MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
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User ID: 1783
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
9hr ago
I think there’s a danger of too much escapism, but I don’t think it terrible that someone might occasionally dip out of hard reality for a time to rest from the cares of this world. The issue, like most other things is the degree to which it gets in the way of other things, things that benefit you now and in the future.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
10hr ago
Most of the insiders are unnamed, and given that they’re working various forms of espionage and intelligence, they’d be more likely than the average American to concoct a cover story, especially if the truth is something they don’t want other countries to know about.
My best be it that this is about explaining away things that are being tested by the government in ways that would make sense to other countries.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
10hr ago
I mean if you had met a Klingon, I would think it would be hard to not mention it to someone, especially given the absolute mania in the West for stories of aliens going back to HG Wells, and through Buck Roger’s in the 1940s and so on. Add in that any scientist with proof of alien life (and it would not even need to be intelligent, just alive and on another planet) would be the winner of the highest honors science has to offer, as well as book offers, sell out speaking engagements, and be the most famous scientist since Einstein, and the fact that no one has claimed those prizes, the money, the fame, or the career security that such proof would bring is pretty strong negative evidence.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
10hr ago
I’ll always go back to the first important question of whether or not there’s the possibility of aliens or alien technology: if they are really aliens, why can’t we point to a signal from deep space? Why can’t we hear chatter or detect engines or Dyson spheres or other forms of building in either deep space or on a planet? In short, how are these things getting here without bases, ships or cities on another planet. We needed a global civilization to launch glorified missiles at the moon. That’s almost nothing compared to the amount of infrastructure needed to launch something like the fictitious Enterprise. Even if we grant the rather dubious idea of FTL travel, you still need advanced civilization based on at least one planet to build the ship (likely several planets linked by trade). Yet, we have no evidence of even life on other planets. Certainly no cities have been discovered, let alone solar system spanning infrastructure necessary to build our starship. Absent that, I don’t see any reason to invent concepts of aliens to explain this stuff. 1,2 and 4 require that there be a solar system spanning civilization out there. 5 and 3 don’t. And 3 would be something that the government would want to protect. You don’t want Chinese spies to know exactly which companies are producing technology decades ahead of conventional technology.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
11hr ago
I mean I suppose it depends on the immigrants and the compatibility of the culture. Chinese secular people would generally fit within the framework of American secular culture just fine. But if you’re importing the supermen from less compatible culture groups, and allowing them to set up little ethnic bergs within your country you’ll eventually end up being a collection of incompatible cultures bound together by nothing more than a piece of cloth and a national anthem. Unless you want to jettison democracy to find a strongman to hold all of those ethnic groups and their competing interests together, you’re going to watch the thing fly apart at the speed that those groups learn to use the federal government to issue carve outs for them and no one else.
Also keep in mind that immigration is permanent and regression to the mean exists. You might import a super genius from Iran in 2026, but by 2050 his 4-5 kids won’t be much smarter than average. They’ll still be Iranian Shia Muslims, still have a lot of Iranian cultural baggage, and be much more interested in promoting the fortunes of Arab-Americans at the expense of everyone else’s ethnic groups.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
2d ago
It’s not unique. We absolutely do it here. We actively suppress alternative theories of societal governance, we punish dissent (in western liberal societies, this is run through informal institutions. The government creates a theory called “hostile environment”, and then says you can be sued if you allow that to exist. This results in people not saying certain things in public lest we be unjobbed or kicked out of public spaces for crimethink) just as completely as any communist country ever did. We propagandize very effectively through mass media and through weakening institutions that compete with the government. This is why private schools are often forced to teach similar curricula to public schools and why homeschooling is treated with extreme suspicion. Those are potential seeds of dissent against the state’s views on social and economic issues especially. You can’t have that sort of thing if the state wants control.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
2d ago
Personally I don't take the stance that we can only trust the official word of the state, tons of important stories come out precisely because people are willing to leak things but don't want to immediately destroy their careers.
On the other hand, such things are literally impossible for anyone other than the author of the piece to interrogate. Even if they, personally are telling the truth, there’s the issue of how many people actually agree with that statement, whether or not the information is first hand or just rumor, whether or not the person was knowledgeable about the phenomenon to really understand what they saw or thought they saw. All of that is acting upon the rather charitable assumption that these people are just concerned about the truth, when it could be all kids of things: not liking their job or boss, seeking notoriety, Believing that the wrong political party gained from this, etc. We literally cannot check; we have no answers to any of those questions.
By contrast, even though the official statements of the government are biased, we at least have some idea of what they know, where it comes from, what they are like, and what biases they have. The AG of Puerto Rico is known, he has a party affiliation that we know about, ambitions we know about, a past history we know about. It’s not something we have to guess at, he or she is a public figure whose name and history we have in front of us.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
4d ago
I mean other than trying to conquer the entire planet, sure. It’s kinda strange that Anglos invented the idea of conquest for liberal democracy.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
4d ago
I think this description is pretty accurate. I don’t see the left thinking anything can or will be actually fixed, and when someone proposes doing the thing it’s not enough because nothing is ever enough. We could deal with climate change through a combination of energy efficiency and investment in nuclear power. We could attempt to fix the inequalities by addressing things like education and culture (psst: if you want to get rich, your best bet is to learn math, science and engineering) and work ethic (rich people tend to work consistently where most people who end up poor also have terrible work ethics). Of course any attempt to do such a thing is going to be called racist or something. Or there will be all kinds of “structural reasons” to believe that no poor kid should be expected to do his homework while suffering from poverty. And you just can’t expect poor people to just keep working even when they just want to stay home. So poverty continues because while we know the things that need to happen to make a person more likely to be rich, we can’t do that.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
4d ago
Everyone would eventually do this given the ability. It’s in the nature of humans to form hierarchy and enforce their ideas of morality on society. It’s been that way for most of human history. I don’t think we’re that different.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
4d ago
The general idea is that the thing in question has an internal experience of itself. It has desires, thoughts, and ideas of its own. Like a person might have negative sensations around some task, or might think of something as good or bad. It might want something it has not been told to want. Like I have negative sensations when I injure myself.
But my issue with any of this is that it’s a question of whether or not some being has such internal states when direct observation of the internal states of another being is impossible. I simply cannot know what any other mind is thinking. I can observe it, I can ask it questions and observe the answers, but I cannot actually answer the question of whether or not an LLM has any internal subjective sense of itself as a separate being with its own wants and needs apart from whatever im trying to do with it.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
5d ago
I don’t think there is a way to answer the question simply because we really don’t have a good definition of consciousness, nor a good test for what kinds of things actually indicate that a given object or creature has consciousness.
Am I conscious right now? You could ask me and I could give answers that sound like consciousness, but could have just as easily been that some entity had told me to say (or think) that. Going further into lower animals, it’s hard to say that even things like dogs, cats, chickens, or fish are conscious beings. The best behavioral test we seem to have is a mirror test, which honestly doesn’t seem that indicative of consciousness but more of an understanding of what mirrors do — which means the animal lives around enough mirror like surfaces to understand the concept of reflection. Your most distant ancestors would have failed the test before the invention of mirrors.
The qualia concept isn’t terrible, except that it requires the person applying the test to make huge assumptions about the internal state of another creature. The usual phrasing is “is it like something to be an X”, but all you can actually do is observe behaviors and if the creature can think, ask it questions. You don’t have access to its actual internal sense of itself.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
7d ago
Extreme thinking in general tends to correspond to mental illness in a lot of cases. It’s not just the resulting panic about people disagreeing, but it takes a certain mindset to become obsessed with a topic long enough to be radicalized. You need to be isolated, you need to have a strong need to be obsessed, you need to have few connections to the rest of the human world, and really I find most people into radical politics are after a sense of power and control. A normal person with good real-world relationships, hobbies, sports interests, and a good job probably isn’t going to follow politics enough to become a radical. They have too many other things they care about.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
7d ago
I mean I’ve noticed this trend in all major political movements for a while now, and while it’s not literally everyone in a political “tribe”, it’s becoming much more common for people to orient their lives around their political beliefs even if they’re nominally religious. Tell me your political ideology, and I can probably predict a lot about your other beliefs and habits. Liberals tend to fetishize the products of other cultures— food, fashions, and art especially. They play up their differences from their neighbors and especially in their sex, gender and sexuality. They are much more likely to smoke weed (this might be just people I know). Conservatives very much favor Americana, especially things associated with country living, cowboys, and emphasize their similarities with their neighbors. Theres no reason that such a thing has to be.
By contrast, you very rarely (with the exception of fundamentalist Christians) find Christians orienting themselves and their beliefs and practices around Christianity to the degree that it impacts how they dress or behave in public. Theres no correlations for most modern Christians. There are for Muslims, or at least serious believers. They won’t violate their religion for conformity to politics.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
7d ago
I think honestly for a lot of people, politics is religion, it’s a complete world view that they take on faith that colors and shapes the rest of their lives. It comes with assumptions about what is good or evil, who and what humanity is, and how we deal with the environment and poverty and technology and so on. So it only makes sense that people now treat political differences the way someone would treat religious differences in an earlier era. There was a time when the denomination you followed was important enough to break relationships for. We don’t do that even with religion anymore— mixed religion relationships are perfectly acceptable in most cases. But if you lived in 1626, it would have mattered a great deal whether you were Catholic or Lutheran or Anglican and it would have been unthinkable to be close friends of anyone who didn’t share your faith, let alone a Muslim or Buddhist or Hindu or something.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
8d ago
I’m mostly thinking of the House and the electoral college. In both cases, California gets 50 votes, and thus can have a large influence on how things will happen. If you live in a less populated state, say Idaho with a whopping 4 electoral votes and 2 members of the House, you, for most practical purposes do not matter. No one looks at a piece of legislation and worries about pissing off Idaho. If something would harm a large state like CA, NY, PA, FL, it’s going to be hard to get the party to agree to do it. Most of the cultural issues are issues because they play in the urban core and big coastal states. If it were backward, and trans issues were viewed negatively in California but positively in Idaho, no one would be forcing the issue of things like bathroom bills.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
9d ago
I’m not sure that it’s possible to have a democracy and have rules about what parties can exist. Nor do I think democracies can survive when millions of people vote for parties of an authoritarian nature. I don’t see any way out of that conflict though. I’m almost to the point where you can have a stable democracy if you have the kinds of centralized media that used to exist, or you can have modern decentralized media and let democracy die of whatever populist movement that ultimately ends it.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
9d ago
I think in order to get Haute Couture in any type of art you need a civilization that still buys its own narrative and one that expects the future to be as least as good as the past. The people building cathedrals imagined that their descendents would be burning incense before the host at the altar a thousand years in the future. They imagined themselves at the beginning of a grand future that would see their descendants living lives they could only fantasize about. If we legitimately believed that our civilization would eventually build a future like our science fiction utopias, and that our civilization was basically right about how to get there, we’d have no problem producing great buildings and great art and great stories. China can produce great works. The bird nest dome at the Olympics was pretty cool I think. We are getting the Olympics, and im mostly expecting them to mostly push the homeless people out of the main venues for two weeks. But we don’t really believe our own mythology anymore, we don’t really think our great great grandchildren will explore the universe in a starship easy chair. We don’t really take our religion seriously anymore (the fundamentalists do, but they’re not a large segment of the population). Why would a civilization that is disillusioned and thinks it’s best days are in the past bother to build or create?
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
9d ago
Congress is more and more of a rump every term. The regulatory agencies and the president are doing most of the work that Congress used to do. It’s one reason I don’t exactly hate that Trump is ignoring the process. Congress is as useless as the old Roman Senate which became a glorified debate society long before Caesar showed up. Ours is basically there, and so I expect nothing less, if Trump isn’t the founder of the Empire, the founder is coming.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
9d ago
I think most blocs are cultural in at least some sense. It’s just like anything else. Rural Americans have been conservative for a long time now. Evangelicals in many churches would consider a vote for a democrat to be sinful. Is that a sober analysis of political positions? It’s part of the culture.
As to the ridiculous division of power in the country, honestly I think our current system is too flawed to work. It really seems to solidify the ideas of some blocks over others. Yes the individual voter in a large state is disempowered in the senate, but he’s also overpowered in the House and the presidential elections. California has 54 electoral votes. Pennsylvania has 20+. Those states have outsized influence over national politics. If you lose all of the big population states, you lose. Heck, if you lose the northwest corridor you have an uphill battle, especially if you’re a Republican who won’t have the 54 electoral votes CA brings.
Electorally I think it’s past time to allow each congressional and senatorial district to issue its own electors. State by state winner takes all overpowers the large states too much in national policy.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
10d ago
Minority grievances are the point in my mind, and in fact fostering grievances is a big part of the project of liberal democracy. If I can convince you that you are being wronged by those guys over there, you’re mine for life. You won’t go anywhere else especially to those guys over there who you believe are oppressing you in some fashion. And fixing those things would mean the grievances go away.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
11d ago
I’ve long suspected this, most especially because it explains the very large disconnection between what the liberal elite think about as important issues for minorities and other countries and cultures and what those people who are minorities think and want. It’s very obvious that in very few cases that anyone in the elite actually knows any minorities. Like, no working class minority has ever cared or ever will care about appropriation, or past oppression. They want access to education, they want to live in low crime neighborhoods, they want good jobs. Liberals don’t care about most of that. They have zero interest in fixing local majority minority schools. They don’t care about whether or not those majority minority neighborhoods are safe. They could give a shit less whether the median black man can get a decent job. Moving middle class and upper middle class blacks into slightly better jobs doesn’t fix anything that working class minorities care about.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
12d ago
This guy is potentially anyone. You just need to lose them into echo chambers in which they spend hours hearing that their out-group is evil and that the future of the country hangs in the balance — and time is running out.
This is also why the grievances feel so vague. Most of the accusations are vague because they’re designed to create a vibe of being the resistance. It’s meant to drive engagement, to keep the person angry and afraid so they’ll keep reading and watching and scrolling. Specifics don’t work well for this, as the spell can be broken by a falsified claim. If the claim was that Trump was going to cancel the election, an election would be a chance to break the spell, so you don’t want to do that. Claim he might or that he’s a “wannabe dictator” or something, and you get the same effect, but without the potential of being proved wrong.
The only solution, at least if you have young people in your life (or even just yourself) is to absolutely put strict limitations on the political content you consume, and avoid it on social media. For me, I restrict myself to hard news from AP or a five minute news update from NPR. I don’t listen to political commentary at all. Most, if not all of it is designed to be viral in the attention/addiction economy, and thus to inflame rather than inform. There’s nothing of value there. And the potential of a kid to become radicalized from constantly listening to or watching to political rhetoric designed to get attention and inflame people is much too great.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
12d ago
I think the habit of going out to places with other people helps the process indirectly by creating the opportunity for one member of that group to introduce some members of the opposite sex. They might have a sibling, or a platonic relationship with a man or woman they’ll introduce to members of the group.
Except that the entire argument is simply trying to explain away finding absolutely no evidence that there are aliens out there. And while accept that radio waves don’t propagate infinitely, you still have to explain why we don’t see Dyson swarms or spheres, why we’ve never detected life, let alone civilization anywhere in the universe. At some point, the thing becomes silly. They’re definitely out there, but they’re invisible, you see, and no you can’t possibly detect them no matter what methods you use, or what you’re looking for. I find it much simpler to say that until there is concrete, public evidence to the contrary, there’s no good reason to insert aliens into the picture, or if the picture includes anything people believe is out there, no reason to include aliens and exclude angels, demons, ghosts, or Asgardians. Until there’s evidence of aliens in deep space, it’s just speculation. They should be there, perhaps, but we don’t know if they actually are there.
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