MaiqTheTrue

MaiqTheTrue Renrijra Krin 20hr 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.

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MaiqTheTrue Renrijra Krin 21hr 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.

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MaiqTheTrue Renrijra Krin 2d 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.

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MaiqTheTrue Renrijra Krin 2d 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.

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MaiqTheTrue Renrijra Krin 2d 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.

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MaiqTheTrue Renrijra Krin 2d 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.

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MaiqTheTrue Renrijra Krin 3d 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.

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MaiqTheTrue Renrijra Krin 5d 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.

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MaiqTheTrue Renrijra Krin 5d 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.

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MaiqTheTrue Renrijra Krin 5d 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.

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MaiqTheTrue Renrijra Krin 6d 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.

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MaiqTheTrue Renrijra Krin 7d 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.

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MaiqTheTrue Renrijra Krin 7d 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?

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MaiqTheTrue Renrijra Krin 7d 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.

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MaiqTheTrue Renrijra Krin 7d 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.

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MaiqTheTrue Renrijra Krin 8d 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.

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MaiqTheTrue Renrijra Krin 9d 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.

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MaiqTheTrue Renrijra Krin 10d 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.

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MaiqTheTrue Renrijra Krin 10d 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.

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MaiqTheTrue Renrijra Krin 11d ago

I think the tech isn’t helping, both because it’s ubiquitous and easy to access (including being portable) but also because it’s free and frictionless. When every home has an arcade and a movie theater, it’s a harder sell to get people to go do things outside of that. Add in the money and set up time of planning a meetup and a lot of people are just going to binge Netflix at home or scroll.

One thing that I’d love to see tried is to essentially force kids in schools to join a club. So you’d have an hour of time set aside during the school day, you’d have an hour in which you would be forced to join a club and do club based activities. It could be a sport, art, robotics, anime, movies, science fiction, whatever. But you have to pick one, and you have to participate. I think this would get kids a bit more social and hopefully push them to form bonds that would last outside of school.

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MaiqTheTrue Renrijra Krin 11d ago

I think most of your suggestions are spot on, however, one that im concerned about is the lack of incentive and ability for young adults to meet other young adults in person. The decline of cheap or free activities specifically for young adults to meet other young adults is a huge problem. Even something as simple as meeting for a meal often requires a minimum of $50 and add $10 each if you’re having wine or a mixed drink. Movies are not cheap, but also not great for getting to know the person you’re dating. Most places that people used to meet other young adults before college became the default are gone. Dances no longer happen except for in junior high. Parks are hard to get to without a car. Clubs are expensive. So then where do people end up hanging out?

Add in that people are spending more time online and more time alone at home, and it’s just hard to get the ball rolling toward family formation. If you’re isolated in your home and mostly gaming, watching TV or doomscrolling there, it’s not very likely that you’ll meet someone you want to have children with. Especially given that everyone is working and doin* chores after work. It’s like, you don’t do things with people in the real world outside of work, you don’t meet the opposite sex, not love, no marriage, no babies.

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MaiqTheTrue Renrijra Krin 11d ago

But the argument falls apart if you don’t use spree shooting simply because it then brings up the question of who’s doing the shooting (and it isn’t white midwesterners carrying in the grocery store). They literally cannot make the argument where it would actually make sense because they lose. Once they say handguns, they NRA’s best play is to simply point out that the vast majority of handgun shooters are gang members in the urban core most of whom have miles and miles of rap sheet and were out on parole at the time of the shootings. Easy to make the uncomfortable connection and to ask “why won’t the liberal DAs put those guys in jail and actually keep them there.”

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MaiqTheTrue Renrijra Krin 14d ago

It doesn’t shock me. Most of the effects happen decades or centuries from now, given that the cost of preventing the damage is also heavy — but is incurred immediately— the whole thing likely breaks even over that decade. You can spend $1000 today to prevent $1000 dollars of loss twenty years from now. I mean depending on the industry, the current cost is likely more of an issue that the future cost.

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MaiqTheTrue Renrijra Krin 14d ago

As opposed to the traditional way to start a war which is to talk about the war for months to “build consensus” and give your enemies months to harden their targets and plan a defense. I get that you don’t want to leak your very specific war plans (date, time and location) but most wars are not that surprising to anyone with access to American cable news. I think there’s either a reasonable compromise here, or that a lot of people should be in jail for leaking info in previous wars.

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