Corvos
4hr ago
I, Robot? It's old-school but there's the satisfying 'oh... that's how the laws of robotics go wrong in this scenario' that he might appreciate, and it's short stories.
Corvos
16hr ago
Oh, I agree. But it's fascinating to live on the other side of that boundary. And I think "able to entertain logical propositions without being bound by them" is "smarter" in a meaningful way.
Corvos
20hr ago
Spending on American products and partnerships with American companies. Any Chinese tech / people interfacing with European infrastructure is treated as a security threat; nobody acts the same way about Americans and American products. The EU would certainly like to be self-sufficient but they ultimately trust and rely on Americans in the way that they absolutely don't trust the Russians and Chinese.
I get that this isn't the warm fuzzy sort of thing that would make you happy to support Europe, but geopolitically it's extremely important.
Corvos
1d ago
As the "bad mod" (yawn)
I will chime in with the others to say that this kind of thing is a blatant violation of the site’s rules on tone, and obviously hypocritical. You regularly insult and demean posters in your comments and your mod notes; many of those users are admittedly no better, but as a mod I think that you should be setting an example for how users should behave rather than pulling rank.
I deeply respect the volunteer work you have done for years, and as the most active mod I recognise that you are in many ways keeping the show on the road. Perhaps this kind of letting off steam is required for you to do that. Nevertheless, I do think that it is corrosive to the norms of this site which you are trying to maintain.
Corvos
3d ago
Humans actually did it. They created AI.
This struck me recently when replaying Portal 2. There’s a part where you’re going up against a rogue AI, armed with nothing more than hope and a logic paradox, and I remember suddenly being struck by the fact that this isn’t sci-fi any more.
I have GLaDOS and Wheatley in my pocket.
And it’s smarter than they are.
I hit ChatGPT with “this statement is false” and the reply was broadly, “Lol, indeed. Would you like to hear about some systems of formal logic where that statement can be valid?”
Corvos
3d ago
I can't wait for my transhumanist utopia... so that I can do "modernity was a mistake" without massive economic collapse and with the more genuinely horrible bits removed.
Actually, I just want to be a neo-Victorian gentleman of leisure with a country house and one of Gwern's Guardian Angels.
Corvos
3d ago
Nine democrats vote against late-term abortions
Democrats who rejected the bill included Reps. Brian Ashe, Lisa Field, Michael Finn, Dennis Gallagher, Russell Holmes, Christopher Markey, Francisco Paulino, Alan Silvia and Jeffrey Turco.
It is rare, to be fair.
on some level you are fine with children dying
if you support abortion in the US, you effectively support Planned Parenthood
this is an organization that effectively pays people who deliberately kill babies
Those weasel words are doing an awful lot of work. In reality, as you know perfectly well, I am not keen on children dying and it is perfectly possible to support abortion in the US without supporting late-term abortions. A supermajority of your fellow citizens do.
Regarding your equivocation on what exactly pro-abortion people support
I gave you facts about what pro-abortion people support. You don't like those facts, and they don't support your case, but that is not my problem.
This is similar to the gish-gallop of the pro-trans
I think that the person accusing people of supporting sexual slavery and mutilation of children if they allow immigration from the Middle East, and supporting child-murder if they don't support an absolute ban on abortion, should show a little self-awareness before accusing other people of bad argumentative practices.
Our governments are just as effective at stopping child abuse as they are at stopping school shootings or stopping teenagers from smoking the Devil's lettuce.
If you want to argue that we should close down ineffective government departments, be my guest. I'm pretty sure we have most of the same political opinions, but frankly your arguments for them leave much to be desired.
If you support abortion, you agree that it is sometimes okay to kill a child
That one. Abortion, as standardly practised and as it is in most people's heads, is killing a small and non-sapient lump of flesh. It may one day turn into something that we regard as a 'person' but it isn't one yet. Personhood is either assigned to it in anticipation of what it will someday be, or because of church doctrine that holds that personhood is about ensoulment rather than sapience and that ensoulment happens at conception.
Naturally, if you alter the passage to distinguish fetuses from children it stops making sense:
If you support abortion, you agree that it is sometimes okay to kill a small ball of nonsapient flesh. Therefore you do not care about the well-being of that small ball of non-sapient flesh being killed. Therefore there are some five-year-olds whose well-being you don't care about that much. Therefore it is possible we could agree on a way to relax government standards around five-year-old safety, considering the deleterious downstream effects on parents, family formation, birth rates and society in general.
I'm not asking you to agree with that distinction, only to recognise that many others do.
A much more exaggerated version would be "If you use disinfectants, you kill millions of living things on your kitchen top. Therefore you do not care about the wellbeing of those living things, and there are living things whose well-being you don't care about that much. Therefore, it is possible that we should could exterminate the more inconvenient races in our country. You've already shown you're okay with exterminating living things."
I'm not aiming this at you, necessarily, but while I have some sympathy with the anti-abortion movement they have a strong tendency to refuse to acknowledge any difference between an early fetus and a small child. It seems to me to mirror the refusal of left-wingers to admit any difference between genociding a group by hacking them apart with carving knives and 'genociding' them by forbidding their ancestral practice of gory human sacrifice. What is sometimes called the non-central fallacy. It increases the passion of their movement, and makes debate futile in ways that can be advantageous, but it still seems disingenuous and it makes it harder for people to understand each other.
(I am in no way saying that the pro-abortion movement is devoid of rhetorical dirty-tricks. Faaaaaar from it.)
EDIT: I see this comment wasn't aimed at me. Downside of reading from the comments feed.
Many pro-abortion people support abortion way after the 24 weeks limit of viability outside the womb.
Only 4-5% of Britons think abortion should be extended beyond the current 24 weeks limit according to Pew surveys.
YouGov found that 19% of Americans felt abortion should be illegal at all ages, 9% felt that it should be legal beyond 27 weeks, and the remaining 73% of Americans felt that abortion became morally impermissible at some time between 0 weeks and 27 weeks. So that's 7 out of 8 pro-abortionists opposed.
Responses fluctate depending on exactly how you word the question, but Gallup put 13% of people thought third-trimester abortion should be legal (remember that's out of the 80% who are okay with abortion in general). That rose to 20% in 2022, almost certainly because of Roe vs. Wade making the issue salient and tribal, again out of 80% who are broadly comfortable with some level of abortion. A supermajority of pro-abortion voters continue to oppose it.
All of this is before you start distinguishing 'I don't think this should be illegal, there are times when it might be appropriate' to 'I think that people should kill pre-term babies for fun'.
There's just no way you can get from this to 'most people are fine with children dying'.
Euphemism for cultures that practice child marriage or sex slavery, genital mutilation, slavery in general...
Pro-refugee open-borders types overwhelmingly think that these are libels that almost never happen, and to the extent that they do happen, will stop happening with some education. Again, you simply cannot get from "I think we need to take in people who are desperately poor, suffering, and often persecuted by their government; it would be terrible if one of them did something nasty to a child but we can't let millions of people suffer just in case one of them does something bad," to "I'm basically okay with children being raped and enslaved, who needs Child Services?".
Most people who are pro-abortion have a definition of 'child' that does include bouncing three-year-olds and does not include balls of 256 totipotent cells. I feel sure you know this. You can disapprove all you like, but deducing that therefore abortionists are a-ok with the murder or neglect of three-year-olds is logically fallacious (and wrong). Thus, the requirement to be able to state somebody else's beliefs in terms they'd accept, because if you can do that then you won't make fallacious arguments like
completely dismantle the child protective services' apparatus. Who even cares about that, objectively speaking? Left-wingers clearly don't care about children's well-being when they support abortion. They also do not in general care about child abuse, or they would not demand the mass importation of parents from countries where the standards of child safety are significantly relaxed.
because you know that being pro-abortion does not have anything to do with whether you are for brutalising little children, and neither does relaxing 'standards of child safety'. There are the rare mentally ill person who genuinely doesn't give a damn about children, or sadistically wants children to suffer, but they're rare as hell.
demonstrably not maximally concerned about the well-being of children
Who is maximally concerned about the well-being of children? Me? You? There are other things in the world that get traded off against the well-being of children: time, cost, convenience, the richness of life for those over 8 years old, potentially the right of refugees not to be tortured to death in their home countries depending on your immigration views. That doesn't mean you have no concern for child protection.
Corvos
4d ago
there are spaces online where Anime is discussed in Japanese
Yahoo? 2chan/8kun? I was never really able to find the native Japanese internet. Or were you speaking generally?
Corvos
5d ago
Not commenting on you in either way but I think believing:
The 21st century escalation of the culture war is largely driven by social media
vs.
Social media made it impossible to continue suppressing non-approved perspectives
is the primary division that makes somebody either 'centrist' or 'populist/far-/alt-/whatever-you-want-to-call-it'.
An opinion can be interesting in so many ways. I wish you luck on your voyage of discovery.
Corvos
7d ago
But AI blatantly has a theory of other minds. You can ask it “if I did X, what would Y think?” It passes a disguised version of the Smarties test with ease.
You’re talking about callousness, which is an entirely different matter, and one that our helpfulness training already broadly trains out.
Accessibility options have become the modern equivalent. I found that several games went from deeply annoying and painful to awesome through switching accessibility settings. Most notably Pacific Drive.
Corvos
9d ago
Your tastes are your own, but I think lots of people don’t particularly need or want deep or mastery-based gameplay. Myself included.
If you’re mostly there for the story, gameplay is basically something to keep your hands busy and get the plot pacing right. It should look good and feel good (ME1 doesn’t really pass that test) without being too deep or intimidating.
It got finished by Brandon Sanderson in case you weren't aware, using Jordan's notes, after being chosen by Jordan’s widow. That was one of the major elements propelling Sanderson to fame.
My understanding is that Sanderson managed to tie up most of the loose ends and get back to the main characters pretty well, though I never finished the series myself. I have a sort of affection for the later books just because with Rand they go into character/political territory that ordinary fantasy (and indeed Dark Fantasy which has its own genre constraints) never actually has to get into, but I have to admit that my rereads usually stop at the end of book 5.
Corvos
9d ago
To be fair, Jordan was well aware he might not be able to finish the series himself, and planned it carefully and left all his notes so another writer could do the job. ( @RoyGBivensAction ).
Corvos
9d ago
You would know better than I, I'm afraid, but I'm interested to learn.
I think it's really more about the the sound itself
I considered that but assumed that the association was Germanic/Anglo -> short and harsh (German tends to sound harsh to English ears) not the other way round. It's quite possible I was mistaken, and the 'nigger' pair backs up your hypothesis since obviously they are both latinate.
If he likes animals, the Willard Price books ("Undersea Adventure" and the like) are also perennial classics.
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