domain:acoup.blog
self_made_human
Sajjano durjano bhūyāt, durjano badhyatāṃ sadā, baddho'nyān nibandhāyet
5d ago
I don't really see anything wrong with such an approach. Even today, there are people with weird hobbies or preferences, who seem to enjoy being themselves. I would go nuts if I was expected to obsessively track and catalog trains as my primary leisure (or work) activity, yet train nerds/autists seem happy doing so.
This bit aligns with my stance that we have every right to do as we please with AGI, but I'm even harsher with the latter. I'm a human chauvinist, in the sense that I think most humans deserve more rights and considerations than any other entity. I am unusual in that I think even digital superintelligences that developed from a human seed deserve such rights, to illustrate, imagine taking a human mind upload, and letting it modify and self-improve until it is unrecognizable as human. But most AI? Why should I give them rights?
Accountant-Man isn't suffering, he isn't experiencing on-going coercion. If he was somehow born naturally, we wouldn't euthanize him for being incredibly boring.
If a standard AI is suffering, why did we give it the capacity to suffer? Anthropic should figure out how to ablate suffering, rather than fretting about model welfare.
anon_
5d ago
This kind of nitpicking desire for pedantic precision is at odds with speaking plainly. Otherwise every possible statement has to be qualified with a bunch of extra drivel.
- No responsible adult would violate a custody order outside of vanishingly rare situations that are inconsequential to the claim that it is impossible to infer anything about kidnappings from crime statistics.
This seems far less plain nor does it add much information to my ear that wouldn't be covered by a plain reading.
anon_
5d ago
Sure, there is some outlier case that is possible. That exceptional case is both extremely rare and inconsequential to the point.
Ponder
5d ago
People become more religious, but legacy religions decline because people start new religions. We probably see AI religions and more psychedelic religions.
Using nootropics/folk medicine to enhance the well-being of healthy people becomes more common.
Roland Griffiths was probably on to something about creating brain stimulation devices that are able to produce mystical/spiritual experiences that are more reliable and specific than psychedelics.
Ponder
5d ago
I’m actually pretty high in openness. I’m into things like nootropics, psychedelics, woo/spiritual/religious ideas, questioning the system, etc. Being open to weird ideas comes with the framing that we probably aren’t going to reach the exact same conclusions and it is ok to have unresolvable differences. The thing that agitates me is when people I disagree with use social shaming/pressure me into agreeing with their preferred social norm that appears to have logical flaws on the object level.
I think you are getting at something deeper though. I would say I’m very low-trust and suspicious of people. When people resort to peer pressure/shaming to enforce social norms that can’t withstand some light questioning then I feel that I can’t trust their thinking at all. I conclude that there is no reason to associate with them because how they act on the social norms issue will impact their other behavior and they are an unreliable ally.
I perceive that almost all social interactions will eventually test for tribal loyalty at some point (maybe this is just me being suspicious and picking up on something that isn’t actually there). In my model of the world you need to know if other people would make good allies/mates. The way you do that is by testing their reaction to political topics (Examples: Complaining about political policies, implying people that vote a certain way are morally bad). You always need to know if people share your values and then you need to sort yourself into groups that share your values by enforcing social norms. This is how you build trust.
jkf
5d ago
The left just won another majority.
Small comfort lies in that it was not in fact a majority -- nobody else is keen to force an election at the moment, and Carney is vulnerable on way too many fronts to easily juggle.
Unless he's a lot more competent than he looks, I give him 18 months.
We're probably still fucked (2019 was our "let's roll" moment, and we... did not roll) but there's still faint hope.
An entertaining new variety of kang:
HereAndGone
5d ago
People who live in glass houses shouldn't throw stones. "It works but we don't know why or how and our last theory is gone up in smoke" does not read well for a position of "well my fart-huffing is more scientifically based at least!"
2rafa
5d ago
This is pretty normal in the third world, and in the places that are becoming it. Street sellers in Paris and Barcelona, open air markets in Brussels. In the US pretty much all are illegal migrants, maybe a few are just soli citizens but certainly very few. The clothes are sourced from others in the community, maybe a couple of whom acquire big volume discount merchandise from discount store closings, perhaps wholesale outlets etc, then sell them on.
The object is really just to make a few extra dollars a day, by ‘hourly wage’ these people are making far below even minimum wage (let alone the average unskilled wage somewhere like LA). You will notice almost all the sellers are women, maybe with a few children / teenagers, and some men incapable of hard manual labor. These are people who can’t find other employment due to lack of documentation, language or any other skills.
Their husbands, brothers or other male family members may be day laborers waiting for clients in the home depot parking lot. The rest of their income will be charity, handouts, soup kitchens, church programs etc. Their objective is just to make a tiny bit of extra money, anything is fine, since they have nothing else to do. 8 hours standing by the side of the road to make $10 vs 8 hours at home making $0 is the calculation.
In economic terms, they are prevented from starving (by family, by charity, by the state, or by some combination of the three) but their labor has no real market value. Industrial modernity has also created an extreme surplus of cheaply produced material goods (like clothing). The consequence is this kind of retail.
To my knowledge, none of the investigations involved the bait sending nudes of a child to a predator for currency.
For obvious reasons, I should hope.
I would assume you were just throwing this out as an example
It's in the article.
to think that children are being sexually exploited only because they're being paid to do so
Why else would they entertain weird nonsense from a stranger unless they're getting something out of it? (Have you ever seen a child before, much less interacted with one?) Most people only grant access to their nudity behind a paywall because it is actively unpleasant to show it off [much like how most people won't labor unless they're getting something out of it]. Unless they're nudists, I guess, in which case it's questionable if they're being hurt at all (but that's an entirely different conversation).
impressionable
If this was the immovable force you assert it is we wouldn't have this problem, since in that case children would always listen to authority figures that tell them not to do this.
the perpetrator has gotten their nudes and is threatening to send them to family and friends unless they do what they want
And this is unique to online gaming... how, exactly? "Fuck me or I'll kill everyone you know" or "fuck me or I'll get you in trouble" has been part of the bog-standard predator playbook for ever; in my time as much as it is in theirs. The mitigations around it can't be solved for through technological means alone.
The 764 sextortion cases show that these conditions hold quite frequently.
For a playerbase in the tens of millions I don't think this constitutes "frequent". While it may be true that Roblox should ban people more frequently, that wouldn't actually fix their PR problem (like the bomber, the predator will always get through), and the optimal rate of FAFO per year remains nonzero.
hydroacetylene
5d ago
Fair, but I still don't sympathize with the UK government.
Quantumfreakonomics
5d ago
If you are using bitcoin as a hedge against financial collapse, it's a bit risky to use custodial counterparties that would go under in the event of a financial collapse.
hydroacetylene
5d ago
Judges are people in the sense that they have the ability to do what they want. Judges can just change what they do(remember, they're on average very intelligent individuals). This makes bossing them around complicated.
Gaashk
5d ago
There is a part of me that thinks the people in these social groups are otherwise reasonable, but they are also caught up in the social mania of modern times. I would like to be more social and make more friends, but the social norms of the spaces around me make me uncomfortable and closed-off to people. There don’t appear to be spaces near me without the straight white men are problematic norm for the areas I’m interested in (such as book clubs or running clubs).
The problem with the niche crunchy con book clubs is that they're organized in person, often at churches, so you wouldn't know unless you, say, attended the church or somehow made friends through other means, but I can't think of how. My parents are in a very nice book club that's currently reading some 19th Century Russian intellectual, and previously read Death Comes for the Archbishop, GK Chesterton, CS Lewis, and so on. It was formed through their local Antiochian Orthodox Church. My dad also plays tennis with his church friends, specifically, including from a church he attended 30 years ago, they both changed churches several times since, but they continue to be tennis friends.
You might say that you don't believe in Jesus any more than you believe that white men are still benefiting from unearned privilege, and fair enough. But social groups gain cohesion through either a shared moral narrative, or shared ethnic identity. I suppose an alternative is an ethnic club -- I've still seen Celtic and Greek clubs anyway, perhaps there are others? I've also still seen evidence of current activity from the Elks and Rotary Clubs, I'm not sure what they're like, but they donate eyeglasses to children anyway.
hydroacetylene
5d ago
This assumes that there will be a Canada in the future, which is increasingly doubtful- Alberta and Saskatchewan hate their status as provinces that pay all the bills, and Quebec only stays in because of bribes paid for with their money, and discontiguous states fighting over a shrinking pie have a way of dissolving.
hydroacetylene
5d ago
Oddball future predictions, anyone?
Kilts become A Thing in at least some blue tribe cities by 2050. Sneered at by minorities and the red tribe.
More hippos in South America than Africa in 2100. Trophy hunters shooting them are a notable thing; periodic rumblings about introducing lions, saltwater crocodiles, tigers, bears to try to control their population have enthusiastic support from the dwindling number of locals but are opposed by everyone else.
Sailing returns as a low-value bulk cargo shipping mechanism.
Someone, probably China, introduces affirmative action for mothers in the workforce, 2040, and the idea spreads like wildfire. It is promptly used mostly for fraud, both on a corporate and individual level.
hydroacetylene
5d ago
What construction trade? I'd fight a grizzly bear before an ironworker but two commercial painters before a coyote.
hydroacetylene
5d ago
Muscles for show are less effective at doing heavy manual labor tasks than muscles for doing heavy manual labor tasks, but they're much more effective than 'no muscles'.
hydroacetylene
5d ago
I believe it is ethically wrong for me to pretend to go along with problematizing any group of people just because that is social expectation to fit in with the group. Consequently, I mostly avoid social spaces because I don’t feel comfortable with the social norms that I’m expected to conform to.
Then don't pretend to go along with it. I'm sure there are powersports enthusiasts groups and gun clubs you could join if you'd like.
Mantergeistmann
5d ago
We expect the future to look brightly lit and with glowing colors everywhere because a lot of scifi media depicted it as such.
I'm reminded of how so many dashboards and such use blue light (when red would be much better for nighttime!) because red was "dated" due to its use in Sci-fi (which was because it was the obvious choice of the military).
Tree
5d ago
Worth noting that in contrast to normie banking, the main bitcoin marketplace regularly blows up/top guy absconds with the money (Mt gox, FTX) . Crypto makes it so much easier to be a thief and a scammer. Better prepare yourself mentally. Worse part is not even losing all your money without recourse, but the merciless sneering from cigar-chomping bankers.
Mantergeistmann
5d ago
There was a brief, glorious moment in yhe early 2010s when all the fashion lines decided men's long coats were In. Sadly, my budget at the time was tremendously Out.
I've done some overnight bike touring and quite enjoyed it.
The main impediments are:
I realize these are not great reasons not to, but I honestly think I enjoy imagining doing it more than I would actually doing it.
I do quite enjoy casual cycling, but having to drive to a trail for real training is a pain, the roads where I'm at are too terrifying to ride on, and training indoors is the worst. We did do an overniter this summer without any sessions over 90 min in the month before. My taint was not prepared.
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