jimm
22d ago
I've done nothing to even state the effectiveness of hypnosis other than pointing out one thing that is bog standard in erotic hypnosis circles -- which you seemed to agree with as possible, at least after I point it out?
I'm asking you questions about what you think the science says because I don't think you actually know what the science says despite actively taking a strong stance, and you immediately started back tracking and dodging. You apparently can't answer simple questions about how you interpret the science, and you're accusing me of a lack of scientific rigor? The projection is super strong here.
People who can justify their beliefs don't move goal posts and don't dodge questions. Why do you feel the need to?
jimm
23d ago
What about the other question?
I pointed out that the "boring" hypnosis you see in medical training has more to do with what "reputable" people are permitted to do, and gave the example of orgasms as something "less boring" which you won't see there because it's clearly inappropriate not because it can't be done.
Your response was "I mean it's entirely possible it's more potent than described by medical literature", which seems to imply that you think the literature says such things aren't doable, but when I ask what you think the literature actually says on the topic you seem to do a 180 and downplay the significance as if you never thought hypnosis couldn't produce orgasms or anything "powerful".
I'm not really sure what your stance is here. Do you see how this looks like a change of tune?
Since you are asking this question I'm sure there is a paper from 50 years ago with terrible research methods that suggests this is a thing, but that doesn't make it not absolute nonsense.
But that's not the question, right? The question is "how potent is it as described by the literature", not "do you trust what the literature". Do you see why that's the question at play here?
To more directly answer your question, I predict the literature that is the body of scientific knowledge suggests that this is not a thing and does not take it credibly. The existence of crank papers to the contrary does not mitigate this.
What does "I predict the body of scientific knowledge suggests that it's not a thing and does not take it credibly" mean, exactly?
Do you predict that there might be a poorly done study that found some effect, but more studies or the best studies find no effect?
Or do you just mean something like "Even if everything in the literature is supportive, if it's not studied recently I interpret that as the science saying it's not a thing"?
Do you see why I'm asking these questions?
jimm
9mo ago
"Controlling your appetite" seems harder than "controlling what you eats" in the same way that "controlling what you are afraid of" seems harder than "controlling whether you into the fear", but fears are "controllable" too. Pairing a shock with a stimulus is a good way to condition a fear of said stimulus, and exposing yourself to the stimulus while paying attention to the lack of any bad consequences is the way that therapy can reduce fear.
The same thing works for appetite. Pay attention to what you're eating, how your body feels in response, and what the outcomes are. People are often very mindless about this, craving foods which make them feel bad and lead to undesirable outcomes while flinching away from making the connections. Make the connections, and all of a sudden those foods/quantities of foods no longer seem so appealing -- in the same way that a restaurant no longer seems so appealing after you get food poisoning there, only more subtle because the effects are not so immediate and dramatic. When someone says something horribly fat shaming like "You eat too much", for example, instead of pushing it away with "I know I know don't rub it in I can't help it!", sit with it. Face it. "I do eat too much. I am fat, and look disgusting. My stomach feels disgustingly over full, once I pay attention to it". How hungry are you after sitting through that? How compelling is that same hunger?
Perhaps the easiest way to get a gut level feel for how much your relationship to food can change is to just not eat for a few days. Eventually you get over the neediness and experience the desire for food completely differently, in a way that leaves a lot more perceived freedom to do what you want to do.
jimm
23d ago
Lots of weird shit causes orgasms, and IIRC people have used hypnosis as a replacement for anesthesia. Dissociation is powerful.
Yes hypnosis is good at pain too. This sounds like a change of tune though?
If you are saying hypnosis can make your boobs grow then I'm going to call you a crank unless you have some damn good evidence.
I'm not saying it can, I'm asking you to predict what the literature says.
What do you think the literature says?
jimm
23d ago
I mean it's entirely possible it's more potent than described by medical literature.
The medical literature doesn't actually describe it as impotent. Without cheating, what do you think the medical literature says about the ability of hypnosis to induce orgasm in women? What do you think the medical literature says about the effectiveness of hypnosis for breast growth? How confident are you?
It's also entirely possible that people who buy into it are more likely to have out of character or excessive manifestations
It has nothing to do with buying into it. Hypnotic orgasms do not at all require buy in, and don't require unusually strong manifestation. You might find Richard Feynman's account of trying to call BS on hypnosis interesting.
Here are a couple quotes:
I thought, "Baloney!" She took a match, lit it, blew it out, and touched it to the back of my hand. It felt slightly warm. My eyes were closed throughout all of this, but I was thinking, "That's easy. She lit one match, but touched a different match to my hand. There's nothin' to that; it's a fake!"
When I came out of the hypnosis and looked at the back of my hand, I got the biggest surprise: There was a burn on the back of my hand. Soon a blister grew, and it never hurt at all, even when it broke.
And
The hypnotist made various demonstrations, having me do things that I couldn't normally do, and at the end he said that after I came out of hypnosis, instead of returning to my seat directly, which was the natural way to go, I would walk all the way around the room and go to my seat from the back.
All through the demonstration I was vaguely aware of what was going on, and cooperating with the things the hypnotist said, but this time I decided, "Damn it, enough is enough! I'm gonna go straight to my seat."
When it was time to get up and go off the stage, I started to walk straight to my seat. But then an annoying feeling came over me: I felt so uncomfortable that I couldn't continue. I walked all the way around the hall.
jimm
23d ago
What do you think would happen to the reputation of the hypnotist that hypnotized your colleagues if he surprised the women with orgasms?
This is bog standard shit in the erotic hypnosis community, and the reason you didn't see it in your medical education isn't that it's not possible.
jimm
1mo ago
I'm going to try to restate what I see as your position, before responding to it:
With regard to "read/write access", it appears that you don't mean it in the basic sense of "Do things that inform you of the content"/"Do things that change the content", but rather you specifically mean "outside of the normal IO channels". This is because free will is the big thing here.
Because I have free will, nothing you can do through my normal IO can control me. You can present evidence, and I'm free to veto the idea that it's even evidence. You can listen to what I choose to say -- or choose to think at your implant -- but you can't keep me from lying and you can't detect when I am. This fundamentally changes things because it means you cannot neglect my will; I am in control of how things pass into/out of my mind, and until you can go around my normal IO channels you need my buy in unlike with ships and planes who don't get a say in things. As a result, the normal paradigm of engineering ain't gonna work.
For "read access" to change things here, you would have to be able to not just read my surface level outputs but also the deep generating beliefs with reasonable resolution -- at least to the degree that "lie detection" can be done reliably. For "write access" to change things you would have to be able to write my conclusions not just impressions.
And reliable lie detection doesn't exist. It's impossible to "hack" into someone's mind in a way that bypasses the individuals say on things, and do things like "making a Christian into an atheist" or "implant a memory". Been tried, failed.
Is this essentially correct, or am I missing a key distinction here?
Because it looks to be like you're noticing that there's almost always a little white in a grayscale world and that attempts to do "pure black" aren't super successful, and then making the mistake of declaring everything to be "white" because it's "not [completely] black".
There's a lot of gray area out there, and some of it quite dark.
Twin studies demolish the whole "born this way" thing, and show that it's only "born half way there". Even less for lesbians.
The "scientific consensus" is very against conversion therapy, but the science itself is a similarly mixed bag as that on therapy for something like alcoholism. Few people go from alcoholics to never touching a drink again, and a lot of people end up "relatively unrecovered", but nonetheless therapy is considered "effective" for alcoholism because a good portion of people end up drinking less. The science on conversion therapy also shows some people showing complete success, and a lot showing meaningful-but-incomplete success, and also a lot of failure -- and a lot of the failure is in the over the top terrible attempts at therapy which would fail at any therapeutic target. Yet conversion therapy gets touted as not only "difficult and likely to fail" but blanket "ineffective" because "you can't change what you're born with" as if it's an immutable fact, even though the science flat out contradicts this.
The science also says that homosexual men are higher in narcissism, which isn't very flattering and people probably won't like to admit. And in diseases, which is sometimes admitted but often gets shoved away too.
There might be more, this is just what comes to mind off the top of my head. The point is that as a topic, this is not one where truth is welcome so the science regularly gets avoided or branded "not REAL science". Imagine a study comes out tomorrow showing that 80% of gay people left in charge of children rape them, and it's bombproof. Do you see people saying "Oh, shit, I guess we need to stop letting gays watch kids", or do you see people screeching and revolting against the potential truth being suggested? That's the test for whether people are actually doing science or science denial. If a new paper came out in physics suggesting perpetual motion was possible, and actually demonstrated it, physicists wouldn't screech they'd update.
jimm
11mo ago
It can definitely happen quicker than 5 seconds or take longer than 15 seconds. The problem is that unconsciousness isn't always as obvious as you'd think, and so "choking someone until they stop resisting" can mean that the choke is being held long after unconsciousness and is only released upon death. That appears to be what happened here.
jimm
1yr ago
No HylnaCG, I am not. It boggles my mind that you'd double down with such confident counter assertions without checking if you understand what is being said or whether you have your facts straight. Google "critical temperature" and "critical temperature methane", then reread my comment. Then maybe google "supercritical fluid compressibility".
jimm
1mo ago
Sorry for the late response. I'll try to hit all the main points and drop the things that I don't think are important, but if I miss responding to something you think is important then let me know and I'll address it.
I think the core of your questions can be summarized like this:
If hypnosis as mind control is real, then what are the actual limits and why do I not see all these signs of it I'd expect to see?
The basic answer is that people are complicated, hypnosis doesn't negate that complexity, and problems are separable from that complexity to varying degrees with the biggest most important problems being not very separable. From a control theory point of view, you need a model of the system before you can control it. It doesn't do you any good to have big powerful actuators which can greatly influence the process if you don't know which way to push to create the desired output. "Hypnosis" can solve the "I need an actuator" part of the problem, but it can't solve the "Where do I hook it up and which way do I push?" part of the problem. The naive perspective we all go into it with is "I just need an actuator, then I could fix these damn undesired behaviors", and it's not until you have one and start trying to actually solve problems that you start to realize you don't know what to do with it and the "undesired" has a lot more connection to reality than people give credit for.
You suggested marriage counseling as an example, and I think that's a perfect example to show the problem. Say we have a couple come in for couples hypnotherapy because they both want to get along. I swing my magical pocket watch at them, "hypnotize" them so that everything you say becomes interpreted as truth through and through, and then say "here you go FC, fix them up!". What suggestions do you give to fix everything?
"You don't hate your husband, because he's not a POS"? But what if he is? How do you know he's not, and why would she hate him if he isn't? If you think you have a compelling answer to that, then why isn't she compelled? You say they both want "to get along", but what does that look like, exactly? Is his "to get along" compatible with her "to get along"? If he thinks she's spending too much on shoes, do you hypnotize him to stfu about it, or her to stop buying so many fucking shoes? How do we know there exists a type of "get along" that would be mutually agreeable? How do we even know a solution exists? We could go on forever with these kinds of questions because relationships are complicated. If you try to brute force things by installing the bottom line "We don't fight anymore" without addressing the structure of the problem, then the points of conflict will still exist, they'll still run into them, they still won't have a solution or means for generating a solution. Whatever ends up happening it probably won't be "solved", because how could it be? By the time you understand the system well enough that you understand which bits could be flipped so as to get the desired results then yes you can use hypnosis and fix up their relationship. But that's no trivial task so good luck demonstrating it reliably and scalably, and by the time you've disentangled things enough that you can see the answer it's likely that they can as well so you won't even need hypnosis.
Getting results in any real world example is largely art. You're 100% right about that. But it's an art built on rules that can be understood and engineered with at low levels.
"Martial arts" are arts too. Yet physical bodies obey laws of leverage, and in certain entanglements the vast complexity of possible response sequences can be narrowed down to very few which can then be mapped out systematically. The idea that you can "scientifically solve fighting", and then go win all the UFCs simply by virtue of being a decent scientist is obvious nonsense. At the same time, it's no surprise that the guy who brought heel hooks from "that shit don't work" to one of the most prevalent no gi submissions (and was wrecking everyone with them in competition) was a physics PhD student. And it's no surprise that he used science/engineering type thinking to figure out the principles of control and map out the leg lock game deeper than his opponents -- allowing him to engineer responses to whatever they threw at him so long as he could suck them into his simplified game first. The power of heel hooks is simultaneously "scary" and "not an immediate solution to all fighting problems ever", and the analogy fits well. How well are you able to simplify this example of human interaction into something you understand?
The reason things "wears off" sometimes is that the person is bigger than your simplified model, and those outside complexity can come creeping in. Why do your Wikipedia edits "wear off" when they do? Well, you're not the only editor. Did you back up your edits such that when all the Wikipedians look at the resulting conflict, they take your side? Or did you just write the bottom line and neglect to reinforce it with anything? If the latter, then it will "wear off" because someone else will put in something different. It's like that.
If you think of hypnosis as "hacking" (and there's a group who called themselves "head hackers"), then you can get a feel for the practical difficulties there. People are going to generally try to revert unwanted changes. Security teams are going to patch exploits as they're noticed. You either have to continually outsmart the people whose computer you're trying to change against their will, even as they learn your tricks and they have the defensive advantages, or you have to suggest changes they're happy to keep around and go through the front door -- in which case you're not really a "hacker" anymore. So "does hacking work"? It depends on your context and goals. Are you trying to harm grandma? Then sure it works. Are you trying to steal information from a bank? Maybe if you're really good at it and the bank is caught slipping, and you're willing to risk jail time. Are you going to pull it off long term against a competent target by following steps you read in "Hacking for Dummies"? Hell no.
Similarly, does hypnosis work well enough to allow people to sexually assault women, have them forget it ever happened, and then repeat it a half dozen times before it all falls apart and the perp ends up in jail? Absolutely. The proof of this is Michael Fine. Does it work well enough to have someone hallucinate a dick as a popsicle, get the person to "suck on the popsicle", and have hypnosis researchers back them up in court based on their wishful-thinking/unfalsifiable-victim-blaming stance of "You can't be made to do anything you don't want to do, so if you say you didn't want to do it you're a liar and you really wanted it"? The Oxford Handbook of Hypnosis documents such a case. Does it work well enough to get you "happily ever after"? Not with the myopic/oversimplified/non-cooperation-focused methods those men used.
The science shows good results on simple things like pain control. You can probably find evidence of worthwhile effect on weight loss/smoking (prepublish edit: I wasn't intending to look, but I stumbled across this one when looking for something else: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/1097-4679(198501)41:1%3C35::AID-JCLP2270410107%3E3.0.CO;2-Z), and plenty of people make their living helping people with that kind of thing. But you're not going to find a reliable "snap of the fingers" cure to "alcoholism" or "marriage difficulties" because those problems just aren't that simple.
On questions like "Can you get kids to get along", my kid gets along with others quite well so far. I'd love to claim that it's totally on purpose and I'm just an amazing dad, its a bit nebulous and not that uncommon so it's hard to prove an effect there. The clearer effects are on the simpler/easier problems where ~100% of people fail anyway. Liver is healthy, so your kid should enjoy eating liver; my kid loves it. Getting your shots isn't a bad thing, so your kid shouldn't be averse to it; my kid has enjoyed it so far. These are things where if you understand how this shit works, you stop making kid shows that systematically instill fear of needles into kids when you're "trying to help", and instead can systematically work to undo such nonsense. It's still a dance, and knowing the rules of the game doesn't mean you play perfectly. I was all proud that I was able to get my two year old excited to get her shots and that I didn't have to drag her there, but jokes on me because I had to drag her away when she was crying about not being able to get more. But hey, it's a problem I'm happy to have and I certainly wouldn't have gotten there if I hadn't learned which way to nudge to get the response I wanted.
I don't know much about hypnosis, so this is both interesting and directly applicable to the issue at hand. My rough understanding is that hypnosis is easily resisted, and that you can't get the subject to do anything they actually don't want to do. Is this incorrect?
It's usually fairly easy to resist things if you see it coming and you have already recognized the thing as something you coherently don't want to do. That's a lot of qualifications. It's enough to prevent things from scaling beyond a certain point, but not enough to prevent cases like Michael Fine. Richard Feynman's account is interesting too. He saw it coming and walked right into it anyway to see what would happen, then found it more difficult to resist than anticipated and ended up playing into the stupid trick he had resolved to reject. He certainly would have rejected it if the stakes were higher, but then again hypnosis can get much more insidious than that.
So there's significant truth to it, but without those qualifications it's mainly a "lie to children" that hypnotherapists tell to reassure their clients (and which the dumb ones believe, to reassure themselves), which is conveniently repeated by sexual predators in order to get their victims guard down and defend themselves from allegations of wrongdoing.
Most interesting. Could you describe this process in more detail? Why does it wear off? What do you think the wear-off implies? Did they know you were going to try to do it?
For the most part they didn't know what I was going to try to do and that would have prevented it from working. The one that failed was sloppy, and the person seemed to pick up on where I was going with it. The process was mostly hypnotizing them, adding a single layer of misdirection by suggesting things that would lead to them holding an atheist perspective but which weren't labeled as such, and then suggesting that this is what they've always believed. For example, "Let's just pretend to be atheist, so as to better understand the mind of a nonbeliever and reach them better. Okay, so why don't you believe in God? And you've always believed this? You definitely weren't hypnotized to have this perspective right? Like, for reals for reals? You've never been hypnotized before in your life? Okay, cool. Later!" -- to oversimplify a bit.
The last one was a bit different in that it was all above board and I asked for a volunteer for an experiment using hypnosis to find out what happens when a conversation about religious beliefs is conducted with hypnotically enforced honesty. The religious beliefs crumbled immediately upon accepting the suggestion for honesty about her beliefs, and it was a viscerally painful experience for her. She admitted that it was basically a way to not have to deal with her fear of death, and then eventually (after 1-2 months) she picked up her religious beliefs again because that load needed bearing still, but she didn't pick up the same denomination of church since that part wasn't load bearing and was actually causing her problems.
The big take away for me was that people believe things for reasons -- even when they don't know what those reasons are and all the justifications they give are clearly nonsense that even they don't believe. I thought it might have been something where it's like "I believe X because I believe X, and its embarrassing to change my mind so I'm not gonna", and if you change X to Y they just stick there instead. And they did stick for a while, but there really are forces that pulled them towards X in the first place and if you want long term results you have to understand and work with those forces (e.g. provide an alternate way of handling fear of death, or whatever) rather than attempt to bypass them so that you don't have to deal with the complexity.
I want to be clear that I feel pretty bad about it and wouldn't do it again; it wasn't a very nice thing to do. I did some other experiments too, including stuff like trying to get people to download and run a program named "virus.exe" which was actually harmless (for which the antivirus software was a more difficult hurdle), and trying to just walk up to people and hypnotize them without asking permission (which I eventually succeeded at, but which contained other difficulties), etc. It really did help show in an unmistakable way that there's no such thing as "dark arts for good", and that the skills needed for long term stable results require working in a different direction. So I got a lot out of it even though I wish I would have found a better way to learn some of it.
Anyway, I hope that explains things enough to get a sense of what I'm getting at, and feel free to ask any questions about things I didn't cover or didn't explain well.
jimm
6mo ago
This presupposes that decoupling is actually a good thing, and that "high decouplers" are better off because they can decouple sex from anything meaningful.
Sex is a very powerful tool, and decoupling it from anything it can harm might be better than recklessly destroying your life with it, but it also decouples it from anything it could be used to build.
jimm
7mo ago
Absolutely, because almost no-one is intellectually honest in my experience let alone politicians. But thats not my point,
The fact that people behave poorly does not make the behavior good. If you take off the pressure to behave well, you get worse behavior, not better behavior.
And it actually is the point, since the rest of your argument rests on this idea that intellectual dishonesty is okay so long as enough people do it.
And once you have accepted there is an unwritten exception it becomes an avenue for further unwritten exceptions that are also "necessary".
And this is a perfect example. Once you justified intellectual dishonesty, you allow yourself to start saying things like this in a way that conflates "intellectually dishonest people are going to claim this, but they're clearly wrong and behavior is deserving of shame" with "it's true".
I've already given you two reasons why this doesn't work.
The first, IMO, is that once due process has been followed and you have been considered to be a threat to "the people" to the extent that you need to be locked up and maybe executed, you are no longer part of the protected class "the people". This seems quite clear to me too, since you can't exercise any rights once you're dead.
The second is that even if you were able to find an infringement so slight that everyone agrees it "doesn't count", then there's no need to amend things because no one disagrees. The moment you have people pushing back saying "Actually, 'shall not be infringed' means 'shall not be infringed'", it's not true that everyone agrees and now intellectual honesty requires amending the constitution in order to do that infringement. This is how it works in every other instance. If someone says "Do not touch me", in unqualified language like that, then you don't get to push them and justify it by saying that you expect they would have been okay if you hugged them. If they say "Do not touch me means do not touch me", then that does not give you the right to hug them just because you can justify why you think they don't/shouldn't mean it in the absolute. It is as absolute as the person whose rights being infringed on insists on, no less.
The only way you can miss either of these problems, even before they're explained but certainly after, is by relying on the mistaken idea that intellectual dishonesty isn't intellectual dishonesty if it's common.
jimm
7mo ago
Once you have established there is an unwritten tunnel,
Do you mean "Once you have established that politicians and justices have been dishonestly passing unconstitutional laws", "Once you have established that doing so is legitimate", or are you conflating the two?
The former can be argued, but the latter is clearly false. You're essentially arguing that we shouldn't expect our government to be intellectually honest -- is this a bullet you will explicitly bite?
jimm
7mo ago
You're missing the point. It isn't about the "intended quantity", it's the quantity of intent. Premeditated murder is different than murder without premeditation, even if the same body is just as dead.
If the extent of the plan is to knock down the fences and wreak havoc, then maybe they're simple barbarians getting high on "allahu akbar". If the plan was explicitly to navigate to the children's hospital to behead babies, then they're more cold and calculating. The former may have goals which would have been better served by attacking government buildings, or no real coherent goals at all. If the level of sophistication is no more than a pack of wild dogs, then it makes sense to respond as one might to a pack of wild dogs.
In contrast, the latter at least thinks that the optics of beheading children is more important than whatever you think they could do with government buildings. If this is the case, they look to have thought this through and have likely anticipated what your knee jerk response will be. And if your enemy is that deliberate and intentional about provoking you, then it might serve your interests to think a bit harder and make sure you're a step ahead not a step behind.
The type of evil you're fighting matters. If you can't distinguish between thoughtful and thoughtless evil, then you're the one that ends up the predictable animal when faced with the former.
jimm
8mo ago
Agreed.
If you can say "Maybe it's true though?", no matter how abhorrent, it is speech that needs to be protected. In fact, the more abhorrent the more it needs the protection.
You can't "Maybe it's true" a call to violence like "Shoot this bastard".
jimm
1yr ago
He's struggling, but he's unconscious. It's not clear to an untrained eye, and from time to time even MMA/jiu jitsu refs will fail to recognize that the person struggling isn't conscious anymore, so it's understandable that these guys didn't realize that he was unconscious.
However, to someone who has experience with this stuff, it's very clear that the guy is unconscious for at least two minutes and twenty seconds of being choked.
jimm
7mo ago
If justices are capable of reading "shall not be infringed" as "can be infringed to an arbitrary degree",
Almost everyone believes that though, they just vary on what degree, as far as I can tell.
First, you're missing the key word "arbitrary". Even if we accept for sake of argument that almost everyone agrees that it can be infringed on to a degree, it does not follow that it can be infringed upon to an arbitrary degree.
It's one thing to argue that waiting periods don't interfere with the purpose of the second amendment and therefore is not "an infringement" in any significant sense. It's a completely different thing to argue that semi-automatic firearms can be banned because "stopping school shootings is more important than preserving the right to keep and bear arms". And if you try to argue that banning semi-automatic firearms "isn't a significant infringement" because you think "stopping school shootings" (or whatever the claimed motivation is) is more important than the right to keep and bear arms, then it's just the latter dishonestly presented as the former.
The point of the comment you're responding to is that justices have shown a complete lack of integrity in pretending that clearly significant infringements "aren't really infringements" because they want to infringe. Even if their desire to infringe is justifiable (like in the case of nuclear weapons, for example), that doesn't mean "Well... it doesn't really mean what it says. It means do whatever we think is appropriate while giving lip service to this 'right'". It means get your shit together and pass an amendment that says "The right to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed further than prohibiting private ownership of weapons of mass destruction" -- and whatever other infringements that you think are so clearly appropriate that you can get the necessary supermajority support for.
Second, even if we did all agree that "some infringement is necessary" (rather than, e.g. taking the stance that criminals imprisoned/awaiting execution following due process no longer count as "the people" who are being protected, and the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed), the very premise of "we all agree" means that there is sufficient support for passing an amendment and the only reason it's not being done is that we're all on the same page about what is meant. If it ever gets to the point where we're even discussing whether or not "we all agree" that "shall not be infringed" didn't apply to that kind of infringement, then we clearly do not all agree -- so get your shit together and pass the damn amendment if you think you can justify it, or make the case if you think you have important insights that aren't shared by the necessary supermajority.
jimm
8mo ago
That would apply if the person said "This bastard should be shot", instead of the statement they hypothetically said.
Which does bring in the complication of how you deal with mafia threats like "Nice place you got there. Would be a shame if something happened to it". But again, the principle is clear: you're allowed to express that people have nice things, and you're allowed to argue that this bastard should be shot, you're not allowed to threaten.
So the burden is on you to make the case that "this bastard should be shot" or "nice place, would be a shame" is actually a threat, because the statement it is pretending to be is absolutely protected speech.
jimm
9mo ago
You’ve got a limited amount of time on this earth, and aren’t obligated to spend it debating people you think are trolls or at least cranks. [...] There is some level of belief where it becomes rational to write off the rest as a rounding error, rather than spend time on it.
This is justification for not having any motivation to talk to them. It is not motivation to avoid looking more closely at your beliefs.
I believe the earth is round. I could be wrong, but I find it sufficiently unlikely that I'm going to learn anything worthwhile from the average flat earther that I'm not really interested in debating them. However, if I ever find myself wanting to debate them, and also feeling like I need to avoid doing that, then that's a sign that something about what I claim to believe is wrong.
Having watched a couple actual debates on this topic, it's often that the "round earther" has no idea how to justify their (correct, IMO) beliefs, and instead of honestly admitting that they are essentially taking people's words for it, are trying to pretend that they actually understand things more than they do. That cognitive dissonance doesn't necessarily mean you're wrong on the object of contention, but it's a pretty good bet that you're wrong somewhere (perhaps in how confident and justified you actually are), and this sign marks the trailhead.
feel stupider for having engaged, or encourage your opponents.
These are both signs that your story isn't adding up. Why did you feel tempted to do something stupid? What roped you in?
Why would your opponent leave feeling "encouraged" rather than humiliated? If you actually know the topic so well, and their beliefs so dumb, shouldn't you be able to address their points so well that they are the ones that leave feeling dumb?
If I think something is 99% likely to be true, and I don’t want to spend time debating heretics, it’s still fair to say that I believe that thing.
That's 99% fair. And that 1% lie can be an acceptable rounding error.
But that 1% lie can also be a part of a much bigger lie to avoid having to deal with the fact that it's a hell of a lot more than 1% motivated and likely to be false.
Any time you find yourself actively wanting to avoid engagement (and not simply lacking motivation to engage), you're actively up against the part of your belief which isn't genuine. Even if it's only 1%, it's proven that it's not small enough to be irrelevant. And if it's making itself relevant, that's good evidence that it isn't really as small as you might like to believe.
jimm
1yr ago
I've been training jiu jitsu for the better part of a decade now, and I disagree. The RNC and hooks combo is common enough that a lot of people who don't train have seen it on UFC, and his execution is sloppy enough in more than one way (against a basically non-resisting opponent, by that time) that I find it hard to believe that he had any significant amount of training.
Anyone that trains will know that you shouldn't be holding a legit RNC tight for minutes after the guy has gone unconscious. However, I find it to be very unlikely that they knew the homeless man was unconscious. The homeless man was still moving, and even professional MMA refs occasionally fail to recognize that the competitor being choked is only jerking around unconsciously. If you have little to no training, and a piss poor RNC (which probably didn't put him out quickly), and the guy you're trying to choke keeps flailing around.... and you don't have have enough years in jiu jitsu to have seen people keep fighting when unconscious, then it's pretty easy to conclude that you just aren't successfully strangling him.
jimm
1mo ago
Saying "torture regimes fail" is like saying "cars fail". Of course they do; entropy is a bitch. But cars also work for a while before breaking down. It's neither the case that "Torture regimes never fail" nor that "Torture never accomplishes anything for the torturer". It's a question of "to what extent", and "in which circumstances?".
The difficulty of "engineering people" doesn't require determinism to be false, just that we have imperfect knowledge of what the determinants are. You'll have a hard time getting into my safe, despite the combination lock being entirely deterministic. If you were to have a sufficiently good model of the internals, you'd know just what to do in order to get the desired response 100% of the time. If you have a partial model, you only get partial results. It's just a matter of entropy.
Similarly, one's ability to persuade a person depends strongly on their ability to predict what kinds of things this person would veto as "not evidence" and what they would accept. Even if we assume human beings are 100% entirely deterministic, in order to get 100% results we need to have a complete model of the deterministic algorithm which changes by the moment as new experiences accumulate. We don't have to posit that a human mind is fundamentally non-deterministic in order to recognize that perfect determination is going to be an infeasible practical problem -- hence the "humans need to be treated like people" abstraction.
But what if we don't care about perfect 100% results? What if we don't limit ourselves to zero chance of failure, zero limit to the reach of control, zero limit to the duration of control?
Things get a lot more feasible. Now we don't have to contain a 100% faithful and ever changing model of the person we're attempting to "control" -- or perhaps more fittingly "manipulate". We just need to create a situation where we can reduce the entropy enough that we can get the results we're looking for before the entropy compounds and bursts through the seams.
And sure enough, manipulation works. Not well enough to get you a stable and fulfilling marriage into old age, but people do get manipulated successfully enough that it harms them and benefits their manipulators -- in the short term, at least. Serial killer Ed Kemper used to look at his watch and mutter something about not knowing if he had time to pick up a hitch hiker as what PUA would call a "false time constraint". Because the interaction of "picking up a hitchhiker" is such a simple low entropy scenario it doesn't matter if he can fully predict everything because all he needed to do was find that one little regularity that allowed him to "social engineer" some victims into his car.
A much more extreme version of this "funnel people into low entropy and take advantage of superior knowledge of the terrain" is hypnosis. Provided that the "subject" agrees to hypnosis and isn't creeped out and on guard, hypnotists can take advantage of a fairly low entropy set of possible responses to engineer ways to get people into states where their guards are predictably lowered even further, and then do stuff that bypasses the persons conscious will completely. Implanting fake memories is easy, and doesn't even require hypnosis. Implanting other ideas is doable too, as is prying out secrets that the person really does not want shared, and removing the person's ability to speak/move/remember basic things. The stuff that's possible with hypnosis is legit scary.
When you ask rhetorically "Can you make a Christian atheist?", my answer is "Provided they volunteer for hypnosis, yes, actually". I have run that exact experiment, and I forget my exact success rate but it was something like six attempts and five successes. The effect lasted about one to three months depending on the person, then they ended up reverting back to believing in God.
So is that "success" or "failure"? You could look at the bright side and note that it didn't last forever, or you could look at the dark side and notice that it worked remarkably reliably, for months without a shred of reinforcement, and with a very unsophisticated strategy and zero attempt made to make the effect robust.
It just comes down to what you're trying to justify. "Attempts to write the bottom line first and then engineer a way to manipulate people into doing what you want are unwise and ineffective in the long term and large scale", absolutely. "I know I saw that picture, because I remember it, and it's impossible to implant memories against a person's will", no.
As it applies to this conversation, it seems that the relevant question is "Can 'engineering' mindsets be used effectively to do things like help people with psychiatric conditions", I'd say "Yes, absolutely" -- but I'd also challenge your presupposition that "engineering" requires one to work around rather than with people's will. People's will can be predictable and controllable too, to an extent. Incentives shape wills, because people aren't dumb. If you show me a better way to get to work, I'll take it because it gets me what I want. Free will, sure. But also deterministic -- and determined by what gets me what I want. If you plug your fence into the electrical outlet, I won't touch it twice. Call it "operant conditioning"/"reprogramming when a person did something wrong", or call it "voluntarily deciding not to get shocked again". To-may-to, to-mah-to.
jimm
7mo ago
It's easy to get detached from the consequences of war in the heat of passion if you're not the one putting your life on the line. You're probably not going to get so angry about the lack of a bridge that you completely refuse to consider the costs of building it, and the cost of building it will probably not be paid in large quantities of blood.
That's not to say that it's never valid for someone to have a stance on violence without being the one to commit it (e.g. a woman hiring a bodyguard to protect her from her stalker), but there's definitely a failure mode of a belligerent woman picking fights that don't make any sense because she expects her boyfriend to fight them for her (or the little yappy dogs that are hyper aggressive when on leash). The accusation is that we're the beliggerant woman/yappy dogs, not the sober person hiring security when necessary and appropriate.
"This sounds like a change of tune though?" sounds super gentle to me, but sorry if it feels harsh to you; that wasn't the intent.
It was (and still is) genuine question, btw. I was expecting you to have a completely reasonable answer and I'm still open to hearing it if you have one.
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