Exotic_cetacean
Aesthetics over ethics
No bio...
User ID: 102
Exotic_cetacean
Aesthetics over ethics
5mo ago
"To have an opportunity to talk with actual people" sounds like a really low bar to clear for an internet forum. Even if your AI slop tasted exactly like the real thing, it would just be good manners to refrain from clogging our airwaves with that.
Knowing that you're talking with something sapient has an inherent value, and this value might very well go up in the coming years. I can't say I even understand why'd you think anyone would find AI outputs interesting to read.
or maybe just ban me, I'm too old now to just nod and play along with gingerly preserved, increasingly obsolete traditions of some authoritarian Reddit circus. Anyway, I like that post and that's all I care about.
Bizarre reaction. But I like a sincere, organically produced tantrum better than simulation of one, so I'd rank this post as higher than the one above!
Exotic_cetacean
Aesthetics over ethics
2mo ago
Speaking of the legal force. Maybe you will have better luck on YouTube, or failing that just use VPN.
Exotic_cetacean
Aesthetics over ethics
5mo ago
Speaking of fences - do you have any guesses how did the US survive with government spending per capita dramatically lower than now for the first couple hundred years of its history?
I never felt invested in arguing about piracy simply because how unbelievably flimsy the whole idea of intellectual property is.
Utilitarian, practical angle: we use property claims, first and foremost, to avoid conflicts over scarce resources. Ideas and combinations of zeros and ones are not scarce. Maybe IP can be justified because it brings value by incentivizing creation? In the first place, I find it questionable that we should bring certain legal frankensteins into existence to maximize GDP per capita, but is this goal even achieved? How to price in costs of legal bickering over patents and lawsuits, big actors using IP to suppress potential competition? What about indirect consequences of curtailing individual freedoms and ever multiplying victimless crime legislation? Surely there's a better way to do this.
Deontological angle: Material and Intellectual property as similar things - intuitive at first glance analogy, after all we could say that creator makes a certain "thing" that he can then "own" because he made it. However, as mentioned before, IP is not scarce and IP holder loses nothing from piracy, and often gains in exposure and influence. Surely it's clear that this analogy doesn't really work. And how applying this ethical principle looks in reality? Is an Indian kid downloading a western textbook because he can't possibly afford buying western ip for dollars committing an ethically wrong act? Do people actually believe things like this? I imagine an IP advocate might bite the bullet and say that he commits a minor wrongdoing that is balanced out by him benefiting from the "theft" a-la a starving man being justified in stealing bread, but I find this whole thing laughable. Though not as laughable as I find calling breaking IP laws piracy. Ah, yes, sea-faring robbers and murderers is a very apt analogy for downloading certain combinations of zeros and ones. It's so absurd that I can't help but like it.
Edit: strongest argument in favor of IP was voiced by one of the other commenters - basically that by disregarding certain laws of the land, no matter what they are, we compromise our social fabric in an ever so small way. It's a real concern, though it would have more weight if our governments and laws were much closer to perfection than they are. I would rather put the blame squarely at legislators for outlawing mundane, victimless actions, making sure that a big chunk of the population will find themselves committing legal crimes at some point or another, which certainly doesn't benefit society.
Now excuse me, I have some torrents to unapologetically download. Yo ho ho and a bottle of rum.
Disagree. Satisfying social needs with AI is like satisfying sex needs with an inflatable sex doll, and both will stay incredibly low-status. Especially in the scenario of dramatic automation: if you have the time, you really run out of excuses to just sit in your room and chat with computers.
Exotic_cetacean
Aesthetics over ethics
1yr ago
This is all so tiresome. Since we are going wild with ambitious proposals, how about we deport the Jews instead?
This would have to take place some decades in the future, when the space tech matures a little. That, or we just give the Jews longer deadlines. Everybody (by that I mean mostly the US) does their best to convince the Jews that the promised holy land is, in fact, on Mars. They are then strongly incentivized, both through threats, as well as generous funding, to use their superior IQ to settle the red planet. The place is admittedly somewhat drier, but on the other hand, a lot more spacious and with no neighbors to complain. I'm sure they'll do fine.
Benefits of my plan:
-Space development dramatically accelerated.
-Final solution to Jewish settlement problem. Jews don't bother anyone and no one is bothering the Jews.
-The Palestinians can have their cursed patch of desert all to themselves.
Exotic_cetacean
Aesthetics over ethics
5mo ago
Mid by what metric, pray tell?
Exotic_cetacean
Aesthetics over ethics
2yr ago
That picture of Pope Francis in a puffer coat got me thinking:
AI generation of highly realistic images is a problem. Ideally, we would want a reliable way to distinguish truth from lies. So we train another AI to spot the difference. Then someone trains a different AI to fool both humans and AIs.
Will this be an endless arms race? Will one side win?
Are there actually many sci-fi books that excel not just at exploring fun sci-fi themes, but at actually delivering good prose and characters? The trend of having only the former is so persistent that I came to assume that having these two at the same time is supremely difficult for some reason, like running out of skill points when creating an RPG character.
Exotic_cetacean
Aesthetics over ethics
7mo ago
That would be a lot more convincing if we didn't incur permanent damage to our bodies merely by staying alive.
Exotic_cetacean
Aesthetics over ethics
1yr ago
I didn't quite reach Marcus Aurelius yet, but I've read a few books on Roman history this year and it's more or less a story of how Roman citizens just can't catch a break. I'm somewhat less impressed with Hoppean "kings have low time preference" argument now
Exotic_cetacean
Aesthetics over ethics
6mo ago
Every time I hear this...line of thought I feel frustration with some black amusement mixed in.
NATO is problematic, if not irresponsibly hostile, while very literal aggressive expansionism from Russia itself, when it's not outright 'dindu nuffin', is complicated and needs to be understood in context, and it's their backyard, and nothing is ever black and white like that, you know.
All of this, and more, is possible at the modest price of dramatically lowering the standards to which Russia is being held.
One would be forgiven for thinking that Russia in this frame is something akin to a rabid dog that just can't be blamed for trying to tear every careless passerby's throat out.
I almost agree, though somehow the proposed solution always amounts to sticking one's head in the sand, sending thoughts and prayers to those unable to afford the luxury, and hoping everything will work out somehow, while simultaneously trying best to create the impression that this is the tough, sober, "realist" approach to international politics.
Exotic_cetacean
Aesthetics over ethics
1yr ago
Forget Americans for now, what do you make of Europe and their "infinite flood of sub-Saharan Africans and Arabs" (as opposed to Mexicans and Guatemalans) predicament?
I'm a libertarian too, and I see it as something that obviously puts the existence of (Western) European civilization as such in peril.
I think there's a problem with priorities here.
If self defense is illegal...
if carrying pointy objects of wrong shape, let alone firearms is illegal....
if freedom of association is outlawed...
if natives are heavily taxed, but foreigners are subsidized...
if you live in an anarcho-tyranny state and the "authorities" are happy to prosecute natives for violation of one of the arcane regulation clauses written down in one of the many tomes of legislation, but are terribly afraid to investigate, prosecute, sentence, let alone deport a Muslim foreigner for rape and plunder...
letting open borders be used as a weapon against you seems rather short-sighted, even if in a better world something as crude as building a wall and physically removing aliens from your country might be less practiced.
Exotic_cetacean
Aesthetics over ethics
1yr ago
There is a Twitter account called "Trump history" and it's somehow the funniest thing on the internet I've seen in a while. It's like a historical trivia account, except every post alleges Trump's role in every conceivable historical event, backing it up by an AI-generated illustration.
There's something hilarious in the idea of Trump as a fixture of human civilization, guiding and guarding mankind through millennia.
Exotic_cetacean
Aesthetics over ethics
1mo ago
Agree on LGBT, but for mental illness, it might be too lax, actually
We can't easily filter for "a total bitch who will drive you insane if you will have the misfortune to put a ring on her", so the next best thing is diagnosed mental illness. These categories heavily overlap, but the bitch category is almost certainly larger.
There seems to be a motte/bailey dynamic here. You put it more mildly, so maybe you will disagree somewhat with the bailey, but it's common enough that I hope you indulge me.
Motte: It's reasonable for states to care about their international influence, more so when their neighbors are concerned. When a highly culturally and linguistically related people and a former colony attempts to steer away, expect attempts to prevent this.
Bailey: It was predictable all along that these attempts include abrupt abandonment of other options in favor of an all out war, with all of the inevitable costs that would ensue in the best case scenario. It also includes doubling down for years when the best case scenario did not materialize.
Just tragic geopolitical dominos falling and rulers forced into ugly decisions, nothing to do with a septuagenarian autocrat gradually detaching from the real world, ending up spending fortunes and immolating hundreds of thousands of both his enemy's and his own citizens on sacrificial pyre of boomer retardation
Exotic_cetacean
Aesthetics over ethics
1yr ago
I finished the latest installment of Sun Eater the other day.
Unlike a certain infamous fat garden gnome, Ruocchio is a fruitful writer - he puts out a book every 1.5 years or so, with the conclusion of the series planned for next year. I might as well shill it and share some of my impressions here, he well deserves it.
1.Sun Eater is a space opera about a traitor and genocidal murderer to some, hero of mankind to others. Told from his own perspective, as a memoir that he writes at the dusk of his life. From the first pages, Dune and Warhammer influences become apparent, but I quickly forgot about this: don't let anyone say that Ruocchio doesn't have his own creative voice.
2.The quality of writing—the way the books are written word-by-word, sentence-by-sentence—is where Ruocchio really shines, and that's fortunate, since I consider this to be the backbone of any work of fiction. In this regard, Ruocchio mogs...wait, the spell checker is upset with me for using zoomer dialect...I meant to say dramatically outperforms most authors I've ever read, and the vast majority of modern writers overall. He will make you open a dictionary a few times if you want to understand some sentences fully, but the prose is by no means overly ornate. It's elegant, memorable, and quite detached from modern conversational English, fittingly for something presented as the writing of a far-future aristocrat. Maybe there's something to say in favor of the more down-to-earth style most common in modern prose, but my guess is that most other writers don't write as Ruocchio simply because they lack the wits and sufficient command of their language.
3.I find evil/irreconcilably antagonistic aliens to be a much more interesting direction to take than the Star Trek approach, or, god forbid, "humans are the real evil". It's not just that it's terribly overdone and tediously misanthropic in practice, hostile aliens seem inherently more plausible. Finding common ground with beings that share our own nature is challenging enough. Competition for resources might not be the most plausible cause for conflict when interstellar civilizations are concerned, but there are any number of others to explore.
4.I enjoy speculations on alien cultures and theology, and here Ruocchio doesn't disappoint either. We humans can observe our flaws and some of the worst animal inclinations in ourselves easily enough.
The Cielcin can as well, and as their condition is more degraded and repulsive, even given their habituation to it, they draw more radical conclusions than most human religions. They remind me of Gnostics, believing this universe to be corrupted and seeking release from it. They also resemble Muslims in their rejection of the visual arts.
Exotic_cetacean
Aesthetics over ethics
1yr ago
This seems to be just a regular mildly charitable interpretation to me?
Per Merriam-Webster, Hunka would be a Nazi if he was either a
1.Member of the Nazi party
2.Supported Nazi ideology.
He wasn't a party member, and superficial search doesn't give any indication of him being an ideological Nazi.
There's a small matter of him fighting under Nazi command but given the historical context, it's entirely plausible, indeed probable, that him volunteering had nothing to do with a sympathy toward Nazis, but rather hatred of communists
Exotic_cetacean
Aesthetics over ethics
1yr ago
Ukraine put the Pope on official list of enemies.
Worth noting that this didn't happen. It's not an official list of Ukrainian enemies (the Pope isn't even in that list, but that's details)
Exotic_cetacean
Aesthetics over ethics
1yr ago
I would push even further than Nybbler and assert that "the Holocaust should happen" is not specific and concrete enough to be a candidate for "call to violence" exception.
Given the very special treatment of the holocaust in comparison to other genocides one could make a good case that the holocaust legislation amounts to little more than anti-blasphemy laws.
I broadly agree, and though I don't have inspiration to say too much, I will leave a quote that captures our atheist condition rather succinctly:
...In such a world, you are living your life inside a coffin. Now, this may be a large coffin, and certain things like love and family and rewarding work or temporary artistic experiences may distract you or please you for a certain time, but that time will pass and those things will fail and die, and you will be in the coffin whether you distract yourself from that horrible reality or not
I'm trying to figure out what I should be thinking about AI (largely in attempt to get away from rat-sphere's alarmists and their uncomfortably plausible arguments), so I started by doing the first obvious thing: looking for notable AI skeptics.
Here's the punchline: I used chat GPT for that purpose. Not without mistakes, but on cursory look it seems like the answers are largely correct, most of these are actual people matching the criteria. It gave me five, then I asked "give me some more" and it gave me more. Few months ago something like that would take me a lot more effort in googling, unless I lucked out and someone already did the job for me and I could find it somewhere on internet's surface.
Fuck.
To desire to be more is a part of being human.
Where's the limit to what a human can be? Who's to say? Perhaps there isn't one. If we were to attempt to trap ideal individual in a conceptual box, to limit him to a specific set of characteristics, then at some level, disappointment appears to be inevitable. Any given definition can be retorted with - "That sounds great, a lot better than now, sure. But is it really all we can be?"
When put in theological terms - it's our mission to climb the ladder to God, using tools that he gave us. Estimated time of arrival: one eternity from now.
Ideal human society in this framework is one of multitudes rather than unity, one that allows for experimentation and different ways of being, acknowledging that we don't actually know what is the best way of going forward.
Exotic_cetacean
Aesthetics over ethics
1yr ago
Inspired by this post, but it's kind of buried there, and the topic has decidedly nothing to do with culture wars, so I took the liberty of taking it here. After going through a similar line of thought, I've concluded that the best argument in favor of free will I can think of is Magic.
"Magic is Awesome!" approach to free will
I owe Sapolsky for helping me to articulate this.
I recall him putting forward this very argument, complaining about how free will is incoherent and would have to be powered by magic. This got me wondering: does magic actually deserve to be dismissed with such contempt? For the purposes of this post, I explicitly reject the Clarkian definition of "magic" as anything merely outside of our current knowledge, but use it to indicate something that is inscrutable in a far more profound way. Consider two problems:
1. Consciousness. No scientific framework predicts it, no theory can explain it. No experiment can be devised to test it. We have no idea how consciousness works. What's more interesting is that we have no idea how to get an idea of how consciousness works. It doesn't have to be there, yet there it is. If this isn't Magic, what is?
2. Why are we here? Why is anything? One option is that one thing causes another, and another, back-propagating in the past...forever. All the way down. Personally, I find this idea unsatisfying somehow, if not downright annoying. But even if that's how it is, we are still left with the question of why does it do it, and the best you will ever be able to come up with is some variant of "it just does, I guess". This positively stinks of Magic.
The more old-fashioned alternative to an infinite causal chain is a finite causal chain, one that terminates with God—the uncaused cause, the unmoved mover... Magic? Magic.
We could even ask whether God could share a bit of this Magic juice with some of his creations; we could call it a divine spark or something like that.
That's part of the reason why common in these circles brand of autistic materialism doesn't sit right with me. Both the place we live in and our very direct experience of it seem to be a middle finger to rationality.
I don't believe that free will is something spurious and irrelevant to ethics and meaning. I'm also not convinced that linguistic atrocities like molesting the definition of free will until it's compatible with determinism are of any help here.
If you're of the same mind, "magic is awesome!" seems to be a nice motto to live by.
Ye, better known as Kanye West has released a song titled "Heil Hitler"
I have to admit, it's quite catchy, especially the unlikely refrain "nigger, Heil Hitler", which definitely has an intriguing ring to it. Whether Kanye is a truly great artist or not, he's nothing if not a skilled craftsman.
I've long since lost the ability to treat anything on the internet seriously and my reaction was limited to squeezing my eyes shut and suppressing a chuckle, but I suspect that the wider audience is also outraged only in a performative, inertial way. I doubt it will end up making any real impact on anything and waves in the social media will likely fizzle out in no more than a few weeks.
I wonder if we're seeing the first signs of postmodern corrosion eating away at the last grand unifying narrative of our age: WW2 mythos, with Adolf Hitler at its center not as mere historical figure, but as the archetypal villain and the secular devil. In many countries the taboo is backed by legal force, but legislation doesn't truly govern things of this nature. The law may end up hollowed out and irrelevant long before someone cares to remove it from the books
Maybe I will live to tell my incredulous grandkids about how we were all expected to perceive one specific 20th century dictator through a prism of quasi-superstitious dread.
Should this really happen, good riddance. Though on the other hand, we might end up remembering having this kind of culture spanning, unifying narrative as kind of comfy compared to total balkanization
More options
Context Copy link