Titus_1_16
1yr ago
the above are just a few years ahead of the rest of us. If we survive the singularity then we, too, will spend our lives on our little reservations, everything provided from above
It's worth considering that the rickety, shitey-arse state of many reservations etc. is as much the result of incompetence, indifference and bad faith from conquerors, as it is the inherent fecklessness of indigenes. Perhaps a hyper-competent, hyper-intelligent robot overlord would simply provide a better standard of reservation.
Competently-administed mandatory eudaimonia would actually be a wise policy on the part of any hypothetical roboking that was disinclined towards genocidal eradication. To keep humans in a sub-par state of flourishing would mean less predictability - there's always the chance of some freak behaving who-knows-how. Having all the decorative/ethically-sourced humans in a state that is the absolute pinnacle of human excellence means you can plan accordingly, and the odd freak won't "hop the fence" so to speak.
Even that practical concern aside, I think an AI inclined to keep us would probably keep us well. And for the humans, this is a life at least as fulfilling as that experienced by all the chaps in the old testament, in Greek myth, etc - a life of challenge, overseen by known gods. Not too bad really.
Titus_1_16
1yr ago
And I strongly suspect the 'people see more child porn so they want to offend more' effect is either nonexistent or tiny
I eh, disagree emphatically with your suspicion. If cp doesn't make people into more vigourous paedophiles, then we have to assume also assume the whole wild explosion of paraphilias and perversion that's come out in the past 20 years has just, by remarkable fluke, happened to co-incide with the ubiquity of online porn. I don't think the evidence supports that position, and I think wider availability of cruelty-free fairtrade child porn would likewise increase paedos' appetite for real-world abusing.
Titus_1_16
1yr ago
That's super interesting, have you ever been to Europe? There's a lot that's distinct about White Americans (the capitalisation makes sense here to draw attention to the group, they're not just Americans who happen to be white) compared to other Euro nations. If I'm to trade in unkind European characterisations, White Americans can be a bit insincere, plastic and not-quite-there. Maybe "hollow" would be a better term than "plastic", actually.
I wonder if these traits are what you noticed; "automaton-like" is not a bad match for this set of traits
Titus_1_16
1yr ago
It's amusing in a post talking about translation and language prowess that you've actually made a (very common with Americans) grammatical error.
if I would evaluate people by the content I find on the social media, I'd be forced to conclude that the vast majority of humanity are complete utter morons.
This should be either "if I evaluated" or "if I were to evaluate", since it forms a subordinate clause to the second conditional, if you're interested. Mistakes of this form are nearly guaranteed with Dutchmen, which I always find interesting because their English is otherwise near-perfect, and typically more orthodox than the average, say, Brit.
Titus_1_16
1yr ago
Twitter is a lot more crass than this place, it's like putting your mouth right on the tap.
I know the answer is always to curate one's feed, but it's hard to stop the low content creeping in on twitter
Titus_1_16
1yr ago
Poland in full war mode would likely crush Russia.
What on Earth makes you think that? Is this a typo?
Titus_1_16
1yr ago
The average person with that title on LinkedIn (and by extension Hinge) is literally one step (or no step) above a ‘hustle’ crypto influencer and hangs around their city’s startup coworking scene selling ‘networking services’ and asking for 5% in exchange for ‘marketing and connections’
Roman criminals weren't nailed this hard my god
Titus_1_16
1yr ago
Fair play
Titus_1_16
1yr ago
What did Jefferson mean by inferior in "body"?
Probably aesthetically. Enslaved people tend to look pretty wretched. Also, this might not be obvious to a person from a multiracial country, but if you're not exposed to them very much, people of other races can seem kind of generally gross. Witness eg Chinese people encountering bodily hairiness in the flesh for the first time - they're often repulsed. Or, non-African men (for whom women's hair is a site of eroticism) encountering precolonial African women, for whom the hair on one's head was no more a locus of beauty than the skin on one's elbow.
Titus_1_16
1yr ago
Far-right insulting term for blacks. Comes from some case in the US South a while ago where a black jogger was shot. I think it's popular because the last four letters are G-G-E-R
Titus_1_16
1yr ago
People who get eye contact wrong come off as autistic, because it's a classic symptom of autism. But they can get it wrong by having too much or too little.
The correct amount of eye contact varies by culture. New Yorkers make remarkably little, and Irish tend to make quite a lot. I was showing a crew of New York Jews around Dublin last year for a wedding, and the eye contact differential was striking
Titus_1_16
1yr ago
The same way that gay liberation did a number on close male friendships (ie made them more difficult to cultivate and maintain), trans emancipation has been strictly negative for masculine women (who of course greatly outnumber MtF transsexuals)
Titus_1_16
1yr ago
Yeah she's quite pretty, looks well for her age
Titus_1_16
1yr ago
Can i just say, absolute banger of a reply (and definitely better than chatGPT, to whose writing I've been comparing literally everything else today)
Titus_1_16
1yr ago
Ostensibly, humans want to maximize the greatness of their life
This "ostensibly" is doing quite a bit of work.
Trying to answer "what is good in life" with any rigour is not possible in the format of a board like this. You may equally try to answer in the same space a question like "by the way, what actually is everything?"
To avoid condescension and make clear what I mean, let's even tease apart your first postulate here:
humans
Why is the goodness or otherwise of life applicable to groups of "humans" rather than individuals? Now it might be or it might not, I'm not taking a position, just pointing out that you're implicitly smuggling in a sort of moral realism here, a sense that "the good" is a discoverable truth that's the same for many people, as opposed to say an "invented" individual preference or something else.
want
The Good is what people want, really? Is that the relation you're grounding it in? You sure? What about people who want bad things etc. Okay, so we'll only trust the wanting of sensible people. But how do we decide which reasonable group's wanting we should trust to define the Good, when the Good itself is the criterion we'll have to use to define reasonableness? (This is close to something called the Euthyphro problem, FYI)
to maximise
Do they? What does "maximisation" really mean here, is this like arithmetical summing of good to get the most utils? What's the conversion ratio of big boons to little ones? How many fun nights out does it take to equal me bearing a child?
the greatness
Is this just a synoym for "the Good"? If not, what is it?
Usw, the point is getting clear now!
Titus_1_16
1yr ago
I enjoyed reading this. And surprisingly, not with sadism, it actually put a smile on my face to read it, because it reminded me so much of myself.
I'm much older than you, married in my 30s, boring and well off. Life is decent. I've pure affection for my tossing and turning, genuinely miserable, deeply neurotic college self.
Nothing more profound to say except good luck, advice across ages doesn't work anyway.
Titus_1_16
1yr ago
Ishiguro is British, not American.
Titus_1_16
1yr ago
Id rather get wet a few mornings a week than deal with obesity and heart disease from physical inactivity. I charitably attribute Americans' fatness to your car-centricity: if you think it's actually just pure moral torpor, and the cars are an unrelated co-incidence, then fair play to you.
Car-development gives diffuse malus and discrete bonus (ie a dry and comfortable commute), whereas walking is the inverse
Titus_1_16
1yr ago
I don't wonder; I'm quite certain they'd all be dead in a decade, or whatever is the longest possible period you can run on predatory cannibalism.
Titus_1_16
1yr ago
Damn, that's how I'd classify you too. 4 times a day at 40? What are you, top 5% of age-weighted wankers?
Titus_1_16
1yr ago
It's age dependent. At 35 that's crazy high, at 15 it's not really unusual
Titus_1_16
1yr ago
A niggle, but:
aren't African Americans more like 10% of the population, with the other 2.5% that's black being mostly African immigrant
It seems intuitively incorrect to me that one in five black Americans have even recent African ancestry. I would guess it's more like one in ten at most. Can any Americans vouch for the likelihood of this?
Titus_1_16
1yr ago
As much as Americans kvetch about their black people, there really is no population over there that's really comparable to Gypsies.
It's an unfair over-generalisation to assume, without any other evidence (habitus, dress, accent, etc) that some individual black American person has a meaningfully higher chance of committing crime. But with Gypsies, man, it's an iron law, there's not even a question. A gypsy president, or for that matter gypsy lawyer or doctor or other middle-class type, is inconceivable.
Titus_1_16
1yr ago
If the principal of a school is responsible for all injuries on the playground, the result is going to be obese kids who aren't allowed to play fun games.
Side note, but I've long thought it would be a pro-social act for someone to sue a school over their child's obesity/ADHD, and charge that policies mandating physical inactivity for most of a child's waking hours are the direct, proximate cause.
Just establishing this legal risk would provide cover with insurance etc to allow more short-term risk (eg running at playtime)
I think until such time as Israelis stop kvetching to Germans about the Holocaust, Palestinians can be permitted to protest their subsequent territorial expropriation.
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