Cell Block 4. He saw an inmate held up in front of a window; he was being tortured by using a blowtorch on his face and eyes until his head exploded. Another story was about Mario Urioste, who was jailed for shoplifting. He was originally placed by officers in a violent unit where he was gang-raped by seven inmates. Mario had filed a lawsuit against his rapists, so prison officials had housed him in Cell Block 4 for his own protection. Urioste was one of the targets for revenge. His body was found hanged, with his throat cut and his dismembered genitals stuffed into his mouth.
The former is a useful biological mechanism; the latter raises suffering to the level of a genuine philosophical problem (as in, should we sacrifice everything else to make the elimination of suffering our primary goal? If the choice is between a universe with suffering and no universe at all, would it be better to just not exist at all? etc).
netstack
Texas is freedom land
2d ago
Pretty much, except it’s neither silencing nor unjust.
You and Turok are welcome to state your true facts in a suitably polite, cooperative fashion.
magic9mushroom
If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me
2d ago
I seem to recall putting "neutral" and then changing it to "deserves a warning" on noticing the last paragraph (because seriously, that was vicious). I also seem to recall taking so long to do it that @Amadan had already actually warned you by the time I completed the form.
(I've given out "deserves a ban" before, but all the times I can remember were death threats. There are other things that'd get it, like doxxing or advocacy of specific terrorist acts, but those are pretty rare here.)
ChickenOverlord
2d ago
Your comment here actually really got me thinking. My wife loves most bugs, and over the years we've found several struggling bugs that managed to find their way inside, usually cute ones like moths and box elder bugs (she has no qualms with killing pests like mosquitoes, flies, and wasps though). My wife will catch them, give them water and something to eat (like leaves or sugar water or whatever, depends on the bug), then release them in a nice place. Sometimes I think she goes a little overboard in making things nice for them, but her actions are driven by real love and compassion for the little critters. In fact just a week ago we found a vole trapped in one of our window wells so we caught him and brought him to a beautiful field a few miles away right next to a river.
In any case, my ooint is that for all of this abstract talk of bee consciousness and suffering, the idea of the weirdos writing this stuff having actual compassion and concern for these creatures doesn't seem to be the case. Maybe it's the virtue ethicist in me (and my utter contempt for utilitarianism as a guiding ethical framework) but all of these attempts to abstract moral and ethical behavior into quantifiable abstractions makes them seem like something an alien might come uo with. The human aspects of ethics are completely missing.
Almost makes me wonder if secret lizardmen aliens infiltrating human society conspiracy theories aren't true.
sun_the_second
could survive a COD lobby and a gay furry discord server
2d ago
Relevant sarcastic comment by qtnm in the comments of Lena:
"Why should I care about other people?"
All instances of people caring about other people in history, so far, have happened under the assumption that any given person could, in theory, be in another person's place.
The horror of Lena is that this assumption is destroyed. The technology is mind copying, not mind transfer. Every single person who is scanned will go inside the facility and will come out. There is no mechanism to shift perspective, ever: the material and the digital substrates never cross directly. If you experience living in reality now (as opposed to remembering it), by induction you can be sure that you will never experience living as an em.
Ever.
This puts the suffering of ems at a greater distance than even the suffering of animals, for a person could fathom a timeline where, but for the grace of God, he lives the life of cattle. None such mechanism to facilitate empathy would exist for copying scans. They would be as fictional characters, whose suffering evokes vivid emotions in many but never a desire to stop it by refusing to create fiction.
Ditto6687
2d ago
There's a lot of pointless sufferring that is a useless signal. Evolution just isn't smart enough to distinguish. Besides, if "I should react to reduce this pain" is a useful idea on an individual level, why shouldn't there be cases where it is also useful on a collective one? E.g. "torture is bad, ceteris paribus"
Bees can't do anything about their condition when being farmed. Why is suffering a useful signal to them? Why should it be preserved?
If there was a cost-free way to make bees not suffer at all while farmed, wouldn't you press the button?
Iconochasm
2. Bootstrap the rest of the fucking omnipotence.
2d ago
Any advice for recovery from serious fatigue?
My new favorite thing is to go to the gym, do arms for 60-90 minutes, and then go hiking with a 40lb backpack for another 1-2 hours.
Unfortunately, afterwards I am kind of obliterated for a few more hours. Obviously some turndown is going to be necessary after expending that much energy, but I'd like to get a higher resting state than "staring blankly at Youtube", and/or a duration shorter than "as long as I was just working out".
And I guess I might specify that I'm hoping for suggestions more like "cold shower" or "hydrate with X" rather than "steroids or meth".
FtttG
2d ago
I know that strictly speaking "pescatarian" means "eats fish", but most people colloquially use it to mean "I don't eat meat but I do eat fish and other kinds of seafood", which would include oysters and caviar. If someone describes himself as pescatarian, without further disambiguation I think it's reasonable to assume I can offer him prawn curry for dinner.
giving my full dietary philosophy would be more about signaling and self aggrandizement than anything useful to them.
Along these lines, I once wrote an article expressing my distaste for terms like "flexitarian".
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
2d ago
Israel would not need to nuke Gaza to engage in successful total warfare. Nor would they want to; it's too damned close and anyway an Israel willing to make such total war would want Gaza's land for itself (or at least to lease to Trump for his resort)
ThenElection
2d ago
I don't think it's too hard to get around that objection: just divide suffering into useful suffering and pointless suffering, and then switch the objective to minimizing the pointless suffering. Suffering from touching a hot pan is useful; suffering by immolating someone on a pyre is pointless.
Iconochasm
2. Bootstrap the rest of the fucking omnipotence.
2d ago
Nah, there's a middle ground. "Trad with liberal characteristics" or whatever, where you acknowledge that some people are gonna do what they want and have it mostly work out for them, and encourage them to do it in isolated enclaves like SF, while still discouraging it in the general case.
What we instead got is this monstrous inversion where our successful people generally act conservative in their personal lives while encouraging self-destructive libertinism and emotional disregulation in the rest of the population. This helps those individuals, by hamstringing their competition, but it is virulently anti-social.
professorgerm
You shall love your crooked neighbor, with your crooked heart
2d ago
nerdy utilitarian blogs.
The newest crop of utilitarians and adjacent on Substack are much worse than the old crop of the Good Scott era. Alas!
This particular post is high on assumption and light on rigor. It received outrage.
Someone on Twitter suggested Bentham is a psyop to make utilitariains look worse, and while I think it was a joke, it's more or less right. Anyone that believes bees suffer 7% as intensely as humans is a lost cause and should be ignored, only paid attention to the extent you should discourage others from paying any attention.
Iconochasm
2. Bootstrap the rest of the fucking omnipotence.
2d ago
It gets thrown around by goblinoids like Richard Hanania to explain why they viscerally hate regular people and instead offer unlimited, unjustified consideration for people with proper credentials, in spite of their decades of total incompetence and failure. It's a sad effort by the untalented to ingratiate themselves into the popular kids table, even as the popular kids are having their lives fall apart.
professorgerm
You shall love your crooked neighbor, with your crooked heart
2d ago
people at issue are dead (or at any rate no longer relevant)
From upthread, just in case you missed it:
Joe Biden, Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, and Mitch McConnell to have voted for the 1986 amnesty earlier in their careers
Also
you can't read the minds of people today based on dirty tricks pulled - consciously or otherwise - by their geriatric forebears half a century prior, even if the current scions are nominally waving the same flag.
Does that mean we can put any discussion of reparation to rest too because there's no such thing as group responsibility for past sins so long as you run the clock long enough?
ThenElection
2d ago
But oysters aren't fish either. Something like ostrotarian would probably be best, but that will invariably end up confusing the people you're trying to communicate your dietary desires to.
I kind of fall into a similar category: I'm a vegetarian who eats bivalves (because no central nervous system) and caviar (because yum). When going out to eat, I say vegetarian because it communicates all the information people need to make any accomodations they want to; giving my full dietary philosophy would be more about signaling and self aggrandizement than anything useful to them. (And, in my head, I don't really identify as anything, dietary wise.)
wemptronics
2d ago
At one point I knew his name and his position as a grad student. Thanks.
But Adelstein's take on veganism strikes me as aggressively, surely willfully obtuse
They appear to becoming more like performance art with time, which is likely the product of a growing audience.
sun_the_second
could survive a COD lobby and a gay furry discord server
2d ago
If you told me that you enjoy a video game where the goal is to torture fictional characters, I'd also probably remember your face and tell people to avoid you. What makes me suspicious of you is that by playing this hypothetical game you are reacting as though you want to cause suffering. It doesn't matter whether the suffering is real.
Dwarf Fortress/Rimworld fanbase in shambles.
BurdensomeCount
—Your em dash is showing...
2d ago
It's only poison for disproportionate economic growth of your country relative to the other countries of the world. It's poison for a selfish country level view of the planet yes, but that is not a bad thing; much like how pesticide is poison for aphids but is very much a good thing. If you support policies that lead to long term global growth instead of merely localized growth then this laissez faire approach isn't bad at all, in fact it's the fastest way to get global GDP growing as fast as possible.
Tree
2d ago
That distinction does not matter though. When Bismarck implemented social democratic policies “to undermine the social democrats”, that last part is irrelevant. When John Lackland granted the Magna Carta he didn’t do it because in his heart he loved the freedom of his subjects more than his own power.
ThenElection
2d ago
I think of it more as a (negative) reward signal in RL. When a human touches a hot stove, there's a sharp drop in dopamine (our reward signal). Neural circuits adjust their synapses to betterpredict future (negative) reward, and subsequently they take actions that don't do it. There's a bit of a sleight of hand here--do we actually know our experience of pain is equivalent to a negative reward signal--but it's not too wild a hypothetical extrapolation.
How do atoms fit in? Well, it's a stretch, but one way to approach it is to treat atoms as trying to maximize a reward of negative energy, on a hard coded (unlearned) policy corresponding to the laws of physics. E.g. burning some methane helps them get to a lower energy state, maximizing their own reward. Or, to cause "physical" pain, you could put all the gas in a box on one side of the box: nature abhors a vacuum.
If you told me that you enjoy a video game where the goal is to torture fictional characters, I'd also probably remember your face and tell people to avoid you.
Listen, I did not intentionally trap those Sims in their living room. The placement of the stove was an innocent mistake. That fire could have happened anywhere! A terrible tragedy.
as an instrumental goal in the process of doing something else
One man's instrument is another man's cross to bear, or something like that. They demonstrate that it's not as instrumental as you (or I) claim, or not instrumental at all, by existing and being more righteous. People in Africa or Indonesia get a necessity pass for now, but you, neighbor, have a choice. That is if they cast judgment. I've met more vegans who are simply tired of the same old jokes, jabs, and want to be left alone than I have met the stereotype, or vegans cognizant of utilitarianism for that matter.
magic9mushroom
If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me
2d ago
· Edited 2d ago
My understanding is that it's not a hypothesis founded or invoked with nuance, which is what you're trying to insert here.
Disproof by example: I'm most favourably disposed to genetic explanations of group differences in a few specific cases.
-
Sub-Saharan Africans, because of longer timescales of the main, H. s. s. component (100,000+ years of relative isolation in some cases), and because of very low hybridisation with Neanderthals (whereas everyone else has ~3%).
-
Austronesians, because they're essentially the only group with substantial Denisovan ancestry.
-
Shitty immune systems from those that didn't settle down until recently, because of the massive and sustained selection for plague resistance since we started building cities. I'm normally sceptical of recent-significant-change explanations, but this one has actually met the high burden of proof given the Columbian Exchange and the similar effects on Australian Aborigines, and it's a relatively-simple tweak compared to stuff "upstairs".
What's not there? I'm highly sceptical of any attempt to explain differences within Eurasia by HBD; the timescales of divergence are quite short, with in most cases significant gene-flow for the entire period, and we've all been civilised for long enough. That includes people going on about Near Easterners (except to the - relatively minor AIUI - degree that there's sub-Saharan African introgression) and, yes, Jews.
So I'm not really with @DradisPing about Iraqis being genetically unsuited to democracy, though I will note that he did also mention "deep culture" and I don't see anything wrong with that claim.
if there’s one tangible Eastern European development that can be called the result of Wilson's deranged fantasies, it’s the creation of Czechoslovakia
You think Germany and Russia gave up so much territory between them, because they were such jolly old chums?
in the case of Hungary, Bulgaria and Romania there was zero democratic tendency after WW1 to slide back from towards authoritarianism.
Pretty sure they all had some parliamentary system that got couped at some point between the wars. Hungary speed-ran it, but they still had it for a brief period after the war. The "zero democratic tendency" thing is my argument, thank you very much.
5434a
2d ago
I don't know how you could do it but I think the best way to find your limits is to exceed them, so if you're concerned you're going to fall over you should make a point of falling over. One point in your favour is that bikes become more stable as the speed goes up, so balance-to-failure can be practiced by going as slowly as possible. Also you're a BJJ guy so you're probably used to getting thrown on the floor.
You could try finding somewhere semi-soft like some grass [1] and then riding very tight circles and figure-of-8s as slowly as possible, then slower than possible. Stall. Fall off. Then try it a bit faster. Keep speeding up, turning tight and falling off until self preservation kicks in when the falls get uncomfortable enough that you chicken out of falling off and correct the turn. Then repeat the exercise one handed. You'll look like a clown doing it but you'll quickly map out the lower end of the performance envelope, and you can practice your judo/BJJ falling technique at the same time (the only time my childhood judo classes have paid dividends is when I fall off my bike).
[1] Narrow bike tyres are bad for grass so try and choose somewhere more like a cow pasture or a rugby pitch, not someone's lawn(!).
These seem like absolutely huge changes to our understanding of how to manipulate society in order to improve it, though. AA and similar programs are juggernauts in modern Western society, and so our understanding of how/if they work have huge impacts in our understanding of the world.
More options
Context Copy link