domain:freddiedeboer.substack.com
naraburns
nihil supernum
13hr ago
I see. Yeah, no, as far as I know that's just a reference to his reddit username, which is/was not "WhiningCoil." The mod team was discussing WhiningCoil's status just yesterday and no one made any mention of alt accounts at that time.
naraburns
nihil supernum
13hr ago
That's a nice quote, but how are my freedoms being suppressed? I think I would have noticed by now.
Oh, depending on your age, there's a very good chance you're not missing out on any freedoms at all. At worst, maybe you've been passed over for university admissions or a job or a promotion as a result of affirmative action or something--and given the abundance of all those things in America, even then you may not have so much as noticed.
Your comment alludes to the process of integration and I think that historically there is much to be said for it. European immigrants faced much the same concern as that directed toward South and Central American, African, Middle Eastern, and Indian immigrants today, but a couple generations later they seem to have integrated entirely. It might be observed that the integration of descendants of African slavery has gone a bit less smoothly, but of course we didn't really start trying to integrate them throughout the nation until about 75 years ago.
Nevertheless, there is in certain corners a tendency of some political groups to assert "whiteness" as a kind of original sin. Job postings listing essentially every demographic except straight white Christian men as "preferred candidates" come up a lot in Canada and even sometimes in the United States. More importantly, just the fact of identifying as "Republican" or "conservative" is enough to get you dog piled and even banned from certain online communities. If you in fact found this space via Twitter, you might not be familiar with some of the more "canonical" writings that created this space, but I heartily recommend them:
I Can Tolerate Anything Except the Outgroup
Neutral Versus Conservative: The Eternal Struggle
None of this is to suggest that I really disagree with you. I have high hopes for the long term, and I stubbornly refuse to believe that liberalism is dead (or if it is, that we should stop trying to resurrect it). But that means I strongly oppose identitarianism both from the Right ("alt-right") and from the Left ("Woke"). Identitarianism is illiberal and works against your own expressed preferences for integration by instead demanding ideological conformity. The worry toward which I am pointing is that identitarianism appears to be on the rise since ~2014, first on the Left and then on the Right. Many people only get alarmed about the identitarianism happening in their outgroup (since the other kind is a personal benefit). But I think also sometimes people don't realize that just because you don't think someone is in your outgroup, doesn't mean they actually consider you part of their ingroup.
magic9mushroom
If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me
13hr ago
I am not aware of any accusations of you running alts.
Two days ago.
Less than a day ago.
"I do know you have been modded and banned pretty regularly under whichever alt you're using."
Both from @Amadan.
Barfknuckle
13hr ago
Yeah, about that, I sent a modmail about this accusation that I'm running alts, because it's bullshit, and I'd appreciate a response.
You should just make some alts. The trick is that the alts should say absolutely nothing the least bit controversial at least until the current main is kaput. They should just make obvious little comments and build up a few points until it's time for them to become the new main.
By the time your new main goes from "newbie with a clean record so far" to being someone the mods remember in their own right, your last account getting banned should be old news.
Barfknuckle
13hr ago
I just got around to bothering to read this post 17 days later.
You're basically complaining that there isn't a reasonable 'win condition' against the scolds scolding him, and I am extrapolating on that.
I lightheartedly complained that there wasn't a way to avoid people bitching about what a rich guy's woman looks like. You just sound like some sack of shit whose wife left him, barging in all serious to tell us how actually it's because adultery is bad, like nobody else knows the context around this or why anyone might be mad at Jeff Bezos.
Fuck off, retard.
naraburns
nihil supernum
13hr ago
Hopefully you see my response. I am not aware of any accusations of you running alts. In the past year you have accumulated AAQCs, warnings, and bans in approximately equal proportion. These are always hard cases for us, because we can see that you're smart enough to understand and follow the rules, and you create excellent content for the community on a regular basis. So we actively resist banning you, but you blatantly violate the rules way too often for us to simply ignore. Your current balance is such that you really are flirting with a perma, or at least a very long term (90+ days) ban.
campy
14hr ago
America has outperformed its economic peers in Europe and Asia over the last forty years despite this supposed "anchor".
Does anybody imagine that Europe and Asia are bastions of noble, honest public servants?
orthoxerox
If you can read this, you're using a custom theme
14hr ago
"If you mince your oaths, the Lord still knows you took His name in vain, he just sees you're a fucking pussy as well"
And NO, I will NOT do it.
Nobody cares which words you say or which wokies use it as a spell to steal all your mana or whatever you're afraid of, just maybe find a way to talk about the subject without everyone on the board cringing their way to a rectal prolapse over your childish personal neurosis.
I don't think I even particularly disagree with you, but this is pure cringe. You sound completely brain-fried and should probably stop consuming culture war material.
BurdensomeCount
—Your em dash is showing...
15hr ago
Didn't that particular anecdote turn out to be an exaggeration?
jkf
16hr ago
I can confirm that I have bought womens' razors at times because they were cheaper (slightly) and didn't have the dumb 'lubricating strip' that clogs up with beard if you don't shave often enough.
From my perspective, America has outperformed its economic peers in Europe and Asia over the last forty years despite this supposed "anchor"
Debatable. Over my life time America went from "the promised land" to "not sure if this is worth the bother of moving half way across the world" to "it's definitely not worth the bother, plus they lost their marbles culturally". Though this is somewhat complicated by the fact that Europe made no shortage of idiotic political/economic decisions during that time itself, including importing it's own set of anchors, as well as America's cultural trends.
If I had any intention of moving across the world, I'd probably be picking China, not the US.
Jiro
17hr ago
Normies have the idea that a price is based on cost, plus a certain amount of profit. Charging more for a product because the customers are less price sensitive rather than because the product costs more to make is considered cheating the customer.
Rationalists may not think that way, but everyone else does. If pink razors cost the same to make, but women are willing to pay extra for them, charging extra is dishonest.
Jiro
17hr ago
I wonder if some of the problems people have with this kind of in-group bias is the reverse: immigrants who are culturally different and need to exert a lot of effort to catch up will get along with mainstream Americans, but immigrants who are multiple generation assimilated are more likely to use their immigrant heritage for identity politics.
Unfortunately that is past the point where Reddit lets you search. (You may see posts suggesting that Reddit only returns 1000 posts but narrowing it down will work. Narrowing it down will not work.) But I can come up with some related posts:
Moderator tells me that I can be abrasive but not antagonistic
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
17hr ago
I am agnostic on LLMs being conscious or having qualia. More importantly, I think it's largely irrelevant. What difference to me does it make if an unaligned ASI turns me into a paperclip but doesn't really dislike me?
Is a horse happy about the fact that the tractor replacing it isn't conscious? It's destined for the glue factory nonetheless.
We have no principled or rigorous way to interrogate consciousness in humans. We have no way of saying with any certainty that LLMs aren't conscious, even if I am inclined to think that, if they are, it's a very alien form of consciousness.
You mention an entity being 'cognizant' of something, but I would have thought that's the thing obviously missing here. To be cognizant of something is to be aware of it - it's a claim about interiority.
I'm talking about whoever is doing the assessment of consciousness being "aware" of the fundamental limitations of the entity they're testing. I could, in theory, administer a med school final exam to Terence Tao, and he'd fail miserably. I would be a bigger idiot if I went on to then declare that Tao is thus proven to not be as smart as he seems. That meme about subjecting a monkey, fish and elephant to the same objective test of ability in the form of climbing trees, while usually misapplied, isn't entirely wrong.
I also don't mean to make any implications about "interiority" here. I would happily say that an LLM is "cognizant" of fact X, if say, that information was in its training data or within the context window. No qualia or introspection required.
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
17hr ago
Well, that sucks. People really are getting their history in all the wrong places.
OliveTapenade
17hr ago
...I think that's what the Sunday small-scale question thread is for.
OliveTapenade
17hr ago
Well, I will grant that on the latter definition, LLMs are 'intelligent'.
I don't think I would grant it on the former definition, because I take building a model of the world to be a claim about conscious experience, which LLMs don't have. LLMs are capable of goal-directed activity, for whatever that may be worth, but I think having a model of the world implies having some kind of mental space or awareness. You mention an entity being 'cognizant' of something, but I would have thought that's the thing obviously missing here. To be cognizant of something is to be aware of it - it's a claim about interiority.
I mention this because I notice in AI discourse a gulf where it seems that, for some people, LLMs are obviously intelligent, and the idea of denying that they are is ridiculous; and that for other people LLMs are obviously not intelligent, and the idea of affirming that they are is ridiculous. I'm in the latter camp personally, and the way I make sense of this is just to guess that people are using the word 'intelligent' in very different ways.
aldomilyar
17hr ago
I've seen people stating they essentially believe Bridgerton's portrait of the period is racially correct, even if they acknowledge that the queen figure doesn't exist.
aldomilyar
17hr ago
I think it's a combination of a few things
- These modifications largely only go one way in modern culture. There'll be Black Blitz sufferers, but there will be no White characters in an equivalent tale about Africa 500 years ago
- A lot of people are staggeringly ignorant and take this sort of thing at face value, promoting this sort of 'eternal present day' mindset in which it becomes impossible to think rationally about historical topics since you're essentially imagining the current level of affluence and racial integration to have extended back forever. I've met people who genuinely think Bridgerton is a historical tale.
erwgv3g34
17hr ago
Not that there is anything wrong with taking the high road and turning your back on media, but there's at least two good alternatives:
One: Watch old stuff. No, that's not the same as rewatching stuff you already like, because nobody has enough time to consume all the multiple lifetimes of classics that already exist.
If you are a science fiction fan, for example, can you seriously tell me that you have already watched all of Star Trek (the pre-Enterprise stuff), Babylon 5, Stargate, Battlestar Galactica, Firefly, The Twilight Zone, and The Outer Limits? If you are a film buff, have you honestly already tried going down the American Film Institute's list of the 100 best American movies, Roger Ebert's The Great Movies, or all Best Picture winners made before the year 2010? If you are an animation guy, have you truly already watched all 2D entries in the Disney Animated Canon, Don Bluth's entire filmography, and the standard recommendations of Gargoyles, Avatar: The Last Airbender, and the DCAU, as well as hidden gems like Exosquad?
I doubt it.
Two: Watch foreign media. The woke mind virus may have taken over the Anglosphere, but Asian stuff remains largely isolated. You could embrace the hallyu and watch one of the very nice K-dramas that are going around, most notably Squid Game. Or you could dive into anime, which is truly a completely different world; there is a reason why men fall in love with anime girls and Demon Slayer can outsell the entire American comic book industry. As AntiDem put it:
The appeal of anime is simple: It depicts a world with intact families, high trust, feminine women, politeness and good manners, public order, low crime, and a sense of mutual obligation between neighbors in a community - a world not slathered in gratuitous degeneracy and consumerism, peopled by unmarriageable women and increasingly angry men, which is in the process of careening toward disaster because a corrupt, ineffectual government is helpless in containing an uprising by violent lunatics hopped up on a fanatical ideology.
In the 20th century, people longed for a galaxy full of advanced technology which would take us to unknown worlds beyond the stars, and were inspired by television which showed it to us. In the 21st century, people long only for home and family, for peace and stability, for connection and friendship. To hell with the stars - just give us back the hearth and the dinner table. That is all we dream of now.
I encountered anime in the first year of my adulthood. It taught me that there was another path available - that people could behave differently than they had in my shattered family and the cold, brutal place where I grew up. That there were other ways to go through life than being selfish and angry all the time. That not every love between a man and a woman was doomed to end in bitterness and hatred. That people could be your friend for reasons other than wanting something out of you. That behaving honorably and sacrificing for the good of people around you isn’t just a thing that suckers do for ingrates. That not everybody breaks promises whenever they become inconvenient. That there are other approaches to the world than cynicism and irony. That not everything is a scam, and not everybody is out to hustle you.
Nothing in my life up to then had taught me any of that.
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
18hr ago
You're probably right. The biggest driver was just being able to sneak in games while work was slow.
DiscourseMagnus
18hr ago
I get some sort of autistic pleasure from obfuscating language
That doesn't sound very autistic at all, actually.
I don't think so.
Numbering is mine. Amadan seems to think I've had at least 4 accounts and is holding this against me in his moderation decisions.
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