flitter
1yr ago
there are still social rules around how you should treat others
Yeah I think this is an example of early forms of local "dove" behavior out-competing the hawk memes for how to treat those around you.
So civilization is the process of expanding the moral circle (I've heard that one before) through competition: brothers outcompete loners. Families outcompete brothers. Tribes outcompete families. etc etc etc.
I'm reminded of the fremen mirage blogpost, which argues that throughout history the expanded (decadent) civs have outcompeted the more spartan "fremen" go-kill-and-take-their-stuff gangs. https://acoup.blog/2020/01/17/collections-the-fremen-mirage-part-i-war-at-the-dawn-of-civilization/
flitter
1yr ago
Agreed, but I think OP would also agree with you. Genes are the primary reproductive unit right now. The secondary reproductive unit right now is the ideas on top of genes. Genes are currently the smallest reproductive unit, the recursive loop of evolution. Memes form on top of them and are influenced by them (see Idiocracy for fictional evidence), but in the future with bio-electronics or large matrices the ideas could create a new primary reproductive unit whose behavior would begin influencing the ideas instead of genes.
flitter
1yr ago
This makes sense to me, even if I don't fully agree. There's some truth to how these "hawks" and "doves" will have a overpopulation life-cycle.
On the other hand I suspect there's an underlying structure to these positions (motte) that would suggest that there are stable "optimal" environment behaviors (bailey) that suggests an underlying weak-ordering to how moral a system is (double bailey)
flitter
1yr ago
It's a very strong argument against naive whiggish presentism. You've given good argument that some moral principles merely followed in the wake of technological abundance, and weren't "self evidently" adapted until the economics changed. Perhaps the average morality as practiced is accidental and self congratulatory.
Something hinted in this post is that an individual "weak" morality is a strong meme, and can convert others faster than they destroy the carriers. The "go kill people and take their shit" meme builds a large empire through conquer. When material conditions improve it seems like "tithe to the poor and hungry" gains a footing and starts taking over though. Either through Fashionably irrationality or through moral discovery who knows. A prime case study of this is the spread of Christianity through Rome. Or the final boss Fukuyama.
The core question is what happens to morality over time when material conditions don't improve. Do the social structures remain static? Or do they develop on the same converging fixed points but more slowly. You mention George Washington was a strong supporter of slavery during a time it was seems as economically necessary, and yet during that time there were also abolitionists, who opposed it purely for moral reasons. This seems contrary to the simple thesis you've presented,
For me, I think the nature of morality is too early to call, and depends on deeper studying patterns of history and some questions about how consciousness exists and such.
flitter
1yr ago
The flipped version is likely prostitution. Men who are down on their luck can't sell themselves. Woman who are down on their luck can (to some extant). This is an extra option for women, but it's generally not an appealing one, so isn't seen as an advantage for women.
flitter
1yr ago
In the way that a sculptor discovers the statue, the Hock will break you until only Strength remains
flitter
1yr ago
Might be falling into a history average familiarity trap. I don't people are going to be naming even second-rate pharaohs
flitter
1yr ago
That makes sense, direct editing is going to cause a lot of indirect problems. Similar to immune system or dietary supplements.
flitter
1yr ago
minimizing how many instructions you need to add to the genome in order to make something happen
This is the mechanism for why the body isn't fully optimized: it has to be backwards compatible and build iteratively off of previous DNA. That tech debt is exactly what an artificial engineered brain/body could re-design.
flitter
1yr ago
Watts used to hold those positions more strongly. I think he has updated his opinions more recently in Nov 2022. His blog has some posts about consciousness and survival
https://www.rifters.com/crawl/?p=10307
What they’ve got, as it turns out, is a nifty little proof-of-principle in support of the Free-Energy-Minimization model I was chewing over last April. Back then it was Mark Solms, forcing me to rethink my assertion that consciousness could be decoupled from the survival instinct. The essence of Solms’ argument is that feelings are a metric of need, you don’t have needs unless you have an agenda (i.e., survival), and you can’t feel feelings without being subjectively aware of them (i.e., conscious). I wasn’t fully convinced, but I was shaken free of certain suppositions I’d encrusted around myself over a couple of decades. If Solms was right, I realized, consciousness wasn’t independent of survival drives; it was a manifestation of them.
https://www.rifters.com/crawl/?p=10225
Only now—now, as it turns out, maybe sentience implies survival after all. Maybe I’ve had my head up my ass all these years.
I’m not sure I buy it. Then again, I’m not writing it off, either.
flitter
1yr ago
Why does selecting text near the top of the screen scroll up in this UI?
Find a big post like https://www.themotte.org/post/216/meta-something-shiny-and-two-things, scroll down a bit, and then try to select a sentence within an inch of the screen-top.
flitter
1yr ago
Interesting, I find the consistent tree structure more intuitive than the sibling only branching screenshot. Props to customization
flitter
2yr ago
Firefox mobile can install adblock addons & play videos in the background.
Can't do the skipping-sponsored-content afaik
flitter
2yr ago
https://old.reddit.com/r/TheMotte/comments/eabgr3/even_space_marines_need_artillery_support_why_i/
Warhammer 40k, StarWars, Fascism, Equality. Even Spacemarines need artillery support.
flitter
2yr ago
A major goal of this forum is to avoid the kind of incendiary language used here. Speak plainly. Don't attempt to build consensus about whether Vaush sucks, give an argument instead.
What led you to predict that "bread tube" would be anti-AI? Do you find their position hypocritical? Anti-progress?
the image link is broken, copypasting the whole thing works
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