jimm
8mo ago
The importance of freedom of speech has to do with the fact that censorship is prone to abuse, and truth is not reliably obtained by censorship. The statement "But this time, the thing being censored is actually false" comes with a "according to me and my allies" qualifier, and even if I agree with you that in this case you're correct that doesn't mean that censorship isn't a political maneuver. It is still a use of force by the strong to silence the weak (or else it wouldn't work) and being strong is not sufficient proof that the use of force is just (or else there would have been no holocaust to deny).
The whole point of the freedom of speech is that the free market place of ideas is a more reliable path to good outcomes than is oppressing the weak when you feel really convinced that they're in the wrong. That's exactly what the Nazis did, and no amount of "But that's different because they were wrong [according to us]!" will change the fact that it's the same reasoning and the same justification.
In other words, if holocaust denial is clearly false and evil, then it won't need to be censored because anyone denying the holocaust will come off as clearly delusional and evil. If it's not so clear, then it actually needs to be hashed out, or else there will be unintegrated resentment and distrust building and the regime would have actually earned this distrust by choosing to close the path to feedback.
Abiding by the principle of free speech means voluntarily refusing to censor what you can censor, because you place more faith in the free expression of ideas to reach good conclusions than you do in your own ideology if it cannot sustain free expression of ideas. It's saying "Hey, maybe my head is up my own ass, and so to be appropriately humble I will refrain from oppressing the weak just because I think they're wrong and evil, and make sure that they stay uninfluential on their own merits".
And it works. While I'm sure they exist, I have never actually heard anyone deny the holocaust and I'm not even sure I've even met someone who wouldn't judge a person negatively for daring to suggest it didn't happen. This is an easy case, and if we can't even refrain from thumbing the scale when our ideological enemies are so easily defeated by pointing to the truth, we have no chance on anything remotely hard.
jimm
8mo ago
No, it requires admitting that TX regards them as such.
Absolutely not.
If you inherit your fathers rifle and think it's "icky", then a gun collector would be happy to take it off your hands without worrying about "setting a precedent" that it's okay for anti gun people to gift guns to pro gun people.
When large groups of people tell you they believe X for reason Y, you should generally believe them.
Yeah, no. Not when it's politically convenient to have an excuse, and there's no substance behind it.
And the number of people does very little to make something more credible, since it's not like they're independent observations.
Or, to put it another way, if they have such a problem with migrants, why do they have no problem with the literal millions of them already there? What it is about a few additional busloads that makes it a bridge too far?
This does nothing to provide substance to the claim. There's still no proposed reason why "bussing migrants is bad", so nothing to even argue with.
Showing off to your supporters that you're tough and cruel to the people they hate.
Absolutely not.
The Wikipedia page is actually pretty decent on this one.
You may find it to be "cruel" to make fun of people for their exposed cognitive dissonance, but it is specifically getting a kick out of proving their perspectives to be reliant on mental contortions. Quoting Wikipedia here, "Online troll Jacob Wohl has stated that the goal in owning the libs is to evoke in people "the type of unhinged emotional response that you would expect out of somebody who is suffering a serious mental episode."". There are plenty of ways to be cruel to people you disagree with which you do not see falling under "own the libs" -- for example, "punch nazis!" is a thing, but "punch libs to own them!" is not, despite it being a great way to show how tough and cruel you are to the people they hate.
In contrast "owning the libs" works well even the "lib" in question is smiling and being a relatively good sport about it. Jordan Peterson vs Cathy Newmanis a good example. It is an asymmetric weapon in that it only works if you can successfully frame your opponent as having no rational response, and isn't even cruel to the extent that your outgroup can demonstrate humility, intellectual integrity, and a sense of humor when they can't respond with a rational thought. Those which can be humiliated with truth should be.
The whole point of "owning the libs" is definitely to own the libs. Yes, they get a kick out of doing it. Yes, there are social incentives to get "high fives" from the ingroup. Yes, people on the right sometimes like to pretend that their arguments are more solid than they actually are, and conveniently fail to notice valid rebuttals (shame on them). Yet the purpose of doing and rewarding this behavior is to actually show the libs to be fools, and to the extent that it is obvious that it is not doing this, the behavior isn't socially rewarded.
And as a result, the only valid response is... a valid object level response. Pointing out that they are high fiving each other and enjoying having made you look like a fool doesn't help your case, unless you first show that you aren't actually the fool you appear to them to be.
jimm
9mo ago
So trans women can assault women in the bathroom, away from the protection of men, but that's okay and totally not an issue unless
- the assault is sexual
- the assailant doesn't precede their assault with words
- they're assaulting someone they don't know
- they choose to assault women one at a time
- they couldn't possibly have found another venue at which to assault people
That sounds like an odd place to move the goalpost to, and I think there may have been a reason you didn't list all these criteria up front when saying I "I've never seen an example which meets all these criteria"
Regardless, it's not like I keep a file tracking these things, or even follow it intentionally at all; this is just the first example that met your criteria. If you can't think of any examples of things that most people would see as "the kind of thing anti-trans activists warn about", then it seems like you're not looking, and not noticing when it happens..
jimm
8mo ago
The difference between sexual assault and the other crimes you list is that unlike with sexual assault, people generally don't recognize any temptation to get victimized, tempt criminals to victimize you, or falsely claim victimization. When someone claims mugging, no one wonders "Are you sure you didn't just regret giving them your wallet?". People rarely wonder "Are you sure that guy who broke into your house and attacked you wasn't someone you invited in?" -- but you do see people using the term "victim blaming" in the Pelosi case.
If someone gets sexually assaulted, or beat by their spouse, or gets caught with their pants down drinking wine with their assailant, some people are going to wonder "Are you sure you aren't more responsible for this than you're admitting?", and some people are going to get offended at the implication. "Fat shaming" and "alcoholism is a disease" are similar in structure, though you don't hear the phrase "victim blaming" because they're one person affairs.
jimm
8mo ago
Definitely not impossible.
It helps to have more science cred then they do, and just generally not fitting the low-IQ backwater hick stereotype. It also helps if you reject science for scientific reasons, by doing things like citing science on the failures of science, or making specific critiques about how they used the wrong statistical test or whatever.
It's also useful to note that there are many aspects of science that these people reject themselves. Off the top of my head, there's the science relating to IQ, homosexuality, most of the COVID stuff if you pick the right point in time. Plenty more if you're willing to pick and choose bits that they will disagree with. "Science quickly becomes unscientific pseudoscience when touching on political hot topics, for example ".
jimm
9mo ago
I am not aware of a single case of a trans woman assaulting a woman in a women's bathroom. This is purely hypothetical as far as I know. If it happened, I expect the anti-trans side would publicize it heavily.
jimm
8mo ago
These are good observations. "Am I prone to pretend I am what I want to be" is kinda a given -- like any self described "Alpha male", for example. Or the people who inspired the phrase "the tolerant left". People do that a lot.
The other question is much more interesting, and Zach's "Sexual Dimorphism in Yudkowsky's Sequences, in Relation to My Gender Problems" is insightful here.
The fascinating thing to me, is that despite being a quite gender conforming (and non-AGP) straight guy, when I read his description of his underlying desires it resonated. I could have written the exact same thing with one minor and meaning preserving word swap.
Consider this (word swapped) quote from Zach's post:
I'm mostly imagining a specific woman (which one, varies a lot) as from the outside, admiring her face, and her voice, and her breasts, but somehow wanting the soul behind those eyes to be mine. Wanting my body to be shaped like that, to be in control of that avatar of beauty—not even necessarily to do anything overtly "sexy" in particular, but just to exist like that.
The relevant difference between Zach and me isn't that we feel "X is good" for different X. It's the same X.
Here's another quote, this one direct:
"Oh my God, I have breasts and a vagina that I can look at and touch without needing anyone's permission; this is the scintillating apotheosis of sexual desire and the most important thing in the world."
The most obvious way to fulfil this desire isn't "become a woman", but to own a woman -- but that doesn't fit with being (in his words) a sensitive boy who was ideologically committed to "antisexism" as defined by the religion of feminism. And if "owning" a woman is too unthinkable, you might come up with creative solutions.
When phrased that way it does sound sexist, and words do kinda fail here, but there's a nonsexist way of achieving this too, which Zach touches on slightly here:
It's because I was straight. Because I loved women, and wanted to do right by them. It's an identificatory kind of love—loving women as extension of the self, rather than a mysterious, unfathomable Other. But that's not unusual, is it?—or it shouldn't be. I would have assumed that guys who can't relate to this are probably just sexist.
If you can imagine a woman saying to you "I don't want to be 'your girlfriend'. I want to be yours" -- and meaning it, and being right to mean it, then you can love her "as an extension of yourself". There's no more "needing permission" because the mutual love breaks down the boundaries and the idea your lover "needs your permission" to touch you just becomes absurd and nonsensical. "Wanting my body to be shaped like that"/"wanting the soul behind those eyes to be mine" takes on a different literal meaning, but the desire being fulfilled is the same.
The question is whether "X is good" leads to "I want to be X" or "I want to be sexually/romantically involved with X".
jimm
8mo ago
To what extent does this analysis apply to homosexuality?
Building off of my other comment here, homosexuality could be viewed through the same lens.
The question is whether "X is good" leads to "I want to be X" or "I want to be sexually/romantically involved with X".
Only in this case X represents masculine virtue, and the "mistake" is in the other direction.
When a young boy observes his dad do something requiring great strength and is in awe (say, efficiently chopping down a tree with an axe), the result is that he wants to become strong like that when he grows up. He's likely to start imitating his dad, swinging axes or whatever his dad did to build/use his strength. Eventually, he becomes strong himself and chops down trees simply when they need to be chopped down, taking his physical strength for granted because it has just become part of who he is. Or he doesn't become strong, and is simply aware of what he's missing out by not being stronger.
When a woman is similarly awed by a man's strength, she's less likely to imitate his strength building behaviors and her fantasies are of a different kind. When you take the same expression of awe and way of relating and put it on a normal straight woman, it's no longer "I want to become more like him" -- it's a crush. She's attracted to him, as a way to have some of his strength as her own.
This seems to make some predictions too. If homosexuality is about noticing masculine virtue and fetishizing it rather then working to integrate, embody, and get bored with masculine virtue, then one might predict that it would lead to overemphasis of the appearance of the traits themselves rather than the end use. It would predict that working construction jobs and watching football "aren't very gay", and that bodybuilding -- even in nominally straight bodybuilders -- is "kinda gay". And that seems to fit, as shown by the bodybuilding communities frequent need to say "no homo".
It would also predict that homosexuality is correlated with narcissism, which appears to bear out (p<.001). The implication that "I can't embody masculine virtue and move on with my life" seems to predict lower self esteem too, which also appears to be true (p<.001), but I have to admit that I didn't think of that connection until seeing the result.
jimm
6mo ago
But does anyone really NEED an AR-15 with night vision and thousands of rounds?
That sounds like the kind of thing where you don't need it often, but when you need it you really need it.
If you give them up as a society because you haven't needed them in a while, then they won't be there when you do. Ask Israel about how that one went for them.
jimm
6mo ago
I don't think "I can't control this, but I can control those things" actually works here.
You can not drive drunk and always drive defensively, but you can't always stop the drunk person blasting through the red light from T-boning you unless you stay off the roads altogether. You may say you can control your diet and exercise, but how well do you, and what do the actuarial tables say about your actual risk of heart attack?
If you want to reduce your chance of being killed by a spree killer, it's not like there's nothing you can do. You can carry a firearm and train with it. You can avoid "gun free zones" that can't actually enforce their self identification. You can come up with plans for escape/counter ambush in case of a spree shooting. You can wear body armor, and avoid the kinds of large gatherings where these things happen. There's a lot you could do, it's just not always convenient to reduce risk, and you can never reduce risk to exactly zero.
Your theory would make sense if it were concealed carriers who were freaking out about spree shooting, having already taken steps to mitigate risk and being in relatively less control of their remaining risk. What I tend to find though is that it's people who are opposed to concealed carry who tend to be more concerned about spree shootings, and that points more to "don't want to have to consider doing the things necessary in order to mitigate this risk" as the actual driver of this concern.
jimm
9mo ago
If you genuinely believe X -- as in, all the evidence you've seen points towards X, you have no inkling that X might be false, you would be willing to bet at strong odds that X is true -- then there may not be any motivation to look any more closely but there certainly isn't any motivation to avoid looking closely -- because what's the worst that can happen? You find more evidence that you're right?
In order to know that you need to be motivated to not look to closely, you need to know that there's at least a significant chance of learning that a thing you want to be true is not true. And that means you know that you already know there's at least a significant chance of this thing not being true. At this point, if you act as if you "believe" X with any confidence then you are merely acting.
Genuine (dis)belief and motivated reasoning do not fit together.
jimm
1yr ago
That says "water hammer", not "natural gas hammer". It has nothing to do with "volatility" and everything to do with incompressibility which gasses lack. The increase in pressure caused by instantaneously stopping the average flow of the pipeline is well under one percent.
This is simply a specific implementation of 'anti inciting to violence' provisions of speech, clearly defined and accepted within constitutional law consistantly around the world in most democratic countries, in order to make it easier to specifically target a clearly delineated type of person -- neo-nazis.
Simply put, no it is not.
The "call to violence" exception isn't really an exception because you're not actually punishing speech.
If I kill Betty and bury her body under the old church, then if I'm ever caught saying the words "I killed Betty and buried her under the old church", I'm likely to go to jail because I said those words. But it's not "punishing speech", it's punishing violence -- murder, specifically. And in the same vein, if I say "Give me your money or I will kill you", it is not "speech", it's the counterfactual violence which I am using to extort you. Speech is needed to communicate the evidence of guilt, or convey the threats, but it's the violence itself that calls for punishment -- and that's why I can say the words "Give me your money or I will kill you" here, or "I killed betty and buried her under the old church" without getting or deserving punishment for it.
If you are actively attempting to coordinate unjust and illegal violence, then again, it's the violence that's a problem. But it has to be unjust and illegal violence. Making the case that parking tickets should be given in a certain case is not "advocating for violence" just because their policy, if accepted, would ultimately lead to violence against anyone refusing to pay the parking tickets. It's the illegal parker's "resisting arrest" that will be deemed violence. And that's fine and good, because if we as a society decide that it makes sense to enact new parking rules, we as a society agree that people parking there are defecting and doing the wrong thing -- even though this "bears an implicit threat" against people who like to park there.
Saying "The holocaust should happen" is vague as fuck. What's that even mean? "The jews are vermin, which we should exterminate"? That's absolutely a threat of 'unpopular truth' to the people who want to ban it, even though I don't feel particularly threatened myself because I'm solid in the fact that it's not true. But that also means I don't feel a need to censor in order to stop the ideas from spreading.
"Show up by the old church wearing swastikas, and round up any jew in sight" is a call to violence, and you should arrest those people for attempting violence -- if you have sufficient evidence that the violence is real, that is. If someone is merely arguing -- even incorrectly -- the factual case that we'd be better off if jews were genocided, then that is factual speech and absolutely 100% speech that needs to be protected.
The bottom line is this:
If it were true, would it be important to know?
If we'd really be better off exterminating jews, because jews really are so parasitic as to be more comparable to tapeworms than productive members of society (and therefore "the holocaust should happen"), then that would be very important to know.
If we just disagree that it's true, then we use our words like grown ups instead of having tantrums at ideas that upset us to think about.
Applying "If it were true, would it be important to know?" to "Show up and round up the jews", we immediately find that it is not applicable, because there is no truth value to be found. If the statement has no truth value because it isn't a proposition but an actual call to violence, then respond to the actual threat of violence accordingly.
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.
jimm
9mo ago
I don't think it's ironic at all. It's just what's obviously going to happen if 1) it needs to be said in the first place and 2) you can't think of a more persuasive thing to say.
"Don't ask us to support our reasoning" is not trust building discourse.
jimm
11mo ago
The theme running through my whole series of posts is "just because they don't act right doesn't mean you get to act v badly too". Why would that change when it's the government not acting right?
The point is that enforcing order when no one else will is not "acting badly".
jimm
1yr ago
Butane and propane liquify just fine at room temperature, but methane does not. Methane has to be below -80C in order to form a liquid, and therefore cannot be transported through a pipeline as a liquid. Liquids can end up in the pipelines anyway, but that is not the same thing and requires an additional detail to be specified -- something that cuts against your Occam's razor argument.
Whether you think it's a priory super unlikely that a military would ever attempt a clandestine operation and only kinda get caught is really beside my point.
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
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.
This is all very very weak
This would be valid if the response was "Hey, it's great that you're sending us these people! Can we coordinate to handle this better?", and TX refused to send more people with coordination.
This requires admitting that immigrants are "undesirables" -- otherwise the precedent is that TX can ship people that CA wants to CA.
This doesn't appear to have enough reason behind it to even refute.
Of course it's an exercise in lib-owning. What do you think lib-owning is, if not exposing their hypocrisy and virtue signaling? Saying "You're getting a kick out of my floundering around in cognitive dissonance when you expose my hypocrisy!" is not a defense.
Who's surprised? The fact that liberal governing bodies are opposed to something their stated beliefs demand they support is exactly the point. That's why it's "owning the libs"
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