domain:felipec.substack.com
WhiningCoil
25m ago
No you're right of course. I'm sure you will be able to phrase your wish in just the right way on the monkey's paw.
Ditto6687
55m ago
There's a lot of pointless sufferring that is a useless signal. Evolution just isn't smart enough to distinguish. Besides, if "I should react to reduce this pain" is a useful idea on an individual level, why shouldn't there be cases where it is also useful on a collective one? E.g. "torture is bad, ceteris paribus"
Bees can't do anything about their condition when being farmed. Why is suffering a useful signal to them? Why should it be preserved?
If there was a cost-free way to make bees not suffer at all while farmed, wouldn't you press the button?
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
3m ago
Final Fantasy
WhiningCoil
7m ago
If there was a cost-free way to make bees not suffer at all while farmed, wouldn't you press the button?
Because nothing is cost-free, and it's this sort of magical thinking that walks people straight into the nightmare world.
Point taken, but the transhumanists will reasonably interject how contingent so much suffering is. They're entirely correct to note that technological solutions (vaccines, cochlear implants, glasses etc.) have largely obviated forms of suffering which affected vast swathes of the population even a few generations ago, and that it is reasonable to expect this trend to continue. Pain as a stimulus warning you off doing something which will injure or kill you is a relatively elegant evolutionary mechanism, but the modern WEIRD context in which the rate of premature violent death has plummeted to negligible levels really brings home how much of a hack it is in absolute terms (e.g. people who are bedridden for years because of chronic idiopathic back pain). It's not much of a reach to imagine how these particular kinds of suffering could be wholly negated in the near future. Your example about children afflicted with chronic insensitivity to pain and inadvertently gnawing off their own fingers is entirely valid, but it isn't remotely difficult to imagine a future in which small children are given e.g. brain implants so that they intuitively understand that they oughtn't do this without needing the pain stimulus.
naraburns
nihil supernum
12m ago
They appear to becoming more like performance art with time, which is likely the product of a growing audience.
This is absolutely my impression also.
ActuallyATleilaxuGhola
Axolotl Tank Class of '24
13m ago
This is it right here. If you have to tell people that you're "elite human capital," you ain't elite human capital.
Corvos
14m ago
No, I mean that it’s going to make it much harder to get any democratic buy in if people who have already experienced growth think that you’re dooming them to decline, people in third world understand that they’re going to get at best two generations of growth and then decline, etc.
I.e. it’s poison for the idea of economic growth, which up until now was mostly regarded positively.
Any ruler will face pressure from his subjects. If we call that "democratic norms" I'll be even more confused as to why some countries are said to have them, and others are not.
Like, ages ago I was listening to a libertarian podcast talking about the news, and they had this clip of a western journalist grilling the Saudi king about why he doesn't just give equal rights to women. "You're the king", she said, "can't you just declare whatever you want?". His responses were a stream of evasions, centering around the theme of how much he loves his subjects. The libertarian hosts of the show were utterly clueless and were just making fun of how he's not answering the question, but in my opinion he was giving a clear and obvious response - this is what my subjects want, if I overturn the social order in such a drastic way, they'll hang me from a lamppost by tomorrow morning. Is that a "democratic norm"?
Magusoflight
16m ago
And most descendents of Borderers have intermarried with descendents of non-Borderers.
Do you have evidence for this claim, or is it just a vague assumption? Class assortment is pretty strong in marriage and reproduction, and few move in to the rural areas where the borderers live
Ditto6687
19m ago
Neither psychologist nor RL people I talked with seem to believe that this is literally how the human mind works, because this leads you to the suspicious conclusion that the thousands of simple RL models people train for e.g. homework are also experiencing immense sufferring. Yes there is a vaguely RL-like layer of our brain, but RL itself does not conscious experience make. Unless of course you have some very heavy philosophical machinery to convince us otherwise...
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
22m ago
Well yes there is a significant monkey's paw aspect, that's why I said it's a problem. If the answer was obvious, it wouldn't be a problem. I'm not a utilitarian or a consequentialist, I don't adhere to an "anti-suffering ethics". But I also appreciate the gravity of the problem and I understand why people do become utilitarians.
gattsuru
24m ago
To be fair, once you've built a colony industry around Human Skin Leather and Human Skin Leather accessories, there's an upper limit to how much of a surprise this could become.
07mk
34m ago
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.
These seem like absolutely huge changes to our understanding of how to manipulate society in order to improve it, though. AA and similar programs are juggernauts in modern Western society, and so our understanding of how/if they work have huge impacts in our understanding of the world.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
38m ago
Pretty much, except it’s neither silencing nor unjust.
You and Turok are welcome to state your true facts in a suitably polite, cooperative fashion.
magic9mushroom
If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me
43m ago
I seem to recall putting "neutral" and then changing it to "deserves a warning" on noticing the last paragraph (because seriously, that was vicious). I also seem to recall taking so long to do it that @Amadan had already actually warned you by the time I completed the form.
(I've given out "deserves a ban" before, but all the times I can remember were death threats. There are other things that'd get it, like doxxing or advocacy of specific terrorist acts, but those are pretty rare here.)
ChickenOverlord
46m ago
Your comment here actually really got me thinking. My wife loves most bugs, and over the years we've found several struggling bugs that managed to find their way inside, usually cute ones like moths and box elder bugs (she has no qualms with killing pests like mosquitoes, flies, and wasps though). My wife will catch them, give them water and something to eat (like leaves or sugar water or whatever, depends on the bug), then release them in a nice place. Sometimes I think she goes a little overboard in making things nice for them, but her actions are driven by real love and compassion for the little critters. In fact just a week ago we found a vole trapped in one of our window wells so we caught him and brought him to a beautiful field a few miles away right next to a river.
In any case, my ooint is that for all of this abstract talk of bee consciousness and suffering, the idea of the weirdos writing this stuff having actual compassion and concern for these creatures doesn't seem to be the case. Maybe it's the virtue ethicist in me (and my utter contempt for utilitarianism as a guiding ethical framework) but all of these attempts to abstract moral and ethical behavior into quantifiable abstractions makes them seem like something an alien might come uo with. The human aspects of ethics are completely missing.
Almost makes me wonder if secret lizardmen aliens infiltrating human society conspiracy theories aren't true.
sun_the_second
could survive a COD lobby and a gay furry discord server
52m ago
Relevant sarcastic comment by qtnm in the comments of Lena:
"Why should I care about other people?"
All instances of people caring about other people in history, so far, have happened under the assumption that any given person could, in theory, be in another person's place.
The horror of Lena is that this assumption is destroyed. The technology is mind copying, not mind transfer. Every single person who is scanned will go inside the facility and will come out. There is no mechanism to shift perspective, ever: the material and the digital substrates never cross directly. 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.
Ever.
This puts the suffering of ems at a greater distance than even the suffering of animals, for a person could fathom a timeline where, but for the grace of God, he lives the life of cattle. None such mechanism to facilitate empathy would exist for copying scans. They would be as fictional characters, whose suffering evokes vivid emotions in many but never a desire to stop it by refusing to create fiction.
Iconochasm
2. Bootstrap the rest of the fucking omnipotence.
57m ago
Any advice for recovery from serious fatigue?
My new favorite thing is to go to the gym, do arms for 60-90 minutes, and then go hiking with a 40lb backpack for another 1-2 hours.
Unfortunately, afterwards I am kind of obliterated for a few more hours. Obviously some turndown is going to be necessary after expending that much energy, but I'd like to get a higher resting state than "staring blankly at Youtube", and/or a duration shorter than "as long as I was just working out".
And I guess I might specify that I'm hoping for suggestions more like "cold shower" or "hydrate with X" rather than "steroids or meth".
Well, there's suffering and there's suffering.
A pain signal that tells you to pull your hand away from a hot stove is "suffering".
This, on the other hand, is suffering:
The former is a useful biological mechanism; the latter raises suffering to the level of a genuine philosophical problem (as in, should we sacrifice everything else to make the elimination of suffering our primary goal? If the choice is between a universe with suffering and no universe at all, would it be better to just not exist at all? etc).
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