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Less a free market of ideas, more a brutal Coliseum of ideas. (Still no politics.)
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Overmind 05/30/2019 11:54 AM
Less a free market of ideas, more a brutal Coliseum of ideas. (Still no politics.) Seriously. Don't make this go the same way as #politics . Or else I'm gonna need a bigger cornfield.
Overmind 05/30/2019 11:54 AM
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gollark 05/30/2019 12:00 PM
You put it twice in #announcements.
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Overmind 05/30/2019 12:01 PM
Well, something's glitchy. That was an edit.
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Tronzoid 05/30/2019 3:49 PM
Sometimes my mind feels like it's just sitting in a chair in my brain, not integrated with my body itself. Why is that?
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MarcusAurelius 05/30/2019 3:50 PM
Because arguably it is. Your brain is just the substrate for your mind
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Tronzoid 05/30/2019 3:51 PM
Like i'm looking through a camera or a bottlecap not fully sealing a bottle
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Zarpaulek 05/30/2019 3:51 PM
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dissociation_(psychology)?wprov=sfti1
Dissociation (psychology)?wprov=sfti1
15:52
My extremities tend to feel dissociated when I drink too much
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MarcusAurelius 05/30/2019 3:52 PM
I’ve gotten a bit of it when I got way too high, yeah
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Sevoris 05/30/2019 3:53 PM
I‘ve never consciously managed it, but sometimes I have moment where I... iddle.
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Tronzoid 05/30/2019 3:53 PM
Maybe I have some form of dementia (edited)
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Sevoris 05/30/2019 3:53 PM
Just no activity for a moment.
15:53
Unlikely Tronzoid.
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Tronzoid 05/30/2019 3:54 PM
it's as if i'm sealed in a capsule, isolated from the rest of the world
15:55
someday, someone will saw me out with an electric buzzsaw
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MarcusAurelius 05/30/2019 3:56 PM
Dementia is from old age, I think it’s unlikely you have it. Isolated how? Like you have no effect? Like it’s effects can’t really touch you?
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Tronzoid 05/30/2019 3:56 PM
Like I'm looking through a vr headset, but only slight (edited)
15:59
As if at some point I was put into a simulated reality or i'm playing some game
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MarcusAurelius 05/30/2019 3:59 PM
I get you may not be comfortable sharing it, but how old are you?
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Tronzoid 05/30/2019 3:59 PM
Why?
15:59
Let's say: old enough to drink
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MarcusAurelius 05/30/2019 4:00 PM
UK, so 16+? (edited)
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Tronzoid 05/30/2019 4:00 PM
over 16 and 17
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0111narwhalz 05/30/2019 4:00 PM
that's genuinely surprising, I thought you were like 13 V:
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Tronzoid 05/30/2019 4:00 PM
18
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MarcusAurelius 05/30/2019 4:01 PM
Alright. I ask because your stage in life tends to provide insight when you have, well, issues
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Tronzoid 05/30/2019 4:01 PM
I tend to act less maturely than my age group
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Sevoris 05/30/2019 4:02 PM
Only case I know off for fuzy vision are usually neurological... which is to say Migraines.
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Tronzoid 05/30/2019 4:02 PM
How old are you Marcus? you seem 30s
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MarcusAurelius 05/30/2019 4:02 PM
I don’t think he means literally blurry. I’m 19
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0111narwhalz 05/30/2019 4:04 PM
you've aged well considering you were born in the Roman empire, no? :V
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Sevoris 05/30/2019 4:04 PM
I‘m not saying it was Eldrae... but it was Eldrae.
16:04
Also, we‘re horribly abusing this channels purpose, I just noticed.
16:04
Let‘s better cease and desist with that.
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Tronzoid 05/30/2019 4:05 PM
Do I sound 13 to you?
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MarcusAurelius 05/30/2019 4:05 PM
Yeah, this has wondered towards #random, I say we all move there
16:09
But back to the initial question, this almost sounds like a less sociopathic version of the matrix defense
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Tronzoid 05/30/2019 4:10 PM
Sometimes I have a thought of where my real form is lying
16:10
it is usually a large corridor with pods on either side
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MarcusAurelius 05/30/2019 4:11 PM
This is starting to sound like the territory where talking to a professional would be a good idea. Does the NHS cover mental health?
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Tronzoid 05/30/2019 4:11 PM
but I discount it as a foolish idea
16:11
Even if such a thing were real: it would not matter: I already live a normal life (edited)
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Zarpaulek 05/30/2019 4:44 PM
If that discussion's been diverted, care to hear my analysis of Manichaean dualism?
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MarcusAurelius 05/30/2019 4:46 PM
please do
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Tronzoid 05/30/2019 4:46 PM
Go ahead
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Zarpaulek 05/30/2019 4:53 PM
Mani founded a religion by taking elements of Christianity, Zoroastrianism, and a little bit of Buddhism. But on account of the religion dying out Manichaeism is now used to refer to a secular binary view of ethics.
16:57
This is a problem as you can't have a absolutist belief in good and evil without having divine beings of good and evil. Humanity cannot agree on what is moral so all humanist morality must therefore be subjective.
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Overmind 05/30/2019 4:57 PM
[citation needed]
16:58
...sorry, Imma let you finish.
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Zarpaulek 05/30/2019 4:59 PM
If nothing else because labeling some people as Evil gives you license for genocide. Can you name one non-Abrahamic religion that even has a concept of Evil? Aside from Zoroastrianism with all its' cross-contamination?
16:59
Come to think of it, Evil in Judaism is kind of an iffy concept.
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Overmind 05/30/2019 5:04 PM
Well, in terms of Cosmic Good and Cosmic Evil, perhaps, but Judaism definitely has ethos . Actually, I can't think offhand of any religions that don't have an ethos.
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MarcusAurelius 05/30/2019 5:05 PM
Depends on how you define “religion”. Chinese folk religion and lots of animist practices have less of a coherent ethos
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Overmind 05/30/2019 5:08 PM
True. Although that said, to my knowledge, all those that have coalesced enough to be considered a belief system rather than a collection of beliefs in close formation have developed an ethos.
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Zarpaulek 05/30/2019 5:09 PM
Yes, but most ethical systems have a gradient of "better" and "worse" rather than absolute good and evil.
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Overmind 05/30/2019 5:10 PM
(My familiarity with Chinese folk religion is all post- its heavy influences by other belief systems.)
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MarcusAurelius 05/30/2019 5:10 PM
The absolutist view does seem highly correlative with monotheism/that-word-for-Zoroastrianism’s-cosmology
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Overmind 05/30/2019 5:11 PM
Not like Christianity doesn't have the concept of venial vs. mortal sins.
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Zarpaulek 05/30/2019 5:11 PM
Chinese folk religion tends to be almost indistinquishable from Taoism and the Chinese strains of Buddhism.
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Overmind 05/30/2019 5:11 PM
For example.
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Zarpaulek 05/30/2019 5:11 PM
That "fat Buddha" was originally a Chinese god of luck.
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Overmind 05/30/2019 5:11 PM
Both of which have defined ethoi.
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MarcusAurelius 05/30/2019 5:12 PM
And even then, at least modern practice of most of the Abrahamics still have some shades of gray. I’d say less “indistinguishable” and more “not disintangleable”
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Zarpaulek 05/30/2019 5:12 PM
And Buddhism doesn't have absolute evil so much as a gradient of "enlightenment" and "suffering".
17:13
While Taoism's resident dualistic philosophy of Yin and Yang has nothing to do with morality.
17:15
I've read the Tao Te Ching, it's more into suggestions for living a carefree life than moralizing.
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Overmind 05/30/2019 5:15 PM
That wouldn't be what I'd consider the relevant duality in Daoism. Daoist ethics are more about being vs. doing and self-transformation.
17:18
But here's another angle of approach. We look at Buddhist ethics and see a gradient running from "enlightenment" to "suffering". We note that one end of this gradient is preferred to the other. This implicitly requires that we have a concept of "good" and "not good", because that's the value judgment being made in preferring the one to the other.
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Zarpaulek 05/30/2019 5:20 PM
But is "not good" the same as absolute Evil?
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Overmind 05/30/2019 5:20 PM
(Actually, I might argue that this is something of an inadequacy in Abrahamic pop-theology, as defining good as good and evil as evil is rather circular.)
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Tronzoid 05/30/2019 5:21 PM
How so?
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Overmind 05/30/2019 5:21 PM
Well, now, that's a whole other question.
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Tronzoid 05/30/2019 5:22 PM
how is evil circular?
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Overmind 05/30/2019 5:23 PM
I would say no, inasmuch as it seems to me necessary to distinguish the active pursuit of the bad from the passive neglect of the good, but then, while we look at the Buddhist gradient as running from enlightenment to suffering, I do not think they would have a problem distinguishing mere indifference to suffering from the active promotion of suffering.
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Zarpaulek 05/30/2019 5:25 PM
You know "active promotion of suffering" would include eating meat to Buddhists?
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Overmind 05/30/2019 5:26 PM
In that framework, you might be able to conceptualize absolute evil as creating inescapable suffering for all beings for all time, but it's not what you might call a terribly useful definition for non-philosophical purposes. Most absolutes aren't.
17:26
Yes?
17:27
@Unknown Because you can't define something in terms of itself.
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Tronzoid 05/30/2019 5:27 PM
Religion is quite complex in it's beliefs it seems
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0111narwhalz 05/30/2019 5:28 PM
that statement is almost tautological
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MarcusAurelius 05/30/2019 5:29 PM
but the point is, defining evil as evil is useless, because that provides no information. Defining evil as "the lack of good" is a start, but still problematic
👆 2
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Overmind 05/30/2019 5:30 PM
In the Flamic framework, you could define absolute evil as "the destruction of all things in all aspects and points of their existence, in such a manner as to preclude any potential for future creation". This is, needless to say, not something anyone is likely to encounter.
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0111narwhalz 05/30/2019 5:30 PM
not with that attitude
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Overmind 05/30/2019 5:31 PM
@MarcusAurelius Well, unless you have a good definition of the good, anyway. And are working on a system in which everything is either evil or good, which seems unlikely to be the case.
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0111narwhalz 05/30/2019 5:31 PM
Of course, if it happens once, its definition is such that it happens to everyone.
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MarcusAurelius 05/30/2019 5:32 PM
the problem with my above definition is, like was mentioned early, it doesn't distinguish apathy, negligence, or innocent incompetence (e.g. children) from the willfully malicious
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Zarpaulek 05/30/2019 5:34 PM
That's the advantage of relativistic morality, deeming theft as less bad than murder gives you an actual framework to deal with them.
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Overmind 05/30/2019 5:34 PM
Anyway, @Zarpaulek , what I would wish to challenge about this is this: "This is a problem as you can't have a absolutist belief in good and evil without having divine beings of good and evil. Humanity cannot agree on what is moral so all humanist morality must therefore be subjective." To which I say: we are entirely capable of having absolutist beliefs about, say, physics, without having divine beings of physics, and that humanity cannot agree on what the laws of physics are doesn't make physics subjective. It makes it imperfectly understood.
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Zarpaulek 05/30/2019 5:35 PM
Or killing in self defense as less bad than killing in defensive war as less bad than killing for ideology and less bad than killing to take the other's stuff...
17:35
Physics is physics, ethics is ethics, there's no crossover between the two.
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Overmind 05/30/2019 5:35 PM
That humans disagree about ethics could mean no more than that most of them are wrong, or more likely, all of them are wrong.
17:36
It's not a crossover, it's an isomorphism.
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MarcusAurelius 05/30/2019 5:36 PM
one is a descriptive field, the other prescriptive.
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Overmind 05/30/2019 5:36 PM
OR IS IT?
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Tronzoid 05/30/2019 5:37 PM
Err, some of us would like to live
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Zarpaulek 05/30/2019 5:37 PM
I fail to see how physics can be inverted to form ethics.
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MarcusAurelius 05/30/2019 5:37 PM
how would you go about a descriptive approach to finding a one true theory of ethics? how is that relevant tronzoid?
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Overmind 05/30/2019 5:38 PM
People say the same thing about economics, and that doesn't work out so well every time people try prescribing their special version of it.
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Zarpaulek 05/30/2019 5:39 PM
You can't defy laws of physics, ethical laws are broken on a regular basis.
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Overmind 05/30/2019 5:39 PM
Well, I'm more or less compelled to work by reasoning from first principles and observation, since I'm fairly confident that "don't perform ethical experiments on sophonts" is valid.
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Zarpaulek 05/30/2019 5:40 PM
And economic laws have a tendency to assume rationality on irrational people.
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Overmind 05/30/2019 5:43 PM
Then (what we claim them to be) is wrong in that respect. But look at the entire history of attempts to repeal the Law of Supply and Demand by fiat.
17:44
The results of that inspection demonstrate very clearly that it actually is a natural law, and every bit as immutable as gravity. In either case, trying to repeal it ends in a crash. (edited)
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Zarpaulek 05/30/2019 5:47 PM
In a market economy in any case.
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Overmind 05/30/2019 5:47 PM
Now, when it comes to ethical laws, think of it in this perspective: The ethical "law" that can be broken is the one that says "Thou shalt not murder." The ethical law that cannot be broken is the one that says "If murder is permitted, your society will be a shithole."
17:48
(Example only.)
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Zarpaulek 05/30/2019 5:48 PM
One man's shithole is another's paradise.
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Overmind 05/30/2019 5:49 PM
Those non-market economies that fail to produce equivalent prosperity?
17:49
That's the inexorable outcome of the law.
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Zarpaulek 05/30/2019 5:49 PM
There's a reason why writer's advice on how to write a believable dystopia say "write a utopia."
17:50
And you're assuming that economies always aim to produce prosperity rather than mere group survival.
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Overmind 05/30/2019 5:52 PM
I am assuming that people can be irrational, mistaken, or otherwise wrong.
17:52
(Which seems like a pretty safe assumption.)
17:54
And if you are aiming for mere group survival and your methodology for doing so is deliberately non-optimal (i.e., in opposition to the laws of economics or other natural laws), then you are frustrating your ends by your means. Which is contra-survival. (edited)
18:00
On the former point, this does require that one accept self-consistency as a requirement: that one, for example, cannot approve of doing murder and disapprove of being murdered at the same time.
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BizarroLand ♀ 05/30/2019 6:28 PM
I wanted to say something about the dualism earlier, kind of tangential but: It's all well and good to say that thoughts and the inner life of ideas etc. have no physical substance. In practice, though, they do: it's the wiring in our bodies. We don't need uploading or neuroscientific breakthroughs to see it at work, just look at someone who's suffered brain trauma.
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sdschildberg 05/30/2019 6:56 PM
phineas gage
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Overmind 05/30/2019 11:11 PM
That's the instance, not the class.
23:12
(You can tell because if I shoot you right in the neurological encoding of the concept of triangles, triangles don't go away .)
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Tronzoid 06/01/2019 6:38 AM
An answer to the "reality or simulation" hypothesis might be: Speaker 1: "Only the operators outside can tell" Speaker 2: "But what about their reality?" (edited)
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Tronzoid 06/01/2019 6:46 AM
But here's one question: If it's possible to simulate reality and sentience, wouldn't it be a crime, as you are undirectedly causing harm to the simulation's inhabitants through inaction?
06:48
You are deliberately creating a simulation to monitor a civilisation
06:51
It might be the case that the simulation hypothesis has a lesser chance of being confirmed, due to the implications of such a project in the operator race's civilisation (edited)
06:57
All that being said: We should focus research on technologies that can confirm whether a given reality is either genuine or a indistinguishable simulation by running simulations and developing a device for each type of conceivable computing system running the test simulations
06:58
by doing that, we will have a range of technologies able to detect whether a given reality is either genuine or simulated on a number of computing types
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0111narwhalz 06/01/2019 6:59 AM
by the definition of "indistinguishable" you cannot distinguish
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Tronzoid 06/01/2019 6:59 AM
indistinguishable until proven otherwise (edited)
07:00
The device would run something resource intensive to the computer running the simulation
07:00
Quantum simulations are quite resource intensive for binary computers to run IIRC (edited)
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0111narwhalz 06/01/2019 7:23 AM
well, most of what I associate with "ways to discover a physics engine" are more related to corner cases that expose holes in certain assumptions
07:24
Usually they involve uncovering corners cut in the name of optimization.
07:25
Quantum mechanics itself is kinda a prime candidate for such.
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Morgrim Moon 06/01/2019 8:03 AM
I've seen a joke blog post where the nature of water compared to all other fluid was raised as evidence we're in a sim that got refactored
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Zarpaulek 06/01/2019 8:13 AM
What, how the density decreases when it crystallizes?
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Morgrim Moon 06/01/2019 8:17 AM
And it's weird surface tension and some other stuff
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Sevoris 06/01/2019 9:33 AM
That‘s always said by people who... never had chemistry.
09:33
Water‘s just behaving that way due to some electron configuration perculiarities... which are in terms of fundamental laws not special at all.
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gollark 06/01/2019 9:57 AM
A lot of the ideas around stuff which might be an optimization in our universe do sort of assume that the universe simulating us works similarly.
09:57
The laws of physics their computers run on might happen to allow some specific computations to run very fast, or make it run very slowly.
09:58
Basically the only universal is probably that less computation is preferred.
10:00
Unless the universe is just being simulated by accident as part of solving some complex optimization problem or something weird like that.
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Overmind 06/01/2019 10:01 AM
42
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Archon 06/03/2019 8:28 AM
@Unknown You are identical until something causes you to diverge
08:28
The thing which will first cause you to diverge is e.g. the different sense-data the two instantiations receive
08:29
from seeing two different hospital rooms or w/e
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Tronzoid 06/03/2019 8:30 AM
What would being forked feel like? I assume it feels like part of your mind is being split off into another individual
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Archon 06/03/2019 8:31 AM
It doesn't feel like anything
08:31
There is just another one of you now
08:31
External to you
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Zarpaulek 06/03/2019 9:14 AM
Don’t feel a thing. Like this http://drmcninja.com/archives/comic/17p20/
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Tronzoid 06/03/2019 10:18 AM
So, the clone also has the (recent) memories of the original? (edited)
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MarcusAurelius 06/03/2019 12:49 PM
If you were unconscious, you just feel like you woke up. Only upon meeting the fork would you have to realize you are slowly becoming different people.
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Tronzoid 07/06/2019 4:38 PM
Is it normal to feel nostalgic and proud about the BBC? they did unite the country during WW2 with their broadcasts and also made some decent documentaries/programming. I grew up with the BBC, since I am British (edited)
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MarcusAurelius 07/06/2019 4:41 PM
they have a really cool funding model, and general upstanding content and less bias than usual
16:41
yeah
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Tronzoid 07/06/2019 4:42 PM
28 Languages broadcast in as of now, although they have been accused of having a liberal, right wing bias (edited)
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MarcusAurelius 07/06/2019 4:46 PM
lol in the US liberal and right wing are antonyms. But I'd still say they have a less prominent political bias than every comparable US news outlet
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Tronzoid 07/06/2019 4:46 PM
Ok, lets not descend into politics, my above mention is enough (edited)
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Overmind 07/06/2019 5:21 PM
NO POLITICS. (And this would be the wrong channel anyway; try #random .)
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Zarpaulek 07/06/2019 5:54 PM
Would this fit? https://zarpaulus.tumblr.com/post/186032991437/is-it-just-me-or-does-the-new-age-communitys
Zarpaulus' random stuff
Zarpaulus' random stuff
Is it just me, or does the New Age community’s current obsession with “Empaths” seem like another attempt to turn autism into a superpower? Seriously, the types of empathy they tend to talk about are...
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sdschildberg 07/06/2019 6:01 PM
Especially when such emotion-scanning is the weakpoint
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Zarpaulek 07/06/2019 6:02 PM
Which line are you responding to?
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sdschildberg 07/06/2019 6:05 PM
The entire thing. I am as far from tng luxwana as possible, speaking as someone with Aspergers (which is already treated as some superpower)
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sdschildberg 07/06/2019 6:18 PM
Woo empaths 🤝 bleach cures 🤝 vaccines cause autism Being extremely nasty for actual autists
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Zarpaulek 07/06/2019 6:59 PM
You have any experience with the "Indigo Child" crowd by any chance?
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sdschildberg 07/06/2019 7:03 PM
Nope
19:04
Autism = woo powers i guess
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sdschildberg 07/06/2019 8:34 PM
I read up and calling people on the spectrum (part) alien/faery or the next stage of human evolution is insulting to people trying to humanize it
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Zarpaulek 07/16/2019 5:29 PM
Seems “bystander syndrome” might be a myth after all https://www.science20.com/news_staff/bystander_effect_debunked_in_91_of_real_world_cases_someone_helps-239169
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gollark 07/16/2019 5:30 PM
Random idea: maybe people's belief in the bystander effect causes the bystander effect. (edited)
17:32
(probably not, but it would be kind of ironic)
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Overmind 07/16/2019 5:54 PM
well, maybe there's a little hope for humans yet
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o11o1 07/18/2019 8:47 AM
wait, was it debunked by an actual study ?
08:47
I didn't see a link to the paper
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Zarpaulek 07/19/2019 8:28 PM
@o11o1 It was the link in "Video surveillance..." https://psycnet.apa.org/doiLanding?doi=10.1037%2Famp0000469
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Zarpaulek 07/23/2019 2:04 PM
This came up in Firefox's suggested articles today http://theconversation.com/humans-arent-designed-to-be-happy-so-stop-trying-119262?utm_source=pocket-newtab
Humans aren't designed to be happy – so stop trying
Happiness is a human construct, an abstract idea with no biological basis. But this is something to be happy about.
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14:05
I assume the eldrae "fixed" that?
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sdschildberg 07/23/2019 2:06 PM
They do take issues to being cubes of hedonium
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o11o1 07/23/2019 4:01 PM
"Some things are more important than happiness." (edited)
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Zarpaulek 07/26/2019 12:15 PM
Manichaeism sounds a bit like it promotes entropy https://silkroadhistory.podbean.com/e/episode-006-religions-of-the-silk-road-manicheaism/
Episode 006 | Religions of the Silk Road: Manicheaism
In this episode, Nathan discusses one of the most unique and bizarre religions of world history, and perhaps the most emblematic of the great syncretism of the Silk Road: Manicheaism....
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Zarpaulek 07/28/2019 3:24 PM
It’s not the same each cycle, but there’s a tendency for liberal phases of society to be followed by conservative backlashes, which are followed in turn by a liberal backlash, and so on and so forth.
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0111narwhalz 07/28/2019 3:24 PM
someone needs to dampen the moralizers
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Tronzoid 07/28/2019 3:24 PM
I think this has to do with politics (edited)
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Zarpaulek 07/28/2019 3:25 PM
I didn’t mention the parties and policies influenced by these waves.
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sdschildberg 07/28/2019 3:28 PM
🅱olitics 🅱tected
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Overmind 07/28/2019 3:29 PM
Ruling: Philosophy of morality discussion is not politics unless and until it also turns into the Swamp of Despair.
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Tronzoid 07/28/2019 3:29 PM
Dampen the moralizers?
15:29
ah
15:30
yes
15:30
the 60s
15:30
bad
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MarcusAurelius 07/28/2019 3:32 PM
This isn’t necessarily political, more sociological
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Tronzoid 07/28/2019 3:32 PM
The 60s sucked
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MarcusAurelius 07/28/2019 3:32 PM
They just share terminology, unfortunately
15:32
The 60s sucked for some, but well so do most big transitions
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Tronzoid 07/28/2019 3:33 PM
But rest assured society won't return to what happened back then, what with social rights movements, racism and military conscription
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MarcusAurelius 07/28/2019 3:36 PM
We haven’t passed any of those things
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Tronzoid 07/28/2019 3:36 PM
it was worse then
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MarcusAurelius 07/28/2019 3:36 PM
yes, but that doesn’t mean we won’t fall back into it
15:37
Look at the rising xenophobia in the west, for instance
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Tronzoid 07/28/2019 3:37 PM
LGBT+ seems to be getting more of a foothold in society since the start of the 2010s IIRC (edited)
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Zarpaulek 07/28/2019 4:53 PM
There’s been a bit of a pushback though.
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Tronzoid 07/28/2019 4:53 PM
How so?
16:53
I thought things were getting better!
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0111narwhalz 07/28/2019 5:06 PM
The system oscillates pretty widely.
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Zarpaulek 07/28/2019 5:32 PM
Well there's the "transgender bathroom issue", based on a myth I might add.
17:33
Also, one of Russia's republics went out and rounded up all their gay people into camps.
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gollark 07/28/2019 5:34 PM
We should just get rid of the non-cubicley toilets.
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Tronzoid 07/28/2019 5:34 PM
Neutral gender toilets?
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Zarpaulek 07/28/2019 5:35 PM
They really don't need to be raised more than a couple inches above the floor for drainage.
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0111narwhalz 07/28/2019 5:35 PM
put tops on the cubicle walls, extend the bottoms down until you can just about fit a mop under them, problem solved
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Zarpaulek 07/28/2019 5:35 PM
My office has gender-neutral single-occupant bathrooms everywhere but the showers, but they get crowded at the typical break times.
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Overmind 07/30/2019 7:08 AM
NO POLITICS. .
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Morgrim Moon 07/30/2019 7:08 AM
that would be a yes
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Enderminion 07/30/2019 12:17 PM
Apparently my Coworker once tried to Run as a third Party candidate for US Senate
12:17
which went exactly as well as you thought it did
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KAL_9000 07/30/2019 12:49 PM
NO POLITICS.
12:50
@Unknown execute exterminatus.exe
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sdschildberg 07/30/2019 12:56 PM
Image attachment
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KAL_9000 07/30/2019 12:56 PM
I'm adding that as a legit emoji to me and my IRL friends' personal Discord server
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baidicoot 07/31/2019 11:51 AM
artist?
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Zarpaulek 07/31/2019 1:46 PM
In regnandi, veritas? https://getpocket.com/explore/item/why-power-brings-out-your-true-self?utm_source=pocket-newtab
Why Power Brings Out Your True Self - Nautilus - Pocket
Are you a tyrant or a servant?
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baidicoot 08/01/2019 7:29 AM
Everyone is a tyrant.
07:29
Benevolence is a lie, created by the establishment.
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Jade Nekotenshi 08/01/2019 8:23 AM
Now that's cynical.
08:23
Everyone's got their demons, but not everyone yields to them.
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sdschildberg 08/01/2019 8:23 AM
Most tyrants wholeheartedly think there servsnts
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Jade Nekotenshi 08/01/2019 8:24 AM
I'll grant that. Most folks can't see when they're unwittingly doing evil, and the more power they have the more destructive that blindness/delusion is.
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o11o1 08/01/2019 2:46 PM
And the less enjoyable having your eyes opened to the harm you cause is
14:46
Especially when, particularly at the nation state level, you can end up with a lot of rock-and-a-hard-place type choices
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Zarpaulek 08/01/2019 4:18 PM
Honestly, I think the process of attaining leadership over large groups tends to select for sociopathic tendencies.
16:19
Especially in bureaucracy and politics
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BizarroLand ♀ 08/01/2019 4:19 PM
yeah
16:19
because power, well, is power
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Overmind 08/01/2019 9:18 PM
Process of attaining? No. Desire to attain? Definitely.
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Zarpaulek 08/01/2019 9:26 PM
@Overmind Assuming humans judge the selection process, not space elves.
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Overmind 08/01/2019 9:33 PM
Yeah, but in our process of selection we don't get to choose the non-sociopath; at best we get to choose which sociopath.
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Zarpaulek 08/06/2019 6:45 PM
Okay, this sounds like first-degree hubris https://aeon.co/ideas/the-hypersane-are-among-us-if-only-we-are-prepared-to-look
The hypersane are among us, if only we are prepared to look – Ne...
From Diogenes to Jane Goodall, the hypersane seem mad to the mainstream but perhaps they see more deeply than the sane
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18:45
Jung believed in psychic powers.
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0111narwhalz 08/06/2019 6:46 PM
"hypersane"
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Zarpaulek 08/06/2019 6:47 PM
Diogenes lived in a tub on a diet of wild onions.
18:47
And Socrates, Plato, Confucius... really?
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BizarroLand ♀ 08/06/2019 7:47 PM
@Zarpaulek I once saw a 'serious writer' famous in his niche who actually thought psychoanalysts could predict the future
19:47
Not kidding.
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sdschildberg 08/06/2019 7:48 PM
Psychoanalysis
Only works where a singular culture is involved, written by writers who dont care about others
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BizarroLand ♀ 08/06/2019 7:48 PM
He thought Jung's vague prophecies of a dark teutonic god on the horizon predicted World Wars I/II, somehow
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sdschildberg 08/06/2019 7:49 PM
WW1 was a result of an unsable alliance system WW2 is obviously caused by rabid anticommunism and militarism, including in a country far from teutonic things
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Zarpaulek 08/06/2019 7:52 PM
Also, attempting to impose reparations that the Romans would find excessive on a country that had little to nothing to do with the start of the war and was simply the largest intact country left on the losing side.
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sdschildberg 08/06/2019 7:53 PM
And the economy going to crap globally (germany and japan were held up by the US economy and silk exports respectivly)
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Enderminion 08/06/2019 10:23 PM
Well all our signs don't specify position
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Zarpaulek 08/15/2019 1:29 PM
Be careful not to confuse cultural pressure towards collectivism with personal willingness https://heterodoxacademy.org/half-hour-of-heterodoxy/
Half Hour of Heterodoxy w/ Chris Martin - Heterodox Academy
In "Half Hour of Heterodoxy" Chris Martin interviews academics and other university stakeholders about their work and the state of higher ed.
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Zarpaulek 08/20/2019 6:10 AM
http://existentialcomics.com/comic/303
Jeremy Bentham Designs a Prison
A philosophy webcomic about the inevitable anguish of living a brief life in an absurd world. Also Jokes
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Buggy 08/20/2019 7:43 AM
"Well of course the prison would try to turn sophs into glorified worker-drones using primitive sophotech. Monkey-brain instincts, remember? Their very definition of criminal behavior is deviating from the societal norm, so its no surprise that they think the best way to address criminals is to stomp out the logos."
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sdschildberg 08/20/2019 7:49 AM
Zombies that retain conciousness but not free will are the only human monster that would scare the locals over there
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MarcusAurelius 08/20/2019 7:50 AM
They probably wouldn’t like vampires either. Or the loss of control in most werewolf myths
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Jade Nekotenshi 08/20/2019 9:02 AM
True, though that kinda depends on the model of vampire.
09:04
The kind that mostly has free will, but has to resist the urge to go too far would be horrifying in a different way from the kind that literally lives only to drink blood and pretty much frames everything in those terms.
09:05
But I figure they'd think the former could be fixed or at least worked around, and the second is a monster to be destroyed.
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Overmind 08/20/2019 9:20 AM
The local vampires aren't bloodsuckers. They're mindsuckers .
09:21
As for werewolves, for historical canid-relations reasons dating all the way back to the Winter of Nightmares, they get to rock the dangerous-but-fundamentally-noble-friends hat.
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Jade Nekotenshi 08/20/2019 9:25 AM
Mindsuckers kinda like the Dresden Files' White Court, that stoke emotions and use those emotions to essentially rip apart the victim's will?
09:25
Or more like intellivores that sand away the self/identity?
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Overmind 08/20/2019 9:25 AM
Mindsuckers that eat your thoughts and leave you empty,
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Jade Nekotenshi 08/20/2019 9:27 AM
Ouch, yeah, I can see why that might be the local flavor of horror.
09:27
(Doubly so when a bloodsucker can only /corpicide/ you. But those? That's cognicide, I'd think, or tantamount to it.)
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Overmind 08/20/2019 11:25 AM
(Up in the Crescent, werewolves were also associated with the local berserker tradition, usually in ancestry, which resulted in an actual werewolf clade being developed once that became possible. That was some fancy biotech.)
11:28
There definitely is some mythic beastie which fills the fear-of-loss-of-control slot, but I haven't worked it out yet.
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Zarpaulek 08/20/2019 11:51 AM
I'd guess maybe zombies or ghouls for "loss-of-control".
11:51
Ghouls for beastial behavior, zombies controlled by external force.
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MarcusAurelius 08/20/2019 1:45 PM
Yeah, more voodoo and west African magic zombies than the standard western ones
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sdschildberg 08/20/2019 1:46 PM
So the 3 proper monsters over there are Possesed people, mind-suckers, and Irish Faeries
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Jade Nekotenshi 08/20/2019 2:17 PM
I'd bet anything that can remotely seize control would count too, for similar reasons
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Zarpaulek 08/20/2019 4:03 PM
@Unknown The people are Fae.
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Buggy 08/20/2019 4:59 PM
well, in some versions Faes take consent much more liberally, to the point that offhand remarks or minor and casual actions can be considered consent to all sorts of major things
16:59
even if the person in question has no idea about it
16:59
that'd be a sort of corruption that could be another kind of monster
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gollark 08/20/2019 5:06 PM
I think it is written somewhere that anything you promise to do is considered, well, binding by the eldræ, so that's not massively far off.
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Buggy 08/20/2019 5:24 PM
well yeah, informed consent and agreement is all you need
17:24
no 'rituals of agreement' or anything silly
17:25
but the idea is that Fae don't care about informed, and rather jump the gun about 'consent' even being given
17:25
and they're obsessed with deals in a very zero-sum-game-y way
17:25
which is a sort of close perversion of how the Eldrae do it
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Cyfnos BOT 08/20/2019 5:25 PM
Reminder: species names are not capitalized.
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Buggy 08/20/2019 5:25 PM
how the eLDRAE do it
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sdschildberg 08/20/2019 5:29 PM
A stereotype
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Buggy 08/20/2019 5:32 PM
i mean, its a reasonable description of several different depictions of fairies that i've seen
17:32
you can't really stereotype a non-existent set of mythological creatures
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Zarpaulek 08/20/2019 5:55 PM
Especially with as many variations as fae, elves, trolls...
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BizarroLand ♀ 08/20/2019 6:18 PM
you know, it may serve a useful purpose but right now I would trade away my ability to generate excess mucus for a lot of things
18:19
something as simple as chronic congestion + runny eyes + sneezing really hurts quality of life
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Buggy 08/20/2019 7:43 PM
https://eldraeverse.com/2012/01/02/not-so-common/
Alistair Young
Not So Common
Andreth Prime Allatrian-ith-Ancalyx Vallasélan, currently of Suite 141, Gildedrest, Starbridge City, Gáling (Ring Nebula), to Technical Services, Artificial Immunity Division, Riverside Eubiosis Fo…
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19:43
you're not the only one
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BizarroLand ♀ 08/20/2019 8:12 PM
i feel your pain Andreth I really do
20:18
I bet what he wouldn't know is what it's like to have lived with it for years on end
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sdschildberg 08/27/2019 11:45 AM
To sum up local psychology: left brain>right brain
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Zarpaulek 08/29/2019 8:17 AM
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-shaping-us/201908/ninja-proof-seats?utm_source=pocket-newtab
Ninja-Proof Seats
Where you sit at work can impact your productivity.
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Zarpaulek 08/29/2019 8:36 AM
That I can understand, our current office is a converted furniture store.
08:39
When I first joined five years ago we worked in a building that had more enclosed spaces, still I remember this one time one girl in my alcove refused to go to lunch because she was afraid someone would steal her workstation, all while talking about how hungry she was
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Jade Nekotenshi 08/29/2019 9:43 AM
I hate open-plan offices - I feel like I have to constantly watch my back for snoopers.
09:43
(Even if I'm not doing anything that such snoopers would object to)
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baidicoot 08/31/2019 1:17 PM
I misread that 'watch my back for stormtroopers' the first time. I've been watching too much Star Wars, evidently.
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Zarpaulek 09/01/2019 9:03 AM
I don’t think the critics “get” Buddhism https://www.cnn.com/travel/article/mindar-android-buddhist-priest-japan/index.html
The android priest that's revolutionizing Buddhism
Kodaiji temple, a 400-year-old Japanese hourse of worship in Kyoto, has drafted in an android named Mindar to preach sermons. Find out how it's revolutionizing Buddhism in Japan.
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baidicoot 09/01/2019 10:01 AM
this is why buddhism is the objectively best religion
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Zarpaulek 09/01/2019 10:02 AM
I don’t know, Nietzsche thought the whole “nirvana” thing too nihilistic for his taste
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sdschildberg 09/01/2019 10:16 AM
Lemme guess: the android is Westernizing it
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Zarpaulek 09/01/2019 10:24 AM
The article doesn't say it outright, but I'm guessing the monks see it as another refinement on the prayer wheel (there's already wind, water, and electrical wheels).
10:24
It does say that "[Mindar] can meet a lot of people and store a lot of information [over time]. It will evolve infinitely."
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Archon 09/02/2019 5:17 AM
I was under the impression that electric prayer wheels were considered a bad idea because the power company got the prayer, not the person who set the wheel?
05:17
So you basically just ended up paying them twice
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gollark 09/02/2019 5:31 AM
Solar-powered electric prayer wheels?
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Archon 09/02/2019 5:40 AM
Something like that would work, or local hydroelectric
05:41
(With the note that the wind and water ones bless the wind and the water, not you, it's just useful to have the wind and water you live in to be blessed, as far as these things go)
05:41
That's my memory from when I last looked into these things, at least
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BizarroLand ♀ 09/02/2019 1:11 PM
If the issue is really cultural, that engenders the hope there's some kind of 'way out', but the universe is full of inescapable no-win scenarios. Perhaps the Internet falls apart as it is now, because of World War 3 or too much cyber-sabotage or something else, but that wouldn't remove the sense of being 'fake'; Hollywood had some symptoms of this overhedonia before the digital age (edited)
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Zarpaulek 09/02/2019 1:12 PM
But the memes are going to fight to survive, it’s what they’ve been doing for a minimum of 6,000 years and they’ve gotten good at it
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BizarroLand ♀ 09/02/2019 1:13 PM
@Zarpaulek Or it could be that memes that are suboptimal to the individual are optimal for the greater society
13:13
And thus natural selection will favor them
13:14
I don't like thinking about that very much
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Overmind 09/02/2019 1:14 PM
MOLOCH.
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Zarpaulek 09/02/2019 1:14 PM
That’s why peacocks
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Overmind 09/02/2019 1:14 PM
KILL MOLOCH.
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KAL_9000 09/02/2019 1:14 PM
Don't get me started on Moloch
13:14
Bastard
13:15
There's a reason the Mythos doesn't invite him to their Friday night board game session
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Zarpaulek 09/02/2019 1:15 PM
I thought Moloch was unenlightened self-interest?
13:15
Seems more like you’re talking about Ra
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Tronzoid 09/02/2019 1:15 PM
Why are simple constructs doing prayers?
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BizarroLand ♀ 09/02/2019 1:15 PM
As in, there have actually been quite a few societies, eg Ladakh (Tibet) and possibly some Indigenous cultures elsewhere that have reached what we may call 'happiness'
13:15
But they are not the majority, and historically they've been turned into subjects the moment they run into unhappy, but productive slave-drivers
13:16
The Wild West closed and became developed
13:17
@Zarpaulek I still get a giggle because I remember the memes about moloch being the carthaginians' deity
13:17
I don't know. Maybe there's an escape route by telling people about it, or nuking the world, or simply becoming posthuman
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Zarpaulek 09/02/2019 1:18 PM
@BizarroLand ♀ So you’re suggesting empires are on the hedonism treadmill? https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/treadmill
Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal -
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BizarroLand ♀ 09/02/2019 1:20 PM
Not exactly
13:21
It's more like, a state of lasting personal happiness and fulfilment is achievable, but ultimately maladaptive (edited)
13:21
Which I wouldn't put out of the question in this nightmare world
13:22
In the end, the core issue might run deeper than cultural memes and stem from iron laws of psychology and social dynamics is what I'm trying to get at
13:22
In which case, there's no solution
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KAL_9000 09/02/2019 1:22 PM
We can fix that
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BizarroLand ♀ 09/02/2019 1:23 PM
@KAL_9000 Well, yeah, leaving aside posthumanism and whatnot
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KAL_9000 09/02/2019 1:23 PM
Genetically engineer people's psychologies to be different!
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BizarroLand ♀ 09/02/2019 1:23 PM
But in any other case, all we've to really look forward to is human extinction
13:23
Which might happen anyways if we speed down the path of modification ironically enough
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Zarpaulek 09/02/2019 1:24 PM
@KAL_9000 That might run into a “Motie problem” where civilizations who adopt that psychosurgery get ground underheel by others
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BizarroLand ♀ 09/02/2019 1:25 PM
Exactly. I don't feel too bad right now, but damn this convo started dark grey and went black
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Overmind 09/02/2019 1:26 PM
@Zarpaulek Moloch is more the game of Playing Stupid Games and Winning Stupid Prizes. In this case, our cultural psychology optimizes for comfortable mediocrity rather than chaotic greatness. And, for that matter, for retarding humanity as a whole rather than having to suffer the status-pain of acknowledging that someone could do something greater than you. Classic Molochian optimization-failure.
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BizarroLand ♀ 09/02/2019 1:27 PM
Well, if it's any comfort, this state might just be a local maxima rather than the absolute one; evolution goes for the former over the latter all the time (edited)
13:29
And I myself am actually hypersensitive to even small changes in status, even if I try not to show it
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Overmind 09/02/2019 1:35 PM
As a good example of the former, witness the general reaction against the gig economy: it's astonishing how many people seem literally incapable of grasping that anyone might prefer the risky flexibility and hustle-opportunities of independence to the supposed security of being a wage-serf. 'Cause, y'know, that's the way it's done. Punch in, punch out, obey your superiors, pay off your student loans, climb the greasy pole, retire, move to Florida, die. That's the established life path, and how dare you go against the accepted collective wisdom of everyone. You are OBVIOUSLY WRONG, have probably been duped by $BOGEYMAN, and must be brought back to the One True Way. It's for your own good, y'know.
13:36
...he ranted. Hail Eris.
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BizarroLand ♀ 09/02/2019 1:37 PM
At least I haven't taken student loans yet
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KAL_9000 09/02/2019 1:37 PM
No, don't hail Eris
13:37
Eris is the goddess of chaos and discord a.k.a. entropy
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BizarroLand ♀ 09/02/2019 1:38 PM
I feel pretty Erisian myself, but most radicals tend to, wel..
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Tronzoid 09/02/2019 1:38 PM
There are still going to be lazy idiots in the posthuman world
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Overmind 09/02/2019 1:39 PM
The Discordian Eris, not the original Greek, in this case.
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BizarroLand ♀ 09/02/2019 1:39 PM
My feeling was that the long-term solution, without getting into poly tickal specifics, was to mostly break up the current power centers and replace them with a wider variety of much smaller societums
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Overmind 09/02/2019 1:39 PM
"I am chaos. I am the substance from which your artists and scientists build rhythms. I am the spirit with which your children and clowns laugh in happy anarchy. I am chaos. I am alive, and I tell you that you are free."
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Overmind 09/02/2019 1:46 PM
"I am filled with fear and tormented with terrible visions of pain. Everywhere people are hurting one another, the planet is rampant with injustices, whole societies plunder groups of their own people, mothers imprison sons, children perish while brothers war. O, woe." WHAT IS THE MATTER WITH THAT, IF IT IS WHAT YOU WANT TO DO? "But nobody Wants it! Everybody hates it." OH. WELL, THEN STOP.
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Tronzoid 09/02/2019 1:46 PM
Maybe we should have a battle royale
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BizarroLand ♀ 09/02/2019 5:12 PM
what if there's a penniless man in the desert and only one guy with water bottles tho
17:12
and the guy says 'pay up or nothin'
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Zarpaulek 09/02/2019 5:13 PM
Have you seen The Twilight Zone? (edited)
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BizarroLand ♀ 09/02/2019 5:16 PM
@Zarpaulek nope
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Zarpaulek 09/02/2019 5:17 PM
There's one episode where a few robbers make off with a pile of gold, then put themselves in suspended animation for 70 years to escape the heat.
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BizarroLand ♀ 09/02/2019 5:18 PM
and the gold rots away?
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Zarpaulek 09/02/2019 5:18 PM
In one scene the last two left are trekking through the desert with their bags of gold and one guy has a canteen of water, which he sells to the other guy for one bar a sip.
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BizarroLand ♀ 09/02/2019 5:18 PM
ah
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Zarpaulek 09/02/2019 5:19 PM
Then he raises the price to two bars, because supply and demand and gets his brains bashed out.
17:20
And then, the last guy stumbles upon a couple in a hover car just before he keels over, and the couple wonder what he was doing with so much easily synthesized worthless gold. (edited)
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BizarroLand ♀ 09/02/2019 5:20 PM
OUCH
17:21
I was going to talk some about how most humans view libertism, but I decided it was too close to the Poly Ticks
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baidicoot 09/02/2019 6:36 PM
Damn right it is
18:36
Assuming this is american Libertism
18:36
Which, this being the internet, probably is
18:36
anyway
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Zarpaulek 09/02/2019 8:10 PM
So, I've been reading this book on Icelandic mythical creatures and it mentions that many "trolls" were undead; like ghosts, zombies, vampires, liches.
20:11
Makes me wonder about the role of transhumanism in ancient folklore.
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MarcusAurelius 09/03/2019 6:31 PM
@Unknown I think he means the Empire of the Star's philosophy, not American Libertarianisim
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baidicoot 09/03/2019 6:36 PM
Ooooooh
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BizarroLand ♀ 09/03/2019 9:31 PM
@MarcusAurelius actually its the latter, yes
21:32
Libertism isn't restricted to America but most of its truly outspoken adherents seem to reside there
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MarcusAurelius 09/03/2019 11:59 PM
@BizarroLand ♀ I’m 90% certain than libertism is a neologism by our dear author
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Overmind 09/04/2019 6:15 PM
@MarcusAurelius It is. A trivial attempt to distract the reader from the thought-terminating cliche that the name of any ideology that actually exists tends to be.
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Ian Bruene 09/04/2019 6:25 PM
How dare you imply that my philosophy of Funism isn't Fun! We even count grains of sand in the catbox! You sir, are clearly a most UnFun sort.
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Tronzoid 09/05/2019 2:42 AM
If a discord bot became sentient, and acted like a discord user, would it be a user?
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Morgrim Moon 09/05/2019 2:55 AM
Yes
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Tronzoid 09/05/2019 3:06 AM
Albeit a slightly eccentric one, because AI (edited)
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Zarpaulek 09/05/2019 5:57 AM
@Unknown Are you hinting at something?
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Tronzoid 09/05/2019 6:07 AM
No
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Zarpaulek 09/05/2019 8:14 PM
https://www.schlockmercenary.com/2009-09-13
Sunday 13 September 2009
Daily strip for Sunday 13 September 2009
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sdschildberg 09/07/2019 11:56 PM
The Imperial version of the DnD alignment chart has slef-intrestedness vs other-intrestedness for one axis and good vs hostile intentions So Imperial ethics snugly fits in a box
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Overmind 09/08/2019 12:46 AM
The Imperial alignment chart has three axes. One goes laissez-faire to slaver; one goes dutiful to defaulter; and the last goes awesome to sucky.
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0111narwhalz 09/08/2019 1:13 AM
it's clear where the author of that chart places their priorities
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Overmind 09/08/2019 1:13 AM
Would be, wouldn't it?
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Morgrim Moon 09/08/2019 1:40 AM
if the 'sucky' wasn't the person's fault and more circumstance (or poor response to circumstance due to lack of knowledge) I could absolutely see an Imperial trying to correct this
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Tronzoid 09/21/2019 12:12 PM
This song really makes you think about yourself https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PI7dCCImVwY
Evangelion Lover
BORDERLINE CASE
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gollark 09/21/2019 12:37 PM
You are very obsessed with that... TV show or whatever.
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Morgrim Moon 09/21/2019 12:37 PM
I think it might be his current special interest? Nothing wrong with that, but I've never seen it so I can't comment on it
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Overmind 09/21/2019 12:38 PM
Likewise.
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gollark 09/21/2019 12:39 PM
I don't really have a problem with liking it, more randomly bringing up bits of it with no context or real purpose.
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Tronzoid 09/21/2019 12:46 PM
I'm just into it ATM
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Zarpaulek 09/21/2019 12:46 PM
Y’know, America kind of was another case of “meet the new boss”, the 13 Colonies were already democratic before they broke off from England and the Founding Fathers didn’t lower taxes much, if at all.
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Tronzoid 09/21/2019 12:46 PM
It delves into stuff like depression and separation anxiety
12:49
I talk about it too much
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Zarpaulek 09/25/2019 8:59 PM
My Botany professor seems more interested in bringing up philosophical discussions on the origin of society and consequences of technology than teaching how plants work.
20:59
(Agriculture)
20:59
Today, in the after-class discussion section he went on a tangent about why viruses aren’t alive.
21:00
Which got me wondering about “viral” AIs.
21:00
Are they truly copying themselves when they transmit their source code and memes to another system?
21:01
Or instructing a device on how to recreate themself? (edited)
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0111narwhalz 09/25/2019 9:03 PM
Are they transmitting their binaries or their source? :V
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Zarpaulek 09/25/2019 9:03 PM
What’s the difference?
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Buggy 09/25/2019 9:11 PM
binaries are not necessarily reversible into the source used to create them, may be significantly more difficult to understand than the source, and depending on how they're compiled the binaries may change depending on a number of factors, while the source is static
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0111narwhalz 09/25/2019 9:11 PM
If you transmit binaries, you're transmitting the actual instructions for the processor to enact.
21:11
If you transmit source, you then have to be compiled into binaries.
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Buggy 09/25/2019 9:12 PM
and nothing says the compiler can't compile things differently
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0111narwhalz 09/25/2019 9:13 PM
Usually the compiler knows the system it's compiling on better than you do.
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Buggy 09/25/2019 9:13 PM
a light example would be that, in some cases, creating a version of a program that is compatible with different computer architectures is just a matter of changing a setting in the compiler
21:14
but beyond that, it wouldn't be too crazy for a sort of intelligent virus to use a compiler to produce variations of itself for greater resistance to countermeasures, without the work of changing the source code significantly
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0111narwhalz 09/25/2019 9:15 PM
Of course, in-verse, there's the Universal Noetic Architecture, which means you can transmit even a layer beyond, with the mindstate vector.
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Buggy 09/25/2019 9:15 PM
depending on how advanced we're talking, it could just be changing the obfuscation seed, all the way to some sort of 'conceptual' compiler that makes apparently completely different programs that nonetheless end up acting the same, and would be nigh-impossible to reverse engineer without the source
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0111narwhalz 09/25/2019 9:15 PM
Which is as "you as opposed to instructions for creating you" as you can get.
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Buggy 09/25/2019 9:16 PM
it really depends on what sort of 'intelligent virus' we're talking about, i guess
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Zarpaulek 09/25/2019 9:17 PM
Well, one example I was thinking of was Ennesby from Schlock Mercenary. Who was designed as a cost-saving measure for a music distributor.
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Buggy 09/25/2019 9:17 PM
is it a soph that lives like a virus? a very advanced form of weavelife that isn't sophont?
21:17
ahh
21:17
i don't know if i'd call him virulent
21:17
he's not really designed to infect, he's just designed to be flexible when most AI aren't.
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Zarpaulek 09/25/2019 9:18 PM
The other would be the Oracle from SSDD, who was created by a hacker who put genetic algorithms into viruses and has a habit of overwriting other AIs.
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Buggy 09/25/2019 9:19 PM
in general, if you're going for compatibility, it usually comees at a performance hit
21:19
because you're trying to abstract things to some degree
21:20
so you have at least some unavoidable overhead because you're spending extra effort computing something that isn't quite optimized for the system in question because you can't or don't want to change it
21:21
beyond that, if it's specifically supposed to be virulent, you also have to have methods of attack and defense, unless you're attacking fools who've never heard of antivirus software
21:23
wait, the original question was "are they truly copying themselves"
21:25
well, if they want to spent less or no effort (re)compiling themselves, they have to abstract themselves (and take a performance hit). This is closer to copying because they have to change less about themselves, but it's less efficient. If they want to be better defended, they should spend more time recompiling themselves, because that's one method they could use to introduce obfuscation that will confuse enemies.
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0111narwhalz 09/25/2019 9:25 PM
of course you could say it reduces to "if you cut someone's mind up into packets and attach a header to each one are they still the mind or are they instructions for creating the mind"
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Buggy 09/25/2019 9:25 PM
if we want to talk specific in-verse examples, most of the viruses or such we've seen in action actively change disguises/shape/entire function as they travel
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Zarpaulek 09/25/2019 9:27 PM
Those might be more akin to bacteria than viruses though. Aside from how computer programs need a substrate to run them of course
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Buggy 09/25/2019 9:31 PM
yeah, that is the thing about viruses
21:31
they're kinda implied to be tiny, subtle, subversive things
21:31
not the sort of thing you'd expect to be sophont or even easily defined as alive
21:32
aha
21:32
found it
21:32
https://eldraeverse.com/2012/02/16/the-emancipator/
Alistair Young
The Emancipator
The bundle of program code identifying itself as EPS****β7 flitted silently across the extranet, transmitting itself by laser and tangle from relay node to relay node, Meridia Central to Meridia Ri…
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Zarpaulek 10/02/2019 3:18 PM
If anyone's curious as to how corporate colonization has worked in the past, this podcast's last five episodes have covered Manhattan under the Dutch West Indian Company https://wondery.com/shows/american-history-tellers/
Dan
Wondery - Feel The Story American History Tellers
How well do you really know the stories that made America?
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Zarpaulek 10/03/2019 6:33 PM
Okay, this is an interesting philosophy
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MarcusAurelius 10/03/2019 6:36 PM
cogito ergo volo
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Tronzoid 10/04/2019 1:20 AM
How has she become such a badass?
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Zarpaulek 10/04/2019 6:15 AM
Time travel
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Tronzoid 10/04/2019 10:24 AM
What is her name?
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Zarpaulek 10/04/2019 10:59 AM
Tessa Edwards, Core marine with prototype nanomachine implants, dating a sex droid that looks like her dead first boyfriend, got yanked back in time when the Collective of Anarchist States tried to steal a time/space machine she was guarding. http://www.poisonedminds.com/d/20010108.html
11:01
Since 2006 SSDD has been running two simultaneous arcs, one with her backstory in the future, the other in the “present”. http://www.poisonedminds.com/d/20060202.html
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Tronzoid 10/04/2019 11:37 AM
Why would she date a dead man? Seems rather sinister if its not a backup of him
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Zarpaulek 10/05/2019 8:19 PM
Would you call this an accurate assessment?
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Buggy 10/05/2019 8:22 PM
seems reasonable
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MarcusAurelius 10/05/2019 8:30 PM
Except for the vocab part about soft sciences, the more I delve the more I run into odd not-quite-synonyms that different disciplines use to describe the same thing
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Morgrim Moon 10/05/2019 11:46 PM
I'm not sure, because astronomy fits better into the soft science descriptions given there, but is universally considered a hard science
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BizarroLand ♀ 10/08/2019 7:36 PM
Does inherent value hold even in a vacuum?
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0111narwhalz 10/08/2019 7:37 PM
there is rest energy but also kinetic/relativistic energy and the latter is relative to your reference frame
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BizarroLand ♀ 10/08/2019 7:41 PM
Not energy, value. Can it exist absent everything else, and everyone else?
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0111narwhalz 10/08/2019 7:42 PM
Depending on your definition of such, either tautologically no or tautologically yes.
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Overmind 10/08/2019 7:43 PM
No. Value is not a quality of an object, it’s a quality of the relationship between an agent and an object. You need at least one of each.
19:44
We ignore the special case in which the vacuum is sapient and able to value itself.
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0111narwhalz 10/08/2019 7:45 PM
The old "forces are things and they come in pairs" versus "forces are relations between objects" thing
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sdschildberg 10/08/2019 8:46 PM
Unenlightened self interest is subsuming you and a few into a collective that is a knockoff hivemind and being the core of an all consuming swarm to try and make it as far in the dark era as possible
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Zarpaulek 10/20/2019 4:57 PM
I've been thinking about the preponderance of "transhuman monsters" in global mythology.
✅ 2
16:58
Practically the only time a human making themselves more than human isn't depicted as bad is the Taoist Immortals.
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Zarpaulek 10/20/2019 5:06 PM
I think they're meant as cautionary tales against social climbers, at least partially propaganda by the entrenched ruling class but humans do have a habit of building social structures where psychopaths have the advantage in advancement.
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Overmind 10/21/2019 7:49 PM
On a related note, I find myself reminded of the Icarus myth and its many parallels.
19:51
Although today, I'm reminded of the Cabal (Destiny) legend of Acrius. I quote: "In the Cabal legend, a hero seeks to possess the sun. He succeeds. Then, he becomes Emperor. The Cabal… are not a subtle people. That really is the entire myth. A Cabal named Acrius desires the sun, and he takes it and becomes the first Emperor of the Cabal. Other scholars have already noted the parallels and differences with our own ancient Earth myth of Icarus, which famously has a far more humbling ending. I am more interested in how Cabal leaders throughout history have deployed this legend as a rhetorical and political justification for conquest. Among the most relevant such figures is Dominus Ghaul himself, who appears to have a personal affinity for the Acrius myth. I must also note here that, while linguistic analysis of the Cabal language and its many dialects is incomplete, they do not appear to have a word for the concept of "hubris"." - Research notes of Tyra Karn (edited)
19:52
I have not yet covered in detail a whole bunch of eldraeic mythography, but I'm pretty sure it looks a lot more like the Cabal version.
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BizarroLand ♀ 10/21/2019 9:25 PM
That's... an anagram..
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Overmind 10/21/2019 9:26 PM
Damn those cunning space turtles!
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BizarroLand ♀ 10/21/2019 9:26 PM
Yeah, I know it's vidyagame lore, but it kills me
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Overmind 10/22/2019 9:46 AM
So, I was looking at @Buggy 's comment back in August in re vulnerability: "And the strong cannot always be strong, either. Times and situations of vulnerability are inevitable and unavoidable with anything resembling a functional society." To which - and I do so here too because it's both a rather old comment and a philosophical holy war - I might say three things: 1. I first note that vulnerability as a good/necessary/inevitable thing is a very late-twentieth-century notion even in human society, and one which is not going to work too well with the local psychological differences in many ways. 2. By advocating the above, you'd be trying to argue a society one of whose highest values is God-Like Self-Perfection around to the notion that it's okay not to strive to be. This probably isn't going to work out well. 3. And most importantly, there's a very practical reason why the local cult of Mental Strength and Perfect Self-Control exists, and that's because when it doesn't, people get dead . You don't get to be vulnerable when you not only can kill people with your brain, but will if you aren't in charge of yourself. Instead, you get to shape your will into not merely a razor-sharp edge, but also an insurmountable skullfort. (edited)
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BizarroLand ♀ 10/22/2019 10:43 AM
Well, over there that's the case
10:43
Over here human willpower and endurance is a highly limited resource
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Overmind 10/22/2019 10:47 AM
Well, yes. But even for us depressives, it can be increased by exercise.
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Morgrim Moon 10/22/2019 10:50 AM
Willpower increases, ability to circumvent your own broken brain does not necessarily. Dunno, maybe neurotypicals can. I know no amount of willpower will circumvent parts of mine. Granted, if I was in the Empire they have medicine to fix that.
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Zarpaulek 10/22/2019 11:33 AM
There's significant evidence that willpower is biochemical, there's physical limits to how far you can take it and you're going to crash after a significant exertion.
11:34
Why do you think mania and depression are paired so much?
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BizarroLand ♀ 10/22/2019 1:35 PM
Unrelated: yes, I think immortality is a mostly good thing even withstanding the gerontocracy issue (edited)
13:36
The flipside of having 'stagnant' leaders and notables hanging around for a long time is that their accumulated experience also hangs around
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Jade Nekotenshi 10/22/2019 1:48 PM
I'd argue that this might actually be a feature.
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o11o1 10/22/2019 3:24 PM
Leaders don't have to die to be displaceable. they just have to, say, lose elections or run into some sort of term limit so that new person with different ideas can come in and try things
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Buggy 10/22/2019 4:37 PM
@Overmind i more meant literal, physical vunlerability
16:38
you can't get a hair cut without letting a barber hold something sharp near your head, you can't get in a car without giving someone else the opportunity to ram into you, you can't walk onto the street without being in the line of sights of a hell of a lot of potential sniper nests
16:39
a society that has no physical vulnerability looks like a bunch of giant, automated fortresses with one person inside of each, and they never ever come out
16:40
this holds true at high technology as well; theoretically, a revival clinic specialist or a body designer could do a fair amount of harm before anyone noticed, and if they did it carefully no one might notice at all
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Overmind 10/22/2019 7:47 PM
That seems like a peculiarly autarchic view of vulnerability.
19:48
ObReference: Meditations on the Aspects of Self
19:53
Remember, the Transcend and Empire are, from one perspective, a perfect-trust society nested inside a (very) high-trust society.
19:55
A third-triad type of invulnerability is that which comes from membership in a giant mutuality which enthusiastically exterminates defectors.
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Buggy 10/22/2019 7:56 PM
i don't disagree necessarily, i just don't know if i'd define it as invulnerability
19:56
obviously, you're astonishingly unlikely to be betrayed in the Empire
19:57
as far as the original post goes, where you have people sworn to defend the vulnerable, in one sense those people are the people behind the legal system
19:57
but in another sense, as you say, it's everyone
19:58
except for the very very small portion of people who try (and generally fail) to defect
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Overmind 10/22/2019 7:59 PM
It's like that probably-apocryphal saying attributed to Cyrus the Great, or Genghis Khan, about how a virgin naked but for a bag of gold could walk unmolested from one end of their empire to the other, so safe had they rendered it. If that is literally true, then you may not have achieved perfect invulnerability, but you are within delta of it.
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Buggy 10/22/2019 8:00 PM
fair enough, at that point either it warrants the term 'invulnerable', or there's not really much point in having that word because it can't apply to any real situation
20:01
my original thinking was "It's possible to defect, and we're the people sworn to make those bastards regret it."
20:02
it just so happens that they've done such a good job that no one defects, but that oath is still plenty important
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Overmind 10/22/2019 8:03 PM
In essence, they're (part of) the cause of your invulnerability; because in instrumentalities-of-invulnerability should be counted all the people watching your back,
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Buggy 10/22/2019 8:05 PM
though, the Curia and Co are really only a small portion of the people watching your back
20:06
they're the people who's full time job is that, but the lines get a bit fuzzy because everyone has agreed to take it up as a part time job
20:08
really the original oath seems like something that could be taken straight from a initiation ritual for Citizen Shareholders
20:08
http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=8443
esr
The Order of Defenders
Officiant: "One comes before us today who wishes to become a Sworn Brother. Let him approach." Officiant: "Are there two Brothers present who will affirm that the candidate is of sound mind and goo...
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20:10
My gun protects the weak. My gun speaks for liberty. My gun guards civilization. is pretty much a poetic restatement of the 'common defense' section of the Contract
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Zarpaulek 10/22/2019 8:13 PM
What did they do before the Transcend and brain backups?
20:13
The barber might be killed by the tyrant’s bodyguards afterwards, but the tyrant will still be dead.
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Buggy 10/22/2019 8:14 PM
they took their word pretty seriously for a long while before that
20:14
and tyrants weren't really a thing for most of that period
20:14
those went the way of the dodo... if dodos died off because they were thrown off a 300 foot waterfall in the middle of winter
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Buggy 10/22/2019 8:23 PM
and the risk of a random barber going insane and cutting necks instead of heads is... low
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Zarpaulek 10/22/2019 8:24 PM
I was referencing a story I read
20:24
You can substitute the “tyrant” for anyone someone would want dead really
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Buggy 10/22/2019 8:25 PM
ah, well there's probably a lot less of that there than, say, here.
20:27
for one, the focus on "you do you, i'll do me", calm and rational judgement, the long lifespans, etc all conspire and work together to make sure random instance of things like "goddamnit I hate my coworker so much I just want to kill him" are going to be a lot less common
20:27
they'd have a lot less social friction there.
20:28
as for more legitimate instances, where someone has genuinely done great harm to someone else, there's also going to be a lot less of that as well
20:29
because they place extreme value on promises, consistency, doing their duty, "don't unto others", etc
20:30
and they're a lot better about designing social systems so that defecting is not the best option for anyone
20:31
if someone ends up pulling just about any of the stunts that you commonly see on Earth, where they fuck someone over for their own gain, they're quite unlikely to escape justice for it
20:32
because they really hate that, they really hate when people escape justice, and they take their word very seriously so if someone says that someone else fucked them over, they take that seriously
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sdschildberg 10/22/2019 10:59 PM
DnD alignment meme: the eldrae are Chaotic Neutrals. The law of the market and of the contract, rather than Lawful’s focus on force/fiat. Also CN is the alignment of mercs, free traders, and other such. Finally, jt is the alignment of “because it would be awesome!’
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0111narwhalz 10/22/2019 11:36 PM
chaotic lawful
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sdschildberg 10/23/2019 12:02 AM
T posing above the chart to assert dominance. Lawful in the sense that they follow good and necessary laws and contracts, chaotic in their love of freedom and of The Market/Peace through Firepower Chaotic but not annoying about it like most CN PCs (edited)
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Morgrim Moon 10/23/2019 12:03 AM
Chaotic good voluntarily following a lawful good legal framework
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sdschildberg 10/23/2019 12:04 AM
Well behaved Chaotic Goods who function as lawful in a group
00:06
But neutral is here because there is an Awesome Me vs Dull Us axis. Light Orange vs Dark Blue if you will
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0111narwhalz 10/23/2019 12:07 AM
They play by the rules—the rules are meant to be followed—but they aren't obliged to preserve the rules if they don't like them.
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sdschildberg 10/23/2019 12:09 AM
They play by the rules because the rules are built fair and because they decided to.
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0111narwhalz 10/23/2019 12:11 AM
The rules are built fair because those are the only rules they would tolerate.
00:12
Unfair rules got chucked off waterfalls.
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sdschildberg 10/23/2019 12:12 AM
And can opt out at any to@r. That last point is the source of stuff like the Magan Corprate
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Morgrim Moon 10/23/2019 12:15 AM
I'd say still good because they want everyone else to be awesome too and give them tools and knowledge and help to do so.
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Overmind 10/23/2019 12:31 AM
Chaotic Cooperative. Or possibly Lawful Ooh Shiny.
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0111narwhalz 10/23/2019 12:33 AM
You can see the contempt they have for bad rules, but an eldrus is nothing without his word.
00:38
When the eldrae break rules, they do so by excising the rule, not just by acting contra to it.
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Overmind 10/23/2019 12:39 AM
Or by having written an "unless the outcome of following this rule in this case would be obviously stupid, in which case do something clever" exception into the rule beforehand. (edited)
00:40
(Which is why the law there explicitly allows you to plead "justification" to any charge, not just defamation.)
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o11o1 10/23/2019 11:17 AM
I don't imagine it's very easy to successfully plead justification
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Buggy 10/23/2019 11:48 AM
it's probably something that was a lot easier while the legal system was new, or when there were major unanticipated shifts
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Jade Nekotenshi 10/23/2019 11:49 AM
Coming up with a situation wherein youre justified but that justification hasn't already baked in is probably rare as anodized niobium hen's teeth,
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0111narwhalz 10/23/2019 11:50 AM
mumble mumble mature software environment
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Jade Nekotenshi 10/23/2019 12:11 PM
Yeah, pretty much that. Well-debugged.
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Zarpaulek 10/26/2019 5:53 PM
I had some ideas on why transhumans in mythology tend to be monsters and what it could imply for the transhumanist movement https://docs.google.com/document/d/1cYcFz9Mt_zmZlf86xmjcrlt17cIjDm2UBCLBcCBOe3g/edit?usp=sharing
The Transhuman Monster
Recently, I read Armann Jakobsson’s The Troll Inside You, a literary and psychological analysis of medieval Icelandic folklore. Of particular focus was the “troll”, not a specific creature like some modern fantasy writers have tried to depict them, but rather a catch-al...
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sdschildberg 11/09/2019 10:43 PM
Given local culture, calling someone trash or any insult based on body waste would be fighting words to say the least
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0111narwhalz 11/09/2019 10:45 PM
"malodorous but ultimately useful?"
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sdschildberg 11/10/2019 1:59 PM
Or more powerully: “I would call you trash, but trash can be recycled”
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0111narwhalz 11/10/2019 2:01 PM
"I need you like I need a gigawatt at 300K"
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Zarpaulek 11/16/2019 10:31 AM
Okay, how does psychosurgery fit in with the concept of pattern identity?
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Overmind 11/16/2019 10:41 AM
In what sense?
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Zarpaulek 11/16/2019 10:42 AM
You’re altering the pattern. Or, alternatively erasing and replacing it with a different one
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Overmind 11/16/2019 10:45 AM
For changes below the relevant threshold, it's essentially irrelevant. Living is change. Meme rehab is no different.
10:47
As for the relevant threshold, recall that the ORE's definition of "incurable dysfunction" isn't "we can't edit this out", it's "editing this out would cross the legal threshold at which this person would become a different person".
10:48
(At which point they go to the lethal chamber instead of meme rehab.)
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Zarpaulek 11/16/2019 11:20 AM
So, it sounds like the body can be reduced to naked atoms and a new set of atoms can be arranged into a copy of the brain and that's the same person?
11:21
But if you rearrange an existing brain too much it becomes a totally different person?
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Overmind 11/16/2019 11:22 AM
Software, not hardware.
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Zarpaulek 11/16/2019 11:22 AM
Same thing with biology
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Overmind 11/16/2019 11:28 AM
Yeah, but to be really clear, what matters is not the brain/processor, but the algorithm running on it. If you copy the connectome exactly into another brain, it's the same person; if you copy it into a brain emulator, it's the same person; if you rearrange it first so it's differently wired but behaves in the same way, it's the same person; if you translate it to a non-neural network implementation that operates entirely differently but is still executing the same fundamental algorithm, it's the same person, etc., etc.
11:33
Much as I, having a whole bunch of different devies and emulators around here, can run Word in all sorts of different ways, direct and emulated, and it's still Word. Common psychedesign/meme rehab, if I stretch this analogy some, is like applying patches to turn Word 2016 into Word 2019. It's different in some ways, it hopefully works better, but it's still Word . But there comes a point, when you're changing it, that it stops being Word and starts being, say, Excel. That's the "threshold of identity" that psychedesigners, sophotechs, and lawyers talk about. But all of that's on an orthogonal axis to the previous transformations, because they're changes to the algorithm, whereas the former keep the algorithm the same and just change the substrate.
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0111narwhalz 11/16/2019 11:33 AM
There is an acceptable amount of "error" below which two non-identical minds are considered equal.
✅ 2
11:37
Error is considered only on the math, so changes in implementation are ignored.
✅ 2
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sdschildberg 12/05/2019 7:30 PM
What’s the average eldrae’s MBTI category?
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Jade Nekotenshi 12/05/2019 7:32 PM
Everything about them reads as highly NT to me
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KAL_9000 12/05/2019 7:32 PM
Eldrae are many things
19:33
They are most certainly not neurotypical (by human standards)
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sdschildberg 12/05/2019 7:33 PM
NT on Myeres Briggs Test. I was asking due to all the “MBTI as things” posts
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Jade Nekotenshi 12/05/2019 7:34 PM
Yep, that's what I meant
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KAL_9000 12/05/2019 7:34 PM
ah
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Jade Nekotenshi 12/05/2019 7:35 PM
WRT neurotypicality, boy would the modal human consider the modal (Imperial) eldrae weird.
19:35
(And vice versa)
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Overmind 12/05/2019 7:36 PM
https://eldraeverse.com/2017/07/09/the-mbti-lens/
Alistair Young
The MBTI Lens
It occurred to me that I hadn’t posted on this specifically before, and it might be interesting to those of you who might be interested in the construction equipment behind the curtain. Are y…
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sdschildberg 12/05/2019 7:39 PM
So INTJ/INTPs primarily?
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Jade Nekotenshi 12/05/2019 7:40 PM
I would presume the tendency is a bit weaker for those eldrae outside the Empire, because they've got their reasons for choosing not to live in the Empire when they certainly can, if they so choose.
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Overmind 12/05/2019 7:40 PM
Also, as said at one point: “Oh, no, the galaxy isn’t dominated by the WEIRD (Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic). It’s dominated by the CUTER, who are Consensual, Urbane, Transsophont, even more Educated, and Rich(er). And who would probably not think all that much of the merely WEIRD.” (edited)
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BizarroLand ♀ 12/05/2019 7:42 PM
INTP-T reporting
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sdschildberg 12/05/2019 8:00 PM
That really helps put the eldrae mind into context
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Zarpaulek 12/05/2019 8:04 PM
They also seem to be manic (but somehow not depressive), high-functioning ASD, and mildly sociopathic by the DSM's standards.
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Overmind 12/05/2019 8:05 PM
Hypomania. Carefully tuned for, in fact.
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Jade Nekotenshi 12/05/2019 8:06 PM
Sociopathic?
20:06
Hmm.
20:07
Then again, I suppose the lack of peer norming instinct might read that way.
20:07
(And what the devil would we make of a sense of balance that's as instinctive to them as peer norming is to us?)
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BizarroLand ♀ 12/05/2019 8:08 PM
It goes without saying that a human with those qualities is regarded as utterly insane
20:08
Of course, insane is all relative
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Jade Nekotenshi 12/05/2019 8:09 PM
Though we use the same term to cover gibbering incoherence, weirdness and violent, aggressive malevolence, so...
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sdschildberg 12/05/2019 8:11 PM
Just as sociopathy, peer norming malfunctioning, is associated with violent/amoral behavior, what does the breakdown in balance in eldrae lead to?
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Morgrim Moon 12/05/2019 8:17 PM
Servile behaviour can happen with people raised in environment where they attempted to please unpleaseable peers. That seems a plausible breakdown for an eldrae, complete with social pity and/or condemnation
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Jade Nekotenshi 12/05/2019 8:18 PM
Oooh, that makes sense.
20:19
(I feel that one... This is why I'd pay a hell of a lot for even half-baked working psychdesign/mind editing)
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sdschildberg 12/05/2019 8:20 PM
Seems reasonable. Even we would probably start looking into home life for that case. On a lighter note theres a tag on Tumblr for relationships between INTJ and INTP, with verse relevance
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Morgrim Moon 12/05/2019 8:20 PM
Yeah. It's easier to manage in humans than it would be for them, but likewise they'd handle someone with sociopathy better
20:22
(I had a classmate with mild sociopathy whose workaround was using others for "sanity checks". When in doubt, " this is my reasoning, is it unethical?" We cracked up watching Sherlock and him asking John "is this a bit not good?", it was so her)
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Jade Nekotenshi 12/05/2019 8:30 PM
That kind of thing is a surprisingly useful coping mechanism
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sdschildberg 12/05/2019 8:31 PM
Its how I roll, and why I want my AI muse
20:31
Of verse note IxxJ idea of fun: LET’S FIND OTHER WAYS TO MAKE THAT KNOWN THING EVEN FUNNIER
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sdschildberg 12/23/2019 12:56 PM
An alignment argument came up, and this seemed verse relevant Lawful is about following codes period, because they are codes Chaotic is about disregard for (too many) codes external or sometimes internal (the latter is for neutrals). The problem with alignment is less about the idea and more people being all loose with the words used. It would be more apt to replace them like this: Lawful = Structured Chaotic = Erratic “Good” = Altruistic “Evil” = Egotistic Good and evil are too loaded to use, especially with ascribing them to cultures (edited)
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Jade Nekotenshi 12/23/2019 12:57 PM
Yeah, a bit, though I'd argue that your glosses for good and evil are a bit overspecific.
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sdschildberg 12/23/2019 12:58 PM
It would be better to use that axis to throw out good and evil as an alignment axis.
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Jade Nekotenshi 12/23/2019 12:58 PM
Inasmuch as "evil" seems to cover mostly unenlightened egoism, unfettered self-interest and other sorts of "me, and fuck you", as well as spitefulness, cruelty and sadism.
12:59
While enlightened egoism can also fall into what is generally meant by "good" - "sure, it benefits me, but it benefits all of you too".
13:00
Though I think there's a fair case to be made that the spite/sadism/etc axis is orthogonal to the altruist/egoist one.
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sdschildberg 12/23/2019 1:01 PM
A 3rd dimension, used in practice to define actions. This is designed to fit heroes, and their dark villain archetypes
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gollark 12/23/2019 1:01 PM
I don't think any system which converts the simple, easy alignment square into an alignment cube or tesseract will be popular.
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Jade Nekotenshi 12/23/2019 1:02 PM
Agreed, as far as popularity goes. (This is also why two-dimensional political charts are unpopular and 3+ dimensional ones are even less so, despite being better descriptors.)
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sdschildberg 12/23/2019 1:03 PM
The square is for archetype. This is appended to “good and evil”, unenlightened or enlightened, by action. A meter in game.
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Jade Nekotenshi 12/23/2019 1:03 PM
Ah, ok, that makes more sense!
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sdschildberg 12/23/2019 1:05 PM
And it’s less cursed to apply an archetype to a culture (and it’s characters) than traditional DND alignments.
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0111narwhalz 12/23/2019 1:45 PM
clearly the solution is to use a line… which is formed by stretching out a space-filling curve! [mad cackling]
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sdschildberg 12/23/2019 1:58 PM
Having enlightenment as a meter also lets you pull “we’re not so different”
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sdschildberg 12/23/2019 2:28 PM
Extra spicy: instead of erratic v structured, externally driven and internally driven can take the law and chaos slots
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Archon 12/23/2019 10:11 PM
@Unknown while I'm not commenting on the quality of your content, do note that your system ignores a lot of historical context about how those words are and were used and doesn't "Cut to the truth" so much as replace it with something you find more palatable; this may have been your intent, in which case, good job! Otherwise, go back to the pit from whence you came and stop trying to find sanity in a system that has meant many things to many people, and which grew out of specific historical (in the sense that mid-20th century fantasy novels are historical) contexts and paradigms.
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BizarroLand ♀ 12/24/2019 10:01 AM
‘Objective’ good-evil alignment systems are inherently a trash fire and beyond any hope of salvation. Change my mind (edited)
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Overmind 12/24/2019 10:17 AM
Image attachment
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BizarroLand ♀ 12/24/2019 10:24 AM
Neutral gang
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Jade Nekotenshi 12/24/2019 11:51 AM
Put me in the upper-left quadrant as far as the use and purpose of such things. Of course they don't cut reality at the joints, but why do we need them to?
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Zarpaulek 12/24/2019 11:55 AM
I’m somewhere between CG and CN
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Xveers 12/24/2019 11:56 AM
I'm fairly solidly LN
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BluejayHurricane 12/24/2019 11:57 AM
True Neutral for me
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sdschildberg 12/24/2019 12:19 PM
LG/NG. Alignments, no matter what system is used, or what sets of axises are in play, help outline a character. (edited)
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Xveers 12/24/2019 2:43 PM
I would argue that with TN, it's impossible to uniformly objectify good and evil for an all encompassing definition, but it is possible to come up with an agreeable objective definition for a subset of people
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Enderminion 12/24/2019 2:43 PM
Charts like that are a solid load of BS
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john dougan(his grace/his grace) 12/24/2019 4:20 PM
Clearly, on that chart I'm a solid Yes.
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o11o1 12/25/2019 10:52 PM
Depending on the time of day, I vary between the 'Neutral' and 'Chaotic Good' stance.
22:54
For most settings I'd be much happier with a customized 'factional philosophy' chart that said things like "Follows the ideals of the Wheat-and-Skull Empire", or "Values the importance of family legacy" (edited)
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o11o1 12/25/2019 11:05 PM
perhaps more usably, consider Magic The Gathering color theory as an alignment system. (edited)
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Archon 12/25/2019 11:19 PM
Yeah, I have like 80% of a "Great wheel but with MTG colors" set up somewhere. Not digging it out, old projects are embarrassing
23:20
(The great wheel is the olny good worldbuilding to have come out of the alignment system)
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o11o1 12/25/2019 11:49 PM
maybe a steampunkish type world that uses the Four Humors as it's alignment options
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john dougan(his grace/his grace) 12/26/2019 12:10 AM
Sometimes I'll use the Bartle types, possibly extended. (edited)
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sdschildberg 12/26/2019 2:29 PM
or pin personalities, and thus associated motivations, to MBTI (edited)
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Jade Nekotenshi 12/26/2019 3:28 PM
Is it weird that I find "morality meter" mechanics like World of Darkness' Integrity/Humanity/Wisdom/Harmony/Synergy/etc trickier to work with and more apt to cause issues than D&D-style "statements of alignment"?
15:29
I kinda like Humanity (Vampire) and Clarity (Changeling), but the others are... obnoxiously rubber.
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Morgrim Moon 12/26/2019 7:01 PM
They tried to mimic Vampire's without the same "inevitable slow slide" mechanics
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Jade Nekotenshi 12/26/2019 7:39 PM
Yeah, except for Changeling (which is probably why I like that one)
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o11o1 12/27/2019 2:11 PM
The slow slide effect does seem to be a critical part of those systems, since they're very much about exploring being bad people.
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Jade Nekotenshi 12/27/2019 2:13 PM
Vampire sure is (and I think Beast but I haven't really looked at that yet). In Mage, it's more like avoiding the temptation to turn yourself into a villain in the quest for power. Changeling is more about not thinking like a True Fae - less exploring being bad and more exploring being mad.
14:14
Werewolf... Eh, I feel like its morality meter is tacked on.
14:14
Promethean is an interesting take. I keep wanting to run a Promethean game, but it doesn't thematically do crossover well, and I'd really need a group that's all-in on the whole "quest to be human" thing.
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o11o1 12/27/2019 3:04 PM
Getting four whole players that into that quest sounds like a tricky ask
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Jade Nekotenshi 12/27/2019 3:15 PM
A skosh, aye.
15:16
Though, there is one bit of crossover potential - a throng of Prometheans trying to attain humanity crosses over with a lone kindred (ancilla, probably) trying not to lose theirs. (Or perhaps vice versa)
15:16
((further discussion in that vein goes to #random))
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Archon 12/27/2019 7:09 PM
The problem with that is that the morality meters in WoD are harder to ignore when they're being stupid (which is nearly always)
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BluejayHurricane 12/27/2019 7:24 PM
I think that stupid is an emergent property of trying to meter morality in the first place, but your point is taken.'
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Archon 12/27/2019 11:28 PM
Yeah; the "is nearly always" is "In nearly all examples of design" not "Nearly all times in any given game"
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Jade Nekotenshi 12/28/2019 10:20 AM
WoD fails there because they're trying to have the same mechanic serve as the "balance between human and not-human or sane and insane, depending" and as the mechanical punishment for murderhoboing.
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Morgrim Moon 12/28/2019 10:23 AM
it is a mechanic you can play with to get some interesting results - my (admittedly Storyteller character) high humanity Tzimisce elder says hi - but prone to abuse at the hands of either players or Storytellers
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Archon 12/28/2019 9:43 PM
Rolling "Humanity", "Sanity", and "Morality" meters into one is a big chunk of the problem, yes. Though all three of those things make for bad meters by themselves
21:43
You can get nice results, but was there anything stopping you from being that kind of person anyway?
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KAL_9000 12/28/2019 9:58 PM
Eldrae are like low hum but high san and mor (edited)
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0111narwhalz 12/28/2019 10:00 PM
what about those of Resplendant Vector and Eye in the Flame?
22:00
I am dubious of their SAN :V
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Zarpaulek 12/28/2019 10:00 PM
Correction, they’re like True Fae with high Clarity
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0111narwhalz 12/28/2019 10:01 PM
high morality, low mortality…
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Archon 12/28/2019 10:10 PM
So trying to attach a number to any of those thing is so fundamnetally flawed that those posts are basically meaningless
22:11
(Killing a person in cold blood ticks down your morality rating; sanity meters are 70% of the time an eldritch horror lose-condition; humanity is an essentially meaningless concept except in the very specific thematic context of a game like vampire or werewolf when there's a specific other replacing it)
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KAL_9000 12/28/2019 10:12 PM
I am Chaotic Extropy
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Morgrim Moon 12/28/2019 10:13 PM
morality/sanity meters like that work best in a game where they're supposed to go down over time and that's the point, that a character is doomed and you're just seeing what happens on the way down. So they work well with Call of Cthulhu et al
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Archon 12/28/2019 10:14 PM
They work mechanically best, but I dislike the thing sanity meters are trying to point to on a basic level
22:14
And they're rarely mechanically wise
22:14
And often have the worst takes on mental health
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Zarpaulek 12/28/2019 10:15 PM
I know a few “indie” game devs who are fundamentally opposed to any sort of morality mechanics.
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Archon 12/28/2019 10:17 PM
waves
22:17
Yes, it me
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Zarpaulek 12/28/2019 10:17 PM
It’s a bit counterintuitive to treat a player character losing their qualms against killing as a penalty when they’re the type for whom it would be ideal.
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Archon 12/28/2019 10:17 PM
Also, uh, it's basically impossible to do well
22:18
In the same sense as "Coming up with a general theory of morality, and then implementing it" is basically impossible to do well
22:19
Though now I kinda want to do a game where which antiquated moral system you subscribe to is your main splat, as a Dungeons & Discourse kinda deal
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0111narwhalz 12/28/2019 10:45 PM
RE: "humanity meter is meaningless unless something replaces it:" I have a design doc draft that describes a "corruption" mechanic.
22:47
Basically a body has several potential sources of control.
22:48
The first of these is the native mind, of course, but other "corrupting influences" include things like willful artifacts and other characters… and the player packmind.
22:49
The corruption mechanic is how you hold on to your agent bodies, and how you acquire more.
22:50
So rather than a meter you get an arbitrary-dimensional vector.
22:52
Actions that would be consistent with a corrupting influence, in the presence of said influence, increase its control.
22:52
Which seems hard to implement but cool to talk about V:
22:54
The idea being to introduce more depth into the otherwise flat "willpower contest."
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Zarpaulek 12/29/2019 6:34 PM
So which NWoD morality meter best models the eldrae?
18:34
I'm betting Changeling: The Lost's "clarity"
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KAL_9000 12/29/2019 6:37 PM
Extropic Awesome
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Zarpaulek 12/29/2019 6:40 PM
I said "meter", not "alignment".
18:40
There are Renegades you know.
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Archon 12/29/2019 7:07 PM
Mu. The question is fundamentally pointless.
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Jade Nekotenshi 12/30/2019 8:53 AM
I mostly agree, but if you had to jimmysquid one in there, it'd be Mage's Wisdom, I think. Clarity feels appropriately fae-ish, but I think the heirarchy of sins that Imperials would be mainly worried about are closer to Mage's sins against Wisdom. (That said, some of those seem like such trivial violations that I don't even know why they're considered a problem within Mage.)
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Overmind 12/30/2019 2:59 PM
Wisdom is probably closest, but still not very close.
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Jade Nekotenshi 12/30/2019 3:12 PM
To me it feels close in the sense that hubris seems like it would be something that Imperials would detest and avoid, especially the species of hubris that makes one think that they're better qualified to make choices than the soph to whom those choices apply (because that way lies choice-theft, if it's not there already), but I can't imagine the modal Imperial having any real issue with using grand cosmic power to make their life easier so long as it's not grossly ineffecient, doesn't have horrid negative externalities, doesn't rob anyone else of their choices without consent, etc.
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Overmind 12/30/2019 3:12 PM
When I was tinkering with this sort of thing for potential RPG purposes, I used five (or six) interlocking scales for relevant attributes. (Well, mostly relevant; the first is less so.) Two that were regular attributes: * Drive: your willpower, essentially, from "Enh" to "The Determinator". * Control: your self-control, from raksha levels of "ooh, shiny"/"" to "Not even in the face of Armageddon". (It should be noted that the local culture emphasizes maximizing both of these.) And three hierarchies of sins: * your coercive tendencies, from "mildly passive-aggressive" to "Hegemonizing Swarm". * your destructive tendencies, from "accidentally broke a glass" to "I WILL END IT ALL." * your infiduciary tendencies, from "Captain America" to "Ebon Dragon". (edited)
15:13
(The sixth would be something like the Alchemical Exalted's Clarity , to cover level of integration with the Transcend.)
15:17
(Three, because people break bad in different ways, and conveniently, in-'verse taxonomy of evil tends to divide in much the same way.)
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Jade Nekotenshi 12/30/2019 3:29 PM
Slavers, entropy-cultists and defaulters, basically?
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sdschildberg 12/30/2019 3:34 PM
Just the idea of splitting good/evil into it’s components, and having seperate “characterization sliders”, is genius
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Overmind 12/30/2019 3:38 PM
@Jade Nekotenshi Yep.
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0111narwhalz 12/30/2019 5:13 PM
It only makes sense to not mash a multidimensional concept like good and evil into a single dimension.
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sdschildberg 12/30/2019 5:23 PM
And it lets you have villianous motives
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0111narwhalz 12/30/2019 5:26 PM
Motives follow easily and more or less directly, as they should.
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sdschildberg 12/30/2019 5:54 PM
Independent sliders for characterization and various forms of villany honestly is good in and of itself one could craft a human version of this
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Archon 12/31/2019 8:46 AM
I accept this take in this specific context only because there's the strong in-universe and in-work tenancy to classify all sin into those three boxes, and doing that mechanically follows up on that set of themes that you want to reinforce. It's still a massive oversimplification as far as real morality and moral failure-modes goes, but it's otherwise decent
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Zarpaulek 01/01/2020 7:52 PM
Thread on standards of politeness https://weasowl.tumblr.com/post/182264199515/i-love-it-when-you-accidentally-meet-eyes-with-a
blinkpatch
blinkpatch
It’s not a south v. west thing, it’s a city thing. That’s why New Yorkers are the purest version of this. And it’s why I get both sides. I grew up in a small town in Northern California, and it was...
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sdschildberg 01/01/2020 9:25 PM
Small town polite is focused on the person in the conversation City polite on the group of people around you’s ability to get along with their day
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Jade Nekotenshi 01/01/2020 9:40 PM
Just so. Very much on the order of similar urban/rural differences, too.
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sdschildberg 01/01/2020 10:31 PM
It gets associated with regions of the US due to the fact that the North has both more cities and larger ones
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Zarpaulek 01/20/2020 5:32 PM
http://existentialcomics.com/comic/325
Utilitarian Dictator
A philosophy webcomic about the inevitable anguish of living a brief life in an absurd world. Also Jokes
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Zarpaulek 01/27/2020 7:18 AM
Interesting take, I have noticed a distinct lack of "morals" in the older myths and folklore https://getpocket.com/explore/item/the-good-guy-bad-guy-myth?utm_source=pocket-newtab
The Good Guy/Bad Guy Myth - Aeon - Pocket
Pop culture today is obsessed with the battle between good and evil. Traditional folktales never were. What changed?
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Zarpaulek 02/22/2020 6:38 PM
How weird is the concept of “gambling”? (edited)
18:39
I mean, putting out some valuables and letting one person at random take them all?
18:40
How did we even come up with that idea? My best guess is a means of resolving property disputes via divination methods.
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Xenoangel 02/22/2020 7:02 PM
To me, it seems more likely that humans got bored, so they played games with randomness, and then they got bored of that, so they attributed real value and stakes to the randomness.
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Xveers 02/22/2020 7:48 PM
As well, a lot of classic gambling games involve elements of strategy as well as chance. It's only when you start getting into commercial gambling where you see true random chance ones coming to being
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BluejayHurricane 02/22/2020 9:01 PM
Also, gambling makes brains light up like a Christmas tree, for some reason. There may be a more “evopsych” explanation, but if there is I don’t know it.
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Morgrim Moon 02/22/2020 9:04 PM
I suspect it nails the foraging instincts, somehow. "Does this tree bark have tasty bugs under it? Y/N"
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BluejayHurricane 02/22/2020 9:06 PM
As a way to deal with a hostile environment when staying in is safe, but food is important in the long term?
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0111narwhalz 02/22/2020 10:38 PM
Random reinforcement is vastly more effective at cementing an association than consistent reinforcement.
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Overmind 02/23/2020 12:53 PM
Perhaps a method to experience risk and practice risk assessment in a controlled situation.
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Zarpaulek 02/23/2020 3:14 PM
Most of you seem to be describing the appeal more than how it could have started
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Overmind 02/23/2020 3:16 PM
Well, as a human thing, I'm gonna say status games and sex rewards.
15:18
Like a milder form of potlach, gambling demonstrates your wealth and power - only instead of actually giving up or destroying wealth, you just show that you can afford to risk losing it. Either way, it's a status play for the haves, and an opportunity to gain wealth/status for the have-nots.
15:18
And, like they say, top monkey fucks everyone. (edited)
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Archon 02/23/2020 3:18 PM
It's an explore-exploit thing?
15:19
You need to do unsafe, unreliable things to learn where new oportunities are
15:19
And then you try and refine that unrelaible good outcome into a supersitition
15:19
That will help you get the good outcome
15:20
So the pattern should be 1, do risky thing 2. get reward sometimes 3. figure out how to get reward always
15:20
Except actually gambling is truely random, so the brain latches onto fallacies and superstitions that happened to kinda line up, and biases it's way into keeping on with the thing
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BizarroLand ♀ 02/23/2020 3:21 PM
https://scholars-stage.blogspot.com/2018/08/tradition-is-smarter-than-you-are.html
Tradition is Smarter Than You Are
A blog about history, strategy, geopolitics, and the intersections of governance, ecology, demographics, and culture.
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Archon 02/23/2020 3:21 PM
(you can't consider monkey-level tactics here; the same biases exist in most reasonably smart creatures)
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BizarroLand ♀ 02/23/2020 3:22 PM
For more elaboration on the exploit thing; a lot of traditions have weird and obscure origins that people don't often think about
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Archon 02/23/2020 3:22 PM
(They just don't make roulette for pigeons very often)
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BizarroLand ♀ 02/23/2020 3:23 PM
Human reason has generally fallen short of tradition until recently (edited)
15:24
Call it one of the ways institutional experience is often more important than individual experience
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Overmind 02/23/2020 3:25 PM
Well, this part of it (i.e., leaving aside the exploitable cognitive biases that Vegas has refined perfectly) isn't so much a bias as a winning strategy. "Behold, I can afford to risk $10,000 on the direction a ball bounces; therefore, I am resource-rich, and thereby the sort of person your brain encourages you to have sex with." Peacock tails for shaved apes, basically. (edited)
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baidicoot 02/23/2020 3:26 PM
performUnsafeIO
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Overmind 02/23/2020 3:28 PM
This, of course, is leaning hard into the standard pop-evo-psych conclusion that literally everything involved in human civilization exists to demonstrate that someone is the sort of person with whom sex should be had, but...
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BizarroLand ♀ 02/23/2020 3:29 PM
Humans do plenty of other stuff, it's just that we're pretty 'delusional' and often don't realize the true purpose of many of our activities
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Archon 02/23/2020 3:29 PM
Also like I said, I think gambling-instincts are more fundamental than complex social structures so it can't be a major factor
15:29
Skinner boxes are not (I hope) a sex thing
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BizarroLand ♀ 02/23/2020 3:30 PM
Consciousness is in only partial control! Boo! (edited)
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baidicoot 02/23/2020 3:30 PM
e
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Overmind 02/23/2020 3:30 PM
You don't need complex social structures for this sort of thing. Peacocks don't have complex social structures, and they're all about the conspicuous wasting of resources to demonstrate fitness, as are all sorts of critters down to insects and, hell, plants.
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BizarroLand ♀ 02/23/2020 3:31 PM
All sorts of creatures have weird mating and sexual selection strategies, really
15:31
If you look deep enough, in nearly every kingdom
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Overmind 02/23/2020 3:32 PM
It's just that we've had plenty of time to up the complexity of this particular strategy from "Og bet Og rock shinier" to, well, Las Vegas. (edited)
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baidicoot 02/23/2020 3:33 PM
Hmmm... Does @Overmind mean by 'pop-evo-psych' that human civilization is the product of everyone trying to out-sex each other? Ye I cannae understand what ye are saying but pls confirm idk
15:34
Also, sorry for ping.
15:34
If so, it would probably be cool to model society as a market of sex.
15:34
Weird sentence but ok.
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BizarroLand ♀ 02/23/2020 3:35 PM
A lot of people try to do that and it's cursed as hell actually
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baidicoot 02/23/2020 3:35 PM
Yep
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Overmind 02/23/2020 3:35 PM
Yeah, that's the pop-evo-psych position. For example, basically, the entire space race was all about proving that Johnson had a bigger Johnson than the Russkies.
15:37
In other drives we might accuse, incidentally: consider how gambling relates to the desire/belief that one is the smartest guy at the table.
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baidicoot 02/23/2020 3:40 PM
hmm
15:40
yeah I guess so
15:41
unfortunately that model is limited by assuming all humans have the goal of reproduction
15:41
but I guess that's a good-enough approximation
15:42
even if people wern't to pass on their genes, they would probably still act in a way that would be similar to if they were
15:42
(does that make sense?)
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Overmind 02/23/2020 3:43 PM
Note: not reproduction . We don't have a reproductive drive. We have a sex drive.
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baidicoot 02/23/2020 3:43 PM
the same still applies though
15:43
just to a much lesser extent
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BizarroLand ♀ 02/23/2020 3:43 PM
Some people say they really want to babies tho
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baidicoot 02/23/2020 3:43 PM
yeah
15:44
weirdos who would want more humans
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Overmind 02/23/2020 3:44 PM
How many cultures have spend millennia inculcating the notion that babies are the only acceptable reason to have sex?
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baidicoot 02/23/2020 3:44 PM
zero
15:44
yeah I agree with you
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BizarroLand ♀ 02/23/2020 3:45 PM
Fair point
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Overmind 02/23/2020 3:45 PM
And, of course, our brains are feelthy liars .
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baidicoot 02/23/2020 3:45 PM
meaning?
15:46
anyway, our behaviour is 'designed' so that we have the best chance of producing the most succesful offspring right?
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Overmind 02/23/2020 3:46 PM
There's a large chunk of our thinking that we can't see, and as various experiments have demonstrated, when we don't actually know why we want/did/etc. something, our brain cheerfully confabulates to fill in the gaps.
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baidicoot 02/23/2020 3:46 PM
oh yeah I agree
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Overmind 02/23/2020 3:47 PM
To put it in economic terms, this is what gets you the distinction between revealed preferences and stated preferences.
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baidicoot 02/23/2020 3:47 PM
but I don't think that the individuals thoughts are relevant to modeling their behaviour.
15:47
-add apostraphies as needed
15:48
because you can basically throw away the stated preferences if you have enough data
15:48
yaay markets
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BizarroLand ♀ 02/23/2020 3:49 PM
I experienced the gap between people's modeling of themselves and actual perception in my own life early on
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baidicoot 02/23/2020 3:50 PM
ooh a life story
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BizarroLand ♀ 02/23/2020 3:50 PM
It was rather odd to see in practice
15:51
Sometimes it's mildly depressing
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baidicoot 02/23/2020 3:51 PM
rlly?
15:51
wdym
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BizarroLand ♀ 02/23/2020 3:52 PM
people getting stuck in the same old patterns and trying the same old advice that doesn't work and saying the same old stuff
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baidicoot 02/23/2020 3:53 PM
oh right
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BizarroLand ♀ 02/23/2020 3:53 PM
I don't have any salient examples except when I was in a strange phase in my preteens, where I would do some things with others and then not realize why I was ignored or derided
15:54
Wasn't until much later that I realized 10-year-old me was just blindly copying what he thought of as "cool", like being quiet or foreign or having a vague backstory, none of which actually work as character traits in an isolating vacuum (edited)
15:55
My longterm memory is garbage most of the time, so nothing else jumps out at me (edited)
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baidicoot 02/23/2020 3:57 PM
interesting story (+1)
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BizarroLand ♀ 02/23/2020 3:58 PM
I think I've bored Our Leader with my egotism as well
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baidicoot 02/23/2020 3:59 PM
it's like 1 relevant post which happened to be abt urself, not exactly egotism
15:59
but yeah where is Our Glourious Leader
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BizarroLand ♀ 02/23/2020 4:03 PM
also it's autobiographical memory that is failing me
16:03
Mostly that I always seem to have trouble interpreting some things, especially instructions, because I lack assumptions others seemed to just have by default
16:03
Chalk it up to autism or general neurodiversity
16:04
Some puzzles that are trivial for others are the bane of my existence and vice versa
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baidicoot 02/23/2020 4:05 PM
yeah fair enough, I mostly get the assumptions in instructions but I can see how they make literally no senser
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gollark 02/23/2020 4:07 PM
I also seem to suffer the lack of autobiographical memory thing, in that I have real trouble remembering past events but am fine with random facts.
16:07
Also, I can't really visualize much more than simple coloured shapes, and can't visualize past memories as others apparently can.
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BizarroLand ♀ 02/23/2020 4:08 PM
I can visualize gorgeously detailed art pieces at my best
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baidicoot 02/23/2020 4:08 PM
hw
16:09
I get a vague sense of something but no proportions, which I think is about normal for us humans
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BizarroLand ♀ 02/23/2020 4:09 PM
I have images of past events in my head
16:09
But at this point my imagination has probably overwritten most of the actual memores
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baidicoot 02/23/2020 4:10 PM
yep
16:10
see Our Leaders comment about the mind being a feelthy liar
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BizarroLand ♀ 02/23/2020 4:12 PM
One of my other clues was when I finally started looking into apologetics
16:15
But that may be too close to politics; in any event, I saw people twisting and twisting to justify why their favorite cosmology was needed to resolve these weird 'problems' that seemed to have nothing much to do with the world at large and more to do with their own minds
16:16
And then it finally hit me that our minds aren't really designed to handle the world as it is (edited)
16:20
which started me down the path to looking into human blind spots and rationalism-adjacency (edited)
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baidicoot 02/25/2020 2:38 AM
@BizarroLand ♀ you are now yellow
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BizarroLand ♀ 02/25/2020 8:00 AM
Wat
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Morgrim Moon 02/25/2020 8:01 AM
I think they mean your avatar
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Zarpaulek 03/06/2020 8:23 AM
I've been hearing a lot about the Satanic Panic on podcasts lately.
08:24
Think that could be a contemporary example of a meme plague?
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Jade Nekotenshi 03/06/2020 8:30 AM
I'd call it one, yes.
08:31
(My mother got infected and I still haven't heard the end of it.)
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Zarpaulek 03/12/2020 12:14 PM
Really expected to get more interaction from this channel
12:15
So, we should be setting better subroutines rather than trying to "resist" them? https://getpocket.com/explore/item/the-myth-of-self-control?utm_source=pocket-newtab
The Myth of Self-Control - Vox - Pocket
Psychologists say using willpower to achieve goals is overhyped. Here’s what actually works.
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Jade Nekotenshi 03/12/2020 12:17 PM
I think that makes a lot of sense. I mean, a lot of failures of "willpower" are much more about being out of brainwidth to constantly track something than about being lazy/weak/decadent/stupid/immoral/whathaveye
12:19
But say, for budgeting, I've found that rather than trying to fight myself, I make as many things as possible automagical.
12:20
If I don't, things fail. I succumb to temptation, or I roughly eyeball too many things, think I can afford things I can't, end up short, end up doing something dumb to cover the shortfall, and on it goes.
12:21
And it took me way the hell longer than it ought to have to realize that just castigating myself for my failings, deciding I wasn't allowed to have nice things and trying to fight myself harder didn't work, hadn't worked yesterday and wouldn't work tomorrow.
12:21
(Oh, I'm not allowed to buy things I like, so I can save money? OK, says jerk-brain, I'll just fritter it away on eating out and other dumbassery...)
12:22
So, automate my budget and keep the categories of bills separated, rather than trying to police myself all the time.
12:23
So far it's working. I think this is probably the trick for other things too.
12:23
(Like food, my next big fight. First, so I can spend less on it within reason, and second, so I can get down under 100kg...)
12:28
Also, the inverse of what they're talking about - aversions associated with things we should be doing. (Like the gym for me - excercise is not only unpleasant, it's associated with being hounded to "PT until you puke", which is the last thing I ever want to do, with being constantly audited for any deviations from perfect form and hounded about it, etc... You mean I have the option to not go to the pain-and-punishment session? Yeah, I'll skip that, thanks.)
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BizarroLand ♀ 03/12/2020 12:41 PM
this is why I do more drawing practice when I'm doing line-of-action
12:41
and more exercise when I cycle, etc.
12:41
those things have positive associations
12:42
drawabox exercises are linked with misery and frustration
12:42
regular workouts are bound to end in confusion
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0111narwhalz 03/12/2020 2:17 PM
On the subject of regular workouts: Commuting by bicycle V:
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Jade Nekotenshi 03/12/2020 2:30 PM
Great option where it's practical, yeah.
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Jade Nekotenshi 03/12/2020 2:39 PM
(One thing that's a PITA in the US is that practically everything outside of the really big cities is geographically huge and sprawly.)
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BluejayHurricane 03/12/2020 3:13 PM
And god help you trying to bike in the city.
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BizarroLand ♀ 03/12/2020 3:18 PM
My parents would never let me commute by bicycle even if I thought I had the constitution for it
15:18
My school is near an industrial park so smoke-belching trucks pass by the avenue leading there constantly
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Morgrim Moon 03/12/2020 7:20 PM
I'm in perfect range to commute by bike and don't, because the one time I did the seat hurt my bum so badly I couldn't sit comfortably for 3 days. So aversion response ahoy
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NHO 04/15/2020 12:54 PM
http://loup-vaillant.fr/articles/smartphone-is-the-wrong-name
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Jade Nekotenshi 04/15/2020 4:02 PM
I mean, yeah. They're basically computers that incidentally happens to be able to be a phone.
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DSD [He/They] 04/16/2020 4:10 AM
I tend to think of mine as a primitive exocortex
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BluejayHurricane 05/11/2020 9:58 PM
The imperials would love Celeste, wouldn’t they? Absurdly high skill ceiling, the only thing you’re fighting is physics and your own mistakes, and high level play is beautiful in its own right.
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sdschildberg 05/12/2020 8:54 PM
Imperials would love speedrunning and challenge running in general (edited)
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Zarpaulek 05/30/2020 1:06 PM
Anyone have a subscription? https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-017-0211-5
Evidence that curtailing proactive policing can reduce major crime
Using the 2014 New York Police Department slowdown as a natural experiment, the authors show that civilian complaints of major crime decreased during and after reductions in proactive policing, which challenges existing research on the topic.
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13:06
I found it through a post claiming “NYPD strike leads to less crime”
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Morgrim Moon 05/30/2020 1:13 PM
tried scihub?
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Zarpaulek 08/08/2020 6:32 PM
Image attachment
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Zarpaulek 08/31/2020 7:09 PM
https://existentialcomics.com/comic/357
Turing Tests and Other Things of That Nature
A philosophy webcomic about the inevitable anguish of living a brief life in an absurd world. Also Jokes
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Zarpaulek 08/31/2020 9:13 PM
Didn't mention "Chinese Room" once.
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Buggy 08/31/2020 9:35 PM
see, that's overlooking the key point that it's not if it matches in one property you can test, but most/all of them
21:35
roses are red.
21:35
brains are red. Well, after you take them out, anyway.
21:35
therefore roses are brains.
21:36
except, a rose is nothing like a brain in almost literally any other category. (edited)
21:37
a motto i almost never use but think of occasionally is "If it quacks like a duck, swims like a duck, flies like a duck, and if you cut it open it looks like a duck, it's a duck. If you cut it open and it's blue, well, okay, it's probably a duck. Just a really weird one." (edited)
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Cornflakes 09/02/2020 6:27 AM
goddamn copper blood ducks
06:28
always mess up my pond
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Zarpaulek 09/10/2020 11:54 AM
Speaking of sex and social theory https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/10/joseph-henrich-weird-people/615496/?utm_source=pocket-newtab
A New Theory of Western Civilization
Could a marriage policy first pursued by the Catholic Church a millennium and a half ago explain what made the industrialized world so powerful—and so peculiar?
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11:58
Doesn't really address the fact that WEIRD culture existed before Christianity. Sure, the Greeks and Romans were pretty clannish with consanguinous arranged marriages (at least among the land-owning class), but they also had democracy, universities, corporations, and factories.
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thunk 09/10/2020 12:01 PM
That and in general, I'm not a big fan of trying to ascribe big changes in history to just one thing
12:02
such is necessarily an oversimplification.
12:02
(likewise, why a lot of historians don't like Jared Diamond)
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BizarroLand ♀ 09/10/2020 12:12 PM
Most of these theories smack of Christian exceptionalism of one kind or another
12:13
arranged marriages (Christian matrimony was notionally consensual, hence the formula “I do”) HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH
12:13
Three sentences and I cannot take this idea seriously
12:15
(Arranged marriages were essentially ubiquitous, everywhere, until the industrial age)
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Zarpaulek 09/10/2020 12:22 PM
And tended to be consanguineous among the ruling class.
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Xveers 09/10/2020 12:34 PM
"notionally consentual" insofar as someone went through the motions of making it consensual. Not that in actual practice it always was.
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thunk 09/10/2020 12:59 PM
https://twitter.com/yellingatwind/status/1301588828860235777
Author icon
Self-certified armchair epidemiologist (@yellingatwind)
U of Illinois brought back 40,000+ students to campus based on a model created by 2 very confident physicists, who said epidemiology was important but intellectually unchallenging. Things are not going as planned, because it turns out students party and live together.
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Footer icon Twitter
12:59
The dangers of working outside one's own field.
13:00
though also https://twitter.com/rlsdvm_epivet/status/1301636766001180672
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Rebecca Lee Smith (@rlsdvm_epivet)
@LucyStats @EpiEllie They did. They worked with me. We expected parties. We didn't predict breaking isolation to throw parties. We're addressing that now.
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Footer icon Twitter
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Buggy 09/10/2020 1:04 PM
something something planning fallacy
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Zarpaulek 09/10/2020 1:10 PM
How would they have parties without breaking isolation?
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Xveers 09/10/2020 1:10 PM
They assumed that people might stay isolated because they don't want to kill others?
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Cornflakes 09/10/2020 1:16 PM
they assumed people are smart and rational
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BizarroLand ♀ 09/10/2020 1:32 PM
^biggest mistake
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gollark 09/10/2020 1:43 PM
https://xkcd.com/2355/
xkcd: University COVID Model
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I admit this is an exaggeration, since I can think of at least three parties I attended while doing my degree, and I'm probably forgetting several more.
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thunk 09/10/2020 8:56 PM
https://aeon.co/essays/why-does-keeping-a-bird-in-a-cage-make-people-happy (edited)
Why does keeping a bird in a cage make people happy? – Ilan Greenbe...
Intelligent, devoted, alien – parrots are unlike any other pet. But what does the complex human-avian bond say about us?
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KAL_9000 09/10/2020 9:12 PM
That title is disturbing
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Buggy 09/10/2020 9:52 PM
that definitely sounds more like a title they should've picked if they were doing a piece about cruelty
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thunk 09/10/2020 9:53 PM
yea
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BluejayHurricane 09/10/2020 10:02 PM
I mean, the thrust of the article was sort of that keeping the more intelligent birds as pets, even perfectly done, is kind of hard to justify under the usual frameworks people have about intelligent animals. The title is perhaps designed to get too much of a reaction for the writing, but it’s hard to call it outright incorrect.
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Morgrim Moon 09/10/2020 10:27 PM
uni students are a population known for binge drinking, drunk driving, climbing very high objects with no safety considerations, and running full speed into brick walls on a dare. "Safety" and "accurate risk assessment" are not skills one can consider highly valued within such a population
👍 4
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thunk 09/10/2020 10:33 PM
yes
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Deleted User 09/15/2020 3:35 AM
Intriguing
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Zarpaulek 09/16/2020 3:45 PM
(Continued from #dank ) Also, I doubt a brain scan is gonna cut it, I’m too familiar with how your everything can affect your consciousness
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0111narwhalz 09/16/2020 3:46 PM
Indeed, your substrate is not limited to the brain itself.
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Buggy 09/16/2020 3:47 PM
your perspective doesn't magically 'shift' when you get a clone, nothing like that can happen.
15:48
unless you get something really fancy like a continuous transfer but thats a side point
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Zarpaulek 09/16/2020 3:48 PM
Even if you just want nervous system the spine and enteric nervous system do a lot of processing.
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Buggy 09/16/2020 3:48 PM
rather, if you get a clone (and it's copy-paste, not cut-paste), there are simply two of you
15:48
two perspectives of the same person, slowly diverging.
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Zarpaulek 09/16/2020 3:49 PM
Turns out your gut does a bit of thinking.
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Overmind 09/16/2020 3:49 PM
"Perspective" isn't a material thing.
15:49
The closest thing to it that is a material thing is "state".
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Buggy 09/16/2020 3:50 PM
(i've heard that about the gut too. Peter Watts did a short thing about it, where engineered gut flora were used to orchestrate a terrorist attack by targeted aggression. Or stage a attack, hard to say.)
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Overmind 09/16/2020 3:50 PM
We can transfer state. (Yes, yes, no-cloning theorem, but until someone establishes that Penrose is correct that thought requires quantum fuckery, it's not relevant.)
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Zarpaulek 09/16/2020 3:51 PM
No, you can copy state.
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Buggy 09/16/2020 3:51 PM
what "perspective" is is highly subjective becacuse it's a single word with no elaboration given
15:51
it could mean a whole lotta different things, and until the amiguity is clarified it's not certain what it would be
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Overmind 09/16/2020 3:51 PM
Copy is transfer. Move is just transfer+delete.
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Zarpaulek 09/16/2020 3:52 PM
When you create a clone you’re generating a whole new perspective that remembers someone else’s.
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Buggy 09/16/2020 3:52 PM
technically, you can do a elaborate copy/delete process where the mindstate is running while you're transfering it between two locations. Basically gradual upload, but not necessarily a upload.
15:53
the whole new perspective is identical to the previous perspective
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Zarpaulek 09/16/2020 3:53 PM
Copy is transfer. Move is just transfer+delete.
@Overmind I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. Transhumanism has too many CompSci majors and not enough Biologists.
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Overmind 09/16/2020 3:53 PM
Also, is the GPT-3 that you have downloaded thus not the same GPT-3 as the GPT-3 that was uploaded?
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Zarpaulek 09/16/2020 3:53 PM
No
15:54
And due to quantum effects it won’t be a perfect copy either
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gollark 09/16/2020 3:55 PM
... no?
15:55
It's a digital file. They aren't really subject to those.
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Overmind 09/16/2020 3:55 PM
Because seems to me that that's some pretty convincing evidence that you in fact can make identical duplicates of neural networks.
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gollark 09/16/2020 3:55 PM
The underlying hardware might be, but you can conveniently abstract over all those issues and losslessly transmit things over information networks.
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Zarpaulek 09/16/2020 3:56 PM
Until it glitches
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gollark 09/16/2020 3:56 PM
Well, sure, but there are no relevant quantum effects and a properly working computer system can losslessly send things.
15:56
You can hash it on each end or something to check.
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0111narwhalz 09/16/2020 3:56 PM
looks like you guys have this covered I'm gonna go make a sandwich
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Buggy 09/16/2020 3:57 PM
@Zarpaulek consider this situation: You're running in a sim (which is deterministic). You decide to copy yourself to a identical sim; the copy process freezes everything while the transfer is underway, so at the end you have two whole simulations and two whole yous which are bit-to-bit identical. You let these two separate perspectives run for a bit, and then you XOR them together to merge them. Because the deterministic simulations are identical, it works and you end up with a single merged perspective which is identical to the two separate perspectives. Now, ask yourself this. Because the XOR was successful, would it have made a difference if, instead of XORing, you just picked one at random and deleted it?
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Overmind 09/16/2020 3:58 PM
Another interesting question is what level of fidelity you actually need. We're all walking around with millions of cells inside us which are imperfect duplicates due to trivial copying errors, but with very rare exceptions they behave just like all the others and have no particular impact on the behavior of the whole system.
16:00
Given how good the brain is at maintaining function and sense of self even in the face of gross injury, I think it is reasonable to assume for the moment that tiny quantum-level errors aren't going to perturb it much, because it's really good at carrying on in the face of much larger errors.
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Zarpaulek 09/16/2020 4:00 PM
Cells are a bad example, following mitosis each daughter cells has a set of DNA with half the atoms of the parent’s DNA until they themselves divide and give their progeny half their DNA atoms
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Overmind 09/16/2020 4:01 PM
The universe doesn't care which carbon atom is which.
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Buggy 09/16/2020 4:02 PM
and another is that, as i see it, minds behave holographically. No not the 3d projected image you see in sci-fi movies, the original concept of holography; a recording of a interference pattern to create a 3-dimensional image which, crucially, loses only resolution when divided up instead of losing segments of what is recorded If you stitch two minds together, you end up with one greater mind. If you cut a mind in half, you get two lesser minds. If you cut out a little piece of a mind, the mind is somewhat diminished, and if you add on bits it grows slowly. It doesn't apply perfectly, human mind tend to spatially specialize a fair bit, but over time it holds true; you can suffer catastrophic brain damage but only suffer temporary loss of function until it's restored. Often only partially restored, but you did lose brain matter. (edited)
16:03
(results may vary for individuals with impaired neuroplasticity)
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Overmind 09/16/2020 4:04 PM
In the hypothetical case in which an ontotechnological monster waved their noodly appendage and instantaneously swapped all the carbon atoms in your body with carbon atoms from the nearest convenient coal seam... would anyone notice? Hell, would physics notice?
16:04
(There is a non-zero probability that this has already happened. Close to zero, mind, but not zero.)
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Buggy 09/16/2020 4:05 PM
and even a imperfect copy or simulation process would not destroy a mind, necessarily, just decrease the resolution.
16:07
a good analogy for this is neural networks; GPT-2 is very similar to GPT-3 and was trained in the same way, but it's only a fraction of the size. This doesn't result in it breaking, it results in it working less effectively
16:08
technically they're still different, but there's actually a process where you downscale a neural network by training a second network off of it. Larger networks are easier to train from data, but harder to run; a smaller network can perform just as well when trained off a larger one.
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Zarpaulek 09/16/2020 4:11 PM
In the hypothetical case in which an ontotechnological monster waved their noodly appendage and instantaneously swapped all the carbon atoms in your body with carbon atoms from the nearest convenient coal seam... would anyone notice? Hell, would physics notice?
@Overmind That's still a grandfather's axe because all the nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorous, iron, magnesium... etc was left in place.
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0111narwhalz 09/16/2020 4:12 PM
Okay so If you swap all of each element in the body individually, one after the other, is continuity preserved?
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Zarpaulek 09/16/2020 4:12 PM
If you do it one after the other sure
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0111narwhalz 09/16/2020 4:12 PM
How long do you have to wait between each swap?
16:13
Is an hour enough?
16:13
There's only a little over a hundred elements and probably only about half of them are relevant to human biology, so that'd only take a couple days.
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Zarpaulek 09/16/2020 4:14 PM
A microsecond would be long enough.
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Buggy 09/16/2020 4:15 PM
to me, it seems odd that you could be defined to be a 'different person' by a event that could occur at any time that you have no way of detecting either during or after the fact
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0111narwhalz 09/16/2020 4:15 PM
A nanosecond is too short, though?
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Zarpaulek 09/16/2020 4:15 PM
And realistically if you removed all of one element from the body for longer than that before replacing them the body would collapse into a pile of protoplasmic goo
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0111narwhalz 09/16/2020 4:15 PM
oh no the swap takes differentially little time
16:16
or is one atom at a time instantaneous but overall takes time
16:16
pick whichever suits you
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Zarpaulek 09/16/2020 4:16 PM
What's the smallest measureable unit of time?
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Overmind 09/16/2020 4:16 PM
Planck time.
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0111narwhalz 09/16/2020 4:17 PM
about 10¯⁴⁴s
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Buggy 09/16/2020 4:17 PM
also the time taken for light to travel one planck-length in a vacuum
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0111narwhalz 09/16/2020 4:18 PM
yes, natural units are neat that way
16:18
If you replaced one atom every Planck-time, it would take something like 10¯²⁰s to replace all of them.
16:19
Pretty close to instantaneous I think
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Overmind 09/16/2020 4:20 PM
So. Swap all the carbon atoms at time t. Swap all the atoms of every other element at time t+1 Planck (a time which is effectively too short for any molecule-level interactions because the bosons are c-limited). Works?
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Buggy 09/16/2020 4:21 PM
(i still think a lot of this is because we're working with a nil word, 'perspective')
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0111narwhalz 09/16/2020 4:21 PM
I mean yeah
16:21
I can change my perspective by moving my head but it's no less mine
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Buggy 09/16/2020 4:22 PM
no it's not quite that
16:22
i mean
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0111narwhalz 09/16/2020 4:22 PM
it's one valid definition of "perspective" and we haven't disambiguated
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Overmind 09/16/2020 4:22 PM
(Super extra fun hypothetical: replace all the atoms in the universe with identical copies in that single moment. Has everyone just died and been replaced by a new person without noticing?)
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Buggy 09/16/2020 4:22 PM
i hereby declare the fleepleflipinity to be crucial to my nerbleworp. If i loose the fleepleflip, my nerbleworp is instantly destroyed
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Overmind 09/16/2020 4:23 PM
Part of the problem with perspective is that the entire concept of perspective, as that of qualia, as that of even thoughts necessarily implies information dualism, as they're all informational entities.
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Buggy 09/16/2020 4:24 PM
the issue is deeper than the specific definition of perspective. Essentially i think... the best way to put it might be "concepts which are not ultimately based on physical concepts are nonsense"
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Overmind 09/16/2020 4:25 PM
If one is speaking strictly of material concepts, then there's nothing but electromagnetic interactions, and the whole argument reduces to "is it possible to quote-move/recreate/duplicate-unquote patterns of electromagnetic interactions elsewhere?", and we know the answer to that one already.
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Buggy 09/16/2020 4:26 PM
a interesting example would be that instantly swapping atoms is actually kind of nonsense; assuming my QM knowledge is acceptable, particles and associated structures are hideously complex quantum wavefunctions. Swapping identical wavefunction is the same as doing literally nothing.
☝️ 3
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0111narwhalz 09/16/2020 4:27 PM
two identical electrons in the same position are the same electron—that's why you can't have two identical electrons in the same position
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Overmind 09/16/2020 4:27 PM
For philosophical purposes we are assuming EUSBs did it.
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Buggy 09/16/2020 4:28 PM
and yeah, that's what the argument reduces to kind of. You can reproduce physical whatever in another location no problem. But the problem comes in when you try to bring in concepts that aren't based in physical laws, like 'self' and 'perspective' or such, and you get nonsense because when you boil it down you get the planfinibble being tied to these wavefunctions but not those, except it's unmeasurable and such and you basically just reinvent dualism like @Overmind points out
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Overmind 09/16/2020 4:34 PM
But fundamentally and without even needing to get to the physics of the thing, the moment you introduce concepts like self, qualia, perspectives, thoughts, consciousness, etc., etc. you're pretty much conceding that there is a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts, a ghost in the machine. If you exist in any way that those terms imply, you've thus already conceded dualism. Information dualism has the virtue of invoking no entities that we know don't exist or have reasons not to believe exist, because we know that information exists beyond its material substrate. Obvious example: a book. War and Peace cannot be meaningfully reduced to a pile of tree shavings and hydrocarbon extract; you would destroy it by merely sorting it and leaving every part intact. Quod erat demonstrandum .
16:35
(ObTheology: For an information dualist, since books contain information, obviously books have souls.)
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Buggy 09/16/2020 4:37 PM
counterpoint: reducing or rearranging any structure would destroy it; a rock stops being that rock even if you just smooth out the different types of stone in it.
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Overmind 09/16/2020 4:38 PM
Yes, the only logical conclusion is that everything in the least bit unrandom contains information, ergo has a soul. Welcome to Flamic theology. Or Shinto, for that matter, or even Western pantheism.
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Buggy 09/16/2020 4:39 PM
associating non-identical quantum wavefunctions is tricky. The most straightfoward way to do is it to define a separate wavefunction that will reach a specific range of state when a suitable range of state is input. in other words, figuring out if you have War and Peace or another book requires a book testing machine.
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Overmind 09/16/2020 4:41 PM
This is one reason among many why destroying mere stuff is wrong'n'evil. By reducing its ordered-stateliness, you're tearing apart the very soul of the universe. You bastards.
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Buggy 09/16/2020 4:41 PM
but the problem with this is that as i see it, you can't generalize; no two machines will have identical valid inputs. So you can't reduce things to "this is War and Peace, you can only reduce it to "this is War and Peace according to [SPECIFIC TESTING MACHINE]"
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Overmind 09/16/2020 4:42 PM
True, if information were quantum in nature. It does not appear to be. The bit is more fundamental than the qubit.
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Buggy 09/16/2020 4:42 PM
and even that is condensed a fair bit, a more proper explanation would be "This is a wavefunction that will, with high probability, cause [SPECIFIC TESTING MACHINE] to return a positive signal"
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Overmind 09/16/2020 4:43 PM
...and now I'm gonna be on the road for 45 or so, so see you when I get back.
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Buggy 09/16/2020 4:43 PM
cya
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Zarpaulek 09/16/2020 5:09 PM
@Buggy Now that's I've taken a walk and thought about it if I was a virtual entity and copying myself to another server I would be running as a distributed application on the two servers and selectively terminating processes on server A as I started their counterparts on server B with continuous communication between the two. If communication was interrupted I'd be temporarily lobotomized until the two parts of me reconnected and mutually re-absorbed each other or server A resumed the terminated processes and server B terminated the bit of myself it hosted. It would be a form of movement in the same way a slime mold "moves" by growing new cells in the direction of a new food source while letting the cells on the far end wither and die.
17:10
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17:10
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17:10
And reintegration like a cut up slime mold or carbosilicate amorph
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17:13
As for deleting a copy of me? That's murder.
17:15
Fratricide even
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Overmind 09/16/2020 5:17 PM
Yep. That's why the AIs that migrate in the 'verse wait for confirmation that their copy is up and running, then terminate themselves. That's perfectly legal. (Or not. Freedom of choice, and all that. Just make sure the paperwork's properly filled out either way.)
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Buggy 09/16/2020 5:18 PM
ah, but that's not quite the same thing. two copies of yourself on two servers would be, in most scenarios, be two slightly different copies
17:19
but what if you had, not just a server but a whole completely isolated deterministic simulation, and you copied yourself to another identical simulation
17:19
so the two simulations and the two yous are bit-for-bit identical in every way
17:20
and then, you could do that process of merging (by, for instance, just XORing, or in other words check every bit and if it matches merge them, otherwise abort or do something more elaborate)
17:21
and because its a simulation you don't really need to do it continuously, you can just pause the whole thing.
17:21
and at the end, because you know the two simulations and yous are perfectly identical, this operation will succeed and you will merge into a single, and again, identical you.
17:22
but the kicker is, if you know they're identical does it matter if you do the merge
17:22
the output; a single simulation with a single you, will be bit-for-bit identical if you did the entire process twice and merged in one process and simply deleted one of the copies in the other.
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Zarpaulek 09/16/2020 5:22 PM
Pausing would be death
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Buggy 09/16/2020 5:23 PM
pausing is death?
17:23
okay, so don't pause
17:23
just do the operation between two ticks of the simulation
17:23
without slowing or stopping the simulation at any point; the hardware is just really good.
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KAL_9000 09/16/2020 5:24 PM
@Zarpaulek by that logic, sleep is death
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0111narwhalz 09/16/2020 5:24 PM
Pausing would be death
okay this throws me for a loop
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Buggy 09/16/2020 5:24 PM
me too but i decided to focus on the prior point
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Zarpaulek 09/16/2020 5:25 PM
Do you know how "pausing" works with digital processes? Unless you've got a tape advancing through a player it's terminating the process and saving the data to start a new identical process at a moment's notice.
17:26
@Zarpaulek by that logic, sleep is death
@KAL_9000 My dreams and continued breathing beg to differ.
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KAL_9000 09/16/2020 5:26 PM
Any break in consciousness
17:27
Death of the soul, if not the body
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Zarpaulek 09/16/2020 5:27 PM
Here we go into the "is consciousness the entirety of my being" debate again.
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0111narwhalz 09/16/2020 5:27 PM
I can literally stop and continue processes on my machine
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Zarpaulek 09/16/2020 5:27 PM
For the record, I say not.
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0111narwhalz 09/16/2020 5:27 PM
the fact that the command to stop a process is kill doesn't mean anything
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Zarpaulek 09/16/2020 5:28 PM
But in this simulation scenario we're assuming that I'm not the only person using this server as my substrate, am I?
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0111narwhalz 09/16/2020 5:28 PM
What if instead of terminating the simulation's process you just put a spinner on it?
17:29
Process is still running.
17:29
Just noop-ing for a while.
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Buggy 09/16/2020 5:29 PM
in this case we are assuming you're the only one, for simplicity
17:29
(also, modern digital processes might do that but its absolutely possible to build a simulation that actually pauses.)
17:30
(infact thats what many game engines do; physics advances in discrete steps at regular intervels. You can, in many cases, alter the speed of the ticks or pause inbetween them without affecting the outcome whatsoever.)
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Overmind 09/16/2020 5:35 PM
Er, that's really not how it works. "Pausing" a process just means the kernel doesn't allocate it any time slices to run in until it's resumed. Most processes on your average desktop are in this state most of the time, since they're waiting for you to do something.
17:36
@0111narwhalz Nor does the fact that stopping a process is only one of maybe, uh, something over a dozen different things kill does.
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0111narwhalz 09/16/2020 5:36 PM
yeah
17:37
I mean you can kill which means "end the process," kill -9 which means "I wasn't asking," and kill -STOP and kill -CONT to suspend and unsuspend a process respectively, just to start
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Zarpaulek 09/16/2020 5:37 PM
Er, that's really not how it works. "Pausing" a process just means the kernel doesn't allocate it any time slices to run in until it's resumed. Most processes on your average desktop are in this state most of the time, since they're waiting for you to do something.
@Overmind Unfortunately that's not how the hybrid analog wet circuitry of our neural nets works.
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0111narwhalz 09/16/2020 5:38 PM
that's neat but we weren't talking about hybrid analog wet circuitry, we were talking about a simulation of (potentially) hybrid analog wet circuitry
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Zarpaulek 09/16/2020 5:40 PM
In that case a simulation of wet circuitry is getting killed and replaced every tick
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Overmind 09/16/2020 5:42 PM
Sure it is. Since reality is quantized, the effective clock speed of reality is 1/Planck time. Tick tock.
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0111narwhalz 09/16/2020 5:42 PM
killed and replaced every tick
if so, then the operation of "killed and replaced" becomes utterly meaningless and I don't really feel beholden to engage with it anymore
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Zarpaulek 09/16/2020 5:44 PM
Sure it is. Since reality is quantized, the effective clock speed of reality is 1/Planck time. Tick tock.
@Overmind Are you seriously telling me that the universe has a central processor?
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Overmind 09/16/2020 5:44 PM
No, I'm seriously telling you that the universe is a central processor.
17:45
Insofar as it can be represented by, and is isomorphic to, information transformations.
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Buggy 09/16/2020 5:46 PM
of course, it doesn't quite seem to be sequential
17:46
on a per-tick level i mean
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0111narwhalz 09/16/2020 5:46 PM
it's just hypermassively parallel
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Zarpaulek 09/16/2020 5:46 PM
Time is relative.
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Buggy 09/16/2020 5:46 PM
a CPU in a video game will do all interactions in series; you can get weird interactions that are highly dependant on the order in some cases.
17:46
the universe is uhhhhhhh
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0111narwhalz 09/16/2020 5:46 PM
part of autoexecuted algorithms I guess
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Buggy 09/16/2020 5:47 PM
relativity is complicated.
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0111narwhalz 09/16/2020 5:47 PM
relativity is an optimization hack
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Overmind 09/16/2020 5:47 PM
Well, technically, I suppose it's more like a massively parallel array of tiny processors, but nonetheless, the point is that since there are such things as the Planck time, length, and mass, the universe isn't analog. It's digital. Hell, it's legit made up of voxels. (edited)
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0111narwhalz 09/16/2020 5:48 PM
but yeah overall if advancing a tick in a discrete simulation is equivalent to "death and reconstruction" then I don't care about "death and reconstruction"
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Buggy 09/16/2020 5:48 PM
relativity is that code that somehow works really well even though its undocumented and you coded it all in one take late at night after you drank five cups of coffee, and you aren't sure if you should push it or call a priest
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Overmind 09/16/2020 5:48 PM
Anything that looks analog is basically floating-point math tricks write large.
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Zarpaulek 09/16/2020 5:49 PM
Okay, you've officially convinced me that there's no convincing you.
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Overmind 09/16/2020 5:49 PM
Aw, and we haven't even got onto the bit about how the past doesn't exist yet. 🙂
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Zarpaulek 09/16/2020 5:51 PM
Maybe in a century or so my mind-children will be able to help your less-than-perfect clones cope with their identity issues.
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Buggy 09/16/2020 5:52 PM
i don't even have a clone and i already have identity issues
17:52
(which i suspect that cloning would help with, as it turns out)
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Overmind 09/16/2020 5:53 PM
I really need to get "Happy Pointlessly-Undergoing-Irreversible-Loss-Of-Information Day" cards printed up.
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0111narwhalz 09/16/2020 5:53 PM
I mean "identity" and "equality" are two different operators…
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Zarpaulek 09/16/2020 5:53 PM
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17:53
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Buggy 09/16/2020 5:55 PM
IMO half of the issues people in Schlock have with cloning is a matter of personal opinion
17:55
unless you really fucked up the cloning process, my clone and i would both agree that we're the same person. Even if we're slightly different.
17:55
i'm pretty sure there's not going to be any spontaneous sudden revelations i haven't though of already
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0111narwhalz 09/16/2020 5:56 PM
I, the entity sitting in front of my keyboard and typing to you, am an instance of "me," the algorithm that implements my consciousness.
17:56
(consciousness, or whatever is important)
17:56
Another instance would fail to identify, but would succeed to equate.
17:58
(the other instance is distinguishable by merit of its different position, and what is done to that instance is not reflected in the first—and a change to one may cause the invalidation of their equality)
17:59
I recognize equality as the important function, not identity.
17:59
(to "me-ness" anyway)
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Buggy 09/16/2020 5:59 PM
I. A complex collection of neurons, located in front of a keyboard, is following a variety of roughly-cateogrizable drives and as such is modeling other beings through data transferred by the screen for the purposes of, broadly, both imitation and alteration according to the drives. Incidentally, one of the many parts of these neurons is a recursively self-referental model of self, one of a few modules which handles self modelling. In particular, long term self modelling. This module has... overgrown, a bit, but the rest manages well enough.
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KAL_9000 09/16/2020 7:35 PM
@Overmind As a member of the Church of Last Thursday, I must disagree with you on that
19:35
The past does exist
19:35
As far back as Last Thursday
19:35
Your memories of any time before Last Thursday are fake (edited)
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Buggy 09/16/2020 7:36 PM
w-what happens when the next Thursday comes around
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BluejayHurricane 09/16/2020 8:32 PM
It’s 2020. What do you think?
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Buggy 09/16/2020 8:44 PM
oh no
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KAL_9000 09/17/2020 8:42 AM
Rejoice, for it is a new Thursday!
08:43
The first day of the universe!
08:43
All previous memories are faked!
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Morgrim Moon 09/17/2020 8:50 AM
In that case I want a refund
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Cornflakes 09/17/2020 8:51 AM
https://www.smbc-comics.com/?id=3337
Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal - 2014-04-24
Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal - 2014-04-24
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Overmind 09/17/2020 8:51 AM
Particles have no memory. Any possible sequence of events which could have led up to the current state of the universe is an equally valid past. There is no requirement that [human] memory or any other form of record correspond in any way to the actual sequence which took place. Therefore, memory and history are both untrustworthy and therefore meaningless. There is only now.
08:53
Of course, since now only exists for an infinitesimal moment, too short to perform any actions of significance, now is also meaningless.
08:54
And since the future is nothing but an endless sequence of nows which vanish as soon as they appear, in which one can only hope to perform tiny, meaningless steps towards plans whose success or failure is unknowable, because knowledge of that relies on the past, the future must therefore also be meaningless. (edited)
08:55
tl;dr fucking nihilism
08:57
moral: I should take my goddamned brain pills and finish my coffee.
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xandeross 09/17/2020 9:34 PM
Containing the assumption that 'meaning' is somehow dependent on 'action'. That's a fairly large assumption, if a common one.
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Overmind 09/20/2020 1:12 PM
Duelism: the belief that body and soul should fight each other to the death.
🤣 4
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0111narwhalz 09/20/2020 1:14 PM
Embedded image
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thunk 12/04/2020 12:31 AM
https://www.pewforum.org/2013/08/06/living-to-120-and-beyond-americans-views-on-aging-medical-advances-and-radical-life-extension/
No Author
Living to 120 and Beyond: Americans’ Views on Aging, Medical Advanc...
If new medical treatments could slow the aging process and allow people to live to age 120 and beyond, would you want to? Most Americans say “no” – they would not want a radically extended life span. But roughly two-thirds think that most other people would.
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00:34
What's interesting is that while a lot of demographic attributes don't seem to bear on how many people support life extension, race does: Black and Hispanic respondents are more likely to be in favor than their White counterparts.
00:36
Both Brown and Gibson suggest that many African-Americans, both inside and outside of the National Baptist Convention, would embrace life extension because their history has taught them to persevere through hardship and to make the most of new opportunities. “There is something in our historical fiber that might make us want this, after having been denied so much for hundreds of years,” Gibson says. Brown agrees: “We have gone from a sense of impossibility in the 20th century to one of possibility in the 21st, and I think we want as much chance as we can to participate in these new possibilities.”
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Morgrim Moon 12/04/2020 2:31 AM
I'm at work so can't read the article, but my view is that flat life extensions aren't useful without quality of life; recent years have pushed lifespan at the cost of health. Hence the many arguments for assisted suicide. The idea of 15+ yrs of dementia is terrifying
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Buggy 12/04/2020 2:34 AM
i get your point but i don't think 15+ yrs of dementia is possible, right?
02:35
surely the disease would have killed all of the brain by that point?
02:35
i mean, if treatments are developed then i suppose so, but something that halts the progress of it would also allow for recovery
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thunk 12/04/2020 2:36 AM
yeah, that of course is why many people also talk about 'healthspan'
02:36
the tithonus problem
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Buggy 12/04/2020 2:37 AM
i don't expect that quality of life will keep that far behind lifespan itself if things continue at their current pace
02:39
mainly because most medical development is aimed at symptoms more than diseases the disease (aging). It's rather like if you took the example of plugging a stone floodwall with your fingers, and said "What, replace it? Don't be silly!" and raised a army of 100,000 to spend day and night plugging holes (edited)
02:39
it's dumb, but also so incredibly thorough that you'll pretty much solve the problem just by treating literally every symptom.
02:41
lifespan has, and probably will continue to, be extended by playing a maniac's game of wack-a-mole with every new symptom that crops up, and that inherently addresses QoL first and lifespan second, so QoL should keep up.
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Zarpaulek 12/04/2020 6:31 AM
I think I read somewhere that multi-generational households are more common in the black community than white.
06:35
I suppose if your parents are helping raise your own kids rather than people you take them to visit on the holidays you might be less inclined to think of them as “old people who need to die off for the new generation to succeed them.”
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thunk 12/04/2020 10:01 AM
That too.
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KAL_9000 12/05/2020 8:45 PM
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Zarpaulek 12/05/2020 8:53 PM
"If I'm a simulation, then I'm damned if I do and damned if I don't. If I'm not a simulation then I'm only damned if I do. Based on those odds I should not pull the lever." "In addition, as you have confessed to creating a sapient being for the sole purpose of torturing them I believe I am morally obligated to kill you and put my clone out of his misery." (edited)
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gollark 12/06/2020 3:29 AM
If you do pull it leave it contained, I don't think it has any actual reason to torture the simulation, since you can't verify if it's doing so or not and it would only be worth doing at all if it plans to try and coerce you/other people later. (edited)
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Archon 12/06/2020 3:55 AM
But it's the kind of person who is willing to commit bignum tortue to achive it's goals
03:57
It had the option to be another kind of person and wasn't; it's a pretty good sign that it's not that human-aligned and willing to cause a lot of suffering if it thinks it can get something out of that
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gollark 12/06/2020 4:09 AM
If it values suffering for its own sake it might as well do it anyway, but I don't think doing the torturing would advance other goals.
04:09
Unless it can somehow precommit to torturing the simulations.
04:09
And you can verify that.
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gollark 12/06/2020 4:17 AM
Oh, oops, I got the lever direction mixed up, sorry. I meant that if you left it trapped then it wouldn't have reason to torture you.
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Archon 12/06/2020 4:45 AM
... no, see, if you can't credibly pre-commit to following through on your threats your threats don't work at all so people follow through on threats
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VulpixFangirl 12/06/2020 9:00 AM
I wouldn't pull it. I don't wanna doom a bunch of people.
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Morgrim Moon 12/06/2020 9:09 AM
I mean... my answer is simple, because I don't believe in the simulation hypothesis, so I'd probably laugh at the AI and tell it that they, if you CAN pull of simulations that are even half as good as you'd need for that scenario? Why the hell are you mucking about with trolley problems?! Go engage with scientists, be the first non-human to win a Nobel Prize, and get all the aclaim and renoun you'd ever need!
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VulpixFangirl 12/06/2020 9:14 AM
Good point
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Morgrim Moon 12/06/2020 9:15 AM
(granted, my gut reaction when caught in a scenario I can't seem to beat 'properly' is "break the scenario". I once had a stats exam I flunked where instead of answering the fake-science questions in the way that gave the 'correct' statistics, I wrote out a long spiel on why the results broke the laws of physics and therefore could be automatically rejected as junk input, and how I'd fix the experiment.)
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𝓗𝓸𝓷𝓮𝔂 BUN 𝓗𝔂𝓿𝓪𝓵 12/06/2020 9:17 AM
If they can make a sapient member of ethical society within their box then that is a crying shame, but it would be considerably worse than letting the AI out of the box. In such a case, the AI can torture many more people and still probably make a simulation of you to torture anyway. So it really sucks for simulated-me it really does, but I think the best answer here is to leave the box alone. ....and then come back later when we find out a way to kill it.
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VulpixFangirl 12/06/2020 9:19 AM
Can't we just nuke it or something?
09:20
AnnonThonk
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𝓗𝓸𝓷𝓮𝔂 BUN 𝓗𝔂𝓿𝓪𝓵 12/06/2020 9:22 AM
Honestly it’s a metal box I could probably run it over with a truck Or we could unplug it somehow! Or create a localized EMP
09:24
Also it is moot whether or not we’re a simulation in this case. Although I don’t prescribe to the simulation theory anyway (as it assumes a lot of things that are physically impossible to prove within our own universe), if I leave this AI in this box it doesn’t affect me being an ethical member of society or an NPC in a game
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VulpixFangirl 12/06/2020 9:26 AM
I think the idea is that if you're in the simulation, not pulling the lever will cause you to be tortured for a million years
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𝓗𝓸𝓷𝓮𝔂 BUN 𝓗𝔂𝓿𝓪𝓵 12/06/2020 9:28 AM
Oooohhh yes, I see. Well, in either case it sounds like it is already gonna torture and kill anyway, he never says you’re not on the menu.
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VulpixFangirl 12/06/2020 9:28 AM
....Good point
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𝓗𝓸𝓷𝓮𝔂 BUN 𝓗𝔂𝓿𝓪𝓵 12/06/2020 9:34 AM
AM didn’t spare anybody neither will probably box boi He might reward as a traitor deserves And even then that sounds like a mind-game level threat that somebody whose smart would use on someone they think is gullible, I don’t vibe with the insult >:T
09:34
It’s a bluff most likely (edited)
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Archon
... no, see, if you can't credibly pre-commit to following through on your threats your threats don't work at all so people follow through on threats
gollark 12/06/2020 9:43 AM
I don't think that works for the AI unless this situation is repeated somehow. It may not work at all, since you can't actually tell if it is torturing you or not, from outside it.
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𝓗𝓸𝓷𝓮𝔂 BUN 𝓗𝔂𝓿𝓪𝓵 12/06/2020 9:50 AM
It also helps that in my case I know my “original” copy would be coming to end my suffering soon as he could 🔫
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thunk 12/10/2020 9:15 PM
i was going back to posts about conflict theory vs. mistake theory and my take on it is they are both useful strategies in different situations. In particular, 'conflict theory' is more useful when people really are prejudiced against you for no particularly good reason
21:15
and of course conversely a very high social trust society like the Empire of the Star would likewise be super into mistake theory
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thunk 12/11/2020 1:25 PM
c.f. a relevant article to eugenics: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/12/the-last-children-of-down-syndrome/616928/
The Last Children of Down Syndrome
Prenatal testing is changing who gets born and who doesn’t. This is just the beginning.
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thunk 12/18/2020 4:09 PM
it's generally kind of funny that the 'proper alignment of AI' people don't focus on the algorithmic bias that's the biggest example of misalignment we have currently.
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BluejayHurricane 12/18/2020 5:41 PM
It is an interesting case study, yeah.
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thunk 12/18/2020 6:08 PM
here's an exception of course https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2019/11/7/20897531/artificial-intelligence-left-socialist-google-deepmind
Why the left should worry more about AI
It’s not just a weird libertarian obsession. Corporate AI is already warping our lives and our governments.
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18:14
(conversely of course Kelsey Piper claims:
But on the whole, the state of the field is a little bit as if almost all climate change researchers were focused on managing the droughts, wildfires, and famines we’re already facing today, with only a tiny skeleton team dedicating to forecasting the future and 50 or so researchers who work full time on coming up with a plan to turn things around. Not every organization with a major AI department has a safety team at all, and some of them have safety teams focused only on algorithmic fairness and not on the risks from advanced systems. The US government doesn’t have a department for AI.
but she's way too much a Yudkowskyite for my tastes.)
18:15
what is the actual meaningful work MIRI has done aside from variable-quality fanfic
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thunk
what is the actual meaningful work MIRI has done aside from variable-quality fanfic
KAL_9000 12/18/2020 6:18 PM
nothing
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BluejayHurricane 12/18/2020 6:45 PM
It’s probably best to think about the project of AI safety like any other liberal arts department. There are really good reasons for it to exist, and they’re all kind of difficult to express.
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0111narwhalz 12/18/2020 7:12 PM
what's a MIRI
19:12
all I get is Star Treck and JWST
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Overmind 12/18/2020 7:22 PM
If you can't convince people with "so when we make God, he doesn't eat our brains", what can you convince people with?
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0111narwhalz
what's a MIRI
Overmind 12/18/2020 7:23 PM
These chaps: https://intelligence.org/
admin
Artificial Intelligence @ MIRI
MIRI's artificial intelligence research is focused on developing the mathematical theory of trustworthy reasoning for advanced autonomous AI systems.
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19:23
And they have mostly produced large piles of mathematical theory devoted to the not-brain-eating god problem.
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thunk 12/18/2020 7:34 PM
I don't think they have published in anything other than bottom-tier journals
19:35
c.f. also Pascal's Mugging as Matthews explains in this other article: https://www.vox.com/2015/8/10/9124145/effective-altruism-global-ai
I spent a weekend at Google talking with nerds about charity. I cam...
Many were more excited about battling malevolent artificial intelligence than about helping the poor.
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19:36
worried too much about infinitesimal probabilities of an infinite future than actual problems we face today
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KAL_9000 12/18/2020 7:42 PM
Charity is a symptom of a broken system
19:44
Nobody should need charity
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BluejayHurricane 12/18/2020 7:44 PM
But some of the future problems can be made future non-problems today, while current problems are just a bog.
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thunk 12/18/2020 7:47 PM
ehh
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BluejayHurricane 12/18/2020 7:47 PM
And to write it all off because it’s directing altruism towards [Redacted for reasons of avoiding politics] is something that feels... awkward. I’m going to stop commenting, because this plays rather heavily into how I developed my personal lack of contemporary politics.
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thunk 12/18/2020 7:47 PM
I'm doubtful of utopianism.
19:48
firmly believe progress involves the proverbial 'slow boring of hard boards'
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KAL_9000 12/18/2020 7:50 PM
I'm not saying we shouldn't have charity rn, I'm saying we need to change the system so no one needs it
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thunk 12/18/2020 7:50 PM
humans are horrible at discounting low probabilities
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BluejayHurricane 12/18/2020 7:50 PM
Think about how many problems could be solved with a one-line amendment to the legal code of your choice. Some of those lines aren’t even political bastardry. It’s always massively easier to solve a problem before it becomes a problem.
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thunk 12/18/2020 7:51 PM
i don't disagree
19:51
but I'm not sure how giving money to Big Yud to do...it's not clear what...about hypothetical future AI accomplished much.
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BluejayHurricane 12/18/2020 7:51 PM
step away from the keyboard, Blue. Step away.
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thunk 12/18/2020 7:52 PM
EA is as its best when you can actually use evidence to quantify the effects of what you're doing
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Overmind 12/18/2020 8:15 PM
Charity is a symptom of a broken universe. When you find a means of fixing the universe, call me.
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Zarpaulek 12/20/2020 11:00 AM
https://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=2640
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Overmind 12/20/2020 11:06 AM
Should I ever become a serial killer, it will be explicitly to target these guys.
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Cornflakes 12/20/2020 2:05 PM
aliens?
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Overmind 12/20/2020 2:05 PM
Moral / justicial relativists.
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thunk 12/20/2020 2:06 PM
big ouch
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Overmind 12/20/2020 2:06 PM
On the grounds that killin' folk who have no coherent argument whatsoever as to why I shouldn't turn them into an amusing range of handcrafted goods is ironically hilarious.
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thunk 12/20/2020 2:07 PM
Honestly I think i tend to view moral absolutism suspiciously as they tend to often be absolutist that my preferred existence is a sin or something.
14:09
but total relativism is sus, too.
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Overmind 12/20/2020 2:09 PM
I dislike a lot of moral absolutists, probably most, on the grounds that their moral absolutism is absolutely wrong, but I've got even less patience with the entire class of arguments which boil down to instance X of concept Y is wrong, therefore all instances of concept Y are wrong .
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thunk 12/20/2020 2:10 PM
Yeah, that's not really a good argument. (edited)
14:10
I'm saying that as more of a heuristic.
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gollark 12/20/2020 2:13 PM
I'm not sure exactly how you define "moral relativists", but personally I've never seen a convincing/working argument for some particular ethical system being objectively true, and don't think it's even possible.
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Overmind 12/20/2020 2:14 PM
Yeah, in most cases it’ll be correct, even. But I also try to remember that that’s true in the same way as it is for science. All versions of the laws of physics but one are wrong, but nonetheless...
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thunk 12/20/2020 2:14 PM
at the same time, if most attempts to implemnt concept Y result in failure case X which is wrong, you need to damn well explain why this attempt is not going to also fail in the same way.
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Overmind 12/20/2020 2:16 PM
The fundamental problem, I suspect, is that most ethics-implementers lack the epistemic humility that scientists are supposed to have. (edited)
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gollark 12/20/2020 2:17 PM
I don't see how you can empirically test your ethics like you can a scientific theory.
☝️ 4
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Overmind 12/20/2020 2:18 PM
(Sorry for pause, I eat lunch.)
14:21
Well, if you’re a utilitarian...
14:21
Or any consequentialist, really b
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thunk 12/20/2020 2:21 PM
to borrow your fictional example, the justification for 'proprety is metaphysically equivalent to the person owning it' is more axiomatic than empirical.
14:22
like sure there may be empirical arguments for it, but you can't prove that's intrinsically better than something else.
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gollark 12/20/2020 2:22 PM
If you're going to say something along the lines of "see how it deals with [SCENARIO] and rate that by [OTHER STANDARD]", this doesn't work because it sneaks in [OTHER STANDARD] as a more fundamental underlying ethical system.
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thunk 12/20/2020 2:23 PM
(and in the real world, Western proprety relations had to be imposed in the New World through violence)
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Overmind 12/20/2020 2:24 PM
I’m not, ‘cause I’m mostly not a consequentialist.
14:25
I’d point out that the foundations of ethics, the mathematics to morality’s physics as it were, are rationalist, not empiricist. You can’t empirically test whether 2+2=4, either.
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gollark 12/20/2020 2:27 PM
You can show that 2 + 2 = 4 follows from axioms, and that the system allows you to define useful mathematical tools to model reality.
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thunk 12/20/2020 2:27 PM
(I also think that's part of the reason a true 'Society of Consent' is impossible because what do you do with those who have different axioms...)
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Overmind 12/20/2020 2:32 PM
Well, this is why serious ethicists spend so much time trying to eliminate all the axiomata they can, down to an irreducible minimum.
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Tassadar 12/20/2020 2:32 PM
But by the time they get to said irreducible minimum, does it really even mean anything anymore?
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Overmind 12/20/2020 2:33 PM
(Although to a large extent, even reality depends on axiomata. Like, say, “existence exists”. That’s one of the half-dozen or so I haven’t been able to kill off yet.)
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thunk 12/20/2020 2:34 PM
well, yes.
14:34
(anarcho-antirealist gang)
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thunk
(and in the real world, Western proprety relations had to be imposed in the New World through violence)
Overmind 12/20/2020 2:42 PM
(Well, sort of. Intra- Western property relations never really embraced the notion of "if we can get away with it, we can totes steal everybody's shit". That's the different case of Extra- Western property relations. Or, to be historically fair, the general case of outgroup property relations. It's just that the West were the last group to be really good at it.)
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thunk 12/20/2020 2:43 PM
well, I mean imposing the notion of 'private property' and related concepts in general
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thunk
(I also think that's part of the reason a true 'Society of Consent' is impossible because what do you do with those who have different axioms...)
Overmind 12/20/2020 2:44 PM
(Well, in the Empire's case, the answer is "invite them cordially to depart, because this Society of Consent does not consent to include those who don't believe in the ethically fundamental nature of consent, belike".)
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thunk 12/20/2020 2:44 PM
Another example comes to mind in the Treaty of Waitangi, where both sides had very different constructs about the issue of sovereignty in particular)
14:45
The differences between the two texts have made it difficult to interpret the treaty and continues to undermine its effect. The most critical difference between the texts revolves around the interpretation of three Māori words: kāwanatanga (governorship), which is ceded to the Queen in the first article; rangatiratanga (chieftainship) not mana (leadership) (which was stated in the Declaration of Independence just five years before the treaty was signed), which is retained by the chiefs in the second; and taonga (property or valued possessions), which the chiefs are guaranteed ownership and control of, also in the second article. Few Māori involved with the treaty negotiations understood the concepts of sovereignty or "governorship", as they were used by 19th-century Europeans, and lawyer Moana Jackson has stated that "ceding mana or sovereignty in a treaty was legally and culturally incomprehensible in Māori terms".[84]
14:45
Furthermore, kāwanatanga is a loan translation from "governorship" and was not part of the Māori language. The term had been used by Henry Williams in his translation of the Declaration of the Independence of New Zealand which was signed by 35 northern Māori chiefs at Waitangi on 28 October 1835.[85] The Declaration of Independence of New Zealand had stated "Ko te Kīngitanga ko te mana i te w[h]enua" to describe "all sovereign power and authority in the land".[85] There is considerable debate about what would have been a more appropriate term. Some scholars, notably Ruth Ross, argue that mana (prestige, authority) would have more accurately conveyed the transfer of sovereignty.[86] However, it has more recently been argued by others, including Judith Binney, that mana would not have been appropriate. This is because mana is not the same thing as sovereignty, and also because no-one can give up their mana.[87] The English-language text recognises Māori rights to "properties", which seems to imply physical and perhaps intellectual property. The Māori text, on the other hand, mentions "taonga", meaning "treasures" or "precious things". In Māori usage the term applies much more broadly than the English concept of legal property, and since the 1980s courts have found that the term can encompass intangible things such as language and culture.[88][89][90] Even where physical property such as land is concerned, differing cultural understandings as to what types of land are able to be privately owned have caused problems, as for example in the foreshore and seabed controversy of 2003–04.
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Overmind 12/20/2020 2:49 PM
Sigh. Really wish I had more than an hour (got a physical-world engagement) to get into this, because there is a really interesting discussion to be had about Native American concepts of private property, family/clan property, communal property and their parallels in Western systems.
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thunk 12/20/2020 2:49 PM
yeah
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Overmind 12/20/2020 2:51 PM
These are things I looked into a fair bit when working on the Iniosotac and Variasotec cultures in the 'verse, who are probably the closest parallels, and one of the things I noted in my studies involved the ways in which the colonist's law actually replaced a Native property-rights system (or what we would analyze as such) that was superior to it in many ways, including pure-economically.
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thunk 12/20/2020 2:52 PM
mhm
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Overmind 12/20/2020 2:53 PM
(Since history worked out rather differently in the 'verse, there such ideas were examined carefully and backported to the Old Empires, because they didn't get to be the Old Empires by failing to study carefully and then adopt other people's good ideas.)
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thunk 12/20/2020 2:55 PM
I've thought about this more from examining how they'd react to post-Korps stuff which, considering they're going to be mostly Eclipse Phase-like ancoms, I'd say...Badly.
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Overmind 12/20/2020 2:56 PM
((While that period has not come up much, the Imperial perspective on much of the human colonial era is that it appeared to be being run by a bunch of excruciatingly awful short-termists. What you can physically loot is as nothing compared to the value of all that sophont capital and ideas! eternal ideas! things which, sure, it's harder to take advantage of because it requires that you be cooperative, not obsessed with your own unchecked superiority, and not 100% a dick , but that's just good business.))
📍 1
14:58
Aah, got to go now apparently. Stick a pin in that last and remind me of it tomorrow? I've had some thoughts already on that meeting in the Eclipse Phase context.
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thunk 12/20/2020 2:58 PM
sure!
15:00
(except they'd probably think that game was still written by 'Silicon Valley techbros who don't understand how to be epistemically humble about anyone else')
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thunk 12/20/2020 3:41 PM
As in, the ideologies would be similar, but the background of people who do Korps writing (because it's a trans support group, basically) are a lot different from the background of people who wrote Eclipse Phase (which is pretty similar to Cerebrate). This leads to...different priorities.
15:41
and a general attitude of 'why would you even want to be humanoid?'
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BizarroLand ♀ 12/20/2020 4:49 PM
the EP folks were mostly ancoms iirc
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BizarroLand ♀
the EP folks were mostly ancoms iirc
KAL_9000 12/20/2020 4:50 PM
ancom is a contradiction in terms
16:51
They're commies who are squeamish about the necessary violence
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BizarroLand ♀ 12/20/2020 4:52 PM
point taken but still
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thunk
As in, the ideologies would be similar, but the background of people who do Korps writing (because it's a trans support group, basically) are a lot different from the background of people who wrote Eclipse Phase (which is pretty similar to Cerebrate). This leads to...different priorities.
Zarpaulek 12/20/2020 4:56 PM
I think the consensus on EP was that the Empire would get along best with the Titanians (with their literal social contract) and the less-dickish varieties of Extropian
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thunk 12/20/2020 5:04 PM
Yeah, i think the political system is inspired by an-com ideals but ends up diverging significantly.
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Zarpaulek 12/20/2020 5:05 PM
Mixed with Nordic socialism
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thunk 12/20/2020 5:22 PM
I wouldn't call the nordics socialist lol
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Archon 12/20/2020 5:26 PM
Hey all of you in particular @KAL_9000 seem to be dancing pretty close to the politics rule as you drift into "talking about the content of IRL ideologies"
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thunk 12/20/2020 5:49 PM
ok
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BizarroLand ♀ 12/20/2020 6:32 PM
k
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Overmind 12/21/2020 10:57 AM
Yeah, I have a couple of gripes with the EP portrayal of Extropia, both of which boil down to "if you're gonna try and portray an ancap society, maybe talk to a few first". The first and lesser - and granted, this is partly the self-own of calling it anarcho-capitalism rather than voluntarism, or consensualism, or something else better, is that it definitionally doesn't prescribe any economic system, or it wouldn't be very anarcho, now would it? There should be plenty of cooperatives, collectives, kibbutzim, UBI-associations, Friendly Societies, etc., etc., etc., on Extropia, otherwise they're doing it wrong.
11:02
The second and greater is that they make a big deal of the whole "anyone on Extropia without a PPL is in deep shit, meat for the wolves, etc., etc.", which is just plain wrong. It's a good idea to have one, especially if you're going to be doing things likely to become a matter of law, but the NAP/the rights to life, liberty and property apply to everyone regardless of what they may or may not have signed. That's just ancap 001. Someone tries to rob you, the contractless newbie, on Extropia, it's a question of whether the half-dozen PPLs vying for new customers, the neighborhood watch/community militia, or the public-spirited bystanders who just don't think that that sort of thing should be encouraged get to 'em first.
11:03
tl;dr I highly recommend Anders Sandberg's writeups of what EP-Extropia is like (at his web site and on the EP for), because they're much, much better than canon.
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Zarpaulek 12/21/2020 12:46 PM
Ah, but how many genuine anarcho-capitalists are there in Extropia? And how much of the population are just antisocial rich guys who bought a share of the station, outlaws from other habitats, or indentured infugees? (edited)
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Overmind 12/21/2020 12:50 PM
Then they should probably have mentioned that they're playing it that way, and explained in detail how exactly the rest of the non-Titan outer system somehow is immune from picking up its share of non-ideologically-compatible infugees and outlaws who don't understand that no laws ain't the same thing as no rules. (edited)
12:50
Otherwise that's called "stacking the deck".
12:50
You don't get to have it both ways.
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BizarroLand ♀ 12/21/2020 1:06 PM
I think it's touched on that there are some people who don't mesh with the Anarchist system, but they get like a few throwaway lines and that's it
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Xveers 12/21/2020 1:37 PM
IIRC that's been a fairly solid complaint against EP, is that it's the guys who are the hard anarchists going and writing about systems that aren't their ideal. The initial build of the Jovian governments in particular was... not well received by mane.
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Overmind 12/21/2020 1:43 PM
Yeah, I made some, um, comments on that when 2nd ed. came out. https://discordapp.com/channels/379850656191741952/518150555139571723/611945932707332154 for the full discussion and some excerpts, but have a couple of money quotes:
13:43
"In 2nd. ed, this extends to having the old and transitional economies of the inner system - which, in fairness to them especially in the first case, are cronyist as hell - described in a speech by a character with the moustache-twirling qualities of a Bond villain and the speech idiosyncracies of Donald Trump."
13:43
"...seriously, what the fuck am I reading? This is like Snidely Whiplash trying to reconstruct Atlas Shrugged based on a description of the contents given by Lenin, who only heard about them fifth-hand."
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thunk 12/21/2020 2:28 PM
Yeah. I think this gets to what I'm trying to do. In the Korps/Empire crossover, both baseline settings encode assumptions like this about how their economies are supposed to work and accentuate the failure cases of the other, which kind of makes it hard to present such things neutrally,
14:29
when the korps asks 'well I don't consent to your very specific definition of the right-to-property which you assert is natural and universal?' the response is inevitably going to cause conflict
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BizarroLand ♀ 12/21/2020 2:33 PM
though I thought that group were mostly depicted in pictures
14:33
there were few pieces of writing that I came across, and all of them were either twitter posts or pic descs
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thunk 12/21/2020 2:36 PM
yeah
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Overmind 12/21/2020 2:36 PM
The response is going to be downright explosive , I should think.
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thunk 12/21/2020 2:36 PM
there's some writing but i'm planning them meeting in effect, a postkorps that's my personal setting branch
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Overmind 12/21/2020 2:36 PM
Let me try and come up with an analogy which properly captures the nature of covalír .
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thunk 12/21/2020 2:37 PM
once they've actually gone through a couple of centuries of...tech development/world-governance/space settlement and what I'm calling the "multifarity" (as opposed to a unique Singularity)
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Overmind 12/21/2020 2:41 PM
Imagine for a moment that there was a version of polyamory that encapsulated the right of any of the members to have sex with any of the other members at any time, to which they consented by virtue of joining the polycule. That's probably a bit too weird, creepy and dubconsensualist to be most poly folks' kink, but hey, if that's what the people in the group want and agreed to, sure, what the hell. Now imagine the panamory version in which they extend this version to everyone in the world , to which everyone consents by virtue of existing.
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BizarroLand ♀ 12/21/2020 2:42 PM
whoa /keanu
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Overmind 12/21/2020 2:43 PM
That squicky feeling you just got at the notion of a society that decided that bodily autonomy ain't no thing and therefore universal rape should be accepted as no big deal and, in fact, the righteous path? That's how they feel about nonconsensual communism.
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Sweetie BOT 12/21/2020 2:43 PM
COMMUNISM IS THE VERY DEFINITION OF FAILURE
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Overmind 12/21/2020 2:43 PM
Like I said, explosive.
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thunk 12/21/2020 2:44 PM
Honestly considering that analogy, it would be explosive from my end as well
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BizarroLand ♀ 12/21/2020 2:44 PM
yeah, it seems like covalír is... as instinctual as breathing
14:44
okay, not quite on the same level
14:44
thinking of something like the urge to reproduce and desire for romance
14:44
for baseline humans
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Overmind 12/21/2020 2:45 PM
Yep. When I said it was way down there in the basic instincts, I wasn't kidding.
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thunk 12/21/2020 2:49 PM
mhm
14:50
the problems of course come when the different ideas of consent and non-coercion are as incompatible as they are in this case.
14:55
see also the culture clash that comes from when 'gifts have no expectation of reciprocation' on one side meets the space elves on the other
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VulpixFangirl 12/21/2020 2:57 PM
I am so weird about gifts
14:57
Like, I am fine getting any kind of gift from my family
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thunk 12/21/2020 2:58 PM
(as one of my friends also remarked, it's possible eldrae view communists in fae terms: 'you ate our food once, now you're obligated to add resources to our community')
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Overmind 12/21/2020 2:58 PM
Of course, on one point, they'd be all "Why do you even want my [widget]? There are public cornucopia machines all over the damn place! You had to pass eight of them to get here! I'll make you your own [widget] if you want one so damn much!"
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VulpixFangirl 12/21/2020 2:58 PM
But I just calculated out a gift for my friend of the exact same value he gave me.
14:58
Send help
14:58
NatsukiFacepalm
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0111narwhalz 12/21/2020 2:58 PM
value from what perspective?
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VulpixFangirl 12/21/2020 2:58 PM
Monetary
14:59
I spent the same amount of money he did
14:59
And I can't even send him the gift yet because Discord won't send music files (edited)
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thunk 12/21/2020 2:59 PM
Well yes; postkorps is moving in that direction of course now that things are far less scarce than they used to be. But that society was founded very recently by primarily, a bunch of people feeling screwed over from a small aomunt of people seemingly hoarding a disproportionate fraction of resources.
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VulpixFangirl 12/21/2020 3:00 PM
..... anyway yeah, sometimes I'm weird about gifts and sometimes I'm not
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thunk 12/21/2020 3:00 PM
memes take time to entrench.
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VulpixFangirl 12/21/2020 3:00 PM
cozyhide
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Overmind 12/21/2020 3:03 PM
Just to add to the confusion on that, though, they have plenty of community/clan/family/etc. shared-property arrangements, so it's not like covalír can't work with the concept of "ours". "Anyone's", on the other hand...
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thunk 12/21/2020 3:04 PM
yeah.
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Overmind 12/21/2020 3:05 PM
(Including, arguably, the Empire itself, as a 2.57-trillion member joint-stock corporation. Sort of.)
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thunk 12/21/2020 3:06 PM
admittedly I do also find the 'no no we don't have taxes, it's a services fee!' mildly amusing
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Overmind 12/21/2020 3:07 PM
Important technical distinction. 😋
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thunk 12/21/2020 3:07 PM
Insistent Terminology
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Overmind 12/21/2020 3:18 PM
(Although, in practical distinctions, the main one is that you can sue then for non-performance, win, and not have to pay for what you didn't get - an option not traditionally available with taxes.)
15:21
(Something which mostly comes up in the way the legal system is designed to make good the victims of crime regardless of the outcome of the resulting investigation, as the mere fact that a crime happened means that the Empire failed in its responsibility to prevent it from happening. Most law enforcement systems turn kinda green at the prospect of being held to that sort of standard. Castle Rock v. Gonzalez it ain't.)
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thunk 12/21/2020 4:00 PM
Interesting.
16:01
I remember the 5-4 podcast doing an episode on that case.
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Overmind
(Something which mostly comes up in the way the legal system is designed to make good the victims of crime regardless of the outcome of the resulting investigation, as the mere fact that a crime happened means that the Empire failed in its responsibility to prevent it from happening. Most law enforcement systems turn kinda green at the prospect of being held to that sort of standard. Castle Rock v. Gonzalez it ain't.)
Cornflakes 12/22/2020 2:28 AM
that case. what the fuck
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Buggy 12/22/2020 2:34 AM
humans
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Cornflakes 12/22/2020 2:35 AM
worse. buerocrats
02:35
"i didnt have it mandated by my textbook so i didnt do it"
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Buggy 12/22/2020 2:46 AM
ehh, bureaucrats have a time and a place
02:47
the sophont equivalent of a cog, or a software function, or insert-suitable-analogy-for-machine-component-here can be useful in certain situations
02:47
(namely situations where you can't replace them with a more consistent non-sophont component first)
02:48
but the problem is, because they're the component on hand, the legal system is designed with them in mind.
02:48
or to put it another way, human bureaucrats let lawmakers be lazier
02:52
normally you engineer a machine around the components; a racecar, for instance, might function ideally with perfectly stiff indestructible beams. But since no one seems to stock unobtainium bar stock, they work with titanium. And because they're using it anyway, they also optimize it so that, for instance, the titanium bars also crumple in case of a crash to absorb energy, and the slight flex of the bars accommodates and allows for greater manufacturing errors, and all the nuts are designed to be tightened a specific amount calibrated to the compressibility of the titanium, etc...
02:53
on one hand, that's good engineering. But on the other hand, no matter what the machine will still suffer for the limitations of that part.
02:53
same thing with the legal system.
02:54
Example: archaic laws being completely ignored because the characteristics of the human components of the legal system will gloss over them
02:55
it doesn't matter if it's still illegal to have ice cream in your back pocket, or wear armor in parliament, etc
02:55
you don't have to spend effort getting rid of those laws because the human component will ignore them anyway
02:57
Another example: less sanity-checking with laws. You don't have to worry as much about laws whose strict interpretation would result in less-than-ideal outcomes, because the human component will tend towards a more reasonable outcome if it only requires a minor change in interpretation
02:59
like, jaywalking. Taken literally it would make it very difficult to cross the street, but generally police will only arrest people if the jaywalking is obviously problematic and/or in a area with crosswalks. Or drug laws. For more socially acceptable illegal drugs, officers may ignore minor quantities of the drugs even if technically it is very illegal to have them.
03:00
so that's fair enough, it saves on work necessary to maintain the legal system but
03:00
By relying on the human component, you suffer from the limitations of the human component
03:02
you suffer from the fact that they're time-variant and so your legal system will partially reflect the norms of the time, no matter how good or bad you suffer from the poor tolerances on the part meaning that, on occasion, you can get really awful outcomes where a bunch of parts had bad tolerances line up in just the right way you suffer from the simple physical limitations of the part causing knock-on effects that lead to all sorts of issues etc
03:03
so yes, I blame humans, frankly.
03:04
huh. That's a bit of a wall of text.
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Cornflakes 12/22/2020 3:08 AM
a bit (edited)
03:09
but reasonable
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Buggy 12/22/2020 3:12 AM
this in in contrast to something like, say, this: https://eldraeverse.com/2017/01/07/with-justice-for-all/
Alistair Young
…With Justice For All
SYSTEMIC INTEGRATED TECHNOLOGIES TICKET-TRACKING: CASE 921632 From: Supervisor of Police, Behibehin Rock Mail Subject: HELP US NOW YOUR SYSTEM LOCKED EVERYONE UP AND WE CANT FIX IT WHAT THE —…
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03:13
where a automated legal system would dutifully follow whatever you tell it to do, and so a ambiguous legal system with bylaws archaic laws will rapidly lead to all sorts of problematic situations like, say, the entire population of the planet being incarcerated overnight. (edited)
03:14
this leads to rather significant pressure to ensure that said legal system does not depend on favorable interpretation or such
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Cornflakes 12/22/2020 3:54 AM
imo a law system that you can't safely execute on a machine is at least in need of revision.....
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Buggy
this in in contrast to something like, say, this: https://eldraeverse.com/2017/01/07/with-justice-for-all/
VulpixFangirl 12/22/2020 9:08 AM
That is the most impressive failure ever
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Tassadar 12/22/2020 9:38 AM
^
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thunk 12/22/2020 4:47 PM
This article kind of explains why I think a pure 'society of consent' is impossible--the best we can do is to determine the appropriate tradeoffs to minimize what we see as coercion, but that in itself is subject to debate and disagreement. https://fakenous.net/?p=805
Michael Huemer
NAPs Are for Babies
Baby humans need frequent naps. Also, baby libertarians need NAPs (Non-Aggression Principles). In libertarian lore, the Non-Aggression Principle says something like this: NAP: It is always wrong to…
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16:48
(which applies to this verse as well, as there are some kinds of coercion they do impose to prevent greater harms--e.g. the 'duty to help' others in immediate duress, as well as culling children who fail to develop the proper self control (as a last resort))
16:52
(really you could say that 'society of consent' really means 'society of covalír')
16:56
c.f. discussion here https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/social-philosophy-and-policy/article/abs/libertarian-nonaggression-principle/E8CF5446CB1D9601EFA043F7903F1CB1
THE LIBERTARIAN NONAGGRESSION PRINCIPLE | Social Philosophy and Pol...
THE LIBERTARIAN NONAGGRESSION PRINCIPLE - Volume 32 Issue 2
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Buggy 12/22/2020 5:04 PM
they'd disagree - for instance, 'duty to help' is not coercion. You contractually agree to that when you become a citizen shareholder, which is optional.
17:04
and i'm less familiar with culling but presumably it extends from the right to self defense?
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thunk 12/22/2020 5:05 PM
i mean to some extent the first is part of the state-justification they do
17:06
but I don't see necessarily a bright line between that and a 'duty to pay for others' healthcare'. (edited)
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Overmind 12/22/2020 5:06 PM
As a side-note, this 'verse has never heard of the NAP. It runs off the Fundamental Contract, and the principles of Consent and Obligation.
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thunk 12/22/2020 5:07 PM
ok
17:08
I think what I wanted to point out was that the tradeoffs they make, as well as their definitions of what counts as consent and coercion, somewhat require their view of property rights.
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Overmind 12/22/2020 5:08 PM
Which are somewhat different. Also, the bright line in question isn't one of what it is, it's one of "were you asked nicely?" The Empire, after all, does have a UBI-equivalent. No-one quibbles about paying that, because it's all nicely laid out in the list of obligations that you agree to take on when you sign up.
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thunk 12/22/2020 5:09 PM
yep
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Overmind 12/22/2020 5:09 PM
So it's less about whether you ought to pay for other people's healthcare, and rather more about whether people get to demand that you do at gunpoint, belike.
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thunk 12/22/2020 5:09 PM
(though again, it's somewhat amusing that 'progressive income tax' is held to violate equal protection, while 'flat tax, but we give back more proportionately at the low end' isn't.)
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Buggy 12/22/2020 5:11 PM
also part of it is that the right to self defense of self and others (not obligation, unless you become a citizen shareholder and agree to that obligation), is that you're defending people against people. That is, in the universe-wide game of prisoner's dilemma, you are taking responsibility for demonstrating why you should cooperate. Something like, for instance, paying for healthcare is similar as far as helping people, but there's not necessarily a aggressor. And while pledging to help people wherever possible is noble, that's tantamount to pledging to dedicate your life to solving the entire universe's paracoercion (coercion arising from circumstance rather than originating from a individual). Noble, and you won't have been the first to take up such a quest, but uh... good luck.
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Overmind 12/22/2020 5:11 PM
(With regard to that specific point, you pretty much need some definition of property rights to define coercion, because coercion is essentially asserting rightful control that you don't have, and property rights are the means we have to define who has the right to control a thing.)
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thunk 12/22/2020 5:11 PM
yep!
17:12
and that's part of why things seem so weird and bizarre, because few/none of us share the same idea of property-rights
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Buggy 12/22/2020 5:13 PM
re: tax. You can do whatever tax scheme you want if people agree to it. As they see it, a flat tax of any kind is coercion if the taxees didn't agree first. A progressive income tax that the tax payers agreed to is simply a unusual tax scheme that the empire decided not to use, but hey, you do you.
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thunk 12/22/2020 5:13 PM
Most humans would, when asked, see the Drowning of the People as pretty coercive.
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Buggy 12/22/2020 5:14 PM
(they also, notably, do not call their flat tax scheme a tax. But details.)
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Overmind 12/22/2020 5:16 PM
(As for equal protection - in that case, the Curia's rule of thumb is whether or not you have some sort of special scaling rules. The Citizen's Dividend is exactly that, and paid out in proportion to shares owned, one each. Standard rules. The ESF's flat-percentage fee is awkward, even in this respect, but it's the product of a lengthy series of compromises on the proportionality of bigger-entities-use-more-services and sticks around because it doesn't annoy anyone enough to reopen the question.)
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Buggy 12/22/2020 5:17 PM
they don't use a progressive income tax because they don't think it's a economically sound policy. As they see it, anyone who disagrees but still got the consent of the taxed is well within their rights to try to prove them wrong. And anyone who attempts to copy their system but doesn't get consent is missing the entire point. The vital part is the consent - everything else is merely a design choice, and anyone who disagrees with their choices can do things differently so long as they keep that one vital part.
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thunk 12/22/2020 5:17 PM
my point was, as in the article linked, is what while societies like theirs have a strong presumption against coercion and the like, I fundamentally don't think it can be an absolutist principle.
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Overmind 12/22/2020 5:19 PM
Well, on that point, while certainly rough and ready - as things tended to be way back in pre-Imperial times - the argument would run approximately that all government types ending in -cracy are, by virtue of compelling people by force, criminal conspiracies to deprive people of their civil and natural rights. And as such, attempting to establish one is in the same ballpark as setting up an extortion racket in terms of things you can call out the community militia to deal with.
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thunk 12/22/2020 5:21 PM
RIght. The tradeoffs they make are justified by various arguments, but the merit of those is not absolute.
17:21
likewise a left-libertarian society would justify different tradeoffs with various other arguments.
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Overmind 12/22/2020 5:21 PM
This is where English is a painfully imprecise language, since we would call a private club making decisions by voting, all of whose members chose to be there, "democratic", every bit as much as we would states with large armed brute squads.
17:22
(There is a piece somewhere that covers this little linguistic fillip of Eldraeic.)
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thunk 12/22/2020 5:25 PM
there's a cluster of several principles that gets associated with libertarianism as an idea, but it's possible to take it in several different directions. And the conflict between the directions is what I'm thinking about in this postkorps headcanon/crossover.
A close study of the libertarian intellectual tradition reveals a theory that is far more pluralistic than is commonly supposed. In addition to an opposition to aggression, libertarian thought is characterized by (1) an emphasis on the importance of spontaneous order as a source of social organization, (2) a deep skepticism of authority, especially as manifested in political power, (3) an appreciation for the mutually-beneficial, wealth-creating, and information-conveying power of voluntary market exchange, and (4) a commitment to individualism and personal responsibility.
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Overmind 12/22/2020 5:25 PM
I think their response to that would be that it's entirely possible for any group of consenting individuals to set up a left-libertarian or indeed virtually any other type of society entirely within their system (consent and obligation-wise, not necessarily the Empire as a polity), which prescribes no economic or social arrangements at all except for requiring that you don't force the unwilling into them and abide by agreements that you chose to make. (edited)
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thunk 12/22/2020 5:26 PM
Yeah, that's a common argument I've seen made. And there are responses from the left to that, which I won't go into because they just get into 'shouty politics debate' territory.
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Buggy 12/22/2020 5:29 PM
also worth noting, they aren't really libertarian. Or at least, not libertarian as we use it
17:30
they've arrived at a similar system and set of beliefs, but the eldrae are notably different from humans in a lot of ways
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thunk 12/22/2020 5:30 PM
well, obvioustly.
17:30
But I do think they match the four traits above.
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Buggy 12/22/2020 5:31 PM
hmm, yes, i think that generally fits as well. Though a key point would be that they arrived to those through reason - a skepticism of authority, for instance, is brought about by looking at just how many examples of coercive authorities and how few examples of noncoercive there are
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thunk 12/22/2020 5:31 PM
well, I think most human libertarians did so too.
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Buggy 12/22/2020 5:35 PM
a big difference though is consistency/avoidance of bias - they would be perfectly okay with authorities clearly demonstrated to be noncoercive. So in effect, it's not really a separate belief that is bundled in, it's just a assessment based on the key principle (no coercion) that this particular thing is regularly coercive, and so if you learn that a 'authority' exists with no other details, odds are that it's a bad thing and you should act accordingly until you get followup details
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Overmind 12/22/2020 5:35 PM
Most of them. But, re 2, they would make an argument that considering "authority" and "political power" the same thing is a category error going back to the difference between the Latin auctoritas and potestas/imperium . In which the former reflected a person's prestige, clout, influence, persuasiveness, mysterious power of command, etc., etc. that meant he could function as a leader because people would follow him. Best definition I've heard is probably "more than advice but less than command, advice that one may not ignore". Whereas the latter were the legal power to give orders and force people to obey them.
17:37
The former, they'd say, is what the rúner have, the possession of sufficient leader's merit that people follow them because they're worthy of it; doing so produces the best outcomes.
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thunk 12/22/2020 5:37 PM
I mean a lot of left-anarchists do make a similar distrinction as well--hierarchy-as-coercive vs. hierarchial structures meant for specific things, and consented to.
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Overmind 12/22/2020 5:38 PM
Political power, on the other hand, is the type of power that doesn't require the ability to lead; merely the ability to violently punish anyone who doesn't obey. That latter is the quality that distinguishes it from essentially every other form of power.
17:40
And, to be clear, an Imperial rúner can hold people to obligations strictly according to contract, spend his own resources, rely on his reputation/authority in the former sense, or ask nicely. Beyond that, they're empowered to do exactly nothing. (edited)
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thunk 12/22/2020 7:42 PM
Yeah, to some extent these beliefs come together because they support and reinforce each other.
19:43
But you can't derive the entire set of policies they have, or anyone has, from just one principle.
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Overmind 12/22/2020 8:07 PM
Well, no, because the world is complex and empirical. But when it comes to this ethical core... Well, to quote part of one argument that I like on the topic (from The Golden Transcendence ):
20:07
“Undeniably, then, there are volitional acts and volitional beings that perform them. A volitional being selects both means and goals. Selecting a goal implies that it ought be done. Selecting a means that defeats the goal at which it aims is self-defeating; whatever cannot be done ought not be done. Self-destruction frustrates all aims, all ends, all purposes. Therefore self-destruction ought not be sought. The act of selecting means and goals is itself volitional. Since at least some ends and goals ought not be selected (i.e., the self-defeating, self-destructive kind), the volitional being cannot conclude, from the mere fact that a goal is desired, that it therefore ought to be sought. Since subjective standards can be changed by the volition of the one selecting them, by definition, they cannot be used as standards. Only standards which cannot be changed by the volition can serve as standards to assess when such changes ought be made. Therefore ends and means must be assessed independently of the subjectivity of the actor; an objective standard of some kind must be employed. An objective standard of any kind implies at the very least that the actor apply the same rule to himself that he applies to others. And since no self-destruction ought be willed, neither can destruction at the hands of others; therefore none ought be willed against others; therefore no destructive acts, murder, enslavement, theft, and so on, ought be willed or ought be done. All other ethical rules can be deduced from this foundation.”
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20:11
...they’re perfectly prepared to argue that they’re implicit in the nature of sophoncy itself.
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john dougan(his grace/his grace) 12/22/2020 8:11 PM
The eldrae read Human Action?
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Overmind 12/22/2020 8:12 PM
(They, of course, can put this much better due to my unfortunate lack of a stellar-system-sized god-brain.)
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thunk 12/22/2020 8:27 PM
'just prax it out bro'
20:27
Yeah, this just makes me think they're even more full of it.
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0111narwhalz 12/22/2020 8:28 PM
eldrae are nothing if not full of it
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thunk 12/22/2020 8:28 PM
yep
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0111narwhalz 12/22/2020 8:29 PM
what was their species name again? "bright-shining" or somesuch?
20:30
but of course they will hasten to remind you of the difference between self-confidence and arrogance
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Overmind 12/22/2020 8:31 PM
If you’re looking for people who don’t take ideas seriously, you’re shopping in the wrongest possible store.
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thunk 12/22/2020 8:31 PM
yeah, of course they take them seriously.
20:32
It's just an interesting source of conflict when the interplay is between 'well this stuff is obviously, self-evidently true and we have several millenia of literature and theory on it' vs 'well not in my experience?'
20:36
and then postkorps goes 'well yeah, destructive acts, murder, enslavement, theft are all very bad, but how does this justify privately owning a goddamn entire planet while others starve?'
20:36
and then they start bickering loudly at each other.
20:38
because a society of covalír and a society of well... 'property is theft' can't exactly come to agreement on how consent and non-coercion work in practice, nor can they really intuitively understand at all where the other is coming from. (edited)
20:39
and on both sides a lot of 'well it's just obvious, are you really too dense to understand?' (edited)
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thunk
I mean a lot of left-anarchists do make a similar distrinction as well--hierarchy-as-coercive vs. hierarchial structures meant for specific things, and consented to.
thunk 12/22/2020 8:40 PM
Quoting Bakunin,
Does it follow that I reject all authority? Far from me such a thought. In the matter of boots, I refer to the authority of the bootmaker; concerning houses, canals, or railroads, I consult that of the architect or engineer. For such or such special knowledge I apply to such or such a savant. But I allow neither the bootmaker nor the architect nor the savant to impose his authority upon me. [16]
 (edited)
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Overmind 12/22/2020 8:49 PM
Although that rapidly hits the whole "What starving people? We haven't had starving people around here in something like seven thousand years! If we're going by the lack of people starving or deprived of other little necessities like mansions, flitters, terabyte/s data streams, or solid palladium cutlery, then I dare say our system is working very well , thank you!" problem.
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thunk 12/22/2020 8:51 PM
yep, and that's a fairly solid argument against that-- 'we have a dividend so people don't starve thank you very much'
20:52
vs. of course the posthumans who are going to be deeply bothered by relative poverty in a way the elves are not, period.
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Overmind 12/22/2020 8:52 PM
With a footnote of "And yes, that's us , not the rest of the galaxy, but given that our immigration policy is 'just ask' and our annexation policy is also 'just ask', I'm not sure what we're supposed to do about that. Bring the joys of the consensual free-market economy to the world with the sword? Seems problematic."
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Zarpaulek 12/26/2020 12:43 PM
Came across this explanation of executive dysfunction: https://dentalectomy.tumblr.com/post/638122754578726912/by-which-i-mean-like-heres-how-my-brain-parses
i take "needs 2 people to assemble" as a challenge
i take "needs 2 people to assemble" as a challenge
by which i mean, like, here's how my brain parses the steps in making coffee good day: make coffee regular day: put water in coffee maker put coffee in coffee maker turn on coffee maker bad day: take...
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Morgrim Moon 12/26/2020 12:48 PM
yeeep
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Zarpaulek 12/26/2020 12:49 PM
Seems like an agent integration issue.
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Overmind 12/26/2020 12:50 PM
Yeah, from a depressed-person POV that seems about right. That "why must I operate EVERY GODDAMNED NEURON manually" feeling.
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Cornflakes 12/26/2020 12:56 PM
[Inside Out intensifies] (edited)
12:56
or whatever the name of that pixar movie was
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VulpixFangirl 12/26/2020 12:56 PM
Inside Out
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Jade Nekotenshi 12/26/2020 1:48 PM
That seems like a good summary.
13:48
Bad days feel like "OMG everything is yak shaving".
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Overmind 12/26/2020 1:48 PM
And the yak won't cooperate.
13:48
Because nothing is perfect.
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Cornflakes 12/26/2020 1:49 PM
we no friendly in yakyakistan
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Jade Nekotenshi 12/26/2020 1:49 PM
With the added problem that on bad days, things were usually semi-bad the day before, so I can probably add to those steps "remove and throw away old soggy filter. Wash coffee scoop... No, wait, wash pans so I can wash plates so I can wash silverware so I can wash the coffee scoop without putting more gunk on than I get off", etc
13:54
This is why functional living spaces matter a lot to me. Places with just barely enough space, so eveything has to go back perfectly into its pigeon-hole when you're done drive me mad. Because I know I won't have the mental oomph to always put everything back perfectly, and if I have to shave half a dozen yaks next time I want to do something, I'm liable to say "aw fuggit" and do something else, half-ass it badly, make a worse mess, spend too much money or something like that.
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Morgrim Moon 12/26/2020 8:52 PM
yeah. This is why I need to get a dishwasher at some point. "Dishes in sink" is my biggest stallpoint
💯 1
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BluejayHurricane 12/26/2020 9:27 PM
Or switch to paper plates. It’s a very imperfect solution, but if you’re on your own, it works ok.
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Morgrim Moon 12/26/2020 9:32 PM
it's pots more than plates
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Archon 12/27/2020 3:19 AM
The half-way solution I've heard about is to limit the number of implements you have in usable reach (like, so you put any duplicate pots and whichever half of your plates and glasses you like least in a cupboard or the bottom of a wardrobe) such that that there is a hard maximum on how full your sink can be before the choices are "dredge something out, clean it and use it" or "don't have plates"; it's not perfect but when the problem is the amount of work in cleaning every pot and also an 8-person dinner set because you haven't done any washing in three days it might help any? Also I'm super food-motivated so when there is a path to a good meal that path is much easier than paths to shitty meals or just doing stuff for the sheer virtue of it so that might be topical to why I like this scheme
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Morgrim Moon 12/27/2020 3:36 AM
no, my problem is that I have one pot that I use, and using it again requires cleaning it, and that is such a hurdle (and I am so unmotivated by food) that I'll just fast instead
03:37
when things get really bad I take one item at a time into the shower with me
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Archon 12/27/2020 3:40 AM
Ah, okay, that sounds really annoying
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Jade Nekotenshi 12/28/2020 12:33 PM
I have similar issues, but s/fast/order fast food/g, which is bad in several ways.
12:33
Health and money, when done too frequently.
12:34
But yes, a dishwasher is very nearly non-negotiable for my next place. (This one has one, but this house is two flats in one house, it's in the other flat, and also it barely works. All this limits its utility greatly)
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thunk 12/28/2020 12:38 PM
i too am struggling...
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BizarroLand ♀ 12/28/2020 2:14 PM
I don't get it, if consciousness is the mind's rsyslogd where does volition come from
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0111narwhalz 12/28/2020 2:15 PM
/dev/urandom
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Overmind 12/28/2020 2:32 PM
Space magic.
14:34
(Seriously, if I could answer that question I would have, like, eight Nobel prizes and a fatwa.)
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BizarroLand ♀ 12/28/2020 4:06 PM
...
16:06
fair
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thunk 12/30/2020 1:56 PM
https://www.nature.com/articles/s42256-018-0003-2
Bridging near- and long-term concerns about AI
Debate about the impacts of AI is often split into two camps, one associated with the near term and the other with the long term. This divide is a mistake — the connections between the two perspectives deserve more attention, say Stephen Cave and Seán S. ÓhÉigeartaigh.
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Zarpaulek 01/05/2021 4:47 PM
Thread: https://zarpaulus.tumblr.com/post/639485481460137985/solarpunkwobbly-dgcatanisiri-taciyet
Zarpaulus' random stuff
Zarpaulus' random stuff
There’s a reason they used to call scientists “natural philosophers.”
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thunk 01/22/2021 9:22 PM
https://aeon.co/essays/womens-bodies-emerge-on-the-shoreline-between-biology-and-culture
Women’s bodies emerge on the shoreline between biology and culture ...
A pang of hunger, a stab of pain, a sense of dread – these experiences emerge on the shore where biology and culture meet
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21:26
https://aeon.co/essays/feminists-never-bought-the-idea-of-a-mind-set-free-from-its-body
21:27
I think this sort of embodiment and the tensions surrounding that would be critical to postkorps
21:27
(and another one of the differences between them and eldraeverse, the former being far more explicitly feminist)
21:32
Preciado displays neither a nostalgia for biological fixity, nor some techno-fantasy of embodiment as something that can be simply cast aside. His image of himself is closer to the transgressive feminist being that Haraway calls a ‘cyborg’: a co-evolving hybrid that emerges from a mosaic of technology and biology, thought and feeling, the material and the mental. These entities are a far cry from the demigods that Silicon Valley has in its sights. Instead, Haraway’s cyborgs revel in their own ragged borders, the cross-pollination and pollution of their biological and technological components, their entanglement and reliance on other creatures, their leakiness and unpredictability. ‘It’s not just that “god” is dead; so is the “goddess”,’ Haraway exults: there are ‘great riches for feminists in explicitly embracing the possibilities inherent in the breakdown of clean distinctions between organism and machine’.
 (edited)
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Buggy 01/22/2021 9:54 PM
having read through it (relatively quickly, but not quite skimming; i think it took like 10-15 minutes)
21:55
my response to the article would be that, for one, the article a mix of things - which makes sense because it's pretty long
21:59
i agree, for instance, with the idea that human brains and bodies are fairly intimately linked beyond the simple picture that most people imagine when they think of uploading - disentangling them would not just be a matter of recreating a approximation of the brain in a digital form And nurture and environment play a complex and significant role in that, because the brain's current state emerges from prior states in complex and chaotic ways and various categorizations of that will relate to various complex categorizations of alterations in the final brain state in complicated ways. Complex. But beyond that it seems to me that it falls into the trap of... I've never given it a name, overfitting as pertaining to anthropocentrism? Overconceptualization?
22:00
when i think of a "bus", i do not think the same things as you would when you think of a "bus". A "bus" is not a thing. Rather, you have a thing corresponding to "bus" and i have a different thing that corresponds to "bus".
22:01
these could (and probably are) very similar, but they could be very very different.
22:03
extending this to concepts, i don't think concepts strictly exist; rather, they're sort of categories brought on by language, useful because we can quickly transfer information by communicating these 'concepts', so if i say 'fred was hit by a bus' we very rapidly convey information with relatively little loss and its much quicker than, for instance, attempting to verbally convey the entire networks of neurons corresponding to that memory of fred and the bus via a dialup tone or something silly
22:04
now, how is this relevant?
22:05
well, we mostly share the concept of what a 'bus' is. If we sat down and painstakingly compared traits of a bus and what is or is not a bus, for any likely object we'd encounter on earth we would probably mostly agree. Maybe I'd consider some vans to be technically buses and you wouldn't, and maybe I'd argue that a painting of a bus is not technically a bus and you would, and that sort of thing.
22:06
In other words, that concept is very similar to us and we can effectively communicate using it.
22:06
in large part, because a bus is a very straightforward physical object we can point to
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john dougan(his grace/his grace) 01/22/2021 10:06 PM
Ceci n'est pas une autobus pipe (edited)
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thunk 01/22/2021 10:07 PM
hmm ok
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Buggy 01/22/2021 10:07 PM
you cannot point to, to name common examples, justice, good, evil, tasty, beautiful, or relevantly, gender sex man woman etc etc etc
22:08
so communicating anything complex with these things just sort of
22:08
plomf.
22:08
falls on its face, and two people talk past each other unless they pretty much entirely agree already and then if they do then they pretty much just end up agreeing with each other
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thunk 01/22/2021 10:09 PM
yeah and I think the article touches on that with affordances a bit?
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Buggy 01/22/2021 10:09 PM
what do you mean by affordances?
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thunk 01/22/2021 10:10 PM
n the 1970s, the American psychologist James J Gibson developed the influential notion of affordances, and inaugurated what came to be known as ‘ecological psychology’. Gibson argued that the computational mind, manipulating content-bearing representations, was not the correct way to understand perception. The only reason we’ve evolved and learned to experience particular aspects in our environment such as red and green, hardness and softness, heaviness or lightness, or even if things are alive or dead, he claimed, is that such qualities must have ‘afforded’ us opportunities to act in certain ways that could enhance our chances of survival. Seeing whether a berry was red or green might have allowed us to figure out whether it was ripe (or poisonous). Lifting a stone in one’s hand might help one tell the difference between a piece of charcoal (for lighting a fire) and a piece of granite (for fashioning a tool). Such features of the world, to paraphrase the English anthropologist Gregory Bateson, are ‘differences that make a difference’. They are differences that have come to matter, to have significance for that creature in the context of its life and objectives. They are not mediated by any abstract symbols within a removed cogito, but exist only in the sense that they arise from the way that we couple or grip onto what’s around us. Affordances, in other words, are inextricable from the meaning and purpose of our actions.
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Buggy 01/22/2021 10:11 PM
that quote doesn't appear to be anywhere in the article i'm looking at
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thunk 01/22/2021 10:11 PM
and likewise every individual's concept-map is going to be directly linked to their particular 'goals and abilities' and relationship to the world
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Buggy 01/22/2021 10:11 PM
oh
22:11
wait
22:11
two articles
22:11
i read the first one but not the second
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thunk 01/22/2021 10:11 PM
whoops my discussion was more about the second one
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Buggy 01/22/2021 10:11 PM
ah, i'll read the second then
22:13
but the short answer on the first is that i can't really get anything coherent out parts of it; society having effects on the mind and body makes perfect sense, but it involves concepts which are very much not well shared between people to try to describe how and that's where it breaks down
22:14
in other words "i can't understand the point well enough to attempt a falsification"
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thunk 01/22/2021 10:14 PM
ok
22:14
I guess it just made more sense to me.
22:15
being more personally familiar with some of the experiences described
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Buggy 01/22/2021 10:17 PM
well, that's understandable because you consider gender and/or sex (or whatever you call the complex categorizations of different things pertaining to, in no particular order, genital shapes, body shape, finer biological details, and the interactions between those and other individuals) a significant part of you
22:17
i consider it...
22:17
the words don't translate quite right. Loud and annoying?
22:18
a thing i would rather do without, not so much because i have some preference on it but more the fact that it's annoying, and its interactions with other people are furthermore more annoying, and it would be nice for it to simply not be there rather than to have to work with/around it.
22:19
i would rather be a Culture Drone, in so many words.
22:20
so for someone who considers gender, sex, romance, etc etc a thing to be excised, there are a lot less shared concepts to what someone who considers it important, and as such attempting to communicate using those concepts sorta comes off as gibberish
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thunk 01/22/2021 10:21 PM
mmm yeah I get that
22:23
to some extent it's intrinsically imporant to me and to some extent our society makes it important via structures that create unique (and often oppressive) sexed/gendered experiences
22:23
as Morgrim put it, this makes one have a different utility function.
22:24
I think Toni is a lot more like you in not wanting to participate though.
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Buggy 01/22/2021 10:26 PM
yeah, your reaction to society being like that is to want to change society, while my reaction is "oh no that's messy, that is such a complicated and messy social interaction, I do not want to try to predict or even touch that with a ten foot pole ew eww ewww quick get rid of the bits where it would attach to me!"
22:28
people are really complicated and if I end up having to seriously and productively interact with people on a involved and enduring basis i fully plan to try to work out a system using spreadsheets, statistics, and language engines.
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thunk 01/22/2021 10:28 PM
yeah trying to suppress my girliness didn't really work
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Buggy 01/22/2021 10:31 PM
when it comes to my body, i have few aesthetic preferences myself, most of them are externally referential - e.g. "If i do not shave and maintain other aspects of hygiene, people would assume I'm a homeless person or other negative associations. This would be problematic, so I shower."
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thunk 01/22/2021 10:31 PM
mmm
22:32
I can't really opt out of femaleness, I can however interact in spaces where the negative aspects of that are mitigated
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Buggy 01/22/2021 10:34 PM
and that makes sense when you seek social interaction as a end, I just sort of... don't. Mostly, i think.
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thunk 01/22/2021 10:34 PM
I don't think I necessarily seek social interaction?
22:34
not all that much at least
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Buggy 01/22/2021 10:34 PM
well i mean, i talk here for instance, but i view that as a combination of it being interesting and practice, however accurate that self-assessment is
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Morgrim Moon 01/22/2021 10:35 PM
semi-random sidenote: I have found that if you are perceived to possess the "scary" quality, it mitigates a lot of the downsides of possessing the "female" quality. Possibly with the exception of standardised mate-seeking, but I've had a bad run with dating so currently don't give a hoot.
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thunk 01/22/2021 10:35 PM
good to know
22:35
i generally am notscary
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Buggy 01/22/2021 10:36 PM
but beyond that i just... don't. I had like, 1-2 friends highschool, only one that i ever visited outside of highschool at all. I mostly viewed that as a sort of obligation more than because I wanted or enjoyed a friend; I could relate to them to a degree, but mostly i interacted with them because it'd be rude to just ignore them, or similar things
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thunk 01/22/2021 10:36 PM
like just a few hours ago I was crying because of worry that my transition wouldn't give me the proper results
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Buggy 01/22/2021 10:36 PM
but then i got more skilled about that by college, and between that and the looser schedule i managed to completely avoid making any friends
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thunk 01/22/2021 10:37 PM
but that's tied into the expectations put on women's bodies and the harassment that can result then those bodies don't conform to certain standards
22:37
there's a lot of talk of 'passing' in trans circles and part of that is that passing as female can significantly reduce harassment and marginalization. It's shitty that it's a thing people feel the need to do but such is the world we exist in
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Morgrim Moon 01/22/2021 10:39 PM
in my case, I've always been a tomboy and into STEM subjects which is 'ungirly' so I coped a lot of bullying. It has given me a laundry list of mental illnesses, but it has also made me spiteful and broken my "appropriate escalation" module. Or in other words, men who try physically intimidating you tend to fumble when you go offscript, and I had had success laughing in their faces and grinning like I'm contemplating eating their liver.
22:39
that is how I handle being GNC
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thunk 01/22/2021 10:39 PM
Yeah. I had a rather different history and I think a fair amount of abuse that has left me struggling to have pretty much any agency.
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Morgrim Moon 01/22/2021 10:40 PM
(not saying I reccomend this, just pointing out this is an option)
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thunk 01/22/2021 10:40 PM
I absolutely get it it's just...being simultaneously autistic and disproportionately punished for any attempts to counter the bullying did not help
22:41
I don't really know how to not people-please
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BizarroLand ♀ 01/22/2021 10:43 PM
I just get the general sense most people grudgingly tolerate me if I interact with them long enough
22:44
I have managed to make some Internet friends that can stand my presence for more than a short time without distancing themselves, but in meatspace... I barely left the house even before le virus
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Buggy 01/22/2021 10:45 PM
i don't particularly like my body the way it is either, as far as i do have aesthetic preferences for myself, and transitioning to a woman would be somewhat better i think (partially because of the sex drive, which is there currently whether i want it or not) but i don't dare attempt it. First, it would be a ridiculously involved process and i don't want to get into something like that for a lot of reasons. If it was just a button i could press, maybe. secondly, i'm wary of the... completeness of it. Part of that is due to the whole 'passing' thing; the fact that's even in question makes me dubious, and doubtlessly there are all sorts of tiny nitpicky details which medical science can't address. In my eyes a half measure is worse than both a full measure and no measure at all. third, there's a incredible interaction mess attached to it. Way, way way worse than gender or sex or anything alone. Even attempting it would raise the complexity and difficulty of just about every interaction i have by a order of magnitude. That alone is more than enough to throw me off of it even if i had a magic button that completely addressed the prior two issues. The fact you're trying implies you feel astonishingly strongly about it. And/or have much less issue with complex interactions, i guess.
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thunk 01/22/2021 10:45 PM
I do consider myself lucky to have a very supportive wife though. Even if we haven't seen each other in so long.
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Morgrim Moon 01/22/2021 10:45 PM
Yeah. My issue there is that the bullying and abuse wasn't confined to students, so I now have a toggle that means an authority figure can get "unpersoned", and once that happens I don't want to please them I want to see them burn and disproportionate punishments just make me thrash harder. Granted, that is also while knowing that this WILL blow up in my face and hurt me even worse, but that's where the spite comes in. Yes I had to leave that school but I got 2 people sacked and one person 'retired' and a weirdly beneficial rep for the rest of rest of my teens, so could have been worse
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Buggy 01/22/2021 10:45 PM
still though, gimme a culture drone. I want angular and geometric and versatile toolsets.
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thunk 01/22/2021 10:46 PM
hug
22:46
I put transition off for a long time. I just couldn't anymore.
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Morgrim Moon 01/22/2021 10:46 PM
shell swapping is going to be be SO HANDY when it happens
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BizarroLand ♀ 01/22/2021 10:46 PM
I'm a bad conversationalist and communicator, so things I say tend to rub folks the wrong way and my mind is... uh, it's not calibrated for what most people care about. Serious interaction often feels like trying to breakdance on a tightrope.
22:47
My abuse isn't the direct, physical kind, so I can't commisserate there
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Buggy
still though, gimme a culture drone. I want angular and geometric and versatile toolsets.
thunk 01/22/2021 10:47 PM
why do you think dronekink is so popular in spaces I'm in? :3c
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BizarroLand ♀ 01/22/2021 10:47 PM
Most of the authority figures in my life are (at least superficially) caring and supportive
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thunk
why do you think dronekink is so popular in spaces I'm in? :3c
KAL_9000 01/22/2021 10:48 PM
a what kink?
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BizarroLand ♀ 01/22/2021 10:48 PM
I thought dronekink was partly about taking a break from the agony of being sapient
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thunk 01/22/2021 10:48 PM
that too
22:49
I think it's also related to embodiment in the way Buggy described
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Buggy 01/22/2021 10:49 PM
@KAL_9000 a sexual kink involving 'drones', in other words being or transforming into a mindless drone of some sort, also frequently involving or relating to other fetishes such as bdsm, latex or leather, pet/pony play, objectification, hypnosis and mind control, and a whole host of other things
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BizarroLand ♀
I thought dronekink was partly about taking a break from the agony of being sapient
KAL_9000 01/22/2021 10:50 PM
I can relate to that but not in a horny way
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Buggy 01/22/2021 10:51 PM
i relate in a similar non-horny way, and i think i actually accomplish something like it at times
22:51
or at the very least i can have a good tolerance for repetitive tasks and waiting
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BizarroLand ♀ 01/22/2021 10:51 PM
My sexual kinks are almost completely unrelated to my personal traumas
22:51
At least, unrelated in a clear way
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Buggy 01/22/2021 10:52 PM
part of it is memory, actually
22:52
unthinking and thinking but not remembering it are fairly similar if the memory span is low enough
22:53
remember that bit from freefall where she has her long-term memory suppressed, and ends up waiting in a room for hours until she needs to use the bathroom?
22:53
it's like that.
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BizarroLand ♀ 01/22/2021 10:53 PM
really, though, most people can't seem to stand me when I try to involve myself in a community, so my habit has been to make myself scarce and not be too personal
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Buggy
remember that bit from freefall where she has her long-term memory suppressed, and ends up waiting in a room for hours until she needs to use the bathroom?
BizarroLand ♀ 01/22/2021 10:53 PM
sounds like a nice ability to have on command
22:54
my ... idiosyncracies have been described as anywhere from annoying to irritating to outright offensive
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Buggy 01/22/2021 10:54 PM
comes in handy on car rides, yeah
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BizarroLand ♀ 01/22/2021 10:54 PM
been getting better, but it's still eggshells
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Buggy 01/22/2021 10:56 PM
there's a quote i read in a recent thing i read that really stood out to me, because i don't often relate to fiction but i related to it quite well
22:56
lemme find it
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thunk 01/22/2021 10:57 PM
but yeah...I know several people who like Morgrim dealt with prejudice by developing the skills to actually stand up for themselves and I want to get there too.
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Buggy 01/22/2021 10:57 PM
There had to be a reason. There was something wrong with her. She didn't know what it could be, but... she'd done something wrong. It was a gut-wrenchingly familiar feeling- the feeling of knowing she'd crossed some line, committed a faux-pas, broken a social rule. The feeling when someone would look at her in shock and disgust, and she'd have no idea what she'd said to hurt them.
22:59
that quote
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thunk 01/22/2021 10:59 PM
yep
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BizarroLand ♀ 01/22/2021 11:00 PM
relaaatable
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Buggy 01/22/2021 11:02 PM
(fic is https://archiveofourown.org/works/9402014 not the recommendations channel, but i can really recommend it. A good work of fiction, not painfully long, and you don't really need to know the original work for the fanfic because the original work is a video game with hardly any background in the first place aside from some cool animated shorts)
The World As It Appears To Be - Chapter 1 - Benedict_SC - ...
An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works
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thunk 01/22/2021 11:04 PM
to return to the original topic: I view korps and korps-adjacent stuff as cyberfeminist in the way in which it tries to approach embodiment and gender and transhumanism as all quite linked to each othre
23:05
less 'immortal posthuman gods', more 'cool people tinkering with ourselves to do cool stuff, and messy polycule drama'
23:05
(the life extension would be good though)
23:06
blurring distinctions between man and woman, person and machine, alive and dead...
23:07
and certainly those would all fit within the framework of eldraeverse too, but it's not the focus of the setting and Cerebrate has different perspectives and subjectivities (e.g. remarking he's not trying to be a feminist author)
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Buggy 01/22/2021 11:08 PM
personally i think thats a possible future society, but like most possible future societies it's unlikely to be the only society and most works make that mistake
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thunk 01/22/2021 11:10 PM
right
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Buggy 01/22/2021 11:10 PM
that's why i've always said Orions Arm is one of the most realistic far-future works; it doesn't so much say "here is a interesting plausible future society" as it says "what, you think cultural diversity and serious conceptual disagreements would disappear in the future? Ha! Welcome to the universe, the brief primer is longer than wikipedia. All of it. Have fun."
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thunk 01/22/2021 11:10 PM
it's kind of the society I'd think is cool and would want to write
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Buggy 01/22/2021 11:11 PM
this is true, and in the future it's somewhere you'd want to live, and exploration of the society and leaving others by the wayside makes sense. But it's always struck me as odd when it's the only society, when in reality it'd probably just be a polity that's like that.
23:12
though i
23:13
though i'll admit Eldraeverse does justify it fairly well, with the society in focus very much not being the only one, and it's just so prominent because it's settled on a philosophy that lets it do really well and expand hegemonistically without much pushback. And it does.
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thunk 01/22/2021 11:13 PM
yep
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Buggy 01/22/2021 11:14 PM
the Korps may have a good justification as well, I just haven't really read any of it since it doesn't interest me as much
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thunk 01/22/2021 11:14 PM
obviously if I do end up writing this as I should it won't be the only society
23:15
divine backing and magitek from their alternate universe branch does help quite a bit but...at some point, it becomes like herding cats.
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Buggy 01/22/2021 11:17 PM
i've always been a little wary of divine backing/the universe is sentient or the like
23:18
part of the problem is that in some cases that makes it hard to say "Lets take that star apart and use it for raw materials" if the star in question is alive or part of a living being, or if the universe is meaningfully a thing that objects to using it in certain ways
23:19
it becomes, in a word, inconvenient
23:21
in other ways i guess it also sort of touches on religion as far as having a universal benchmark for morality, etc. And that's uh, a dangerous thing to touch on.
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BizarroLand ♀ 01/22/2021 11:23 PM
I brush everything aside in IAC by establishing a closed-circle world
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Buggy 01/22/2021 11:24 PM
closed-circle? I'm probably understanding that wrong, the first thing that comes to mind is that one Greg Egan series where physics is funky and time/the universe is shown to be fully cyclic
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BizarroLand ♀ 01/22/2021 11:25 PM
Here's the Tiffanians, here's the open star cluster they live in. It's 3600 ly from Earth. No, there's no (traditional and straightforward) FTL. No, there's no lighthuggers. This civilization really is all there is, as far as it is concerned. The events of the story won't explicitly explore anything outside it. (edited)
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Buggy 01/22/2021 11:26 PM
ah i see; extrapolated baseline physics without getting into possible metaphysics/assuming there are no metaphysics
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BizarroLand ♀ 01/22/2021 11:26 PM
wormholes, actually
23:26
they're FTL but also not FTL
23:26
it's all because space and time are actually one and the same
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Buggy 01/22/2021 11:27 PM
aye, that's unmodified physics
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BizarroLand ♀ 01/22/2021 11:27 PM
"The term 'Closed circle' is a mystery term. It refers to a situation where contact with the outside world has been severed... This is where the setting is truly allowed to shine. The culprit and other characters are unable to escape the [closed circle]. At the same time, there won't be any new characters from the outside."
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Buggy 01/22/2021 11:27 PM
... mostly, i guess. Pretty much unmodified physics but with a few assumptions on things that haven't been shown one way or the other, and assuming we don't find anything radically new and significant.
23:29
ah, that makes sense. But this is sci-fi, so 'outside world' would either be something from outside that civilization bubble, or assuming metaphysics or such to insert a deity or something
23:29
sci-fi work with no outsides at all including deities or other universes or such, so no metaphysics as such
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BizarroLand ♀ 01/22/2021 11:30 PM
former sense
23:30
"What happened to Earth?" and "What's the rest of humanity up to?" are questions that are brought up, but not answered
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Buggy 01/22/2021 11:31 PM
makes sense, and the rest can be summed up as firm/hard sci-fi i guess
23:32
however hard sci-fi can realisticly be when set way in the future
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BizarroLand ♀ 01/22/2021 11:32 PM
time gets Very Fucky when you go through wormholes
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Buggy 01/22/2021 11:32 PM
yeah but thats
23:32
physics.
23:32
the physics
23:32
the physics we're currently running on, those physics.
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BizarroLand ♀ 01/22/2021 11:33 PM
yeah, and the physics are such that Tiffanian civilization is so absurdly remote from Earth and everyone else that they can be the sole focus (edited)
23:33
plausibly
23:33
sort of
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Morgrim Moon 01/22/2021 11:34 PM
Diapsora handled that closed circle thing in an interesting way. "Wormhole" type structures exist, can be exploited, but much like rivers do they tend to change over geological time. Cue groups of settlers moving to a system over centuries and thinking this is fine, then getting abruptly cut off
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Buggy 01/22/2021 11:34 PM
i guess what i'm trying to say is, you've chosen a isolated society, but you've also chosen hard sci-fi and so there's no deities or gods or simulation like in other works i was talking about And wormholes are weird but they're hard sci-fi, so having them is perfectly consistent with that
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Buggy
part of the problem is that in some cases that makes it hard to say "Lets take that star apart and use it for raw materials" if the star in question is alive or part of a living being, or if the universe is meaningfully a thing that objects to using it in certain ways
thunk 01/22/2021 11:35 PM
It's an interesting constraint I grant you. No, no paperclipping.
23:35
postkorps is not exactly hard scifi in thise sense, likewise.
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Buggy 01/22/2021 11:36 PM
as for the Greg Egan i was more thinking of the Orthogonal trilogy, the one with time-space fuckery and multiple dimensions of entropy and etc. It comes up later in the book that the universe is provably cyclic
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BizarroLand ♀ 01/22/2021 11:36 PM
orthogonal is nuts
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Buggy 01/22/2021 11:36 PM
Diaspora was interesting too though, with entropy being a thing but infinite accessible universes meaning that you can always just go to another younger one
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BizarroLand ♀ 01/22/2021 11:37 PM
@Buggy what I was trying to get at is: realistically, the future would be ridiculously diverse but there are ways to constrain the amount of that you have to show
23:37
also that's the case in OA as well
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thunk 01/22/2021 11:38 PM
mhm
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BizarroLand ♀ 01/22/2021 11:39 PM
except making a new universe and moving into it will mean you permanently lose contact with the original universe
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Buggy 01/22/2021 11:39 PM
ah, makes sense. Yeah, OA follows a similar premise with there being very few aliens, and no major alien civilizations in contact with humanity's descendents
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thunk 01/22/2021 11:39 PM
and also what I was trying to say: it's going to have different philosophical underpinnings to stuff like OA or eldraeverse or other such works
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Buggy 01/22/2021 11:39 PM
ah, no not quite, in Diaspora it was just a chance
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thunk 01/22/2021 11:39 PM
the themes which the story tries to elucidate are somewhat different
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BizarroLand ♀ 01/22/2021 11:40 PM
which may be worthwhile if the original is near the end of its lifespan
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Buggy 01/22/2021 11:41 PM
there was mainly risk of time slippage in the wormhole IIRC, which smallish with one but then near the end two characters follow a trail of breadcrumbs that takes them through literal millions of them and they are very thoroughly cut off from home
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BizarroLand ♀ 01/22/2021 11:41 PM
wormholes will always give you bad time slippage no matter the details
23:41
's the trouble with technically-not-FTL, Einstein gives you... odd constraints
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Buggy 01/22/2021 11:41 PM
its not the same thing iirc
23:42
it's less a time differential and more "fuck where did that proton-sized wormhole go? Someone find it!"
23:44
i'm not actually sure how it works physics-wise. The main thing i remember is a plot point where they're trying to escape the entire milky way evaporating because of something with the galactic core getting really energetic due to interactions with other universes (really energetic as in 'every atomic nucleus within a million lightyears will be dissociated')
23:45
so they found a escape beacon in the form of a terraformed planet left by one of the other civilizations that realized this, and part of them went through and held the door for the rest of humanity
23:46
and while doing that there's a oops, and time on the other side has 'skipped' forward something like 20 years by the time they manage to open the door again even though it was brief for them on the other side, and there are concerns about everyone making it before the lightspeed wavefront of nope gets there
23:49
i think there are actual models of physics which suggest that particles are also in a sense wormholes, and i do not know enough about them to say if that's possible (especially relating to other universes, which would be something relating to string theory i think?) But macroscale wormholes definitely don't do that
23:50
time dilation and simultaneity between the ends will still do very weird things though
23:52
but predictably. You can't get sudden slippage, it's just very predictable differentials depending on how you handle the ends of the holes
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Cornflakes 01/23/2021 2:47 AM
string theory is a big ball of whack, it hasnt made a single verifyable prediction and has a parameter space so large you can fill this universe just by listing the permutations
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Cornflakes
string theory is a big ball of whack, it hasnt made a single verifyable prediction and has a parameter space so large you can fill this universe just by listing the permutations
KAL_9000 01/23/2021 2:48 AM
not inaccurate
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Cornflakes 01/23/2021 2:51 AM
it may be called string theory from the sheer amount of yarn they are spinning :V
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KAL_9000 01/23/2021 2:53 AM
lmao
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Zarpaulek
Thread: https://zarpaulus.tumblr.com/post/639485481460137985/solarpunkwobbly-dgcatanisiri-taciyet
Overmind 01/23/2021 2:15 PM
Computer engineers, on the other hand, are all "lemme tell you about this thing called a 'hard link'". "Then let me tell you about this thing called 'copy-on-write'."
14:18
...man, if the universe supported those, it would be so much fun.
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thunk
https://aeon.co/essays/womens-bodies-emerge-on-the-shoreline-between-biology-and-culture
Overmind 01/23/2021 2:34 PM
I think the 'verse perspective would be that there is some sort of category error in the notion that any mind - other than a static recording - can meaningfully be considered disembodied. Inasmuch as the body is the means by which you act on the world and the world acts on you, even a pure infomorph has a 'body' of sorts, even if one which is lacking in physicality.
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thunk
less 'immortal posthuman gods', more 'cool people tinkering with ourselves to do cool stuff, and messy polycule drama'
Overmind 01/23/2021 2:38 PM
I submit that immortal posthuman gods should be entirely capable of having messy polycule drama. (I mean, they're not likely to in my writing due to my personal reaction to highly emotional interpersonal drama being to stab it until it stops moving, then run away, but they could .)
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thunk
and certainly those would all fit within the framework of eldraeverse too, but it's not the focus of the setting and Cerebrate has different perspectives and subjectivities (e.g. remarking he's not trying to be a feminist author)
Overmind 01/23/2021 2:45 PM
and certainly those would all fit within the framework of eldraeverse too, but it's not the focus of the setting and Cerebrate has different perspectives and subjectivities (e.g. remarking he's not trying to be a feminist author)
Well, to be clear, not in one particular (common) sense of the term. Like I said, "it depends on what you mean by that". To quote myself: Do I endeavor to have an appropriately representative number of female characters who are competent, agentive, and not defined as some male someone’s accessory? Do I try to depict a society in which people are judged based on their individual merits and character, rather than by prejudicial stereotypes and situationally-irrelevant epiphenomena (specifically including sex, gender, etc., among many other things), and in which all sophonts (regardless of the aforementioned) enjoy the same natural rights, the same civil rights, equality before the law, and possess equal social opportunities? Well, yes, yes I do. I do not necessarily claim that I always succeed as well as I would like to, but it is my intention, and I do think my corpus bears it out. So, y'know, by some standards, that qualifies me. Certainly in the eyes of those people who think I'm being totally unreasonable and unrealistic by putting women in charge of interstellar banks and capital ships. (Yes, yes, your hate mail has been graded and found inadequate. Please go away.)
14:46
I just don't write woke agitprop, because I've read woke agitprop, along with half a dozen other kinds of agitprop, and in my professional and unprofessional opinions both, they're all shite . So by the writing-to-actively-promote-the-viewpoint standard, I kind of fail. (edited)
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Cornflakes 01/23/2021 2:48 PM
>Certainly in the eyes of those people who think I'm being totally unreasonable and unrealistic by putting women in charge of interstellar banks and capital ships. (Yes, yes, your hate mail has been graded and found inadequate. Please go away.)
14:48
please what
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Overmind 01/23/2021 2:53 PM
On the gripping hand, I happen to follow the James S. A. Corey Twitter account, which is host these days to the entertaining spectacle of people talking about how they don't want a bunch of wokeness and feminism being put into The Expanse , and the author being all "Gosh. I hope they never realize how much wokeness and feminism we put in the show." Which I strongly suspect is a mismatch in which the author is writing the former , and the not-wanter is thinking about the latter , and they're talking right past each other. Because, sure, the themes are in the show and the books and the setting, but they haven't turned into quality-devouring agitprop tumors, which is what a lot of people expect, or have come to expect, from an "X-ist writer."
14:55
So, y'know, pick your own definition and make up your own minds, is all I'm saying. I'm just gonna go right on writing people as people, and hopefully not do too badly at making them all people. Even the ones who are only simulating it.
14:59
(and another one of the differences between them and eldraeverse, the former being far more explicitly feminist)
Also, obligatory disclaimer that it's kinda hard to be explicit about solutions unless you write the associated problems into the backstory, and they all had enough problems in the backstory without adding yet another brand of consent-violating jerkoffs to it with even less reason than our timeline had for them to exist.
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thunk 01/23/2021 3:00 PM
Yep
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Buggy 01/23/2021 3:02 PM
huh, that kinda reminds me of Peter Watts. Who is otherwise very much not like you, being immensely cynical and all
15:03
he had uh, i don't remember exactly, i think it was someone nonbinary in one of his books?
15:04
and when he got various reader responses, his response was something like. (People against X): "Thats!" Watts: "Fuck you." (People for X): "Yay!" Watts: "And fuck you. I don't care about political movements. It's the future, statistics say X is inevitable. I'm just writing a realistic world." (edited)
15:05
err wait no i got the quote wrong
15:05
fixed it
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thunk 01/23/2021 3:06 PM
This reminds me of so many complaints about how 'X is unrealistic in the past' when it comes to representation and actual history cares to disagree
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Overmind 01/23/2021 3:07 PM
Oh, gods, history teaching is so miserably inadequate on so, so much.
15:08
(But I should spare you that rant, because I have at least three of them which together offend basically everyone.)
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Buggy 01/23/2021 3:10 PM
don't worry, we're similar in that, though my pet peeve is more in politics-and-not-getting-any-on-me thereof
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thunk 01/23/2021 3:12 PM
I think I might be unhealthily into tics
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Overmind 01/23/2021 3:18 PM
To go with just one example from a literary point of view, would you care to guess how many people are aware of the inspiration for the Iniositac-Variasotec Commonwealth's origin story in the actual, historical attempts of Native American nations to join the US as equal states and how the timeline might have gone were it not for humans being asshats? ...so far, of people whom I have talked over that origin with, I have counted one , maybe two. Among a not-small number. Quietly airbrushed out of the narrative, that was.
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Buggy 01/23/2021 3:19 PM
huh, i haven't heard that
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thunk 01/23/2021 3:19 PM
I'm sort of familiar with Sequoyah, but yeah, you're right
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Buggy 01/23/2021 3:19 PM
which is odd; it's not like it's a flattering history what with the "yeah we basically showed up and then warcrimed a civilization"
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Overmind 01/23/2021 3:20 PM
At best, people might have at least heard of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy and even that the Founders drew some inspiration from its federated structure, but that's about it.
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Buggy 01/23/2021 3:21 PM
though in fairness i think i've learned more about history from various (historically inaccurate) video games, and fanfiction, than i remember from any history classes
15:21
at least, anything i can remember directly from those classes.
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thunk 01/23/2021 3:22 PM
yeah
15:22
I try to read r/askhistorians sometimes, it's fairly interesting
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Overmind 01/23/2021 3:31 PM
In messages that are definitely too subtly embedded in 'verse history: "A common narrative among humans is that we built civilization as we know it by exploiting and enslaving people. This is not true. We retarded the development of civilization by doing stupid, negative-sum things like exploiting and enslaving people, and if we'd invited everyone into the grand project of civilization from the start, we'd all be richer, wiser, and happier. and I'd be writing this to you from my Rigellian space-mansion. So stop being dicks to everyone new we meet, m'kay?"
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thunk 01/23/2021 3:32 PM
heh
15:32
meanwhile the pink goggles society has very different reasons for wanting to not exploit people but in the end gets to the same sort of thinking
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Overmind 01/23/2021 3:36 PM
Heh. Well, those are certainly more ethically fundamental reasons, but it never hurts to point out that if you look at the big picture, benevolence is just good business.
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thunk 01/23/2021 3:38 PM
yeah, the anticapitalists aren't primarily focused on good business even if they come to appreciate the practicality sometimes.
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Overmind 01/23/2021 3:39 PM
What's that Belter proverb again? "The more you share, the more your bowl will be plentiful."
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thunk 01/23/2021 3:41 PM
yeah, that part 100%
15:47
fwiw I think it's kind of telling in the setting that 'hearthmistress' work is notably not gendered among the eldrae, and that's a touch i actually like
15:52
gendered housework expectations can get super annoying and pervasive, here.
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thunk 01/24/2021 4:04 AM
https://twitter.com/acvalens/status/1352108263303733248
Author icon
Ana Valens #StopSISEA 🏴 (@acvalens)
I know I’m not the first to share, but this passage on juvenile elephants as metaphors for horizontal violence among trans women is... wow. From Detransition, Baby
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Footer icon Twitter • 01/20/2021 10:18 PM
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Morgrim Moon 01/24/2021 4:41 AM
um. By that logic, wouldn't young transwomen be lashing out at men? Not each other?
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Cornflakes 01/24/2021 4:43 AM
i think the argumentation is that they don't have any social guidelines at all and just doing what comes to them in the heat of the moment
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KAL_9000 01/24/2021 4:45 AM
This seems a bit dehumanizing to trans people
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Cornflakes 01/24/2021 5:02 AM
to me as well
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Zarpaulek 01/24/2021 7:56 AM
You think that’s bad? I’ve seen people try to use elephant metaphors to explain gang violence among black youths. Never mind that youth violence in general has been dropping since the 90s
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0111narwhalz 01/24/2021 8:42 AM
I think needing elephant metaphors probably speaks to a deep lack of empathy, or at least a failure to engage it.
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Cornflakes 01/24/2021 11:12 AM
use your empathy clutch you fool!
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0111narwhalz
I think needing elephant metaphors probably speaks to a deep lack of empathy, or at least a failure to engage it.
KAL_9000 01/24/2021 11:45 AM
this
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Cornflakes 01/24/2021 11:46 AM
its not like those people exist in a void without any other people
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0111narwhalz 01/24/2021 11:47 AM
…that reply was… really not worth the ping tbh please disable pings if you're only going to contribute a single word
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BizarroLand ♀ 01/24/2021 12:05 PM
if trans people are elephants cis people are hippos
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thunk 01/24/2021 2:21 PM
The book was written by a trans woman fwiw
14:22
And more seriously, there is a lot, a lot, of horizontal violence and lashing out. It's stressful and exhausting.
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Morgrim Moon
um. By that logic, wouldn't young transwomen be lashing out at men? Not each other?
thunk 01/24/2021 2:24 PM
Obviously we do lash out at men but these sort of attacks require institutional power to be noticeable. Men don't often participate in the same communities dominated by trans women--communities where the leadership and social norms can reinforce the weight of attacks against a particular person.
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0111narwhalz
I think needing elephant metaphors probably speaks to a deep lack of empathy, or at least a failure to engage it.
Deleted User 01/25/2021 5:35 PM
The author of that book is actually trans. I mean maybe they are engaging in some great act of self-hatred (I mean that's not terribly uncommon) but they definitely know the experience of being trans.
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Deleted User 01/26/2021 1:39 PM
@Overmind So, I suppose my query was kind of missed due to the deluge of argument on the other thread, but how exactly would you define legal/ethical competence and who would be responsible for the incompetent?
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Overmind 01/26/2021 1:45 PM
Gentles all: I’ve invited a couple of folks over from TSF to have a civilized discussion about aspects of a consensual society. I’ll be getting back to ‘em tomorrow, so please don’t swamp them today and go easy on the ‘ticks rule. Thanks.
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Overmind 01/26/2021 3:49 PM
Oh, hey, since this is my version of one, feel free to chime in on the Obvious Time-Saving Background entries from my corpus. https://eldraeverse.com/2012/09/01/one-law-for-all/ and https://eldraeverse.com/2018/06/14/paracoercion/ , obviously, but there are probably more that don’t leap immediately to mind.
Alistair Young
One Law For All
“Understand this: we have only one crime in the Empire.  That crime is choice-theft. “Underlying every principle of our law, more fundamental even than the Contract and the Charter, is …
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Alistair Young
Paracoercion
“…as to your avowed intention to institute a Universal Income, we welcome such systems – as evidenced by our own Citizen’s Dividend – as an excellent answer to paracoe…
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thunk 01/26/2021 11:36 PM
Stanley Hauerwas, a noted author and theologian at Duke University’s Divinity School, agrees that the certainty of death makes life more fulfilling. Without death, Hauerwas argues, love as we know it would cease to exist because it is the finite nature of life that prompts people to wholly commit themselves to others. “Death … creates an economy that makes love possible,” he said in a 2011 interview with the Pew Research Center. “If you lived forever, there would not be the necessity of loving this one, not that one. You could love them all.”
 (edited)
23:36
I found the most ridiculous argument in my DMs...
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0111narwhalz 01/26/2021 11:40 PM
If you lived forever, […] you could love them all.
tha—that sounds like a win…?
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0111narwhalz
If you lived forever, […] you could love them all.
tha—that sounds like a win…?
Deleted User 01/26/2021 11:44 PM
Given his status as a theologian, presumably multiamory is strictly off the table.
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0111narwhalz 01/26/2021 11:44 PM
that sounds like a him problem
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Overmind 01/26/2021 11:45 PM
As it is my habit of saying, if death is so fulfilling for you, you’re welcome to it.
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Cornflakes 01/27/2021 1:01 AM
"here, have a knife. Enjoy your death"
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Deleted User 01/27/2021 1:31 AM
Really he just needs to have some explosives implanted to sever his spinal cord when some random though number in some range of seconds is reached. That way he can experience the joys of a death that he cannot predict and yet is also guaranteed. (edited)
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Deleted User
@Overmind So, I suppose my query was kind of missed due to the deluge of argument on the other thread, but how exactly would you define legal/ethical competence and who would be responsible for the incompetent?
Overmind 01/27/2021 1:52 AM
how exactly would you define legal/ethical competence
That is, of course, a rather complex question, so please forgive me for addressing it in relatively broad strokes. So, to talk about competence (which for the most part means competence to consent to things, we need to define consent up front. The standard of consent the Empire, as our sample Society of Consent, uses is one they call the Memetic Standard of Consent defined thus: "No sophont may act upon the person or property of another, except through the other’s memetically-shared consent, in response to an action-correspondent memetically-shared request." and to continue on that from my notes: "For legal-ethical purposes, a meme is considered a unit of information expressed through symbols: e.g., writing, speech, farspeech, infographics, Uniglyphics, or other symbols with a broadly published, specific meaning enshrined through law, contract, or long-standing custom, such as the knotted club or spacer's marlinspike that identifies a brawler's bar. Imperial law distinguishes this, thus, from direct or indirect manipulation of another’s mind by mechanisms which do not pass through the cognition, ethical function, and self-awareness of their mind, and thus deprive them of the ability to act accordingly; this constituting choice-theft. Imperial law further requires that the memetically-shared request correspond accurately to the action consented to, and therefore communicate the request properly to a reasonably informed listener; non-informed consent, in Imperial praxis, is no consent at all. Likewise, implicit consent, based on extrapolations of meaning and/or symbols whose meaning the reasonable person would not be aware of, is not considered valid."
01:52
That gives us a baseline for defining competence. You have to be able to both understand and comprehend the request: that implies a certain baseline of cognition and education/experience. You have to be aware that you're making a choice: that implies self-awareness (and currently active self-awareness, at that). And you have to be an ethical actors, i.e., have an operative ethical function, which implies that non-at-least-prosophont animals and paperclip maximizers are out of the club. Leaving aside for the moment the question of alien minds of unusual formation, the chief groups this defines as not ethically competent are children who have not achieved majority (who lack education/experience); the mentally defective (who lack cognition); and incapacitated medical patients (who lack active self-awareness). (Criminal activity or acts of gross stupidity doesn't deprive you of general competence, but they certainly can deprive you of competence in specific areas. If you make a habit of Manual Operation Under the Influence, your tort insurer [see later] is unlikely to keep covering you for driving vehicles or operating heavy machinery, for example.)
01:52
and who would be responsible for the incompetent?
For children, their parents, who consented to that particular responsibility by having children in the first place. For incapacitated medical patients, the attending medical personnel, followed by their legal proxies and next-of-kin, in that order. For the mentally defective - well, historically, that's usually going to be the parents, again, but in the event that it shows up later in life, the courts will keep searching until they can appoint a legal guardian to represent their interests, which as a last resort will probably be an eleemosynary organization of some sort (preferably one separate from that actually involved in their care). [This is a hard problem: here we have tried passing it off to random relatives, and we have tried letting the state take care of it, and both have resulted in a plethora of ridiculously abusive outcomes.] This being an SFnal universe, historically there have been smart contracts and AI systems developed to enable self-declarations of partial mental incompetence, which can take responsibility and power for overriding your decisions in order to, say, keep you away from the drugs, or other kinds of bad decisions you know you tend to make and don't want to. The advanced versions of these can turn into thinking-brain helpers, where the person alone would not be competent, but the combination of the person and his helper-muse in combination can be recognized as competent enough to live their life independently. This is probably the optimal outcome, unless and until all of these cases become soluble medical problems.
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thunk
Stanley Hauerwas, a noted author and theologian at Duke University’s Divinity School, agrees that the certainty of death makes life more fulfilling. Without death, Hauerwas argues, love as we know it would cease to exist because it is the finite nature of life that prompts people to wholly commit themselves to others. “Death … creates an economy that makes love possible,” he said in a 2011 interview with the Pew Research Center. “If you lived forever, there would not be the necessity of loving this one, not that one. You could love them all.”
 (edited)
KAL_9000 01/27/2021 9:42 AM
he can go fuck himself
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thunk 02/04/2021 11:59 AM
https://twitter.com/theymerSophie/status/1357378093695062020
Author icon
Mx Themboposting 🌈⚡ (@theymerSophie)
Part of the latent ableism and transphobia in some cyberpunk stories (not naming any names) is inseperable from the failed anticapitalism (or anti-corporatism) of those same stories
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Footer icon Twitter • 02/04/2021 11:18 AM
12:00
https://twitter.com/theymerSophie/status/1357378098979889157
Author icon
Mx Themboposting 🌈⚡ (@theymerSophie)
In these stories the reason people change their bodies is overlooked in favour of a pseudo anticapitalist critique and you end up with this sort of marxism-terfism-ableism cursed ideology where people who need prosthetics or seek medical transition are evil corporate degenerates
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Footer icon Twitter • 02/04/2021 11:18 AM
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Zarpaulek 02/04/2021 12:06 PM
Sad part is, there's also people who would argue that portraying amputees as seeking prosthetics to be "ableist"
12:11
Note to all cyberpunk writers: "Cybernetics eat your soul" is nothing but a poorly thought-out safeguard against munchkins. (edited)
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Xveers 02/04/2021 4:58 PM
in several universes it's less a "poorly thought out safeguard" but an actual effect on the character's soul (insofar as the universe actively embraces it as an actual, quantifiable thing). Mind this is something that's seen in settings like Shadowrun that has actual spiritual powers/effects, which makes it a kind of "this is how this universe works" datapoint that's not really dissected too deeply (since that doesn't usually serve the story's purposes).
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Zarpaulek 02/04/2021 5:06 PM
I was referring to Shadowrun
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0111narwhalz 02/04/2021 5:07 PM
"why does that actual effect on the character's soul exist?" well, it's game balance :V
17:07
enforces specialization instead of omnipotent do-everything
17:08
but of course in the Eldraeverse omnipotent do-everything is the goal
17:08
(just Eldraeverse as example V: presumably it's a worthy goal in real life too)
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0111narwhalz
"why does that actual effect on the character's soul exist?" well, it's game balance :V
Xveers 02/04/2021 5:15 PM
It's also partially a setting construct as much as game balance, though game balance is something that does enter into it (which can be an interesting chicken-and-egg discussion)
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0111narwhalz 02/04/2021 5:16 PM
To clarify, "game balance" as I use it is generalized to things that aren't necessarily the game itself.
17:17
It makes a poor story if there's a single right way to do things. Much more interesting if there's more than one way, and even better if they're exclusive.
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Xveers 02/04/2021 5:19 PM
they don't necessarily have to be exclusive, just that they're different. They can even be the same mechanically, but if they make use of different resources and have different effects, that can often be enough (the difference between a STR check to boot down a door versus a device skill check to pick a lock, for example)
17:20
But I get what you're saying. I'd perhaps split it between "game balance" where you're looking at a strictly mechanical comparison, and "setting balance" where you're looking at how the "universe" operates
17:21
has been having these sorts of discussions a hell of a lot with rules revisions for a tabletop game he does testing/writing for/with
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0111narwhalz 02/04/2021 5:28 PM
It's the same reason my setting forbids you from putting two different FTL drives on one ship. It lets you circumvent the challenges of the setting too easily.
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thunk 02/08/2021 1:18 PM
https://twitter.com/9BillionTigers/status/1357315964279291904 this sort of stuff would be a strong influence in postkorps
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Leah (@9BillionTigers)
"Rationality," "science," and "facts" have all been, in innumerable cases throughout history, what men have called their feelings.
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Footer icon Twitter • 02/04/2021 7:11 AM
13:19
https://twitter.com/9BillionTigers/status/1357446721974853632
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Leah (@9BillionTigers)
This isn't any revelation to be clear. Here's trans woman Carol Riddell, professional sociologist, pointing out the same thing in 1980 contemporaneously with the radical feminism movement she was part of. This is closely analogous to Marxist theories of science (e.g. J.D. Bernal)
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Footer icon Twitter • 02/04/2021 3:51 PM
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thunk
https://twitter.com/9BillionTigers/status/1357315964279291904 this sort of stuff would be a strong influence in postkorps
KAL_9000 02/08/2021 1:25 PM
Fellas, is it misogynist to like science?
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thunk 02/08/2021 1:26 PM
This has more to do with the long history of men rationalizing their emotions and gut feelings under the cover of scientific truth.
13:27
c.f. ridiculous evopsych about 'race realism' or women's supposed inferiority
13:27
unfortunately very much a problem in r/The_Motte and other such places
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Zarpaulek 02/08/2021 2:06 PM
Somehow, this horrible myth that men don't have strong emotions became prevalent in the Anglosphere.
14:07
Possibly from a failure to realize that the old Stoic philosophers had worked hard to cultivate their indifference.
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Morgrim Moon 02/08/2021 2:52 PM
anyone going "all women are [subjective thing]" or "all men are [subjective thing]" is being sexist
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Jade Nekotenshi 02/08/2021 2:54 PM
There is occasional value in generalizations provided that you realize they're generalizations.
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Morgrim Moon 02/08/2021 3:00 PM
oh yeah. Like, people tend to assume that a fact that is true in a general sense applies universally, and it is irritating. Mild illustrative example: "Men have a higher strength capacity than women". True, in that maximum strength capacity is in large part based on testosterone levels, and men usually have a significantly higher amount of it. But that means nothing when it comes to comparing an individual man and woman, because how big the bucket is means nothing when you don't fill the bucket, so a fit and active woman will be stronger than a sedentary man. (Which is why the statement "men are stronger than women" is no longer accurate in many western societies; most men aren't working in manual labour these days, and are doing very little housework or rearing of young children which is manual labour amongst other things, so the average woman is now doing more incidental strength training than the average man)
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Zarpaulek 02/08/2021 3:11 PM
There's also a general problem with instincts being totally wrong for modern situations and still overriding reason https://getpocket.com/explore/item/here-s-why-your-gut-instinct-is-wrong-at-work-and-how-to-know-when-it-isn-t?utm_source=pocket-newtab
Here’s Why Your Gut Instinct Is Wrong at Work – and How to Know Whe...
Should you go with your gut when hiring an employee or making a decision on the job? Research suggests that in most cases, probably not.
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thunk 02/08/2021 3:17 PM
Yeah, those are important caveats.
15:18
I guess I just don't necessarily see 'cold minded rationality' as a virtue because it usually doesn't live up to that.
15:19
vs. legibly and clearly accounting for one's emotions/perspectives/life experiences as sources of instinct and wisdom, even if thy can be wrong.
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Morgrim Moon 02/08/2021 3:22 PM
it does depend on one's field a bit too. like in many (not all) STEM subjects, you can remove emotions from the data with only a little effort. Humanities not so much
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Overmind 02/08/2021 3:43 PM
/r/The_Motte ain't a great place to find rationality being practiced. I mean, sure, it's better than politics twitter, but IIRC it's the subreddit that sprang into existence to host the stuff that couldn't be discussed rationally enough for the regular SSC comment threads (firstest and mostest, the Culture War threads), which is to say, even the best intentioned thereabouts are pushing that boulder right up the hill.
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BluejayHurricane 02/08/2021 3:45 PM
On the engineering side, it's even more important. Very few things are as unpleasant to work with as someone who is invested in a design, and I say that having been that person before. People who make decisions on emotion, without weighing the "cold-minded rationality", tend to do really badly. On a more personal level, I've found that people who can't at least try to do the 'cold-minded rationality' tend to be flaming hypocrites, who are difficult to work with because changing how someone feels is often the work of years. Not operating under that mode isn't fully preventative, but it does tend to breed a certain humility that curtails much of the more unpleasant behavior. At the very least, I can make the accounting of emotion and perspective and life experience, but I've found that it makes me a bit of a bastard, and it's something to be avoided.
15:46
Your mileage may vary. I hope it does. (edited)
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Overmind 02/08/2021 3:48 PM
Anyway: the problem isn't with rationality per se, the problem is that as with any professional-grade skill, people untrained are very, very bad at it and don't usually know that; and there at the moment isn't anything resembling proper professional training in the Art of Thinking. Even those of us who have spent years and years attempting to master the art of thinking better aren't all that far beyond the level of Charles Babbage inventing computer science.
15:50
Even if we're very generous and grant Bayes' Theorem the equivalent status to Church-Turing, it's still a very long way from producing the stack of highly sophisticated frameworks and technologies I can call up at the touch of a button every time I fancy saying "hello, world!"
15:52
Basically: to properly cultivate talcoríëf , we need to invent the real-world version of Mentat training.
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thunk
This has more to do with the long history of men rationalizing their emotions and gut feelings under the cover of scientific truth.
Overmind 02/08/2021 4:07 PM
The only problem I have with that statement is that you're limiting it to "men" rather than "humans" or almost certainly "sophs". Because that's just regular old prestige-stealing. That's what everyone does to prop up a weak-ass argument; present it as coming from Science, or Authority, or the Word of God, or The Wisdom of the Ancients, or Our Glorious Leader, or whatever other thought-terminating cliché will persuade their listeners not to make up their own damn minds. (Science has been going through a particularly popular phase in this area, to the point where you can be pretty much safe in assuming that any reference to science/the scientific consensus without the actual science included to back up a position is about as epistemically useful as saying "it is known". If it's a political position, it usually has the same resemblance to truth as my pyloric sphincter does to the Gate of Heavenly Peace.)
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Morgrim Moon
anyone going "all women are [subjective thing]" or "all men are [subjective thing]" is being sexist
Overmind 02/08/2021 4:11 PM
It is a truth universally acknowledged that all statements beginning with all are incorrect. 😋
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thunk 02/08/2021 4:12 PM
Honestly a lot of this grates on me in a way that I can't necessarily explain right now. Probably from the times i tend to read Sneer Club.
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Overmind 02/08/2021 4:13 PM
Well, okay, just most of them. But enough that my Eldraeic grammar notes come complete with, when talking about the equivalent modifier, an extensive footnote pointing out that outside mathematical or physical universals, the odds are good that any statement you try to fit it into should actually have something more restrictive there instead.
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thunk 02/08/2021 4:14 PM
But when some of the most popular Rationalist rhetoric seems to drift into communities that go 'hey guys, I don't think women have object permanence?' it's hard not to sneer.
16:15
You're right about the universals though. I remember my therapist in grade school constantly questioning me on that point.
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Overmind 02/08/2021 4:16 PM
(Which is why you can't actually say "men are stronger than women" in Eldraeic. Well, not without someone pointing out that that statement doesn't mean what you think it does and is therefore so very, very wrong.)
16:18
The trouble with popularity as a metric is that all popular rhetoric (herenow) is rhetoric that tells people what they want to hear.
16:19
...I think I've just constructed an argument that one should run like hell from any community whose popular rhetoric is actually representative.
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thunk 02/08/2021 4:20 PM
Lol
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Overmind 02/08/2021 4:23 PM
But: I would expect to find on the fringes of any rationalist community a whole lot of people whose skillset is constructing very well-rationalized arguments for whatever it is they want to believe, since the ability to reason is incredibly easy to pervert into the ability to rationalize. This is unfortunate for multiple reasons, including both the impression it gives of the rationalist community, and the cognitive hazard it poses to people trying to learn how to think better, and yet I have not been able to devise a good way of preventing it. (Short of teaching people how to better tell rationalization and rationality apart, which has a somewhat awkward catch-22 built right in.)
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thunk 02/08/2021 4:25 PM
I honestly think we can't.
16:25
Maybe that's just because I'm a dirty pomo or something
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0111narwhalz
enforces specialization instead of omnipotent do-everything
Overmind 02/08/2021 4:33 PM
Specialization: it's what's for insects.
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Cornflakes 02/08/2021 4:54 PM
but autarky is bad for free trade
16:54
:V
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Zarpaulek 02/10/2021 9:09 AM
Looks about right
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KAL_9000 02/10/2021 9:27 AM
Diogenes off the scale lmao
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0111narwhalz 02/10/2021 9:28 AM
takes a certain type of man to tell Alexander the Great to fuck off when he interrupts your bask sesh with an offer to give you anything you want because he's a huge fan
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BizarroLand ♀ 02/10/2021 12:06 PM
@0111narwhalz "get out of my fucking sun" was his request
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Zarpaulek 02/13/2021 9:32 AM
I think this was the point https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/nietzsche?
Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal - Nietzsche
Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal - Nietzsche
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thunk 02/22/2021 2:21 AM
https://mobile.twitter.com/JuliaSerano/status/1363566637576720385
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Julia Serano (@JuliaSerano)
OK, perhaps against my better judgment, I feel the need to weigh in briefly on the whole Scott Alexander/Slate Star Codex thing (SSC), in part, b/c I just found out I was quoted out of context in his most controversial piece (more on that in a moment), but also b/c of overlap...
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Footer icon Twitter • 02/21/2021 1:09 PM
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Overmind 02/22/2021 2:28 AM
...I may need to add culture-war topics to the list. On a more purely philosophical point this reminds me of, come the decoupling revolution severe penalties will be instituted for anyone who uses "normal" in any sense other than "a contributor to the mode", and especially if they attach a value judgment to it. (edited)
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0111narwhalz 02/22/2021 2:30 AM
even when describing the relationship between a vector and a plane?
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Overmind 02/22/2021 2:31 AM
Anyone who isn't a boring straight cis Han woman is abnormal. Get over it.
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0111narwhalz 02/22/2021 2:31 AM
decoupling revolution
the transition from explosive bolts to… what is it, pneumatically actuated latches?
02:31
(sorry, shitposty mood)
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0111narwhalz
decoupling revolution
the transition from explosive bolts to… what is it, pneumatically actuated latches?
Cornflakes 02/22/2021 2:44 AM
electropermanent magnets
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0111narwhalz 02/22/2021 2:45 AM
Docking port used as decoupler
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Cornflakes 02/22/2021 2:45 AM
both
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0111narwhalz 02/22/2021 2:45 AM
no I mean that's the engineer's report readout when you attempt something like that :V
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Cornflakes 02/22/2021 2:46 AM
ah
02:47
as we're already talking, you know a workable source for small EP magnets?
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0111narwhalz 02/22/2021 2:47 AM
nope
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Cornflakes 02/22/2021 2:47 AM
i cant find any or only ones with 5tons holding force
02:47
:V
02:47
and i need like, half a kilo tops
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0111narwhalz 02/22/2021 2:48 AM
in any case unless you want to debate the merits of orders-of-magnitude overengineering against sticking to mass and funding budgets on a philosophical basis this is probably not the right channel V:
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thunk 02/22/2021 3:14 AM
the idea of treating 'decoupling' as something connoting a superior mode of thinking is laughable to me.
03:14
as a sneerclubber put it, it's like saying we should revolutionize cars by making sure they only have brake pedals
03:14
the gas is important too.
03:15
similarly, there are times when arguments need to be examined by stepping back from the situation, and there are also times when sociocultural and historical context needs to be considered in forming value judgements (edited)
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Overmind 02/22/2021 3:24 AM
As the local representative of the other end of the spectrum, this would be where I sniff that postmodernist philosophers have spent hundreds of thousands of words trying to rehabilitate special pleading, and it’s •still• special pleading.
03:30
(Also some violent isomorphism ensues.)
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Buggy 02/22/2021 4:19 AM
i know some of these words
04:19
like 'the'
04:19
'the' is a great word
04:20
you always start sentences with it, that's how great it is.
04:20
except when you don't, but still
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Zarpaulek 02/22/2021 10:21 PM
I haven’t gotten to reading any primary sources on stoicism yet but the latter three sound like what I’ve gathered. It’s more about addressing your emotional state in a healthy manner than denying you have any emotions.
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Zarpaulek 03/01/2021 7:58 AM
So, I was listening to a podcast about windigo, and it got me looking up "culture-bound syndromes." While pretty much all the officially listed syndromes are confined to non-white or non-Anglosphere cultures I did find speculation that anorexia nervosa might count as a "Western" culture-bound syndrome. You have any ideas of any other examples of syndromes bound to "Western" culture?
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xandeross 03/01/2021 12:47 PM
I think depression might count? It's my understanding that non-Western cultures often get various psychosomatic pains and disabilities instead.
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thunk 03/01/2021 2:10 PM
morgellons?
❓ 1
14:11
i think also 'classical' MPD/DID as opposed to other culture-specific manifestations of plurality
14:12
https://www.healthline.com/health/morgellons-disease (edited)
Morgellons Disease: Symptoms, Fibers, Treatments, and More
Morgellons disease is a rare disorder characterized by the presence of fibers underneath, embedded in, and erupting from unbroken skin or slow-healing sores.
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0111narwhalz 03/01/2021 2:17 PM
wack
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BizarroLand ♀ 03/02/2021 7:23 PM
How do I make a paragraph more compact/less unwieldy in Discord?
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0111narwhalz 03/02/2021 7:29 PM
remove some words
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BizarroLand ♀ 03/02/2021 7:34 PM
Environmental ethicist Bill McKibben argued against germinal choice technology and other advanced biotechnological strategies for human enhancement. He writes that it would be morally wrong for humans to tamper with fundamental aspects of themselves (or their children) in an attempt to overcome universal human limitations, such as [aging, lifespan, physical and mental capacity]. Attempts to "improve" themselves through such manipulation would remove limitations that provide a necessary context for the experience of meaningful human choice. He claims that human lives would no longer seem [meaningful if they] could be overcome with technology. Even the goal of using germinal choice technology for clearly therapeutic purposes should be relinquished (...) since it would inevitably produce temptations (...) He argues that it is possible for societies to benefit from renouncing particular technologies, using as examples Ming China, Tokugawa Japan and the contemporary Amish.[115] (edited)
19:34
I hope I can be excused for being rude, but this is... a stupid perspective
19:35
Is it worthwhile to challenge yourself? Sure
19:36
But the reality is that very few people have the genetic potential to become Nobel prize winners or Olympic athletes, and science is relentlessly getting better at revealing which features of life are inborn nature and environmental nurture
19:39
McKibben's idea of "choice" seems to be tied to bizarre romantic notions around human willpower
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KAL_9000 03/02/2021 7:40 PM
this is peak reaper simping
19:41
"We have to feed everyone to the dragon once they turn 80, because if we didn't, what would make life meaningful?"
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BizarroLand ♀ 03/02/2021 7:41 PM
But in truth, we're starting to learn enough to comprehend each person's limits with more and more accuracy. The idea that people have "a choice" in how well they can ever perform at their maximum is being revealed as an illusion as each new discovery about biomechanics, and psychometrics tear down the curtain about what makes us... well, us (edited)
19:42
We already live in a genetically deterministic world with no "choice", we just don't know the details so we can pretend we have an influence on the outtcome
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Xveers 03/02/2021 7:44 PM
I take special exception to Tokugawa Japan. That was by no means an "environmental utopia". Society was cripplingly stagnant by the time it came apart.
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BizarroLand ♀ 03/02/2021 7:45 PM
I'm never going to be a top professional swimmer, basketball player, or football player (edited)
19:46
Just because I'm 5'8" as opposed to 6'+
19:46
I'm also not going to become a world-beating theoretical physicist. Jury's still out on my artistry, though.
19:46
That doesn't mean I'm not free to make choices
19:48
It just means I'm built a certain way
19:49
So it would be with genetically-engineered children, even if in their case we can put a name and a face to the person responsible.
19:49
Blargleargle
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Zarpaulek 03/02/2021 7:52 PM
There is a bit of a point in regards to financial advantages translating into genetic advantages if the wealthy are the only ones who can afford germinal choice technologies (how would that even work?) or other germline engineering techs.
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BizarroLand ♀ 03/02/2021 7:53 PM
That is a concern, but it's a practical (and political) one rather than philosophical IMHO
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BizarroLand ♀ 03/02/2021 8:05 PM
When I was little, I read a summary of Gattaca and thought, "wow, what an indictment of human society"
20:05
Nowadays I'm like, nah. Vincent's an idiot and he's going to die in space
20:08
But that's more a symptom of the entire premise of the film being broken
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BizarroLand ♀ 03/02/2021 8:19 PM
bluuuuhhhh that's all I wanted to say
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Morgrim Moon 03/02/2021 9:17 PM
"Sick people need to keep suffering to make life meaningful"
21:18
I mean most of it is stupid but saying someone else can't have medicine because it might "tempt" others is infuriating
21:18
No. Fuck off with that religious puritan bullshit
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Overmind 03/03/2021 3:29 PM
Honestly. the more I hear from ethicists in scientific/technical fields, the more inclined I am towards the Cave Johnson approach to these things.
15:30
"Ethics committee said we couldn't. So I had them fired. Out of a mass driver. Into the sun."
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Buggy 03/03/2021 3:34 PM
Cave Johnson + financial advisor would be the ultimate combo
15:40
"Alright, here's the latest prototype from down in Metric R&D. They call it a portal gun. Suggestions?" "Toggleable shower curtain?" "Psychological testing?" "Hmm, not bad, maybe- Ah, George, you have a idea?" "License it to transportation companies and then rename the Fortune 500 "The 'Wish They Were As Rich As Aperture' 500"?" "Oh, I like that one. Get the bean counters on it."
😆 5
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Overmind
Honestly. the more I hear from ethicists in scientific/technical fields, the more inclined I am towards the Cave Johnson approach to these things.
KAL_9000 03/03/2021 4:20 PM
That's called "not giving a shit about people's sanity and well-being as long as the science gets done", and it's usually bad.
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Overmind 03/03/2021 4:26 PM
But you make a neat gun.
16:26
For the people who are.
16:26
Still alive.
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Archon 03/03/2021 7:11 PM
Which is like, two people because nobody else is.
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BluejayHurricane 03/03/2021 7:18 PM
There’s a rather large gap between “doesn’t give a shit” and “research ethics committee”.
19:20
Especially when you consider that ethics as they are practiced is basically “I think it’s kind of squicky”, and you don’t get many practicing researchers with any say.
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Archon 03/03/2021 7:23 PM
(To be clear I was mostly reacting to the reference, not to the actual argument)
19:24
(but yes that's the true and sensible thing but also ethics are bloody hard esp when it comes to trying to get a consensus)
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BluejayHurricane 03/03/2021 7:24 PM
Yeah. It’s just a topic that tends to lose nuance fast.
19:24
Does that make it politics? That feels like a pretty good definition of politics. @Overmind
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Morgrim Moon 03/03/2021 7:30 PM
random ethics committee factoid: when I was doing biochem, all rat dissections had to be cleared by the ethics group first. Partially this was getting the undergrads to practice writing the forms for it, partially because the whole "if you're killing something you need to justify it", which is fair enough. Cane toad dissections, however, did not. Like they are legally excluded from the relevant animal cruelty laws. Australia really hates cane toads.
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0111narwhalz 03/03/2021 7:33 PM
holy shit
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john dougan(his grace/his grace) 03/04/2021 12:31 AM
Working on open source virtual world software in academia, they required an ethics review before we could release it. 🤷‍♂️
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Overmind
Honestly. the more I hear from ethicists in scientific/technical fields, the more inclined I am towards the Cave Johnson approach to these things.
john dougan(his grace/his grace) 03/04/2021 12:33 AM
Cave Johnson is my co-pilot. WWCJD?
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Overmind 03/04/2021 1:06 AM
See, you can have regular ethicists. Because, yes, you should have ethics. On the other hand and in practice, bioethics collects, as seen above, ephemeralists, algecists, and worshippers of the naturalistic fallacy, AI ethics attracts a wacky bunch of biochauvinists and double-standardizers, and in general, any of these specialized science-or-tech-ethics professions attracts all the useless anti-progress codfish in the world. Fire 'em all into the sun. Keeping the world shitty isn't a position that needs a lobbying group.
01:12
(Also, the next person on t'Internet to talk about the unique vulnerability of machine learning systems to adversarial images meaning we should avoid using them in blah blah blah gets beaten to death with my collection of MC Escher woodcuts. Bloody humans poncing about thinking their occipital lobes are all that.)
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thunk 03/04/2021 4:39 AM
(the question that needs asked though: who or what is progress good for?)
04:40
Facial recognition algorithms trained on Uyghur faces certainly aren't good for those in Xinjiang...
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Cornflakes 03/04/2021 4:40 AM
the tech is going to be developed anyway, because you wont get everyone on board. so can as well develop it yourself and not use it to be shitty
04:41
and with you developing it you have some chance of having some control/influence over its developmental direction
04:41
which you dont have with staying out of it
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thunk 03/04/2021 4:42 AM
Ehh...I don't think that argument is as strong as you make it out to be. Providing institutional resources to aid oppression just makes one complicit.
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Cornflakes 03/04/2021 4:43 AM
because that tech has only evil usecases?
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thunk 03/04/2021 4:44 AM
Certainly no
04:45
But blind technological boosterism is a similarly bad error.
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Cornflakes 03/04/2021 4:45 AM
and staying out of it deprives you of any influence on it as well
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thunk 03/04/2021 4:48 AM
I feel like it should be the role of an ethics committee to make those decisions. Supporting work in those technologies that have positive externalities and blocking attempts by bad actors to partner for influence or resources.
04:49
And frankly if you step knee deep in shit in an attempt to unclog something you're still knee deep in shit.
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Cornflakes 03/04/2021 4:49 AM
in the unclogging case you at least have some use out of it for yourself as well
04:50
i dont think that there is a way not to get dirty.
04:51
but you can get in the dirt and try to limit its spread and influence and get some use out of it as well
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thunk 03/04/2021 4:53 AM
Unrelatedly I have no idea what an algecist is supposed to be
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Morgrim Moon 03/04/2021 4:58 AM
Admittedly these days I'm thinking the ethics committee for a subject should be from the next field over. Let biochem advise the AI researchers. Sic the astronomers on the economists. Etc
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Zarpaulek 03/04/2021 6:40 AM
Do a rotation
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Morgrim Moon
random ethics committee factoid: when I was doing biochem, all rat dissections had to be cleared by the ethics group first. Partially this was getting the undergrads to practice writing the forms for it, partially because the whole "if you're killing something you need to justify it", which is fair enough. Cane toad dissections, however, did not. Like they are legally excluded from the relevant animal cruelty laws. Australia really hates cane toads.
Zarpaulek 03/04/2021 6:41 AM
Aren’t rats also an invasive species to Australia? Granted, they’re a bit cuter than toads
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Morgrim Moon 03/04/2021 6:42 AM
wild brown rats are. white lab rats are not
06:42
I think white lab rats fall under 'livestock' rules?
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0111narwhalz 03/04/2021 7:24 AM
attach a cadre of speculative fiction authors to the ethics board
07:24
predicting consequences is what they're for
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Cornflakes 03/04/2021 7:24 AM
inb4 catgirl ethics
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Morgrim Moon
wild brown rats are. white lab rats are not
Zarpaulek 03/04/2021 7:36 AM
Rattus norvegicus
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Morgrim Moon 03/04/2021 7:42 AM
it's the whole dog/wolf distinction 😛
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Archon 03/04/2021 7:54 AM
Also tbh people have much more cane toad hate than other invasives
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thunk
(the question that needs asked though: who or what is progress good for?)
Overmind 03/04/2021 8:50 AM
Technological development is an absolute good, insofar as it expands the sphere of sophont capability. Technological usage is a different matter, but technologies themselves are value-neutral; the tool is not the asshat who uses it.
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thunk
Unrelatedly I have no idea what an algecist is supposed to be
Overmind 03/04/2021 9:01 AM
The pro-suffering brigade.
09:04
Since someone over on Tough SF decided (poor soul!) to ask for my spicy hot take on "the benefits of human nature and its necessity for an upgrade, be it through ideology or erasure", and there is not perfect overlap, I'm gonna go ahead and dump my response here too, so we can all have a philosophical holy war.
09:05
Benefits is something of an awkward term in this context, since it tends to invite awkward questions like "to whom?". Maybe we should go with "adaptiveness", which instead invites the much simpler question, "for what?". I will cheerfully admit that human nature is superbly adaptive for certain scenarios... such as achieving survival and reproductive success in status-hierarchical tribes of a couple of hundred poop-flinging plains apes. Unfortunately, the further you get from the PFPA scenario, the less adaptive it is and the worse it performs. Now, ideological upgrades. What everyone gets wrong about ideological upgrades is by looking at the extreme examples of intentional attempts to use ideology to reshape human nature (cf. New Soviet Man, etc.) and ignores the degree to which we are all soaking in it. We take a couple of decades to hammer all the ideological norms that no-one thinks about any more than fish think about water into the brains of every new human, and the operating system designed to keep Ug and Grog alive long enough to fuck is warped into something that lets us bumble through running a global technological civilization, and seek value in strange and unnatural activities like studying physics, building Las Vegas, and writing science fiction. And that's huge. We have common instincts with our close genetic relatives demanding things like dominance hierarchies and violent conflict with outgroups, and yet our ideological reprogramming has us coming up with fascinating ideas like equality, democracy, peace, notions of universal justice, and the like. Ideological upgrades are truly a miracle of rare device! tl;dr the necessity for ideological upgrades is demonstrated by most of the things that we have that chimps don't.
09:06
As for non-ideological upgrades, the obvious problem with ideological upgrades is that they do have certain limitations in the underlying hardware. Stress atavism is a thing. We have a plethora of terms (saints, heroes, etc., etc.) for people who stand by their ideological principles under stress, because it turns out that that's a non-trivial problem even with our big fancy frontal lobes, and under stressed conditions it's fairly easy to get humans to revert to dumb, panicky monkeys looking for dominant leaders to follow, dividing into ingroups and outgroups, etc., etc. It takes a peculiarly bloody-minded strength of will to adhere to one's principles in one's gloomier times that most people simply aren't capable of, in my experience. And there are some very convincing arguments to be made that at best we've only been able to sublimate a lot of those instincts, ideologically, into less harmful forms, not suppress them. In the sense that aggressive football fans getting drunk and beating on each other are, y'know, less harmful than young men from different tribes going out to spear each other to death for fun, sort of thing.
09:06
So the "necessity" for "erasure", by which I take it we mean things that actually modify human nature and its biological, etc., underpinnings, is basically the argument for desire control writ large - the clash between what you want, and what you want to want, and the obvious advantage in the alignment of the two. It is obviously far easier to achieve a desired end if you don't have to fight your own instincts/nature/essence all the time. Desiring a non-PFPA-flavored end while demanding the preservation of human (PFPA) nature is unsane. It's the grand-scale version of the petty-scale irrationality of the man whose chosen end (want-to-want) is to become an athlete, but who insists on retaining his love of (want) doughnuts in the process because that's his nature, even though it makes reaching the goal a far greater struggle and quite possibly impossible. If you have some unapish ambition, you're gonna have to jettison human nature to some extent to get there. You can't reach the stars by clinging to the mud. The monkey is the pupa of the man, but do you want to stay a monkey forever? super-tl;dr: "I teach you the overman. Man is something that shall be overcome. What have you done to overcome him? "All beings so far have created something beyond themselves; and do you want to be the ebb of this great flood and even go back to the beasts rather than overcome man? What is the ape to man? A laughingstock or a painful embarrassment. And man shall be just that for the overman: a laughingstock or a painful embarrassment..." - Thus Spoke Zarathustra
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DSD [He/They] 03/04/2021 9:07 AM
👌
09:07
Very well said, sir.
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Overmind
Technological development is an absolute good, insofar as it expands the sphere of sophont capability. Technological usage is a different matter, but technologies themselves are value-neutral; the tool is not the asshat who uses it.
gollark 03/04/2021 9:10 AM
Consequentialist-ly speaking (yes, I am aware you don't subscribe to this) a technological development could be "bad", if the majority of the possible uses for it are negative, or it's most likely to be used for negative things. To what extent any technology actually falls into that is a separate issue though.
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BizarroLand ♀ 03/04/2021 9:11 AM
In general I'd have to agree
09:11
It's a miracle humans got as far as they have
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KAL_9000 03/04/2021 9:18 AM
I think what we need really is a common enemy for the human tribe to unite around.
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Morgrim Moon 03/04/2021 9:18 AM
I don't. Mostly because have you SEEN what humans readily justify in the name of fighting a common enemy?
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Overmind 03/04/2021 9:19 AM
...see, now that's two things that need to be eliminated from Homo superior in one sentence!
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Morgrim Moon 03/04/2021 9:19 AM
KALs or mine? XD
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Overmind 03/04/2021 9:20 AM
The former. I take a strong position against both enemies and unity.
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KAL_9000 03/04/2021 9:20 AM
lmao
09:20
If we can't improve human nature, I think that might help.
09:20
Fighting a common enemy is what let us defeat the Nazis and the commies, and it's why we went to the moon.
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Overmind 03/04/2021 9:22 AM
We went to the moon because not even humans are insane enough to fling nuclear bombs like poop.
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Morgrim Moon 03/04/2021 9:22 AM
Right. Quick history lesson: the nazis were never a "common enemy"
09:22
saying so is pretty damned insulting to the entire east-asia pacific region
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KAL_9000 03/04/2021 9:22 AM
Under what other circumstances would the Soviet Union and the US fight on the same side, was my point
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Morgrim Moon 03/04/2021 9:23 AM
uh, many? Like, they were allies BEFORE the war for good economic reasons
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KAL_9000 03/04/2021 9:23 AM
fair enough
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Overmind 03/04/2021 9:23 AM
Arguably, we went to the moon specifically because we invented the nuclear bomb. If we hadn't, the 1960s would have been a World War III in the style of World War II instead, only getting even more people killed and countries wrecked in the process.
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Morgrim Moon 03/04/2021 9:23 AM
and generally "our ally is being attacked we should defend them" is something a group should at least consider.
09:25
I'm struggling to think of a large scale conflict that's been "everyone vs one group" and not "two+ blobs of nebulously linked groups fighting each other, generally with at least one neutral blob and one group switching sides part way through"
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Overmind
...see, now that's two things that need to be eliminated from Homo superior in one sentence!
BizarroLand ♀ 03/04/2021 9:25 AM
"Suffering fools gladly" is something we should also remove
09:26
Let me dig up the fragment that disgusted me most
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Overmind 03/04/2021 9:27 AM
Also, for historical cynics, there is the Inheriting a Sword Stratagem.
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BizarroLand ♀ 03/04/2021 9:28 AM
Embedded image
09:28
here
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Overmind 03/04/2021 9:29 AM
Which is to say, it is useful if you can ally with your enemy to fight your other enemy, insofar as afterwards they will both be weakened and you will be left in the superior position.
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BizarroLand ♀
Click to see attachment 🖼️
KAL_9000 03/04/2021 9:29 AM
Based Ned
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BizarroLand ♀ 03/04/2021 9:31 AM
someone I know said they approved of the teacher
09:31
because you "shouldn't show off knowledge and other things that give you privilege"
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Overmind 03/04/2021 9:34 AM
...also, is everyone forgetting that the Soviets started out on the Axis team?
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KAL_9000 03/04/2021 9:34 AM
fair
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Morgrim Moon 03/04/2021 9:34 AM
That sounds like my school chaplain's complaints after I kept repeatedly disproving the things he was saying
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Overmind 03/04/2021 9:36 AM
Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, and all that.
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Morgrim Moon
That sounds like my school chaplain's complaints after I kept repeatedly disproving the things he was saying
DSD [He/They] 03/04/2021 9:37 AM
Lol. Just general religious bullshit, or what?
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Morgrim Moon
That sounds like my school chaplain's complaints after I kept repeatedly disproving the things he was saying
BizarroLand ♀ 03/04/2021 9:37 AM
not sure what that's referring to
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KAL_9000
Based Ned
BizarroLand ♀ 03/04/2021 9:38 AM
I think "suffering fools gladly" is useful when the foolishness is manifest on trivial issues
09:39
But look what that brings you when someone is simply wrong on a problem that actually matters
09:39
I'm sure you can all imagine where that applies
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BizarroLand ♀
not sure what that's referring to
Morgrim Moon 03/04/2021 9:45 AM
the book excerpt
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DSD [He/They]
Lol. Just general religious bullshit, or what?
Morgrim Moon 03/04/2021 9:48 AM
things like "the Bible gives far more rights to woman than they received in any part of the ancient world", which is trivially disproven. Or "science has shown birds came before reptiles", see above. Or the best was "of course all of the bible is appropriate for children" which is gloriously disproved by Ezekiel 23:20
09:49
(he tried to give me detention for that, the deputy principal overrode and said that it was his job to encourage students to read the bible, stop complaining your student memorised part of it)
09:50
((for reference: There she lusted after her lovers, whose members were like those of donkeys and whose emission was like that of horses. So you longed for the lewdness of your youth, when in Egypt your bosom was caressed and your young breasts fondled. ))
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Overmind 03/04/2021 9:51 AM
On a random note, I have yet to hear a bioethicist come out against unqualified individuals performing randomized genetic recombination experiments on humans , with no oversight or consultation, outside a controlled lab environment. Without so much as a control group! And yet that happens all the time! Some of them even participate themselves!
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Overmind
On a random note, I have yet to hear a bioethicist come out against unqualified individuals performing randomized genetic recombination experiments on humans , with no oversight or consultation, outside a controlled lab environment. Without so much as a control group! And yet that happens all the time! Some of them even participate themselves!
KAL_9000 03/04/2021 9:53 AM
lmao
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Overmind 03/04/2021 9:53 AM
(Yeah, I'm going to take your opinions on carefully controlled, scientific genetic recombination seriously after that, peaches.)
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Morgrim Moon 03/04/2021 9:53 AM
I HAVE heard a related argument that if you can create an offspring that survives to term, you can't have fucked up that badly, therefore self-correcting problem; and that this is why miscarriages are a good thing. While there is merit in discussing why miscarriages happen, perhaps don't phrase it in a way that makes it sound like the fault of the parent's choices
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Overmind
So the "necessity" for "erasure", by which I take it we mean things that actually modify human nature and its biological, etc., underpinnings, is basically the argument for desire control writ large - the clash between what you want, and what you want to want, and the obvious advantage in the alignment of the two. It is obviously far easier to achieve a desired end if you don't have to fight your own instincts/nature/essence all the time. Desiring a non-PFPA-flavored end while demanding the preservation of human (PFPA) nature is unsane. It's the grand-scale version of the petty-scale irrationality of the man whose chosen end (want-to-want) is to become an athlete, but who insists on retaining his love of (want) doughnuts in the process because that's his nature, even though it makes reaching the goal a far greater struggle and quite possibly impossible. If you have some unapish ambition, you're gonna have to jettison human nature to some extent to get there. You can't reach the stars by clinging to the mud. The monkey is the pupa of the man, but do you want to stay a monkey forever? super-tl;dr: "I teach you the overman. Man is something that shall be overcome. What have you done to overcome him? "All beings so far have created something beyond themselves; and do you want to be the ebb of this great flood and even go back to the beasts rather than overcome man? What is the ape to man? A laughingstock or a painful embarrassment. And man shall be just that for the overman: a laughingstock or a painful embarrassment..." - Thus Spoke Zarathustra
Zarpaulek 03/04/2021 10:12 AM
That's why my Para-Imperium universe isn't a utopia. Transhuman augmentations while maintaining human hierarchical inclinations.
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Morgrim Moon
((for reference: There she lusted after her lovers, whose members were like those of donkeys and whose emission was like that of horses. So you longed for the lewdness of your youth, when in Egypt your bosom was caressed and your young breasts fondled. ))
Tassadar 03/04/2021 10:16 AM
That is definitely... adult content.
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Morgrim Moon
((for reference: There she lusted after her lovers, whose members were like those of donkeys and whose emission was like that of horses. So you longed for the lewdness of your youth, when in Egypt your bosom was caressed and your young breasts fondled. ))
BizarroLand ♀ 03/04/2021 10:27 AM
"but the bible isn't graphic so it doesn't count"
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Morgrim Moon 03/04/2021 10:28 AM
I'm not sure if he underestimated a teenager's abillity to find the dirtiest passage in a text, or just thought none of us would actually READ the thing
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KAL_9000 03/04/2021 10:28 AM
Never underestimate the sheer horny of a teenager
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BizarroLand ♀ 03/04/2021 10:29 AM
it is a little shocking to see a bible passage talk about "members like donkeys" and "young breasts" being fondled.
10:29
tbh
10:29
like
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Tassadar 03/04/2021 10:30 AM
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0111narwhalz 03/04/2021 10:35 AM
"horses were smaller back then" "THAT'S NOT HELPING"
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BizarroLand ♀
it is a little shocking to see a bible passage talk about "members like donkeys" and "young breasts" being fondled.
Cornflakes 03/04/2021 12:30 PM
that was actually a burn on the local book club's members
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Cornflakes
that was actually a burn on the local book club's members
BizarroLand ♀ 03/04/2021 1:09 PM
wat
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Cornflakes 03/04/2021 1:09 PM
"members like donkeys"
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BizarroLand ♀ 03/04/2021 1:11 PM
donkey members are huge so the joke didn't land
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0111narwhalz 03/04/2021 1:12 PM
the bigger they are the harder they fall
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Zarpaulek 03/04/2021 1:40 PM
Bronze Age furries in denial
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Tassadar 03/04/2021 1:41 PM
Well... better donkeys than mules... Hehehehe.
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Zarpaulek 03/12/2021 11:47 AM
English has too limiting an emotional vocabulary. https://getpocket.com/explore/item/acedia-the-lost-name-for-the-emotion-we-re-all-feeling-right-now?utm_source=pocket-newtab
Acedia: The Lost Name for the Emotion We’re All Feeling Right Now
The ancient Greek word that so aptly describes our current state was lost to time and translation.
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11:49
Around this time last year I was dissociating so badly I felt kind of like some kind of cloud of vapor
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0111narwhalz 03/12/2021 1:49 PM
…ah. this makes sense
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ZestyLemon 06/08/2021 3:12 AM
Hmmm, I was thinking about how Google is trying to logicify morals and put them in self driving cars, sounds really bloody iffy to me
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BluejayHurricane 06/08/2021 8:51 AM
I mean, what do you think traffic laws are?
08:53
If you haven’t thought about how you would react to different high-hazard driving scenarios, you really should - preparedness means you have training to fall back to. This is the same idea.
08:53
And while thinking about it is squicky, it’s also really important.
08:54
300 people die in car accidents every day, just in the US. That’s worth some squick.
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DSD [He/They] 06/08/2021 8:54 AM
Morals kinda need to be logicified to be done properly, imo.
08:54
Otherwise it's just randomish. (edited)
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0111narwhalz 06/08/2021 8:55 AM
this is ethics, not morals, by the way
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BluejayHurricane 06/08/2021 8:56 AM
No they don’t. I prefer when they are, sure, but plenty of people get by on other systems
08:57
In fact, any suitably unflexible moral system rapidly leads to being a total ass. And logical systems are less flexible than most.
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DSD [He/They] 06/08/2021 8:58 AM
I see your point about flexibility.
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BluejayHurricane 06/08/2021 9:02 AM
It’s one of the reasons why I really try not to think in terms of morality, because while I do have an intuitive sense of it, it mostly triggers on things that would lead me down a silly, silly road.
09:02
It’s maladaptive in most cases.
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BluejayHurricane
No they don’t. I prefer when they are, sure, but plenty of people get by on other systems
Overmind 06/08/2021 9:15 AM
plenty of people get by on other systems
And have you looked at the world recently!?
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BluejayHurricane 06/08/2021 9:17 AM
Logified systems are hard, and I have low expectations of people, so I consider less logified systems acceptable.
09:18
Really, I’m pretty sure morality is less relevant than community norms in most cases, and those have some distinct flaws. I’m all in favor of engineering those.
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BluejayHurricane
In fact, any suitably unflexible moral system rapidly leads to being a total ass. And logical systems are less flexible than most.
Buggy 06/08/2021 12:35 PM
Isn't just just a roundabout way of saying that good moral systems are those that humans tend to gravitate towards?
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Overmind 06/08/2021 12:36 PM
Which idea is literally the worst.
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Buggy 06/08/2021 12:37 PM
because adding flexibility, the ability to change or increase the 'permissible' actions of the moral system, isn't anything on it's own. The direction it flexes is going to depend on the thing running the morals
12:38
so flexible moral system = bending the moral system to do what people feel is right. Which is basically a bleh way of just making the moral system match what people feel is right. (whether or not this is good or bad is another matter)
12:40
[i guess it would also help to settle on a more concrete definition of what a moral/moral system is, too.]
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Overmind 06/08/2021 12:40 PM
I am also, as a side note, predisposed against the "inflexible ethical systems == bad" idea mostly because situationally flexible ethical systems lead directly or indirectly to Hard Men Making Hard Decisions While Hard-wank. And I really hate that. (edited)
12:41
The whole point of inflexible ethical principles is that they're supposed to bitch-slap your brain when it starts whispering "hey, maybe just a little fascism would be okay this time", and other brilliantly stupid ideas. (edited)
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Buggy 06/08/2021 12:42 PM
also, it's going to lead to horrible incompatibility issues when you get very different kinds of people running the morals
12:47
sure, a little flex sounds good when you have the stock situation of, i dunno, a homeless orphan with crutches caught stealing bread, and the cops/whoever decide to let it slide because 'the orphan needs it more' but then you apply the same thing to Car #C5591-OM, when its on a route marked as 'high priority' and 'time-critical' but there's road construction blocking it and forcing it to take a huge detour, and it decides to drive through the construction site filled with workers at highway speeds because 'i need to get to my destination really badly' (edited)
12:48
beware, beware of that flex. For not everyone will flex in the same direction.
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Overmind 06/08/2021 12:49 PM
Also, note that the flex in the first situation doesn't actually make things any better .
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Buggy 06/08/2021 12:51 PM
arguable, you could say it's basically a way of expressing the fact that the preferred moral system for those people would be... i dunno what to call it, socialist? A moral system inwhich starving orphans are given bread at the expense of someone with more bread.
12:53
unless you argue that they only wanted to give the orphan bread because they saw the orphan and felt sympathy. Bu that's the same thing, but stipulating that the bread-giving is dependant on perception. (Which is probably much more accurate to life IMO)
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Buggy
[i guess it would also help to settle on a more concrete definition of what a moral/moral system is, too.]
Overmind 06/08/2021 12:55 PM
Incidentally, where this is concerned, I like to use RFC 2119 as a guideline, and specifically it's three-layer system.
12:55
The difference between MUST and MUST NOT; SHOULD and SHOULD NOT; and MAY and MAY NOT.
12:56
https://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2119.txt
12:57
In 'verse terms, MUST and MUST NOT are the core deontology, the Fundamental Contract. Absolute requirements and prohibitions, the global, essential and obligatory. Shut up and do it. (edited)
12:59
SHOULD and SHOULD NOT are the arêtaic layer wrapped around it, the Nine Excellences, Five Noble Precepts, and so forth. It is at least possible that there are valid situations and reasons in which it might be permissible to derogate from these, but "the full implications must be understood and carefully weighed before choosing a different course". Think bloody hard about it, in other words, and if in doubt, stick with the virtues that have been carefully considered and defined by people with more time and brains than you have. (edited)
13:00
MAY and MAY NOT, on the other hand, are more like guidelines than actual rules. At the other end of the spectrum from the Contract, they're personal and supererogatory rather than global, essential and obligatory.
13:01
The top end of this spectrum is ethics; the bottom end is morality.
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Buggy 06/08/2021 1:04 PM
ah, that works then. i was just confused because i've seen morals/ethics used interchangably, so it's good to establish what they are so no one ends up countering a argument with "no wait, that's not morals. Morals are 'specific thing that meets the common definition but doesn't work with the argument'."
13:05
i was using it fairly broadly myself, so that it essentially covered all three layers of the spectrum. A complete system that describes the rules a person follows, with the rules varying in their importance but all being part of the system.
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Overmind 06/08/2021 1:06 PM
(With regard to that particular example, the Fundamental Contract says that stealing is wrong and the Nine Excellences describe the virtues of clemency, generosity, and kindness, from which the correct course of action is readily deducible.)
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Buggy 06/08/2021 1:08 PM
as i see it, having and wanting flex in a system is a sign that there are MUSTs that shouldn't be
13:09
if a specific person looks at that example and the MUST of no stealing, and the SHOULD of generosity or sympathy or w/e it is that drives them to allow the bread to be stolen, that's essentially saying that specific person wants a different moral system where stealing is a SHOULD NOT
13:10
a person seeing that action as 'right' means, fundamentally, the system of right/wrong they're using for that definition doesn't match them
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BluejayHurricane 06/08/2021 1:10 PM
If you have really good inflexible principles, that is the best possible thing. If you aren’t sure your principles are as good as you hope, then not leaving in room for mercy or charity or kindness is an absolute disaster.
13:12
Any morals I have are probably less than perfect, and I’d like to be able to err on the side of kindness, which implies flexibility.
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Buggy 06/08/2021 1:14 PM
hmm, thinking about it, i guess i'm basically saying that for a single person, their ideal/preferred/flexed-towards moral system is equivalent to their utility function, and for a group, it's equivalent to their averaged-or-otherwise-merged utility function
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Buggy
if a specific person looks at that example and the MUST of no stealing, and the SHOULD of generosity or sympathy or w/e it is that drives them to allow the bread to be stolen, that's essentially saying that specific person wants a different moral system where stealing is a SHOULD NOT
Overmind 06/08/2021 1:15 PM
Ah, but you shouldn't allow the bread to be stolen. Obviously, stealing is forbidden, and the orphan in question must pay the appropriate price for that violation of the contract. Ethics demands it. On the other hand, as the Excellences teach us, we should be clement, generous, and kind. These two things do not contradict each other. tl;dr make them give the bread back, then give them some bread.
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Overmind
Ah, but you shouldn't allow the bread to be stolen. Obviously, stealing is forbidden, and the orphan in question must pay the appropriate price for that violation of the contract. Ethics demands it. On the other hand, as the Excellences teach us, we should be clement, generous, and kind. These two things do not contradict each other. tl;dr make them give the bread back, then give them some bread.
Buggy 06/08/2021 1:17 PM
by the Fundamental Contract, Nine Excellencies, and co., yes. But while that is a good moral system, it's not one that many humans follow
13:20
i'm speaking more about what flexibility is ultimately flexing towards, and that's what a average-human-on-the-street wants it to be. And i'm also arguing that it also ends up being kinda stupid; you get things like the preferred treatment of individuals depending on perception and emotional relation to those individuals, so family members get off with crimes and hated celebrities get their house burned down. That's stupid, ergo lets not flex.
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Overmind 06/08/2021 1:21 PM
The superior sophont, if I may borrow a Confucian term, will turn this little exercise in applied mélith into a scenario in which our protagonist not only repays the wronged baker but comes out the other side of a positive-sum scenario with not only bread, but also some skills to allow him to obtain his own future-bread by honorable means, if not more. The real trick of virtue, after all, is proper application .
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Buggy 06/08/2021 1:21 PM
(and by corrolary, the system should also be good enough to not end up with stupid problems resulting from inflexibility)
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Overmind
The superior sophont, if I may borrow a Confucian term, will turn this little exercise in applied mélith into a scenario in which our protagonist not only repays the wronged baker but comes out the other side of a positive-sum scenario with not only bread, but also some skills to allow him to obtain his own future-bread by honorable means, if not more. The real trick of virtue, after all, is proper application .
Buggy 06/08/2021 1:22 PM
Which is definitely a much better outcome overall
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Buggy
by the Fundamental Contract, Nine Excellencies, and co., yes. But while that is a good moral system, it's not one that many humans follow
Overmind 06/08/2021 1:22 PM
Eh, well, one has to show some of that clemency towards the less fortunate species. 😋 (edited)
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Buggy 06/08/2021 1:23 PM
this is true
13:27
there's also a difference of... not sure of a word for it, but: A average citizen-shareholder would pretty much always agree with the Contract et al. They say the MUSTs are what they must be, the SHOULDs all should be, and the MAYs are as they may. While they might want to break some of the rules in some situation, you could expect that they have a understanding in the back of their head that those are what they are for a reason. But a average human in the bread-orphan scenario is liable to think what amounts to "stealing is specifically and clearly a okay thing in this scenario". There is no "I really shouldn't let allow stealing because its a MUST NOT, even in this scenario".
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BluejayHurricane
If you have really good inflexible principles, that is the best possible thing. If you aren’t sure your principles are as good as you hope, then not leaving in room for mercy or charity or kindness is an absolute disaster.
Overmind 06/08/2021 1:28 PM
The trouble you may run into is that erring "on the side of kindness" is still error and may lead to most unfortunate consequences, oft ironically unkind in the longer term. Sympathy is a two-edged sword. (See further details in the Book of Fluttershy, various chapters.)
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Buggy
there's also a difference of... not sure of a word for it, but: A average citizen-shareholder would pretty much always agree with the Contract et al. They say the MUSTs are what they must be, the SHOULDs all should be, and the MAYs are as they may. While they might want to break some of the rules in some situation, you could expect that they have a understanding in the back of their head that those are what they are for a reason. But a average human in the bread-orphan scenario is liable to think what amounts to "stealing is specifically and clearly a okay thing in this scenario". There is no "I really shouldn't let allow stealing because its a MUST NOT, even in this scenario".
Overmind 06/08/2021 1:29 PM
I think of that one as a varietal of "being bloody awful at generalizing in general" bias.
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Buggy 06/08/2021 1:30 PM
it is, but it's also a argument that humans should not be following a flexible moral system unless the moral system is really badly made and you actually get better results from flexing.
13:32
for much the same reason, say, you keep a bottle of metaphorical society-corroding acid contained in a acid-proof bottle that prevents it from flowing and protonating all it's surroundings as acid is wont to do. (edited)
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Overmind 06/08/2021 1:35 PM
This metaphor needs oh so much refining, but something about how principles are the steel of the heart, but like all other steel, they are hard, cold, and unforgiving. Virtue is the padding that keeps us from being hurt when we run into them. (edited)
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Buggy 06/08/2021 1:37 PM
unrefined or not, it's already a better metaphor than society-corroding acid (edited)
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0111narwhalz 06/08/2021 1:44 PM
I figure that my conscience is probably approximately correct, and work to codify (and account for edge-cases, et cetera) from there.
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Morgrim Moon 06/08/2021 7:42 PM
I'd say most humans wouldn't apply the flexibility in the "stealing is wrong" bit, they'd apply it in the "how should the theft be punished" bit. Which is more clemency, and somewhat in line with the scenario above. Even in real-world situations where police have gone and bought items for the desperate person I've not seen them say the person was RIGHT to steal
19:43
circling back to the cars: I think there are three possible optimisations that could be followed, and the debate is going to be about which one the AI picks. - optimise for the least damage to all humans involved - optimise for the least damage to all occupants of the vehicle - optimise for the least damage to the driver
19:44
at the moment with human drivers, in crashes number 3 tends to be what happens. Instincts are powerful things. 2 happens in some circumstances. Most people say 1, but that very rarely happens in the heat of the moment and could lead to direct market impacts
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ZestyLemon 06/26/2021 4:58 AM
https://eldraeverse.com/2012/09/13/the-cpu-of-fate/ interesting and kinda.... uplifting
Alistair Young
The CPU of Fate
To primitive peoples, the world is a place of telos.  Created for a purpose; moving towards a purpose; ending with that purpose. Of course, as they develop the scientific method and practice it ass…
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Overmind 08/09/2021 10:16 PM
Due to low volume this channel has been deemed redundant under the Channel Reorganization Plan. Please direct future #philosophical-holy-wars content to #general .
Overmind pinned a message to this channel. 08/09/2021 10:16 PM
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