domain:alexepstein.substack.com
But then Darwin clarifies what he really meant, and it just came down to butting heads over whether that was reasonable or not
If I start saying things about "people like Ben Garrison", you call it a personal attack, and I'll clarify I didn't mean you, I just meant people like you, will you accept the logic of that statement?
It wasn't a clairifiaction, it was an obvious attempt to avoid accountability for what he said. This is obvious because even as he backed away from the "eradicate trans people" thing, he doubled down on the claims of generic transphobia, which were directly shown to be just as dishonest. Even that wouldn't be so bad, at the end of it all he managed to get something like "shit, I fucked up, you were right" out his throat, but it's something he never does.
If you think otherwise, I urge you to consider that you're irrationally biased in favor of anyone going against the grain of this forum.
Like, yeah, I think Darwin is wrong too, but I certainly wouldn't want to interact with a person who responded like that.
Are you assuming Darwin is an otherwise good faith poster, and deserves to be treated as such despite his long history of posting here. I think it's your turn to give some links proving your point.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
2hr ago
OK, thanks for an actual link.
I... don't really see what's so bad about this particular post. I disagree with Darwin since I don't think his points are particularly correct, but I really don't see how he's being "dishonest" or "manipulative" or "bad faith". The worst part he does is claim "JK Rowling wants to ... eradicate trans people", which seems like it was originally a throwaway line that Amadan obviously latched onto because it was both inflammatory and untrue. But then Darwin clarifies what he really meant, and it just came down to butting heads over whether that was reasonable or not. Nothing else Darwin said seems particularly egregious in terms of "this is a political debate". If anything, Amadan was a total jerk in responding with statements like these:
Sometimes I think you just read posts, decide who's expressing the "conservative" (bad) position, and reflexively argue the opposite.
you are and always have been a bad faith borderline troll
you are either being astoundingly clueless or just flat out disingenuous.
You have actually spouted a ton of bullshit
Like, yeah, I think Darwin is wrong too, but I certainly wouldn't want to interact with a person who responded like that.
urquan
Every one who exalts himself will be humbled, but he who humbles himself will be exalted.
2hr ago
But the changes have happened since, Gallup says, 2022 — I just don’t know what’s happened since 2022 that would make such a big shift make sense! Except for Trump 2. But Trump has shown no indication of reticence about gay marriage.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
2hr ago
One of his predictions was wrong, that warrants a ban. You really have zero arguments.
In the first place, it was not that he made a bad prediction. It's that he went all-in on that prediction, treated anyone who took the other side with scorn, and then did not seem to learn anything from being proven spectacularly wrong.
In the second place, I linked you an extremely long thread in which I looked at a number of his debates in excruciating detail, breaking down the nature of his technique and pointing to examples of him admitting that this was indeed his technique. Your response is that I have "literally zero arguments."
Since you seem to have missed the very long comment chain of voluminous arguments, I will link them again. Here they are, this is a link, please click it if you would like some arguments. or perhaps will that now be too many arguments, and no one has time for that, and it's necessary that we confine ourselves to vague generalities while accusing others of insufficient specificity? It's so hard to hit that proper amount of detail, in my experience.
Darwin did not acquire his fanbase by making "uncommon, solid arguments". He became notable for engaging people in extended conversations, only for them to discover that he did not believe he was making an argument at all. The link above goes through a number of examples, but the JK Rowling debate with Amadan is a really good example as well.
These are not unusual examples. He was like this all the time, for years. And sure, he made AAQCs as well, and he was very good at riding the line without quite going over, which is why he lasted as long as he did. But his behavior utterly trashed his reputation, and other people learned to ride the line right back, and now he doesn't hang out here any more.
self_made_human
C'est la vie
3hr ago
I have a dim opinion of the Rawlsian veil of ignorance, but even so, there are a million issues with such claims.
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.
This claim implicitly but load-bearingly assumes that a post-Singularity civilization won't have the ability to create simulations indistinguishable from reality.
Even today, we have no actual rebuttal for the Simulation Hypothesis. You and I could be simulations inside a simulation, but it's a possibility we can't prove or exclude at the moment, so the sensible thing to do is to ignore it and move on with our lives.
Even if you did start out as a Real Human, then I think that with the kind of mind editing in Lena, it would be trivial to make you forget or ignore that fact.
Further, I don't think continuity of consciousness is a big deal, which is why I don't have nightmares about going to take a nap. As far as I'm concerned, my "mind" is a pattern that can be instantiated in just about any form of compute, but at the moment is in a biological computer. There is no qualitative change in the process of mind upload, at least a high fidelity one, be it a destructive scan or preserving of the original brain.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
3hr ago
Thanks for the tip!
gattsuru
3hr ago
I'm... hesitant to go with any of the easy answers. The Bulwarkist side of no-longer-Republicans-if-they-ever-were exists, but it's tiny. The Republican minority outreach should expect to see incoming demographics who don't like The Gays, but the difference just isn't that big. Measurement problems are endemic to modern polls, but there's a lot of reasons to suspect that they'd result in these polls going more toward the demographics most gay-friendly (younger, more urban, more online). And while it's possible for some number of people to be rounding 'gay marriage' and 'trans stuff' together, either out of confusion or treating the movement as a whole, there's too big of a difference in poll numbers on gay marriage and trans stuff for that to shake out right either.
I think there's some genuine disagreements on policy that have become a lot more apparent in the last three or four years. MacIntyre likes to Darkly Hint in ways that wouldn't be accepted (or even necessarily understood) by a lot of Red Tribers, but matters like surrogacy, limits of workplace conduct, interactions with media, the bake-the-cake movement, these are things I see from not-especially-online people in the real world.
I'd like to think that there are workable compromise positions, but they depend on actually understanding and respecting the other side, and I thought the same about trans stuff.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
3hr ago
Again, I request examples of your claims.
Here you go. if you'd prefer links to actual posts rather than a compilation of links and discussion, I can probably get you that as well.
Here's the start of the Smollett thread in particular.
Tree
3hr ago
One of his predictions was wrong, that warrants a ban. You really have zero arguments.
If you disagree, show me some examples of what high-quality Darwin looked like
darwin had AAQC's. But just presenting a somewhat uncommon, solid argument is high quality in my book, and he did that often, because by virtue of his politics, most of his arguments were uncommon here. We banned the only progressive voices we had, all to maximize the content-free comments complaining about the enlightenment, modernity and the sexual revolution - the motte equivalent of complaining about boomers, or neoliberalism.
self_made_human
C'est la vie
3hr ago
Sure, but it's unwise to dismiss them.
Sure. And yet I invite you to show me how I'm "dismissing" them. All I've done is point out the competing incentives, which are regulatory, legal and ethical, which I expect to solve the problem.
Because the patients have power to just not go to the ones that would. Not to mention take revenge.
Are you familiar with the literature on the principal-agent problem? It's not remotely as simple as "just not go to the ones that would".
I will leave aside the fact that there's no physical law demanding that prospective mind uploads must use a single compute provider, and don't have the option to self-host either, and that there will likely be persons or organizations that can take "revenge" on their behalf.
PETA exists as an organization that takes "revenge" on the behalf of random animals, to set the floor rather low but not zero.
I feel like this makes the case against you than for you.
I feel like it doesn't, or I wouldn't have used that analogy. Please explain.
You don't find it odd that the singularity has to be accepted as an article of faith for the discussion to continue?
God. Leaving aside such loaded phrases as "article of faith", I think that it's very likely that we have some form of technological Singularity within our nominal life expectancy.
Even @FCfromSSC acknowledges the possibility of mind uploading, and presumably believes that the kind of rapid technological improvement that we colloquially call a Singularity is a requisite for us to live to see it. He even identifies with the potential mind upload. He however, believes that this is against his best interests.
My interests are to attempt to demonstrate why I think this is a mistake, or at the least, throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Consider that, from my perspective, an altruistic act.
If you don't think that mind uploads are a possibility, or that we won't live to see them, my interest in debating with you is minimal. What would the point even be? Alas, I'm here, because I suppose I have a sadomasochistic streak and will argue just about anything.
Right, so when emulation's labour will be like horse labour relative to chatGPT, and it will actively cost resources to keep them running, what does that analogy imply about the likely fate of mind-emulations?
Naively? Bad things. Less naively? Everything I've argued for so far.
But consider that it's not just the emulations that will be in the place of horses. If emulation are horses, then good old fashioned meat and bone humans would be closer to horse with a broken leg.
Being advocate for outcomes that don't literally kill all humans, I believe in attempting to steer the course of our technologies and laws in a direction that doesn't lead to this.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
3hr ago
This is the second time I'm telling you, I already gave you the link to his totally good faith, absolutely not obnoxious, JK Rowling debate. FCFromSSC has links of his own can at least stop acting like people aren't giving you links?
professorgerm
You shall love your crooked neighbor, with your crooked heart
3hr ago
Given there seems to be a decently common strain of progressivism that's pro-abortion and anti-gene-editing, for many people no, the calculus would be the same.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
3hr ago
new accounts and accounts with low net upvotes are autofiltered, and have to be manually fished out of the filter by the mods. I think Turok has gotten enough upvotes to get him out of the autofilter ghetto. Calling this "censorship" is a stretch; it delays discussion until the posts are approved, but we approve anything that isn't obviously spam or egregiously rule-breaking; it just takes a couple hours for a mod to get around to it.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
3hr ago
Downvoting can get people stuck in a filter making his posts invisible until the mods manually approve them. OTOH it's also possible to permanently get out of it with enough upvotes (and there was a "charity drive" to do so, where I did my part by upvoting like 5 pages of his posts).
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
3hr ago
Ah, OK, fair point on that. Thanks for the link. Now if anyone can point me to anything particularly egregious he posted on that alt I'd accept it as a point where darwin himself was egregious.
I'll admit I'm only somewhat familiar with his postings instead of intimately familiar, yet everything I saw really didn't strike me as the kind of poster who'd post obviously egregious things. This notion has been moderately reinforced as I've consistently requested an example of such behavior and people haven't been able to give it to me.
professorgerm
You shall love your crooked neighbor, with your crooked heart
3hr ago
Why wouldn't they survive? Would they succumb to the temptation to be vitriolic and disingenuous too easily, too?
ChrisPrattAlphaRaptr comes to mind. While he gets a little hot under the collar sometimes, certainly I won't cast the first stone for someone getting frustrated, he's never been such a slimeball as Darwin or seethingly hateful as Turok. I think it's quite easy to avoid the particular issues those two represent; it's that the kinds of leftist-progressive types that aren't exceedingly combative don't enjoy playing defense all the time.
The Schism exists back on reddit, the policies are only slightly stricter than here, it's derived from the same Scott-reading social milieu, and it has all of ten regular commenters, in a good month. It has one regular troll now on a yearly cycle of suspensions. Whatever makes The Motte appealing to most of the people here doesn't seem to exist to the left of the motte.
DelendaEst
3hr ago
Legit question, how does getting downvoted censor him? The sorting method on here is by newest, not by top rated.
I already gave you one, and again, if you don't know the Smollet thing, you don't know anything about the guy.
And if you didn't interact with him much, then how are you making the claim about "the only reason people hated him"?!
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
3hr ago
I didn't interact with him that much since I didn't share his views. He was far more left-leaning than I've ever been.
Again, I request examples of your claims. If he really was as bad as you claim, you should have no problem posting examples of where he was particularly egregious instead of just broadly motioning at it.
Did he actually say that GuessWho is his account, or are people just assuming that?
Yes, he did. On what grounds are you telling people "the only reason they hate him" if you're not familiar with his posting history here at all?
Then we have Gattsuru who did this.
I'll grant you that Gattsuru's antipathy for you is somewhat strange, and for the good of both of you, he should just ignore or block you if he can't. If you think the lack of immediate moderatory action is evidence of some bias, you're wrong. It's standard procedure to be a bit more lenient for quality contributors, this is exactly how Darwin was allowed to post here for years with almost no mod actions against him.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
3hr ago
The fact it keeps happening over and over across many different posters should be sufficient evidence that it's a systemic issue,
I get why it feels like that from the perspective of someone who disagrees with the majority of the forum. People start blurring into a single indescript swarm, and it's all the same to you if it's one guy being and asshole one day, and another guy on another day. But this is madness, and I do not believe that you would ever accept the framework off aggregating assholes by ideology, and deploying moderatory actions adjusted for that, if it was your ideology, or you personally in the line of fire
Right-leaning mods are naturally going to feel that left-leaning posts are far more hostile and delusional than the average right-leaning post, which is probably why a post like Turok's gets banned while something like this gets AAQC'd.
If you're trying to tell me gatsuru is somehow as bad as AlexanderTurok, you're going to have your work cut out for you. For starters, don't you think keeping up with all these court cases required several orders of magnitude more effort than anything Turok has ever done here?
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
3hr ago
Did he actually say that GuessWho is his account, or are people just assuming that? Can you link me to where he said that? Also, I'm reading through it and nothing really seems that bad at least without diving more into the context.
you've also said elsewhere that plenty of right-wingers have resorted to making series of personal attacks on you without getting modded. Do you have any examples of either?
Sure, in this interaction the guy claimed my arguments were so bad that I was "living in denial", and he repeated this over and over and over. Then we have Gattsuru who did this. Then we have Zeke who continuously accused me of being "dishonest".
I think negative utilitarians have an ethical obligation to disclose this state to people at the top of everything they write so people know to dismiss their opinions.
Did you read the composting article? His logic is basically: composting is good for worms, so then they reproduce and there's more worms, and then they experience suffering which is bad, so composting is bad. If you follow this logic to its conclusion, it implies we should genocide all life forms so they can't suffer any more. And, mathematically, if your utility function literally only counts negative values and doesn't recognize positive values then this follows.
Anyone whose moral philosophy implies that we should destroy all life is either evil, or hypocritical and illogical by only extrapolating as far as it serves their current purpose. This is why my flair is "Good things are good." Because some people literally believe the opposite. If this person says eating honey is bad for bees, the largest term in his math is probably beekeepers helping bees thrive and reproduce which means more of them exist, and all the things about artificial circumstances are probably rounding errors.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
3hr ago
We are all "there", because most of the posts on the Motte are still available. You don't have to appeal to faded memory through the mists of time, you can just look up compilations of his actual posts, or go digging through the posts themselves.
- He was indeed probably the most progressive commenter. Quite prolific, too.
- He was indeed a capable debater, but he made an art of violating the spirit of the rules by refusing to speak plainly, extend even minimal charity, refrain from building consensus, etc, etc.
- He stuck around a long time, actively working to degrade most conversations he participated in.
And the one you left off:
- He was so blinded by his ideology that he made an absolute clown of himself going all-in on the Jussie Smollet hoax, and then doubling down over and over again when people stood up to predict that he would be proven wrong. He was then proven wrong, and got blown out in truly spectacular style. If he learned anything from the experience, I never saw any indication of it; his behavior just got worse.
If you disagree, show me some examples of what high-quality Darwin looked like, or explain how my examples are poorly interpreted.
Another way of saying vibes" is "tone." Yes, we moderate based on vibes. It's not quite that fuzzy- we try to follow the rubrics we've developed over the years- but yes, when someone is being an obnoxious trolling shitstirrer, and has been posting obnoxious trolling shitstirring threads for a while that so far have been just barely this side of acceptable discourse, eventually we're going to say "Enough, knock it off." @AlexanderTurok has been there for a while, and he's been warned repeatedly. He just got a 1-day slap on the wrist, and so promptly writes a post absolutely dripping with sneering condescension.
You know what my least favorite category of bitching about modding is?
"Waaah, you modded Johnny but you didn't mod Suzy, obviously you love Suzy more!"
Playing this kind of game is never productive. Every one of us mods has explained, many times, that while we try to be more or less consistent, we do indeed mod based on "vibes" to some extent, and a lot of those vibes are "How obnoxious is this particular person being right now?" "How annoying has this particular person been recently?" and "Does this particular person have a long record of AAQCs, or a long record of being warned to knock it off?" There is also a lot of subjectivity in whether a particular word or phrase strikes this mod on this day as being over the line.
(Also worth noting that sometimes someone is filling the mod queue with reports, and he'll eventually get banned for one of them. Unless you're absolutely sure that the person you're complaining about didn't get a ban around the same time for some other post, don't assume that whatever post you're linking to is an example of "Mods thoughts this was okay.")
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