FeepingCreature
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User ID: 311
I don’t get what you’re saying here. They weren’t so bad, compared to some hypothetical regime that would commit a genocide of equal proportion, but would purposefully, systematically torture people before killing them… is that your point?
Yep. I mean, say the Catholic church thought I was a heretic or something. Or some bush war where half the point of the army is that it's where you stuff your psychopaths so they do something useful. And I think that's mostly attributable to the professionalism of the German army. Sure, they served an evil regime - granted! But I think you're just underestimating how much farther an army can fall, and how much more personal suffering it can cause if it has lower standards.
My point is - there is still a point to praising honor and professionalism in the army of Sauron. I would absolutely honor the righteous Orc who ran a tight ship and whose men only ate alive a small fraction of his POWs. - In war, you may die either way, but you can still have a preference whether to die with your limbs attached and your rectum intact. Everybody wants to act like their enemies are the absolute worst, the lowest of the low, the scum of the earth - and they are almost universally wrong, and simply have never seen real scum in their lives. The lowest of humanity is very, very low.
FeepingCreature
1yr ago
Oh, but the german army was full of such honorable, patriotic men. They had made an oath, and they had a duty to their state and people. And by God they carried it out.
Personal opinion, no particular historical knowledge: the German army could have been so much worse. Consider the ordinary execution of genocides in history. The Holocaust was unique in organization and sheer scale of suffering, but at least the suffering it caused was, mostly, incidental and not the goal. If I'm de facto going to be the victim of a genocidal campaign, to be quite honest, there are worse options than the Nazis. There are even worse options in German history than the Nazis! Make my captor and executioner an honorable patriotic career soldier any day.
FeepingCreature
1yr ago
As I understand it from comments here (might be wrong! I have no idea!), part of the Civil War was that it ended in a sort of "okay, let's both now calm down and work together, you lost but that isn't the end" agreement. And whereas the same thing happened, sort of, with World vs Germany, it certainly did not happen with World vs the Nazi movement - that lost, and was destroyed, and eradicated, and all its flags destroyed, and the Earth salted and so on, already after the second World War ended. There was never anything like a truce with the Nazis; the most that occurred was "alright, if you completely repudiate the Nazi project and also are useful, we're going to keep using you and not look too closely." And that was more a matter of civil necessity.
FeepingCreature
1yr ago
Please don't abuse the phrasing "listen to what people say" when you actually mean "speculate what people mean". The entire point of "take them at their word" is to take them at their literal word. If you want to use this phrase, please link a video of Greta Thunberg literally advocating Jewish genocide in those exact terms.
FeepingCreature
1yr ago
But in this case, the moral harm entirely comes from the reaction of her social circle, no? She has to lie that he raped her to protect her reputation. It sounds to me like her peergroup is the problem here, not the sex. It sounds like the problem isn't "open sex-positive norms", but "trying to live sex-positive norms while actually in a very sex-negative environment."
FeepingCreature
1yr ago
Imagine reading this on CNN: "Many fled their vehicles and jumped from the bridge. Those who stayed behind..." Is something good about to happen to those people?
FeepingCreature
1yr ago
Budget cell phones ($150 range) have basically not improved since at least 2016. There's maybe a bit more RAM. Displays are the same, CPUs are largely the same, connectivity is the same, functionality is the same, batteries are largely the same. Numeric improvements seem to average out to maybe 20%. (Which may seem respectable, until you consider that in other computing products we were used to doublings over that range.)
FeepingCreature
1yr ago
This is a point that can be argued, and agreed with or disagreed with. However, to say "X people were killed by capitalism", when they were killed by imperialism, particularly if you know or should know that your conversational partner may not agree with the necessity of the association of capitalism and imperialism, is a way of making a strong point while skipping the work required to actually support it - in other words, the sentence makes sense to you, and it will make sense to your listener, but your listener will take a significantly different meaning from it than the one that you understand it to mean. That's why it's mottebuilding when charitable, and lying otherwise.
FeepingCreature
1yr ago
Every open-minded educated person knows the 14 words, "the Industrial Revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race." Do they remember these words because some recluse killed a few people with mail bombs in the 80s?
Yes, I broadly think this is why they remember them. I mean - how much else of the manifesto do they remember? Maybe I'm arguing too much from my own state of mind here, but I'd wager - nothing. That one sentence is punchy without saying too much that one may disagree with in the specifics, it's universally recognizeable, and most importantly, it's spicy, in no small part because of its association with terror. This all combines to make it a memetic winner.
FeepingCreature
1yr ago
Once you've invested sufficiently in military build-up, you need to somehow translate that buildup into some sort of gain for yourself, or you've wasted a lot of money for nothing. Armies have inertia.
FeepingCreature
1yr ago
I mean, I think this is overly simplistic. Did some people aim intentionally for genocide back then? Sure, probably. Did some people aim, agitate, and advocate for uplift? It seems like this was also the case, hence schools and churches. And of course, the natives as labor force is and has always been among the resources being exploited, where it could be, and this can also explain the schools. Iunno, I don't think you're wrong, per se, I just don't think any single strategy can explain colonialism, being as it was an emergent venture prosecuted by many interest groups. I'd expect most things that were done to fulfill multiple interests.
FeepingCreature
1yr ago
Though of course, hopefully the Scientologists had gone to prison as well. If they hadn't, I'd be getting increasingly sympathetic to the building-burners.
FeepingCreature
1yr ago
This is also my position. It is incredibly unfortunate that this situation gives ammunition to holocaust deniers, and so if people could stop drawing from the credibility account of the Holocaust with scams, and if other people could please stop enabling them doing that with incredibly uncritical reporting, I think we'd be in a much better situation here.
FeepingCreature
1yr ago
I mean, I do think that ... like, if you can go futa, you can go anywhere; it's hard to see why such a world wouldn't collapse into a Slaaneshi fuckpile pretty much overnight. To have a sustainable futa population requires the populace to go: "Alright! Chicks with dicks... but no farther!" Which is indeed quite implausible.
I guess my question would be - is there any purpose to the futa outside of kink and fetishism?
I mean, I guess what I'm saying is just, don't underestimate the lengths people will go to for kink and fetishism. Having kink and fetishism drive a major component of your life like permanent or prevalent body type is not at all implausible to me.
If it's just being done for kink and sexual exhibitionism, does this pattern-match to trans people IRL?
As an AGP, I am the wrong person to ask about this. I guess I'd say, I don't know because the current cost of entry is so enormously high, and also because perversion is still stigmatized. I think "doing it because you find it hot" is a very underestimated motivation, even in trans circles, but it's not one you're allowed to admit to right now, in part because SRS and trans in general draws on limited societal resources. Idk, I'd say give it a year past the singularity and we'll have a lot better idea where people "naturally" land once scarcity of body is removed.
FeepingCreature
1yr ago
But being a big-breasted female-presenting tiefling with a futa cock and dude voice? Feels like a strange midpoint. If you live in a world of magic and this can be done easily with a finger snap or a procured service, why wouldn't you go all in one way or the other? I'll admit to a possible failure of imagination on my end, but it just comes off as kink and fetishism.
If you live in a world of magic and this can be done easily with a finger snap, why wouldn't you go for kink and fetishism?
FeepingCreature
1yr ago
Of course, if you have time travel you certainly have FTL. (By the simple measure of "freeze everyone, drop back in time, fly there the slow way, get there five minutes after you departed if you still want to pretend like you give any hoot about causality.")
FeepingCreature
1yr ago
On one hand I want to say that surely, being able to recognize and admit misconduct is private is better than not being able to do so, so this leak is bad. On the other hand, this is a pretty impressive level of self-delusion even so, and we do want to push back on misconduct when we become aware of it.
But I guess my synthesis would be: if the only way we have of noticing misconduct in a topic as impactful as a world-wide pandemic is a leak of private messages where the scientists involved literally admit to it, then science has much, much bigger problems than these people's misconduct.
If we're defending Ukraine, we'll definitely defend Poland. It's not even "pro-Poland" (though I'm not sure where you're getting 'bad blood' from; I'm not seeing that in the German media offhand). But Germany is pretty thoroughly committed to the idea of the EU and an attack on one is obviously an attack on all.
Anyone who's selling you game theory that contains unexamined utility comparisons between agents is bullshitting.
Note that for instance EA does not do this - it usually starts with the premise of "all human lives have the same worth", which is a valid assignment, and has several charming properties such as being very simple and universal. But if you used a different assignment, it wouldn't be wrong from a utilitarian perspective. The power of EA comes from the fact that most people already profess to have this belief.
Also, classical hedonic utilitarianism defines, by fiat, utility as a qualia of happiness, which being a physical effect in the brain can then be empirically compared. I believe the problems with that are well-known. :) But again, it's a valid assignment, much as it turns the cosmos into a dense farm of amoebas having continuous orgasms.
Is cooperation structurally indistinguishable from submission as well? What about domination?
I mean, yes. There's a bunch of arguments for situations where you should not extract the maximum you can in the short term from a relationship, but they're all founded in maximizing your long-term payoff, not in "being a good person". Even decision theories like TDT/superrationality, where you occasionally leave money on the table, are based on this - in sum, the TDT agent walks away with more utilons than the CDT agent. A decision theory that systematically ended up with less utilons than it could would just be bad.
He who cannot make peace with the thought that his payoff is the smaller one, and makes it even less, burning commons out of pure spite, is irrational; thus, evil.
Utility, being unitless, is not comparable between agents. All theories that allow comparing payoffs do so on the basis of axioms, like pretending that every other agent is a copy of you ("putting yourself in their shoes"), or normalizing all human preferences to a common bound (humanism). Money is arguably also a way to do this. Though all variants of the ultimatum game depend on some way to compare utility between agents to converge, that comparison has to be agreed upon by some other mechanism such as relative capacity to destroy whatever your opponent values. Utilitarianism has no opinion on what the "correct" exchange ratio is. (Though it does advise that you should follow an algorithm to find it that maximizes your payoff. It says that a lot.)
FeepingCreature
1yr ago
We're just using different terms. You say "blackmail", I say "punishment"- they're the same concept. "Obey the law or we put you in jail" is structurally indistinguishable from blackmail, also taxation is theft. These are disagreements of emotional valence, not fact.
Game theory doesn't have an opinion about who should win, just about how to win the most effectively. (Though if it comes to it, I would like it to be known that I'm with the underclass.)
FeepingCreature
1yr ago
Antisocial punishment makes sense to me.
Two angles: first, "prosocial behavior" is defection against a local social group in favor of a larger social group. This can hurt the negotiation position of the smaller group: compare strikers vs scabs. From the perspective of the market-based society, the scabs act "prosocial".
Second, if you know your society contains predators, and you're currently in an equilibrium where they're effectively suppressed, prosocial actions attack the social norms that let you keep the predators starving. "Stop helping!"
So even if you're maximizing global payoff, punishing prosocial behavior can be rational.
FeepingCreature
1yr ago
Game theoretic punishment of defection, in general, requires you to be willing to destroy good things and make the world worse. This is a necessary trait in order to get optimal outcomes. As they said, "unless we're free, the machine will be prevented from working at all." This is bad for you, but it's good in the counterfactual case where the threat motivates cooperation.
A game theoretic agent that won't ever defect isn't a "good guy" but a "resource". I believe the lower classes understand this very well.
Eh. Dyson spheres are a transitional tech to stellar lifting, where you stop treating suns as god-given infrastructure and start using them as hydrogen mines that happen to be temporarily on fire. But in the really long run, you'll use the coal and uranium too - there's no reason not to. The limit with humans is largely effort, whether personal, investment, or regulatory; I can't see that being an issue for a true post-scarcity post-uploading post-AI society.
We're still very much in the "scale-up" regime, not in the "optimal use" regime.
I kind of disagree with this, yes. The limiting factor is having a chance to flourish.
Hypothetical: A guy comes into your house to murder you. He has a gun and spec-ops training; you are a keyboard warrior; he will definitely find you and murder you. The best you can hope for is maybe take him by surprise and give him some bruises. Do you hang out in broad daylight, sheepishly say "guess you caught me" and let yourself be shot? Or do you do the fucker as much damage as you can?
The game theory is this: every decision to exploit somebody exists on a margin spectrum. You are trying to extract as much benefit as possible for a given effort cost; if the other can raise the effort or lower the benefit, it incentivizes you to maybe leave them alone. But we never know where somebody's cut-off point is, so there's always an incentive, if you notice you're being fucked over, to do as much damage as you can back.
So there's a very tentative hypothetical we can construct here to advocate for Palestinean terrorism. Israel is clearly fucking them while exploiting "their" land (whether your game theory implementation advocates forgiveness or revenge here probably depends on preexisting sentiment, but revenge is at least plausible), Israel is clearly trying to minimize effort costs with Gaza, maybe if you can impose some costs on Israel, it'll push them closer to the threshold or at any rate strengthen your negotiating position. In game theory, a person who never plays 'defect' isn't an agent but a resource. Hamas chose the most damaging strategy available to them. Did it break existing compacts? Sure, but I'd presume they assumed that they could not get fucked any worse than they were. Will it work? Probably no.
Okay, cynic hat on: no, but the cost of it not working will not fall on Hamas. IMO, Israel can't really do anything (not hugely expensive) here that will hurt Hamas more than it drives recruitment. From the cynical view, Hamas and the authoritarian movement in Israel are obviously just playing Toxoplasma Tennis. B attacks A'. This enrages A! A cannot fight B, so it attacks B'. This enrages B! B also cannot (cheaply) fight A, so it attacks A', and so on. Part of the reason I don't really have a strong moral view against Hamas is that if this is an accurate model, it's obviously "cooperative" to some extent. Hamas benefits Netanyahu, and conversely. And whenever a cycle like that exists, blaming the most recent hit on whoever committed it is looking at the wrong component. It's a systemic effect. Remove Hamas, another terror group will be found. There is a gap here that allows the existence of a feedback cycle, so a feedback cycle arises. Anyway, in this particular case, the cycle might be running out of control because somebody, A or B, underestimated the damage the current serve would do, so it's unclear what happens next. But my moral view to "let's put the angry people in a cage and then send the guard away" is: a stupid game was played, and a stupid prize was won, I feel bad for the victims but not angry at the perpetrators; it's not like they were the load-bearing causal component.
To loop back: why did I say "the limiting factor is having a chance to flourish?" Well, how do you get out of a cycle like this? You find better things to do with your life. Not sure how good a life you could have in Gaza City. If you could have a good life, a dignified life, a life with authorship and respect, and then you go on a revenge bender - well, I am a humanist, I want to maximize flourishing. When people live an unworthy life, I welcome attempts to, even counterfactually, push for a better life; when people could already live a worthy life, I don't. Do I think Gazans lack the capability to live a worthwhile life? I don't know, honestly, but if I wanted to construct a moral case for terrorism, that's where I'd start.
Addendum: When this conflict started, I said to a family member: "I don't think what Hamas did was right, but I am willing to bet on two things: at the end of this, a lot more Palestineans will have died than Israelis; and at the end of this, Hamas will still be there." If Israel wants to convince me that I'm wrong about the Toxoplasma Tennis thing, those are the two factors they should try to improve.
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