Butlerian
Not robot-ist just don't like 'em
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User ID: 1558
Butlerian
Not robot-ist just don't like 'em
1yr ago
This is noncentral to my argument. The precise internal dynamics of the non-monogamous society(s) are irrelevant; the hypothesis calls only for them to have (a) better mean happiness than Monogamy Land, and (b) worse ability to commit ethnocide than Monogamy Land.
The IRA wanted an Irish Ireland for the Irish. Catalan nationalists want an independent Catalan. Kurdish nationalists want a Kurdistan.
I think these are all rather false analogies, because not many Catalans were forcibly removed from Catalonia and shipped intercontinentally to a new destination and then whipped until they'd forgotten where they came from and intergenerationally raped by their plantation owners until they're 28% non-Catalan.
The African American has no choice but to advocate for his interests in-place, because he is (and I say this to illustrate the existential problems of his self-identification, not to insult) a Frankenstein of genetic and cultural hodgepodge, for whom it would be absurd to claim an "African homeland" any more because all the purebloods back there would just laugh at him (in a language he can't understand). He is an artificial creature, unmoored from any kind of real ethno-geography. If he was a cosmopolitan, he'd be a rootless one. He is without legitimate claim to being the native of any homeland. But he's gotta live somewhere. And America (a) has the convenience factor of being where he is already, and (b) bears some moral responsibility for being the perpetrator of the ghoulish amoral genetic experiments which produced him.
As the African American race is different in kind to the Catalan or Irish or Kurdish races, it is no surprise that it's nationalism contains novel aspects.
Butlerian
Not robot-ist just don't like 'em
1yr ago
If monogamy out competed (at a societal level) non monogamous communities shouldn’t we ask why?
"Outcompeted" overstates atelier's hypothesis a bit. Monogamous societies might be better specifically at "projecting military force against the other tribe in the next valley", while being worse at everything else (including "generating happy men and women").
Indeed, it's easy to see how that exact situation might come about: a tribe full of angry, depressed married men who are henpecked by their nagging monogamous wives so much that dicing with death seems like a prospect of sweet release, would indeed seem like they'd be well placed psychologically to mount a "kill the men and kidnap the women" fratricidal attack on a neighbouring tribe. Conversely, a tribe of men and women living in a successful hippie-free-love non-monogamous sexual utopia have better things to do than scheme to kill everyone in the next valley.
Butlerian
Not robot-ist just don't like 'em
1yr ago
Yes, this was my primary objection as well. While I am not married, I have previously had long-term girlfriends who were terrible at sex, but whom I was overall net-positive satisfaction on the relationship, because they made up for it in other ways, like never giving me back-talk when I told them to make me a sandwich.
I can certainly believe that this effect would be further enhanced if children were involved. If your wife's given you six darling kids and she continues to diligently feed and clothe them (and you), you're probably going to be very pleased with your marriage even if she doesn't put on her latex dominatrix costume that much any more.
Butlerian
Not robot-ist just don't like 'em
1yr ago
We have a few screamers and a lot of drunks but hard drug use on the train does not exist.
Is this not just a case of geographic determinism though? America's hard drugs problem exists because it has a border with Mexico, not because it has any particular social structure / public transportation pricing. Ain't no smugglers bringing coke and coke sellers across the Korean DMZ.
Butlerian
Not robot-ist just don't like 'em
1yr ago
In fact, I would guess that intelligence and socialist beliefs are positively correlated. Why is socialist worldview so appealing
The idea that society should be scientifically managed is very appealing to those who believe themselves to be very intelligent but yet find themselves not managing society.
It's the class of people who see themselves as "temporarily embarrassed central planners".
Butlerian
Not robot-ist just don't like 'em
1yr ago
My issue is that the constraints you have to place to get it to not Do A Racism are probably orthogonal to the constraints you have to place to get it to not Kill All Humans, and thereby represent a rather serious case of misused time and effort.
Butlerian
Not robot-ist just don't like 'em
1yr ago
Not that ethics is going to play a major role in how any of this unfolds; whatever has power will act as they will,
I'm pretty salty that after a decade of yelling "AI SAFETY AI ETHICS INSTRUMENTAL CONVERGENCE PAPERCLIPS" along with Bostrom and Yud, the people who are actually making the AIs put on their 'intentional misinterpretation' masks and go "We're very concerned about AI ethical alignment, look at all this time we spent making sure it doesn't Do A Racism".
"Ethics" is in there, but I would say it's of the variety "parochial tribal beliefs pretending to be universal moral standards" variety.
Butlerian
Not robot-ist just don't like 'em
1yr ago
I believe that was me back at the old place. The context was that managers are mostly useless, because I don't need them to "pass on expertise" or "provide strategic direction" or have any domain knowledge at all (I'd have more than them anyway because I'm at the cliff face rather than diverting my attention into being a people-organiser). What I need is for someone to just shame me into work through the panopticon effect, which could be accomplished by a monkey in a security guard's hat.
Butlerian
Not robot-ist just don't like 'em
1yr ago
Whenever I hear
I think this is the critical part. You are under a selection effect of "Anecdotes that women think it will be socially advantageous to publicize", so those are the ones you hear about. Other adjacent anecdotes, you don't.
One therefore ends up only hearing the scenarios that women want to humblebrag about. And she can humblebrag about "I'm so hot that X wanted to fuck me but I'm too good for him so I said "Eww, no, nerd" lol", but she can't humblebrag about "I'm so hot that X wanted to fuck me and so we fucked", because that would make her a slut.
Butlerian
Not robot-ist just don't like 'em
1yr ago
I hardly know where to start with this, mostly because the part after the comma bears no connection to the part before the comma.
Do I think it's OK for some people to have AI companions? What do you mean "companions"? Do you mean AI GFs, or do you mean the AI social cognition prostheses discussed previously? In any case, I think AI GFs are bad because it's edging towards wireheading and wireheading is bad. And I think AI social cognition prostheses are impossible.
As for the people without AI companions being forced to suffer eternally for no fucking reason:
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Why is tfw no AI gf "eternal suffering"?
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Who's forcing them?
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There's very good reasons for people to not have AI GFS. They're expensive to run, they make it more difficult for him to get a real gf, and there are moral problems to creating arguably semiconscious entities if you're only going to let them be an incel's ERP plaything.
Butlerian
Not robot-ist just don't like 'em
1yr ago
Oh god this gives me flashbacks of summer 2020 when Rockstar literally closed down their servers temporarily.
I never heard about this, and I would assume that anything I found on a Google search would be misrepresentation written as propaganda for the future, so I leave it to you, a rando blinded with rage so hot that it loops back round to calmness, to tell me the tale.
Butlerian
Not robot-ist just don't like 'em
1yr ago
Nobody ever ran for office cause of Jane Austen.
Maybe not, but don't you think maybe that a lot of women took a chunk out of the national birth rate because of it, which is much more macro-historically important?
Butlerian
Not robot-ist just don't like 'em
1yr ago
Anyway, my question is, why don't more culture warriors pursue this path, of exemplifying why their chosen philosophy is good?
Because your opponents will claim that you're only happy because you're oppressing somebody else, and the suffering you're causing is utalitarian-ly greater than the happiness you're experiencing. See: all the anticolonialism theorists who attack the visible prosperity / happiness of the west be claiming that Westerners are only happier / more prosperous than non-Westerners because they stole all the latter's resources. Or all the anti-Christians who insist that the spiritual harmony of monoreligious Europe only worked because they were constantly squeezing Jews / witches / gays / scapegoats to serve as the Two Minutes Hate foundation of community cohesion.
I bet you've heard the phrase "living well is the best revenge." I think it's also the best argument.
I confess that I've never been able to take Yudkowsky seriously since he announced his separation. "If you're so smart, how come your marriage failed?"
My expectation is that many to most people will opt into prosthetics that give them improved social cognition: a feeling, in advance, for how something you're intending to say will be received.
I think you have a fundamental misunderstanding of why some utterances are received poorly.
It's not about knowing enough cultural sensitivities to avoid faux pas, because faux pas aren't really caused by cultural insensitivities (which could be legible to an AI). Whether or not offense is taken is a choice of the listener, not a condition of the zeitgeist. If your interlocutor woke up on the good side of the bed this morning, conversation will go smoothly. If they woke up on the wrong side of the bed this morning, they'll claim to be offended by your aspie stutterings. It depends on the fundamentally invisible qualia of your conversation partner, not a legible, predictable, objective feature of language.
I am reminded of the fall of Lord Renard, brought down because he made "unwanted sexual advances". How could he know they were going to be unwanted? Sorry, pal, whether or not they're unwanted can only be decided inside the woman's head, unfalsifiably. I don't think anyone's going to agree to give up the power to destroy people at will because "Shucks, his AI told him she was asking for it, I guess he's off the hook!"
As such, I predict that "a prosthesis for social cognition" is impossible. Unless its a maxillofacial prosthetic, that'll successfully produce the desired effect.
Butlerian
Not robot-ist just don't like 'em
1yr ago
One example I see is the entire etf industry. Not the specific esg funds but just normal spy. Most just vote according to what ISS tells them
Can you speak plainly, please? Your thicket of context-free acronyms is entirely impenetrable.
Wasn't this exactly the society depicted by Asimov in 1957 for his Solarians?
The Solarians (d?)evolve into refusing to interact with anyone except robots out of giga-anarcho-libertarian FREEEEEDOM rather than safetyism - it's not out of concern that they'll be harmed, more out of concern that anyone stepping foot on their property is anathema - but it comes out the same, no Solarian interacts with other humans, even their children are vat-grown.
Horseshoe theory strikes again!
Think about it, who would you rather spend time with: an AI who will do whatever you want and be whatever you want, anytime, or a grumpy human on her own schedule who wants to complain about someone who said "hi" to her without her consent? The choice seems obvious to me.
Personally I enjoy inflicting rhetorical suffering, so, that's one upside to real humans. If it's a robot that can't be hurt, where's the sadistic thrill?
Butlerian
Not robot-ist just don't like 'em
1yr ago
Of course you can use sex and gender as synonyms but that leaves you with a weaker model that is unable to explain much of the variance that you see in how people act vs how they differ biologically.
An analogy I made previously is that this is like Byzantine theologians trying to make a distinction between the "nature" and "essence" of Christ to let him be simultaneously human and divine. To buy into their framing that there's a real distinction here (rather than just something pseudointellectual they made up to keep themselves in a job) is to already concede the debate.
I would contend that the correct answer when a Monophysite tries to draw you into a debate on homoousios is to tell him "That's a bullshit concept, you're making words up for distinctions that don't exist due to ideological motivation, Jesus was just Some Wierd Guy acting wierd, not a male performing the gender role of God". Likewise, I would contend that the correct answer when a trans theorist tries to draw you into a debate on gender is to tell him "That's a bullshit concept, you're making words up for distinctions that don't exist due to ideological motivation, Emerald Treespirit is just Some Wierd Guy acting wierd, not a male performing the gender role of a woman".
Of course you can use sex and gender as synonyms but that leaves you with a weaker model that is unable to explain much of the variance that you see in how people act vs how they differ biologically.
It doesn't leave you with a weaker model, it leaves you with a better model, because "man acting wierd" correctly predicts what happens when you put them in female prison, whereas "performing the social role of a woman" does not. The POOR predictivity of your model recently cost the Scottish premier her job.
Butlerian
Not robot-ist just don't like 'em
1yr ago
Fleabag seduces him out of his vow of chastity but he doesn't actually stop being a priest iirc.
Fifty Hail Mary's and he'll be fine.
Butlerian
Not robot-ist just don't like 'em
1yr ago
This false belief is that gender is not distinct from sex. The fact is that gender is indeed totally distinct from sex.
If you can assert it one way, I can assert it the other. "No it isn't, sex and gender are synonyms".
Gender on the other hand refers to a socially created psychological programming that every tribe and society imbues its members on upon.
This is not a coherent thing even if one were to agree with your previous framing. If it's tribe-specific, then there is no such thing as "the female gender"; your gender would have to be "American female", "Burkina Fasoan female", "East Timorese female". Very little unifies those cultures (perhaps it was literally zero pre-globalisation), so by this account, we'd need +7,000 genders, to account for all roles in all cultures? At which point, your concept is so far away from the dictionary that you should probably start using a new word instead of trying to repurpose the "gender" one.
Butlerian
Not robot-ist just don't like 'em
1yr ago
whether there's a reason that particular SUBREDDIT would be more left-leaning than gun owners writ large.
There's your answer: it's Reddit
Butlerian
Not robot-ist just don't like 'em
1yr ago
Yeah the ‘threat’ that killed 4000 Americans during 9/11.
As Scott pointed out loooong ago, this is fewer than the number of Americans who are killed by fridges annually.
9/11 was fake news. Not in the sense that it was fake, but in the sense that it wasn't news. Sure, it's flashy, but 4000 fatalities is, in the grand scheme of things, a nothingburger.
Butlerian
Not robot-ist just don't like 'em
1yr ago
I feel like the simpler explanation is that (as OP mentions) promotion is tied to bringing in grant money and grant money is tied to having sexy preliminary results to justify an expensive study.
So the incentive is just to make up some sexy preliminary results.
It's not that inexperienced scientists made a mistake with their data. It's that experienced bullshitters did what they had to do to stay in their high-prestige job.
t. Postdoc
Butlerian
Not robot-ist just don't like 'em
1yr ago
So I conclude that, from a certain point of view, South Africa in peacetime really could be more violent than a full-scale war in Europe. This is an intimidating level of dysfunction.
I always get ratio'd when I say this, but, well, that's what autism is for, to make me impervious to pro-Ukrainian social pressure.
To wit: have you considered perhaps that Ukraine is not embroiled in "full scale" war in Europe and is instead being subject to a limited and comparatively humane Special Military Operation? Y'know, like that one side keeps saying it is, but everyone just keeps disregarding in spite of mountains of circumstantial evidence (like this)?
Would you, though?
Consider that jobs come with a physiognomy and a daughter who looks like "Barry, 63, Plumber" ain't gonna be fighting off suitors to give you grandchildren. Are you still very happy?
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