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ThenElection
2m 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.
wemptronics
3m 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.
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 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 negative utilitarian vegans for that matter.
magic9mushroom
If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me
10m 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.
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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%).
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Austronesians, because they're essentially the only group with substantial Denisovan ancestry.
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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 isolation are quite short 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
14m 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(!).
Agreed except for the last sentence. You're taking token western institutions to pretend there were democratic norms, and (rightfully) dismissing the token Russian ones. Even if you want to carve out Germany as an exception that was somehow actually democratic, deep in their hearts (I can even give you "rule of law" as an institution that they had, to be a good sport), that still does not salvage your argument for why the democratization of the Eastern Block was a success. You even have to invent additional just-so stories to explain the relative "failure" of the democratization of the GDR, even though they it should have been the most successful of all, if "democratic traditions" were so important, and existed in Germany for such a long time.
Botond173
24m ago
Since you specifically referred to ‘Wilson's deranged fantasies’ I picked Czechoslovakia because 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. Also, just to nitpick further: in the case of Hungary, Bulgaria and Romania there was zero democratic tendency after WW1 to slide back from towards authoritarianism.
ThenElection
27m ago
Of course not. Your obligation is to get a well paying job at an AI company, usher in the apocalypse, and convert the universe into computronium, which can run innumerable simulations of bee lives in lands of endless flowers and honey and free of suffering.
Botond173
30m ago
If we consider the period before the outbreak of WW1 in Eastern Europe, we can absolutely surely say that the ideas of freely functioning political parties, democratic elections, rule of law, civil society, parliamentarianism, personal liberty, freedom of expression etc. had precisely zero influence in Russia, and that this was the case ever since the Russian state existed. And yes, this is true even when compared to imperial Germany.
WhiningCoil
30m ago
This view of suffering, as some sort of negative imposed on life, is bizarre to me. I mean it makes sense coming from a person suffering clinical depression or otherwise deeply disordered. But suffering, by and large, is our biology's way of pointing the way to go. Only children think the world would be better off without suffering. Anyone who has ever seen a news segment or documentary about people literally born without the ability to feel pain understands what a nightmarish body horror that is. I'll never forget the one I saw. Turns out without pain, it's hard to keep an infant from clawing their own eyes out, chewing off their own tongue, fingers and toes, and other acts of senseless self mutilation. They won't cry when they need something, so the new parent, ignorant to the condition, first discovers something is amiss after the child, instead of crying to be fed in the middle of the night, lets their parents sleep peacefully while they remove their own eye with their curious searching fingers.
Suffering may seem pointless to the disordered mind, but every now and again we get a Twilight Zone like glimpse at a world without suffering, and it's a horror almost beyond belief. Like a hell out of Event Horizon or Hellraiser.
thejdizzler
33m ago
Yep. It's the same conclusion that I've come to. Lots of vegans will shoot back with "you wouldn't buy something made with slave labor" or "it's not okay to beat your wife just a little bit". The former is funny because all of do in fact buy things made with slave (or quasi-slave labor). The second is true, but if I was the wife in question I'd much rather a little light spanking than being beat by a crowbar. It's this same false equivalence and purity culture (you eat oysters so you're equivalent to a guy who eats steak twice a day) in veganism which is so contrary to the actual goals of the movement (get people to eat less meat so less animals suffer and die on factory farms).
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
38m ago
This reads, to me, like youre taking situations where non-conception is forseeable but not intended (pregnant, post-menopause), and arguing that its therefore ok with intent also.
Can you argue that it is not ok to intentionally avoid conception?
The question is, what tells us that the sexual intercourse thats the point is exactly "ejaculation of a penis in a vagina" and not some related different concept with different boundaries? I think that would be very difficult to explain without tying it to the purpose of sexual intercourse. Im expecting something like "the evolutionary purpose of sexual intercourse is making babies, penis ejaculating in vagina is neccesary for that, therefore its nessecary to proper sexual intercourse".
I figure that's the argument that you're used to expecting, so it's throwing you off that I'm not making it. There are lots of people who will use the Aristotelian-Thomistic Perverted Faculty argument, and you can go talk to those people if you like. Other Catholics like Pope St. John Paul II argue from "the personalistic norm" and semiotics. There isn't an official argumentation that Catholics have to use to defend sexual morality.
If you don't think sexual intercourse is the ejaculation of a penis in a vagina, what do you think sexual intercourse is? I think the definition of sexual intercourse is apparent by looking at the genitals and what they do together, just as you can look at a gun, a bullet, and someone firing a bullet and saying, "yeah, this is how they go together." You don't necessarily need someone to shoot and kill another person with the bullet to figure out that guns are for shooting. You don't necessarily need to have sexual intercourse and have a baby to figure out genitals are for sexual intercourse. The knowledge that these things can be consequences of the action might inform your understanding of the action, but the actions can be analyzed separate from their consequences.
Target practice generally still requires firing small ballistics. Pair bonding and pleasure dont require penis ejaculating in vagina.
True, there are cuddles and other things that can make pair bonding happen. In this part of the analogy, I'm just listing things that are known possible consequences of the action in question. Some possible consequences/results of shooting a gun is that it will hit or miss a target and that will create a feedback loop to help the shooter improve their aim. Some possible consequences/results of sexual intercourse is that it will make a baby or improve pair bonding. This is not an exhausted list of possible consequences of shooting a gun or having sexual intercourse.
The examples are Unidirectional and I'm not making the opposite argument that target practice necessitates the shooting of a gun or something like that. I'm not arguing that the consequences of the actions necessitates how the actions happen or anything like that.
I think thats not how people use words, generally. "Penis ejaculating in vagina", as an ordinary english description, does not actually exclude using a condom.
Where does the ejaculate go? A vagina or a condom? If you poke holes in the condom so that ejaculate leaves the condom, then wearing a condom is fine in Catholic ethics.
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
41m ago
HBD, by which we probably mean IQ is what like 30-60% genetic and average IQ scores for whole racial groups vary, is only really worth discussing because so much of academia and society goes berserk if you bring it up. It's a truth that upsets the blank slatists so much that they pervert scientific discourse to bury it.
But it's not actually all that useful a model for the world? Society doesn't change that much if it informs your view: AA doesn't structurally fix anything, maybe try not to force kids to do school programs they can't possibly succeed in, maybe "learn to code!" is cruel. Ok cool. Now that that's out of the way we still have crushing social problems to deal with.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
45m ago
I find this true with a lot of moralizing movements. They never really think about how many barriers to entry the6 put in front of people who want to do these things. And really the thing that would change farming (just for an example) is millions of plant-based eaters who might include fish and eggs and cheese rather than 5000 hard core vegans studiously reading labels for obscure food ingredients that might have come from an animal of some sort. 5000 people is a rounding error, a million is a movement. And for most Altruistic movements, they have such high barriers that nobody can take on unless they have high enough income and enough time to actually do that. Normies have lives and don’t have extra money to search for and purchase the “pure” foods that would make them “pure” vegans. If you throw in organic on top, you’re restricting the movement to the comfortable middle class to upper middle class who have the money to purchase food that costs 33% or more over the normie food they’re eating now. It would be much more effective to have those people choose to limit meat consumption to a side dish or veggie heavy casserole or a veggie burger with cheese than to play purity games.
mrvanillasky
Indo Aryan Thot Leader
46m ago
I'll do math for ml once I finish discrete math, I want to do both linear algebra and stats as they have the most relevance for computers, especially if I do fast.ai soon and wish to dog deeper.
My mentor is making me do some books on the side that will help me get a second, deeper look at the topics I've already learnt via math academy. I'm unsure of what to do post math for ml tho. Calc 3, linear algebra, stats?
How rigorous/helpful do you think the ml and discrete math adjacent courses like MoP are? Are they enough to help you jump right into applied side of programming? I do trust Jeremy Howard when he says that you don't need a vast amount of math if you're starting machine learning.
They will also publish a ML1 course before their CS1 course so I may jump into that once I knock out MoP, discrete math and m4ml.
magic9mushroom
If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me
46m ago
· Edited 43m ago
you'll start questioning the concept of childhood vaccinations or jet fuel melting steel beams.
TBF, the conspiracists are right that jet fuel doesn't burn hot enough to melt steel. Their mistake is in assuming that you need to melt structural supports in order to make them fail; in actual fact, steel loses most of its strength well before it actually melts.
Reminds me of a bad habit among amateur analysts trying to calculate explosive yields: not knowing the difference between pulverisation (shattering something into dust) and vaporisation. Lots of people see "the building isn't there anymore" and then blithely plug in the specific heat and heat of vaporisation for the entire mass of the building, which is a drastic overestimate because it takes a lot less energy to pulverise than to vaporise something.
Southkraut
The rain fell gentlier.
51m ago
ThenElection
52m ago
Got me to wondering: has there ever been a video game or movie where the villain (hero?) becomes convinced that the only way to end all suffering in the universe is to extinguish all consciousness and life? I feel like I've seen this trope a thousand times, but I can't put my finger on one that matches it perfectly. Maybe one of the FF games? Probably some anime somewhere.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
55m ago
THIS order doesn't apply. That doesn't mean that three months from now there might not be another order that does.
Five years ago birthright citizenship wasn't on the table.
coffee_enjoyer
☕️
58m ago
The suffering of bees may be important to mitigate (I think that’s true — wouldn’t you care if someone were purposely buying bees only to kill them?) but the author must convince us —
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the suffering of bees is of such high importance that it is worth writing on it to convince people to place a burden on themselves. (Unlikely. There is worse suffering taking place even if we consider only bees, like the effects of pesticides. It’s not worth discourse hours).
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that writing something so unintuitive that people ignore what else you write is morally worth the future drawbacks of loss of influence.
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that the suffering of bees is so important that we should forego the very term of pleasure. This is problematic to his utilitarian ambitions, because our motivation to live well and expand our wellbeing is tied to whether we are able to experience wholesome pleasures in life. If people feel better from a spoonful of honey, not only does their own suffering decrease, but (1) they have energy to reduce the suffering of others and (2) the reason to love bees over wasps is brought to mind.
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bees are not designed to be destroyed by mammals, given that bears and raccoons destroy them in the wild, and given that fish are designed to be eaten by other fish. If the author does not believe that nature’s design should be respected, then his interest should be ensuring that killer whales aren’t able to kill dolphins in the ocean. But wouldn’t only a senseless person have a problem with the killer whale enjoying his design and eating dolphins, who significantly more intelligent than bees? So the suffering of bees is within our design — we should only guarantee that the suffering isn’t excessive, like with some easy regulations about whether all the young bees are killed off after the honey is made.
There’s possibly an element of Jewish thought in this reasoning + Singer’s. Because there’s an eagerness to heap up behavioral proscriptions, however numerous; there’s the love of rules and the eagerness to find extrapolations to the rules which defy normal intuition; there’s the arbitrary basis to begin morality; and there’s the obsession with trivia and edge cases over more substantive issues. That’s immaterial, but just interesting to note — it’s possible some of Matthew’s moral intuitions come from a different traditional framework.
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.
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