domain:npr.org
sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
13hr ago
My man, did you bother to do something as simple as Google the phrase thief beaten up India?
India, as you know, is a big place. I am confident that there's a thief beaten up in India every day. The question is, is pickpocketing and robbery rare, and is it rare because thieves are sure to be swiftly beaten? You claim it is, but again, I have met many Indians and I have never heard any of them claim that thieves are guaranteed an ass-whooping on the spot.
I don't have the time to watch the video right now, but my expectation is that they're preying on tourists primarily, which would be easily true in Delhi. They could also, more tentatively, simply be lying about the risks of being caught, or too dumb to care.
It's not a video, it's an article. The guy mostly picks pockets of people on public transit, which tourists are usually wealthy enough to avoid and has a critical mass of witnesses and people who would be available for administering an impromptu beating.
I can't even imagine what it means to be "too dumb to care" about being beaten to a pulp. It is possible that he's lying, but why would he lie about this? Why would he continue to be a pickpocket if he's getting beaten every day by mobs of Indians? More importantly, how could he continue to do anything but lie in a hospital?
That telling people to make lifestyle changes is highly ineffective? That implies nothing about whether or not the changes themselves don't work. I consider it clear enough, in the context of the comment. In fact, the very next sentence is:
Telling people to use their will to get over depression or diabetes doesn't, and the same is true for obesity.
The only reason we even bother trying is that telling people to do things is rather cheap and low-effort. In rare cases, they might even listen. It also makes us feel good, and ticks boxes.
wayfarer
13hr ago
are historically used to them and because fear of foreign threat is an emotionally powerful motivator.
also, because it is quite hard to find alternative solution (other than "I guess we surrender if we end in a serious war") but states with such approach tend to disappear for obvious reasons
HereAndGone
13hr ago
I'm not kidding here, we genuinely are rather unsure about the mechanism of action. Most of the commonly advanced suggestions were found to be wrong or inadequate at best.
I know, which is why I've resisted the blandishments of doctors trying to sell this to me. I know I'd be one of the patients who didn't stick to the stringent lifestyle changes you have to make along with the surgery, and I'd be one of the ones who over-eat to the extent of bursting the sleeve.
Trying to fill yourself with low calorie food is an approach known as "volumetrics", and it works okay.
I don't think just drinking water would work as well, because you'd need an uncomfortable amount to fill your stomach, and the body would quickly realize that it's just water, without calories.
Oh, I've tried the fibre tablets thing - eat this tablet before a meal, drink water, it'll swell up inside your stomach and make you feel full and you'll eat less. Never worked for me because I never got the "feeling full" bit even after taking more than the recommended dose (luckily, I think/hope eating too much fibre is not a bad thing as such).
The problem with false flag theory of this size is that the ten people arrested would have to be genuine. You can't find ten people willing to do a decade in prison over a false-flag attack.
As opposed to the 10 people who demonstratable were willing to do a decade in prison over a non-false-flag attack?
Present culprits aside, you should probably update your sense of scale of people willing to accept severe consequences to act against their enemies. There were more than 1000 suicide bombings, which is to say more than 1000 suicide bombers, in Iraq alone between 2003 and 2011. Iraq during that period was about 1/10th of the population of the US, and hardly had a monopoly on whatever virtue/vice you think it takes to accept guaranteed death for a chance to kill the target of your animosity. Whatever your view of the relative hardiness of the average radicalized American versus the average radicalized Iraqi, finding 10 people to take much lower risks for much lower costs is not the bottle neck.
In fact, we can find far more than ten Americans willing to risk a decade in prison merely by going to the prisons where people are serving sentences of ten or more years. These prisoners are a group who are, by necessity, a smaller subset of the group of people who take risks that could result in a decade or more of prison, since the people who did the same but were not caught/convicted will obviously not be there. And the people who are actually did take the risk is a smaller subset of the people willing to take the risk, and so on.
If your formulation was meant to specify people intending to go to jail as part of the plan would be impossible to find, that would indeed be a lot harder... but it would also be unnecessary. Getting caught isn't required for a false flag any more than it would be for a non-false flag.
Well, they didn't seem to have practiced or thought this out. A competent cell could have modified rifles for fully automatic, controllable fire. I'm sure if you do a bit of research you can find accurate blueprints on how to modify the receiver to allow full auto..
They could, but this would be the sort of tacti-cool that serves as an even greater indicator of cell incompetence that works against a false flag from a competent group hypothesis. It's not that modifying for full auto is something a competent could do and this group failed to do it right, but rather that modifying for full auto for the purpose of this attack is something the competent would not do, and this group thought it would be good to pursue.
Part of this is because 'fully automatic, controllable fire' is more of a video game hollywoodism than a practical advantage for this sort of attack. The physics of recoil are why the sort of squad automatic rifles that use the AR-15's 5.56mm ammo, and larger caliber automatic weapons, are braced against the ground with bipods for full auto. It's also why shoulder-braced SMGs use correspondingly smaller ammo with less kickback, so the body can more easily absorb recoil. Recoil is why militaries train both in terms of small bursts rather than, well, 'full auto.' Unlike video games, where automatic rifles put out more shots on target for more damage, in reality the role of automatic fire is far more for suppressing the enemy for movement and maneuver. You don't control fully automatic fire onto a meatbag target unless that target is particularly numerous, like a WW1 wave attack, particularly close, or both.
And part of this is that this is the google maps image of Prairieland Detention Center. This sort of image is the bare minimum you should expect the weapon-modifiers to have for their planning purposes.
Note that the closest treeline is 100m away from the parking lot. Note that the other woods- the ones large enough to be where Song hid- are closer to 300m. These are not 'close' targets for automatic weapons to effectively hit the target.
And then there's combining the role of an automatic weapon, suppressing for maneuver, to the terrain and how the attack initiated.
From the initial criminal complaint describing the attack in the original Ngo post-
…around 10:59 p.m., an Alvarado Police Department ("APD") officer arrived in the parking lot at the Prairieland Detention Center in response to the 911 call by the Correctional Officers in order to assist the Correctional Officers in their official duties. Immediately after the APD officer got out of his vehicle, an assailant in the woods opened fire, shooting the APD officer in the neck area. The assailant in the green mask, standing near the woods on Sunflower Lane, then also opened fire at the unarmed DI-IS correctional officers. In total, the assailants shot approximately 20 to 30 rounds at the Correctional Officers. Police later recovered spent 5.56 caliber casings at the locations of both of the shooters.
An unmodified AR-15 in its purely semi-automatic function of a shot a squeeze could go through 30 rounds in about 30 seconds.
A M16 on full-auto, the military basis of the AR-15, would go through 30 rounds in about 3 seconds.
Even if you double or triple the shots fired if the weapons didn't jam- a jamming made more likely by the modification to fire faster- you still aren't having a maneuver element do a 100-meter flank assault in 7-to-12 seconds from the closer tree line. Even Usain Bolt took over 9 seconds for his world-record 100m dash, and he wasn't carrying a roughly 6 lb / 3 kg two-handed rifle while doing it.
Again- modifying for rate of fire here is tacti-cool, not tactical. It is anti-competence to expect or pursue, and this group's effort to do so is an indicator against the false flag hypothesis.
(Which is part of why I wish Ngo's article had mentioned it from the start. It would been a helpful balance against his weird flags. Ah well.)
ControlsFreak
13hr ago
Then by all means, please elaborate on how you intended the following sentence to be interpreted:
I'm a doctor for many reasons, but ranking highly among them is that I have an urge to find solutions to problems that actually work.
do you really advocate that some people are property?
personally I will take transing fans, russian agents, antifa and flat earthers over slavery enthusiasts*
anyone that advocates for slavery or considers it as acceptable is worse that serious communists (conscription being a special case, I guess - if you want to argue it is a form of slavery)
*not that I would want either in position of authority or within 100 000 km from me
ControlsFreak
13hr ago
Ah, the good old "all that's needed is just some willpower" argument.
Ah, the good old strawman. Actually, very very bad old strawman.
self_made_human
C'est la vie
13hr ago
I do not necessarily claim that fat-shaming doesn't work. I just think that it's cruel, and the efficacy is far less than ideal.
There are societies, like China or Korea, where the social opprobrium for gaining weight is so strong that most people will do just about anything to avoid it. It likely also drives people into depression, eating disorders, while also sucking.
Locking people in a fat camp and beating them with sticks for eating will, I strongly believe, reduce the obesity rate. I don't endorse such tactics, even if they work.
(You don't see no fatties coming out of Auschwitz, do you?)
Yes, I'm on Ozempic now. I haven't lost weight, but it'd doing good for my blood sugar. Weirdly, I'm eating both less and more, since I don't eat as much at one sitting, but now I'm constantly eating small snacks and meals. No idea what the hell is going on there
I'm not an endocrinologist, but it might be worth asking them to increase the dose. More Ozempic is, very roughly speaking, more weight lost. There are also alternative drugs that work even better, but they're harder to get.
HereAndGone
13hr ago
Changing your lifestyle does actually work; it's just that many people don't do it.
Ah, the good old "all that's needed is just some willpower" argument.
If anything would drive me to be a biological determinist, it's this. Oh, you find it easy to cut down eating, take more exercise, make necessary changes and stick to them?
Do you want a medal for that? Because it's not on you, it's not you making up your mind and applying willpower that does it. It's the genetic luck of the draw of having the fortunate combination of heredity and environment that gave you the physiological and psychological phenotype that means you can eat less, exercise more, and stick to changes.
Both my parents smoked. My father was able to give up smoking and never go back. My mother tried and failed, many times, to give it up and eventually she died of the lung cancer it gave her.
That was not a question of willpower, because my mother was not less strong-willed than my father, or more resistant to change. I don't know why she couldn't stop. She didn't know why she couldn't stop. She wanted to stop, she tried, she failed over and over.
Tell me "all that's needed is just some willpower" about that, and I will spit in your smug face.
JarJarJedi
13hr ago
I am beginning to have doubts about Israel’s combat effectiveness in Gaza
Effectiveness is the function of goals - to evaluate effectiveness, you need to see how the goals are being reached. The problem is, Israel declared two goals here - elimination of Hamas and release of hostages, and these two goals are contradictory. Additionally, there's a longer term goal - not letting October 7 repeat itself - while also avoiding taking full control over Gaza as occupying power long term. This goal is also self-contradictory, since as soon as IDF moves out, Hamas moves back in.
inflicted enough civilian casualties to seriously impact its standing in the United States and the world
This has nothing to do with casualties. The Hamas caucus in the US has been screaming about genocide and singing "from the river to the sea" next day after October 7, long before there even were any casualties. And they will be always screaming that, because they do not recognize Israel as a legitimate state and their ultimate goal is its destruction, so nothing Israel does would ever be good enough for them, short of ceasing to exist completely. The slogan is "Free Palestine", and "free" here means "Judenfrei". It's not "reduce civilian casualties". It's "no Jews, period". They may be fine with some Naturei Karta posers, but that's about it.
I don’t think Israel has the manpower needed to fully occupy Gaza, clear the tunnels,
Israel has more then enough power to do that. What Israel doesn't have is the desire and political will to do that, because it replaces the current problems with much more complicated and painful set of problems, which Israel already experienced and decided to get rid of them by evacuating from Gaza. Israel wants Gaza to be outside and treat it as foreign thing, not a persistent festering sore on its own body. The problem here is that this desire is not matching the reality, and it's not the question of manpower. This is the problem of the political desires of Israeli society not matching the sad reality on the ground. And it will only be resolved, ultimately, by Israel giving up on one of the contradictory requirements. Previously, Israel gave up on security to get rid of Gaza, and got October 7 as the consequence. They can do it again and get it again in another 15 years or so. Or they can accept Gaza as their problem and get another set of problems instead. There's no other "solution" - at least not practical one. So yes, one could say it's not "going well" if somebody expected the contradictory requirements somehow be fulfilled. But it's going exactly as expected for somebody that understands the contradiction from the start. The IDF would do as much as the politics allow it, and then the politics will take over and go to one of the possible outcomes.
I cannot even find an official casualty count but the videos and individuals incident makes me think it could potentially be as high as 1200 dead and 10,000 wounded,
You mean on Israel's side? If you knew anything about Israeli society, this would be laughable, it's impossible to hide this many dead in a small country where literally everybody knows everybody within a couple of handshakes. I mean I like a good conspiracy theory as much as the next guy, but I actually know a thing or two about that country, having lived there for many years, and it's just not something that can happen. Hiding a couple of deaths would be tough, hiding a thousand is plain crazy talk. So I will address this no more.
self_made_human
C'est la vie
13hr ago
Jokes aside, given that you were, presumably, at some point a transhumanist, I would expect that you have better arguments against it than the average person. I would be happy to discuss them, if you cared to.
It seems trivial to me that a society that can actually achieve that goal, is on the cusp of being able to simulate every mind that ever lived, and any arbitrary number of minds that didn’t. So if you think it’s inevitable that simulation will happen, what’s your concern about dying? The pain will suck, I’m sure and that’s fair, I’d enjoy a golden god body too, but it seems highly likely given your priors that you’ll just go to sleep and then wake up a simulation at some unspecified point in the future, with no sensation of loss.
A post-Singularity civilization with Dyson spheres and Matrioshka brains has a lot of energy and computational power, but it is not infinite. The sheer number of computations needed to accurately simulate a single human brain is a subject of considerable debate. In their landmark roadmap on Whole Brain Emulation, Anders Sandberg and Nick Bostrom surveyed estimates that ranged from 10^18 to 10^21 floating point operations per second (FLOP/s). Let's be charitable and take a figure on the lower end, say 10^18 FLOP/s, just for a real-time simulation.
Now, let's consider the scale. The Population Reference Bureau estimates that about 117 billion modern humans have ever been born. Of those, about 109 billion have died. If we wanted to bring them all back for, say, a simulated century, the total compute required would be 109 billion people * 100 years * 3.154e+7 seconds/year * 10^18 FLOP/s. This works out to something on the order of 10^41 total floating point operations. That's a big number, but within budget for a Kardashev-II. But this calculation completely ignores the monumental task of getting the data in the first place. This is, as I see it, the fatal flaw:
For the vast majority of those 109 billion deceased humans, the information that constituted "them" is gone. Utterly. This is what cryonicists call "[information-theoretic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information-theoretic_death)". It is the point at which the physical structures in the brain that encode memory and personality are so thoroughly disrupted that no technology, even highly-speculative, could in principle recover them. Think cremation, advanced decomposition, or having your constituent atoms scattered across the globe by the nitrogen cycle.
Let give an example:
Unga and Bunga were, someone claims with authority, Siberian cavemen from 27,000 years ago. They were unfortunately, not lucky enough to be frozen in permafrost. They have decayed, and all we're left with is maybe a fragmentary sample of DNA or the odd bone. We know next to nothing about their lives, their language, or their culture.
Even with an unlimited budget, we could not bring them back. I don't think even the most powerful ASI around could.
The challenge is not just that ancient DNA is typically fragmented and damaged, but that DNA is merely the blueprint for the hardware. The "software," the connectome, the specific synaptic weights, the epigenetic modifications, the entire lifetime of learned experiences that made Unga Unga and not just some generic instance of his genome, has been overwritten by entropy. The information is lost, and the second law of thermodynamics is a harsh mistress. Reconstructing them from scratch would be, if not a physical impossibility, close enough for government work.
Even for a modern person with a vast digital footprint, the problem remains. You could fine-tune an LLM on my blog, my comments, and every email I've ever sent. You could supplement it with video, audio, and detailed recollections from my family. The result would be a very convincing "self_made_human" chatbot, but it would not be me. It would be a sophisticated imitation, a high-fidelity echo that lacks my internal continuity of consciousness.
I demand far higher fidelity. I want to test such an entity in both a black box, and ideally, look at the simulated neurons and the information they contain.
The same problem applies to cloning. You could take my DNA, create a clone, and raise him in an environment designed to replicate my own. But how would you transfer my almost 30 years of memories, my specific neural pathways? He would be, at best, my identical twin brother, separated by a generation, not a continuation of my existence. He and I would agree that he is not me. Not in the same manner as the me of yesterday or from next year. There just isn't enough data.
(If he doesn't, then something definitely broke along the way)
This brings us to cryonics. It's not a guarantee, not by a long shot. We do not know for certain what level of structural and chemical detail must be preserved to retain the information essential for personal identity. But it is, at present, the only method that even attempts to bridge the gap between clinical death and information-theoretic death by preserving the brain's physical structure.
As others have argued, the decision to sign up can be framed as a question of expected value. If you assign even a tiny, non-zero probability to the success of future revival technology, the potential payoff is a lifespan of indeterminate, potentially astronomical, length. It's a bet against the finality of decay, a wager that our descendants will be much, much smarter than we are. I find that a slim hope is infinitely better than no hope at all, but I would still very much prefer to not die in the first place.
What do you think? Do you want to spin this conversation off somewhere else?
Well, that's what I think haha.
I now mildly regret that whopper of a post being so far down thread. I usually prefer to write out in public instead of DMs (I'm vain enough to want the public to praise me for the work I do). You're welcome to reply here, or post a top-level comment elsewhere, or whatever you please. Even DMs, though I would be saddened by going through all this effort behind closed doors.
aqouta
13hr ago
China tightened regulations on real estate developers in 2020. Xi Jinping stated 'houses are for living, not speculation.' Ghost cities, huge numbers of Chinese citizens owning multiple houses as investment vehicles, I assume you're all familiar with the stories after five years of news stories and discussion. Economists and western commentators largely agreed that the policies were A Really Bad Idea due to the ensuing chaos and meltdown in property prices.
To which I have to say ...what? They said they wanted to reduce housing costs! What did you think that would look like? How else are you going to do it? And what do you think it would look like to 'make housing more affordable' in the USA? If the YIMBYs and neoliberals abundance socialists get their way, home prices are going to tank here too. This is a good thing! Maybe there's some Chestertonian benefit to the upwards spiral of housing costs, but this here's a fence I'm ready to take a torch to.
I think you're misunderstanding the housing issue in China. Their problem is that all that housing was financed with debt taken on by the local governing bodies who are up to their eyeballs in it and also get most of their revenue from building the housing. The Chinese stock market doesn't make returns and Chinese citizens are limited to where they can put their savings. Housing being cheaper is fine, good even but that sector was propping up the local governments. Chinese people have something like 70% of their savings in housing and housing makes up something like 30% of chinese GDP. Chinese local governments are facing debt crises as a result.
HereAndGone
13hr ago
Driving her to tears failed.
that's what people don't understand about "well let's just shame fat people into not over-eating".
If you really make me feel bad, what happens? I feel bad, I cry, I hate myself. There's no quick fix, because even immediately going on a starvation diet will not shift significant amounts of weight in time for all the "good job, you are now not a disgusting lard bucket" to make up for the shaming.
You know what does make me feel better in the short term? Eating.
Congratulations, now you've driven me to eat even more.
(Yes, I'm on Ozempic now. I haven't lost weight, but it'd doing good for my blood sugar. Weirdly, I'm eating both less and more, since I don't eat as much at one sitting, but now I'm constantly eating small snacks and meals. No idea what the hell is going on there).
Bartender_Venator
14hr ago
Hoping to catch an edgelord grasping the nettle? Aristotle discusses this in his writing on slavery - he distinguishes "slaves by nature", i.e. people whose nature is such that they are incapable of maintaining their freedom, and "slaves by convention", i.e. those who are actually legal slaves. He was not a fan of the fact that not all those who are slaves by convention are slaves by nature (Plato himself did some time in chains), and he does not endorse the mass enslavement of natural slaves who are legally free (they are already enslaved, but enslaved to vices, to menial employment, to patrons, etc., such that enslaving them legally would be superfluous. In fact, some of those natural slaves are otherwise wealthy, strong men who would be practically impossible to enslave except through capture in war).
Furthermore, the actual legal institutions required to deal with the fact of natural slavishness are contingent, and there's no reason that a more prosperous society would need to use Greek-style slavery. One way to put it in a modern context would be that those who are dependent on the state to survive are de facto property of the state, and that modern states have largely chosen to bind themselves to take care of their human property, but this is likewise just an historical contingency. There is nothing, besides the choice of voters, stopping the US from repealing some constitutional amendments and making fentanyl addicts pick cotton (to pick the most extreme case of natural slavery in the modern day. The capacity for freedom of a drug addict would not change if we were legally to enslave him, except that he might luck into a kinder master). So, from an Aristotelian perspective, in the modern age, we can pick out a couple categories:
- Those who are for all intents and purposes the property of others, or the state, protected by some legal rights and more importantly a culture of kindness towards the vulnerable (the severely disabled, although transfers of legal guardianship are limited)
- Those who are for all intents and purposes the property of others, but who are protected by strong legal safeguards and to some extent can advocate for themselves (children, some mental illnesses necessitating legal guardianship)
- Those who are naturally slavish to an extent they're incapable of the most basic demands of freedom, and are legally free except when their behaviour inevitably violates the law (drug addicts, lowlife criminals)
- Those who are naturally slavish to an extent they cannot live without depending on others in a one-sided relationship, who are legally free but practically unfree, and are protected by an attitude of kindness the public has adopted (the hopelessly welfare-dependent)
- Those who are naturally slavish but capable of fulfilling the basic demands of life by developing two-way economic relationships with others in a free market (people working shitty jobs with messed-up lives, but still functioning. This is the point where I would call someone practically free, if one wants to introduce a middle category. They will be effectively somebody/something's property in some parts of their lives, such as their boss's, their partner's, or their liquor's, but they have spheres of real choice even if they choose not to take them.)
- Those who are naturally slavish, but who are enslaved to vices they can successfully fulfil by predating on others, and so remain practically free unless they're caught violating the law (successful criminals, blue and white collar)
- Those who are naturally slavish, but whose nature enslaves them to compulsions which are rewarded by society, including with greater freedom of action even though they remain internally unfree (e.g. a miser obsessed with money-making. Many celebrities.)
- Those who are naturally slavish, but whose nature is ordered such that it makes them genuinely happy (e.g. someone who feels compelled to enter a 24/7 BDSM relationship, and deeply enjoys it)
- The naturally free, who are able to choose and prefer through rational consideration, and moderate their appetites according to reason. In the modern Western world, these people no longer need or want slaves as property.
Incidentally, in an American context, that last "choose and prefer" is crucial. Natural rights of the type the Constitution enshrines are based on very simple human capacities, in particular the capacity to choose and prefer. The rationality or quality of that ability to choose doesn't enter into it. Hence why we have a system that is able to assign legal rights without reference to more complex aspects of the individual's nature, including inner slavishness/freedom. This certainly causes problems over time, as people forget that they need other methods to deal with the naturally slavish, like occasionally throwing a chamberpot at the town drunk, but is better-adapted to modern norms and technologies than Classical slavery. Even if some people are born to be property, that does not imply that legal slavery is the solution. Instead, let a free market and healthy social norms deal with them (I'll leave to the reader the question of whether achieving a free market and healthy social norms today would be easier or harder than reinstating slavery).
SSCReader
14hr ago
Yeah Timpson is a notable prison reform advocate who famously (or infamously) thinks 2/3rds of all prisoners should not be in prison. He's talking about women here because the prison in question is a woman's prison, but he has said exactly the same thing about the prison population in general (which is like 90% male). The only difference is that women prisoners who are mothers usually means the state is paying to jail the woman and then pay to put her kids in foster care etc.
Zephyr
14hr ago
Perhaps "You can't sell yourself into slavery" would be a better example here.
self_made_human
C'est la vie
14hr ago
I'm not being circumspect. I am merely elaborating on a point I've made, which was interpreted in a sense I didn't intend (I'm not accusing you of an intentional, bad faith claim, misinterpretations happen). I don't see any additional hedging, or caveats at play.
I would like to think I'm usually quite clear in what I mean via what I say, not that this is any guarantee of people interpreting it exactly as intended. Even legal documents and contracts, intended to maximize clarity and leave no room for error, often end up in the courts. They also make for riveting reading.
BreakerofHorsesandMen
Sweet Sejenus
14hr ago
I am somewhat unfairly advantaged by having been a lurker long before I started posting, but you and I have significantly different points of view on what constitutes “a bad thing.”
That said, I once believed the trajectory of human civilization was in the direction of being golden gods, so I have hopes that you’ll come around. [[Insert positive emoji of your choice]]
Completely unrelated, but I have often wanted to pick your brain on your, trying to be fair here, significant concern around death. Correct everything wrong about my interpretations of your ideas, but you seem to be very focused on instantiating uploads and achieving eternal cyber life of the mind at some point in your expected lifespan.
It seems trivial to me that a society that can actually achieve that goal, is on the cusp of being able to simulate every mind that ever lived, and any arbitrary number of minds that didn’t. So if you think it’s inevitable that simulation will happen, what’s your concern about dying? The pain will suck, I’m sure and that’s fair, I’d enjoy a golden god body too, but it seems highly likely given your priors that you’ll just go to sleep and then wake up a simulation at some unspecified point in the future, with no sensation of loss.
What do you think? Do you want to spin this conversation off somewhere else?
Goodguy
14hr ago
I wonder how much of US prices' resiliency to the tariffs is caused by long-term contracts that were signed before Trump started to levy tariffs and are still in effect. I have no idea, I know very little about how international trade works.
self_made_human
C'est la vie
14hr ago
The kind of adoption process that involves traveling the world to find the perfect orphan is straight-up child buying, and has some moral similarities to eugenic embryo modification.
You say that like it's a bad thing. I consider both of them to be fine, not that I'm looking to adopt, or at the very least "not my business".
self_made_human
C'est la vie
14hr ago
But that may simply be a further question of degree. If we really did build a genuine superintelligence, unfettered by "alignment" to some other human's political agenda, would I not be wise to submit myself to it? I feel grateful to doubt that I will ever face such a choice.)
I'm sure that I'm notorious enough that my own subjective likelihood of facing an ASI in my lifespan doesn't need elaboration, and I'll skip over my usual arguments.
I think that, compared to life as it is right now, accepting the rule and oversight of a benevolent superintelligence would be grossly superior, and beats rule by humans in just about every metric (barring your ability to rebel, should you have strong feelings on the matter). They are likely incorruptible, smarter than the average politician, and thus far better placed to consider the likely outcomes of their policies. They might even, at least theoretically, be democratic and defer to the opinions of us retarded humans. I'd hope so, at least, since we're the ones building them to fulfill our whims.
(If they're not benevolent, gg I guess)
That being said, that's not what I consider an ideal world. I'd much rather use the kind of technology available in a post-Singularity world to improve myself and rapidly bootstrap to the level of an ASI so I can exert agency and be treated as a peer. I'd rather not be beholden to anyone, no matter how kind and wise.
This is of course, a rather aspirational goal. About the same as me saying that utopia-with-free-blowjobs beats utopia-without.
self_made_human
C'est la vie
15hr ago
You've just made it clear that even if I were to produce any figures, you wouldn't believe them. Which isn't even the wrong approach, since crime stats from the Third World are notoriously unreliable, and this isn't as cut and dry as murder.
That being said, the gold standard for comparative statistics when comparing crime rates between jurisdictions is the murder rate. Because, well, murder is a pretty big deal, hard to hide, and the cops, even if lazy and incompetent, are usually not that awful.
India, according to UNODC figures, had a murder rate of 2.94/100,000 in 2021.
The global average is 5.19 in 2023.
The World Bank claims 11 for "low income countries". 10.9 for all of Africa.
The United States? 5.9
I'm not bold enough to immediately jump to claims that the same ratio holds for other forms of crime, but yes, you are far less likely to be murdered as the average person in India compared to the global or third world average. We even beat the States, which is unusually awful by Western standards.
I have no objections if you wish to consider my claims to be entirely anecdotal. I stand by them regardless.
TowardsPanna
15hr ago
I really should get back to playing M:RF. I liked it a lot but dropped it while upgrading my GPU, months ago. I think I'm like 1/3 or 1/2 through it. Played around 33 hours.
Please help re-kindle my interest without spoiling anything. :) I assume there are good reasons why you are playing it not just once but twice.
There is a difference between "crying because hungry/wet/scared" and "crying because I started and don't know how to stop" and if you're around kids for any length of time you'll pick up on the difference. That being said, I'd hate to be a kid raised under the "at six months ignore the crying" regime because yikes. A small baby is not trying to manipulate its parents, it has few other ways to communicate except through crying.
Kids today, or at least middle class kids upwards, are a lot more isolated. "The newborn is in a crib in the nursery and we monitor via babycam"? The hell? Babies were sharing the bed or at the foot of the bed in a cradle in lower class families, so they were never far away from human contact (see The Reeve's Tale, where a plot point is the deception wrought by moving the baby's cradle from the foot of one bed to another). Now it's a lot more "put the kid in a separate room nowhere near the parents until it cries to be fed" which has got to have an affect.
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