Sinity
2yr ago
I think this isn't charitable enough to those who do want to commit suicide. I haven't checked metrics on who regrets committing it vs not, and I do believe that there has to be some barrier to entry. But it's not easy to do far simpler things like dig road rash out of my own skin or cut away lesions. There's a reason why so many people thought it was amazing when that guy sawed off his leg to escape being trapped by a boulder. I do believe that you can absolutely want to commit suicide in a real way but fumble the execution.
IDK. How can you fumble, say, accelerating to VMAX and hitting a tree?
Sinity
2yr ago
The "Dead Internet Theory" doesn't feel like a theory anymore. The Motte is an obscure space with discussion levels high enough you notice if an actor isn't actually thinking or engaging with what's been said... and 2 out of 15 comments in that thread were Fairly undeniably bots....
The Motte is obscure, yes. Also, its userbase contains plenty of people who might want (and ability to), for whatever reason, launch GPT-3 bots or something.
What the hell must it be like on other forums? Newspaper comments? YouTube comments?
Well... Why the future is now and it's scarier than you think
Sinity
2yr ago
Twitter for SJWs already exists in the default mastodon, uh, servers? Instances? I don't know the lingo. It became a thing back when they were furious that Twitter didn't have enough censorship.
Mastodon WTF Timeline is a pretty interesting description
And Twitter allied itself with the Blue side in the war, making the Red side progressively more and more unwelcome on the system. Some of this alliance was expressed overtly, for instance by creating an "advisory board" to guide Twitter culture and staffing it with some of the most hateful of Blue leaders. Other actions were done covertly, such as by "shadowbanning" persons identified as Red by AI systems to prevent them from being able to communicate with each other through Twitter while maintaining plausible deniability that the system was taking a side. This stuff created a steady stream of Red refugees who still wanted to use a system like Twitter but didn't want to or could not use Twitter in particular. But there were also many on the Blue side angry that the Red side still had not been completely annihilated and they considered themselves refugees from a space rendered unsafe by the ongoing presence of the Red side. Both kinds of people wanted to go somewhere other than Twitter.
Around March 2017 I started hearing about Mastodon in a significant way from my contacts on Twitter, who I'd like to emphasize include both Red and Blue (making me unusual among Twitter users) as well as a lot of Japanese people who are outside that classification. There also started to be media coverage of Mastodon at this time. The coverage, all from Blue-aligned media, largely presented Mastodon as a cool new alternative to Twitter that would be free of "harassment," which is a Blue code word for the mere existence of the Red side.
At that time I thought I could see the train wreck coming, because I knew enough to know that the Red side was already strongly entrenched in the pre-Mastodon GNU Social network, and I thought I foresaw that as Blue users showed up thinking they owned the place, the federation would dissolve into fighting the same war that had devastated English-language Twitter, and so it would never be a successful Twitter replacement. I was wrong about this; what actually turned out to be the big divisive issue was something much more entertaining.
Circa Friday the 14th: English-speaking users, especially on mastodon.social, start becoming horrified by what is varyingly described as a flood of Japanese-language postings; an organized invasion by Japanese Internet trolls; a flood of "anime" (significant because "anime avatars" used by white people had been considered an emblem of the Red side in the Twitter Culture War); and a flood of "child pornography." Thoughtful discussion and unhinged hysteria ensue, simultaneously. The fact of Twitter's having been huge in Japan was not generally known in the English-speaking world at the time, which helps support the sheer incomprehension of where all these people could possibly have come from. There's speculation that maybe Mastodon had received some kind of mainstream media coverage that attracted a lot of Japanese attention, or had attracted attention on some popular Japanese Web site other than Twitter, though neither appears to have really been the case - such coverage happened later, as an effect, not a cause, of the sudden influx of Japanese users.
On the night of Friday the 14th: Pixiv (presumably a small group of their employees tasked to do this as an experiment) creates a Mastodon instance (pawoo.net) and it immediately starts growing on roughly the same curve as mstdn.jp. Early on the morning of the 15th, it passes mastodon.xyz to become the third most populous instance on the entire network. Much traffic on and from this instance consists of the amateur artists who populate Pixiv itself sharing their artwork especially including that which they're not allowed to post on Twitter, namely ロリコン.
Midnight, start of Saturday the 15th: mastodon.xyz announces that it is blocking pawoo.net (i.e. refusing to exchange message traffic) "due to a lot of pedopornographic accounts there, without any action from the administrator." The unbelievable idea that ロリコン is really acceptable to Pixiv and Japan generally, and is not a form of extreme misbehaviour by a fringe of trolls, has not sunk in on the English-language side.
Saturday the 15th, afternoon: Gargron the Mastodon developer and admin of mastodon.social creates a Github issue to discuss technological aspects of the ロリコン issue, mostly focused on the potential legal exposure for server admins whose servers may end up caching, and thus "possessing," material that is illegal to possess in their local jurisdiction. In postings there and on the Mastodon network, both in English and Japanese, the administrators of pawoo.net declare that they will not ban from their own servers material that is legal in Japan, but they will attempt to enforce a rule that "mature images" must be hidden by NSFW tags, and they will cooperate with other technical workers in attempts to keep "mature images" out of caches where they might create liability for third parties.
I think that the word choice of the Pixiv admins calling this stuff "mature images" in their English-language communications is telling: Japanese people think what the English speakers are freaking out over is the possibility that children might see the images. They're "mature" images that ought to be for consenting adults only, is the objection to ロリコン that comes closest to making any kind of sense from a Japanese point of view. The idea that even consenting adults ought not to be allowed to see such images isn't on the Japanese radar, and would seem to be wacky moonbat nonsense, even though it is so obvious, and so obviously sensible, as to be unspoken on the English side.
My assessment is supported by the Japanese-language side of the ongoing discussion on the network itself, where Japanese people frequently suggest (English-language commentary) that the network needs "age verification" and that that will somehow solve the problem. At this point I make it something of my own mission to inform the Japanese that that's not the English-speaking point of view, and verifying the age of users will not solve any relevant aspect of the problem that the English speakers see; while similarly informing the non-Japanese of how the Japanese do see things. I don't know if I make much headway in this effort.
Sinity
2yr ago
If advertisers are willing to pay so much, maybe Elon can just ignore their demands to control what kind of content is allowed on the platform?
Sinity
2yr ago
I think there's a nontrivial chance (say, 15%?) that Twitter ends up banned from various app stores like other 'free speech' twitter clones have. Lets say within one year.
It'd be hilarious if it happened, and then Musk invested serious money into some alt-appstore for Android. And maybe somehow broke iPhones to allow alternate app stores there too. Tho EU is already solving that particular problem apparently.
Sinity
2yr ago
What occurred to me watching the Fetterman debate is that ordinary, American political rhetoric is hard to distinguish from literal brain damage: question-evading, compulsive repetition of simple points, failure to substantially engage with alternative points of view, reliance on memorized/rehearsed lines, introduction of irrelevant themes/ideas, etc.
Eh, about political debates, you can't beat what happened in Poland during the last presidential elections...
The presidential candidates "debated" before the second round of elections at the same time, but in two different locations. The bizarre "debates" prompted many biting comments.
"The two photos below 1, 2, from the simultaneous so-called debates in Końskie and Leszno, best illustrate the state of Polish democracy AD 2020. My congratulations to both candidates and their staffs. This is how one destroys the community, which both contenders are supposedly constantly rebuilding..." - wrote political scientist and historian Professor Antoni Dudek.
Src (of the translated quote)
Sinity
2yr ago
Unusually, for not being CW at all: Proprietary software, especially the type that takes control away from the user and keeps getting more bloated and awful with every version. And in particular, being forced to use it.
Same. Especially firmware.
It's 100% due to a quasi-psychopathic desire by big tech companies to maintain an iron stranglehold on their users' rights.
There's also the thing where, if you root an Android phone, suddenly random bank apps and such try to fight back against it. This Reddit thread is very triggering.
So you reviewed with 5 stars previously, now changed to 1 star because they care about users' safety ... hmm, I see, I see.
Their company, their rules. They should be able to do whatever they want with their company.
That argument works both ways.
Edit: I'm just showing that the argument to freedom here works both ways. the same freedom the redditor is arguing form can be used by the company to do whatever they want as well.
Or this Asus forum thread. Specifically, this response from someone actually working there:
No plans for open source that I know of. Other than the complexity of making such a solution possible (there is already a ton of work required), we are also in a market which has fierce competition - one of the few things remaining outside software where vendors get to stamp their uniqueness is via UEFI and the dedicated hardware we use. We would not want to give away any of the special sauce we use to mitigate platform obstacles for others to freely copy or tinker with for example.
The timelines in which this buisiness operates is also unsuitable to support multiple solutions - it does not make sound business sense to do so in many cases and I believe this would be a similar situation.
This makes me wish for terrorism. Sadly no one is going to bomb a mobo manufacturer for these reasons. I just don't understand why it's not all leaked...
"stamp their uniqueness", lol. Maybe that would be convincing if this wasn't utter garbage. Eh
Sinity
2yr ago
Choose team liberty over team coercion.
IMO past lockdowns permanently increased liberty in the future, by shifting the default from office to remote work, where applicable.
The previous arrangement was plain coercion (just look at the management class still trying to fight back occasionally, despite workers clearly preferring their freedom). Which actually affected lives, to a drastic extent. Lockdowns were lukewarm, and very temporary.
Choose team economy over team lockdown.
Same here; it could've only increased the pace of change long-term. Killing/damaging obsolete sectors of the economy like physical retail is good.
Sinity
2yr ago
I translated fun fragment of the irc log (link to a pastebin containing it is in "Some news coverage").
120123.070109 <+hrhrhrhr> they shut down the server ;]
120123.071050 <+hrhrhrhr> do you know what was the password?
120123.071052 <+hrhrhrhr> we got in
120123.071055 <+hrhrhrhr> we break the hash
120123.071056 <+hrhrhrhr> and behold
120123.071058 <+hrhrhrhr> admin1
120123.071059 <+hrhrhrhr> ahahahahaa
120123.071100 <+k0stek> they swapped index [file?]
120123.071100 <+hrhrhr> xD
120123.071102 <+corror> kurwa
120123.072933 <+k0stek> hrhrhrhr but admit you wouldn't guess such a password :D
120123.072942 <+hrhrhr> dude
120123.072946 <+hrhrhrhr> we were thinking hard xD
120123.072952 <+hrhrhrhr> we found a bypass to the panel
120123.072955 <+hrhrhrhr> and there, sql injection
120123.072955 <+hrhrhrhr> xd
120123.072959 <+corror> and then here is, such a password
120123.073003 <+hrhrhrhr> and it [SQL] was so twisted
120123.073005 <+hrhrhrhr> fuck me
120123.073006 <+hrhrhrhr> ;d
120123.073011 <+hrhrhrhr> this SQL was fucked up
120123.073018 <+hrhrhrhr> and so, we're pulling passwords
120123.073021 <+hrhrhrhr> we break the hash
120123.073041 <+hrhrhrhr> and it was admin:admin1
120123.073047 <+hrhrhrhr> admin;admin1
120123.073047 <+hrhrhrhr> xd
Some people say that power over humans is just fundamentally not as interesting to intelligent people as playing with abstractions and earning six figures while being a vulnerable serf, which entirely filters out geniuses. I call them nerds and press (x) for doubt.
Power over humans might be poorly scalable / unreliable / limited by luck. Soft sciences are rather incapable compared to STEM stuff. Maybe 160 IQ focused into math does miracles, while 160 IQ focused into soft stuff lets you predict people to some impressive - but not that terrifying - degree? Human brains are complex systems. And then there are interactions between them. Also, since industrial revolution (or maybe earlier, to some extent), such a genius needs to also take into account crazy changes in tech too.
And then there's other similarly (or significantly) intelligent people to deal with.
Random crap happens and shapes world events to some extent. Does anyone remember ACTA? I was in middle school at the time. I can't remember clearly how, but I stumbled upon some random IRC channel and also Facebook group "protesting" it (just few thousands of users complaining pointlessly, on platform). There were few people on the IRC channel, and they DoSed some random government website. No idea what they were expecting. I didn't really expect anything to happen, but I posted link to the IRC channel, and a link to some JS DoS utility, along with some instructions. I posted that several times, expecting it to just get lost in the flood of messages. Shortly after that I went AFK for 0.5-1h. When I went back there were several hundred people on that IRC channel and apparently they managed to bring some sites down.
So TV news covered it, the same or the next day. In the following days, it was few thousand people on that channel. And also someone defaced one gov site. Some news coverage, 2. No idea if that log is from the same channel.
After it was in the news, physical protests started, and soon spread all over EU. Various elected politicians beclowned themselves rather hard. It was the CurrentThing for some time.
The European Union didn't ruin its energy policy because of being fractured more than the US of A is.
USA also crippled their nuclear tech. EU got caught with pants down because they expected Putin to be "rational". Which was maybe wrong, but not necessarily stupid or unreasonable.
Cutting chip exports to China - is it really high int move, and not simply some base competence?
Sinity
2yr ago
Yeah but the 'dead drop' system seems pretty good. Providing your home address to the counterparty seems horribly risky.
In Poland we have something seemingly even better. Customer pays in Monero into the Escrow (operated by darknet forum admin), and provides a parcel locker's location code. And also what they ordered + some contact info (this is the weak part, most sellers use some properiary communicator called Wickr).
They just send it to a given parcel locker and when it arrives, you get the code to open it. Overall, it seems absurdly safe. And there are 20000+ locations in the country to choose from.
Sinity
2yr ago
And it's not only "provide a short text prompt". There's inpainting, outpainting, img2img, and so on.
Sinity
2yr ago
AI is pretty much only going to harm visual artists. It's not going to "help them make better art", it's going to replace them, because people used to need artists to draw X and now they don't. One guy might get a productivity boost from using AI, but that's not going to do much for the other 10 people who got laid off.
Yes, in a similar way that (machine) computers harmed (human) computers.
Also it will change everything in similar ways. Explosion of amount of computations : explosion of amount of visual media. Someone still needs to decide, ultimately, what is desired out of given piece of media. Someone needs to program computers as well.
But yeah, we don't need human computers anymore, and programmers don't do much (explicit) calculations using their brains.
Sinity
2yr ago
Few random results. I only played with it for a few minutes after setting it up so far.
Sinity
2yr ago
Ofc judges can decide whatever. But there's no way they're going to side with the artists, destroying AI tech. It'd be just yielding to China.
Ignoring practicalities, it just doesn't make any sense. Why couldn't you train AI on copyrighted works while still able to train your own biological neural network on them?
Sinity
2yr ago
You're punishing people for voting illegally
It should be ~impossible to vote illegally by mistake. It's stupid to try to fix broken procedures which allow 'illegal voting' by just punishing citizens really hard if they make a mistake.
Sinity
2yr ago
Kinda off topic, but I find it really weird that felons can't vote in the US. I remember being very confused when I learned about this (recently). Seems like a bad thing, especially given stupidly high incarceration rate. Apparently almost 2.5% of the population was disenfranchised at the peak (2016). Seems to be potentially enough to shift the outcomes of the elections.
So, say, some political group takes power, passes laws which disproportionately affect people voting for the other side, lots of people go to jail... and they're stripped of the right to vote.
Seems like a really stupid idea. Probably popular tho.
Sinity
2yr ago
What would "global censorship" even look like
Lockdown: The coming war on general-purpose computing; relevant text from 2012
Today we have marketing departments that say things such as "we don't need computers, we need appliances. Make me a computer that doesn't run every program, just a program that does this specialized task, like streaming audio, or routing packets, or playing Xbox games, and make sure it doesn't run programs that I haven't authorized that might undermine our profits."
On the surface, this seems like a reasonable idea: a program that does one specialized task. After all, we can put an electric motor in a blender, and we can install a motor in a dishwasher, and we don't worry if it's still possible to run a dishwashing program in a blender. But that's not what we do when we turn a computer into an appliance. We're not making a computer that runs only the "appliance" app; we're taking a computer that can run every program, then using a combination of rootkits, spyware, and code-signing to prevent the user from knowing which processes are running, from installing her own software, and from terminating processes that she doesn't want. In other words, an appliance is not a stripped-down computer—it is a fully functional computer with spyware on it out of the box.
(...)
The copyright wars are just the beta version of a long coming war on computation. The entertainment industry is just the first belligerents to take up arms, and we tend to think of them as particularly successful. After all, here is SOPA, trembling on the verge of passage, ready to break the Internet on a fundamental level— all in the name of preserving Top 40 music, reality TV shows, and Ashton Kutcher movies.
But the reality is that copyright legislation gets as far as it does precisely because it's not taken seriously by politicians.
Why might other sectors come to nurse grudges against computers in the way the entertainment business already has? The world we live in today is made of computers. We don't have cars anymore; we have computers we ride in. We don't have airplanes anymore; we have flying Solaris boxes attached to bucketfuls of industrial control systems. A 3D printer is not a device, it's a peripheral, and it only works connected to a computer. A radio is no longer a crystal: it's a general-purpose computer, running software.
(...) this was the year in which we saw the debut of open source shape files for converting AR-15 rifles to full-automatic. This was the year of crowd-funded open-sourced hardware for genetic sequencing. And while 3D printing will give rise to plenty of trivial complaints, there will be judges in the American South and mullahs in Iran who will lose their minds over people in their jurisdictions printing out sex toys. The trajectory of 3D printing will raise real grievances, from solid-state meth labs to ceramic knives.
It doesn't take a science fiction writer to understand why regulators might be nervous about the user-modifiable firmware on self-driving cars, or limiting interoperability for aviation controllers, or the kind of thing you could do with bio-scale assemblers and sequencers. Imagine what will happen the day that Monsanto determines that it's really important to make sure that computers can't execute programs which cause specialized peripherals to output custom organisms which literally eat their lunch.
Regardless of whether you think these are real problems or hysterical fears, they are, nevertheless, the political currency of lobbies and interest groups far more influential than Hollywood and big content. Every one of them will arrive at the same place: "Can't you just make us a general-purpose computer that runs all the programs, except the ones that scare and anger us? Can't you just make us an Internet that transmits any message over any protocol between any two points, unless it upsets us?"
There will be programs that run on general-purpose computers, and peripherals, that will freak even me out. So I can believe that people who advocate for limiting general-purpose computers will find a receptive audience. But just as we saw with the copyright wars, banning certain instructions, protocols or messages will be wholly ineffective as a means of prevention and remedy. As we saw in the copyright wars, all attempts at controlling PCs will converge on rootkits, and all attempts at controlling the Internet will converge on surveillance and censorship.
There's a book written by a polish author, Jacek Dukaj - "Ice". I didn't read it yet, but I thought it might interest some of the people here, especially @DaseindustriesLtd. English wikipedia claims there's Russian translation, but I'm not sure. No English translation yet.
The story of the book takes place in an alternate universe where the First World War never occurred and Poland is still under Russian rule. Following the Tunguska event, the Ice, a mysterious form of matter, has covered parts of Siberia in Russia and started expanding outwards, reaching Warsaw. The appearance of Ice results in extreme decrease of temperature, putting the whole continent under constant winter, and is accompanied by Lute, angels of Frost, a strange form of being which seems to be a native inhabitant of Ice. Under the influence of the Ice, iron turns into zimnazo (cold iron), a material with extraordinary physical properties, which results in the creation of a new branch of industry, zimnazo mining and processing, giving birth to large fortunes and new industrial empires. Moreover, the Ice freezes History and Philosophy, preserving the old political regime, affecting human psychology and changing the laws of logic from many-valued logic of "Summer" to two-valued logic of "Winter" with no intermediate steps between True and False.
Dukaj noted that in this book, science in science-fiction stands for the philosophy of history.
Plot section explains what this last sentence means, but it seems too spoiler'y.
Here's a partial (3%) translation[2] of his other book I did read, "Perfect Imperfection". I'm not sure how faithful it is; he uses fancy language structures. It has Russian translation; quote from English wiki: "One of many original twists in the book is the new language, such as new grammar and prefixes that try to describe the posthuman beings (somewhat resembling the concept of gender-neutral language). This language play also makes the book especially challenging for translators. The book's translation to Russian was nominated for a Russian awards for best translations" <yep, trying to translate it with Deepl was a struggle>
I put off reading his other books after I bounced several times from one called "Science Fiction"; IIRC I kept getting lost b/c of how meta it is (and the first time I read Perfect Imperfection I really got it only on second reread due to defamiliarization[1]).
Actually, I just remembered that besides "Perfect Imperfection" I also did read his "Black Oceans". It was good, but not very thought provoking in a way Perfect Imperfection was. But now that I looked at the Wiki, this seems interesting (given it was written in 2001):
Technological trends are far from only ones explored by Dukaj in his book. He portrays the futuristic bureaucracy, political power struggles behind private sector, government and the military, and changes in culture. Dukaj extrapolates from the current trend of increasing lawsuits and political correctness: in his world many people willingly live under constant mass surveillance of the New Etiquette (NEti), which registers all their actions so that they couldn't be falsely accused of some "personal offense crime".
He's apparently switching from writing to making video games. Translated polish article:
Jacek Dukaj has announced that he has established the Nolensum studio, which will produce video games based on his works. The first project will be "Hardware Dreams," a virtual adaptation of the novel " The Old Axolotl." That title has received international acclaim, with two TV series based on it - the Belgian "Into the Night" and the Turkish "Yakamoz S-245". The director of the game, also responsible for its visual side, is Maciej Jackiewicz: art director and co-creator of numerous animations and cinematics for games ("Cyberpunk 2077", "The Witcher")
[Dukaj's quote] You can write on paper and you can write into the world. For many years, I have watched closely as the center of gravity of culture has shifted from forms based on writing to audiovisual media. A technological revolution is advancing that makes it possible to experience the content of these media in direct sensory experiences. Much of my work has described the consequences of such transformations. Until the time came when at least some of these ideas of mine, instead of on paper, I can realize for real, out in the world. The work in which I most fully described the world of metaverses, NFTs, universal guaranteed income, the social credit system and similar phenomena was 2010's "Line of Resistance." From it comes the term "nolensum", meaning the situation when technological civilization meets our needs so well that we have to artificially create identities and goals for ourselves. The need to engineer people's sense of life arises. And the pioneers of engineering the meaning of life are the first practitioners of gamification of the human destiny: computer game developers.
The richness of Dukaj's worlds is of a scale that the budgets of Hollywood blockbusters would not be ashamed of," says Marcin Kobylecki, creative producer. - "Hardware Dreams is distinguished by its universality and scalability. Its plot is set in Tokyo, and the post-apocalyptic vision of life in a computer network is sure to gain the attention of audiences around the world.
The strategic plan is to gradually expand the team and production capacity so that Nolensum simultaneously develops several projects. Not necessarily just games. Nolensum is affiliated (through the Bellwether Rocks fund, in which Dukaj is also a shareholder and board member) with companies involved in NFTs, cryptocurrencies, metaverse and tokenization, among others.
Nolensum has secured full funding for the first year and a half of production. In the near future, Nolensum also intends to work with outside contractors.
Nolensum. Sounds promising.
[1] There are concepts / technologies which are just not explained for sth like first half of the book, in order to immerse reader in post-singularity world by showing it from a perspective of someone from ~near-future. (/u/gwern described his It Looks Like You’re Trying To Take Over The World as doing the same thing)
[2] Because I figured I'd try to translate it. Unfortunately I asked for the permission, wrongly expecting I'd just get no response, most likely. In hindsight, that was stupid.
Sinity
2yr ago
Let's say you have content-addressed Content-addressable file system. It supports mirroring of any piece file onto multiple devices. When user saved a new file, it is saved, identifiable only through its content hash, onto two or more devices.
If you unplug any of them and plug it to a different computer, both computers will have the file.
Which is the original file and which is a copy? Neither is original, it makes no sense to talk about 'original' in digital realm (usually).
And yes, files, digital data - abstract stuff. Maybe for 'real' objects it is different? Identity Isn't In Specific Atoms
Suppose I take two atoms of helium-4 in a balloon, and swap their locations via teleportation. I don't move them through the intervening space; I just click my fingers and cause them to swap places. Afterward, the balloon looks just the same, but two of the helium atoms have exchanged positions.
Now, did that scenario seem to make sense? Can you imagine it happening?
If you looked at that and said, "The operation of swapping two helium-4 atoms produces an identical configuration—not a similar configuration, an identical configuration, the same mathematical object—and particles have no individual identities per se—so what you just said is physical nonsense," then you're starting to get quantum mechanics.
If you furthermore had any thoughts about a particular "helium atom" being a factor in a subspace of an amplitude distribution that happens to factorize that way, so that it makes no sense to talk about swapping two identical multiplicative factors, when only the combined amplitude distribution is real, then you're seriously starting to get quantum mechanics.
If you thought about two similar billiard balls changing places inside a balloon, but nobody on the outside being able to notice a difference, then...
The concept of reality as a sum of independent individual billiard balls, seems to be built into the human parietal cortex—the parietal cortex being the part of our brain that does spatial modeling: navigating rooms, grasping objects, throwing rocks.
Even very young children, infants, look longer at a scene that violates expectations—for example, a scene where a ball rolls behind a screen, and then two balls roll out.
People try to think of a person, an identity, an awareness, as though it's an awareness-ball located inside someone's skull. Even nonsophisticated materialists tend to think that, since the consciousness ball is made up of lots of little billiard balls called "atoms", if you swap the atoms, why, you must have swapped the consciousness.
The original must have the quality "created first."
But to what do you attach this metadata, if you are presented with two bit-by-bit (or atom-by-atom) identical objects? If it's a 'real world' painting on a canvas, and you make that copy, the only way to discriminate between them is some metadata - like position in space of its center of gravity or sth. That seems rather arbitrary.
Sinity
2yr ago
Two objects can be physically identical and still have different relational properties. If you make an identical replica of a Van Gogh painting, one is still the original and one is still a fake.
It's just untrue. Overgeneralization of the concept 'original'. If you have two copies which are actually identical, neither is more original than the other.
Sinity
2yr ago
Therefore I wonder - is this all a load of crap?
IMO definitely. Scientific Freud
In this month’s American Journal of Psychiatry: The Efficacy of Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy and Psychodynamic Therapy in the Outpatient Treatment of Major Depression: A Randomized Clinical Trial. It’s got more than just a catchy title. It also demonstrates that…
Wait. Before we go further, a moment of preaching.
Skepticism and metaskepticism seem to be two largely separate skills.
That is, the ability to debunk the claim “X is true” does not generalize to the ability to debunk the claim “X has been debunked”.
I have this problem myself.
I was taught the following foundation myth of my field: in the beginning, psychiatry was a confused amalgam of Freud and Jung and Adler and anyone else who could afford an armchair to speculate in. People would say things like that neurosis was caused by wanting to have sex with your mother, or by secretly wanting a penis, or goodness only knows what else.
Then someone had the bright idea that beliefs ought to be based on evidence! Study after study proved the psychoanalysts’ bizarre castles were built on air, and the Freudians were banished to the outer darkness. Their niche was filled by newer scientific psychotherapies with a robust evidence base, such as cognitive behavioral therapy and [mumble]. And thus was the empire forged.
Now normally when I hear something this convenient, I might be tempted to make sure that there were actual studies this was based on. In this case, I dropped the ball. The Heroic Foundation Myth isn’t a claim, I must have told myself. It’s a debunking. To be skeptical of the work of fellow debunkers would be a violation of professional courtesy!
The AJP article above is interesting because as far as I know it’s the largest study ever to compare Freudian and cognitive-behavioral therapies. It examined both psychodynamic therapy (a streamlined, shorter-term version of Freudian psychoanalysis) and cognitive behavioral therapy on 341 depressed patients. It found – using a statistic called noninferiority which I don’t entirely understand – that CBT was no better than psychoanalysis. In fact, although the study wasn’t designed to demonstrate this, just by eyeballing it looks like psychoanalysis did nonsignificantly better. The journal’s editorial does a good job putting the result in context.
Suppose we accept the conclusion in this and many other articles that psychodynamic therapy is equivalent to cognitive-behavioral therapy. Do we have to accept that Freud was right after all?
Well, one man’s modus ponens is another man’s modus tollens. The other possible conclusion is that cognitive-behavioral therapy doesn’t really work either.
Sinity
2yr ago
If you've got other ideas, or have a more specific idea on how this could work, let me know :)
Maybe somehow integrate comparative sorting into the site? Gwern's text about it. I'm not sure how this could be done though. Make a shortlist of QC's, have users vote on whether the thing they read previously was better/worse than current item? If people actually used it, that'd provide a lot more value than upvotes, I think.
Sinity
2yr ago
I have similar issues, but I don't think it's really internet addiction. It's more like indecisiveness. When trying to decide what should I do, I have a zillion options. I try to figure out the best, which is impossible. I know I should just pick something with positive value, but...
I'm thinking of outsourcing some decision-making to software. Maybe it's possible to build a habit of just doing what it outputs. Something like taskwarrior (or simply taskwarrior) + ordering importance of the tasks via Gwern's Resorter. Or picking e.g. book to read from a list randomly.
The goal is to fundamentally reconfigure your desires and dispositions so they're more naturally aligned with your actual goals.
if an app makes you spend time in a different way, you'll probably 'reconfigure desires' too.
A key factor in understanding internet addiction is understanding the need to accept boredom. Before smartphones, people used to get bored way more often. Sometimes you'd just have to sit there with literally nothing to do, not even anything to think - you won't always want to read a book, or entertain yourself with your own thoughts.
It doesn't help IMO. Experiencing boredom will make you resent the decision to do it to yourself, which leads to relapse. I don't really agree that scrolling Reddit is that entertaining too. Something like watching a good anime is better. The problem is picking which one...
Unlike hard drugs, total abstinence is neither possible nor desirable.
I disagree about it being desirable; hard drugs aren't a coherent category. Total abstinence from opioids if one isn't in pain makes sense; stimulants are useful though.
Rejecting the value of individual's freedom to die also makes you a possible victim.
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