magic9mushroom
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User ID: 1103
magic9mushroom
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1hr ago
UK lawmakers are probably aware that some children will see porn from their adults' screen...but should be aware that some children will see their parents having sex, and the correct course of action is obviously not to ban sex, but threaten such parents with neglect.
This is Chesterton's Ruins; we know plenty of societies - literally the majority of humans that have ever lived - did and do allow this with nothing bad happening. It would seem pretty stupid to call exposing kids to something that won't hurt them "neglect".
magic9mushroom
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13hr ago
Simulation hypothesis doesn't ruin everything as long as you're not being fucked with mentally and as long as the simulation is, like the Matrix, a full world rather than just a trick for you that doesn't model the parts you're not interacting with. Given those stipulations you can still come to conclusions about the simulation.
magic9mushroom
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23hr ago
So, um.
Trump just admitted that he knew for the last year one of his top advisors was dating a Chinese spy, and that he doesn't regret his decision to neither ask Huang to dump Huang nor stop consulting him, and that he wants to continue using him as an advisor.
I can honestly believe that Trump is too inexperienced at this whole "national security" thing (or too demented, or a mixture of both) to realise that this is not how you're supposed to do things. But this seems like the sort of obvious NatSec breach that might actually get those 11-13 Republican Senators to vote to convict.
magic9mushroom
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23hr ago
But we don't know what that looks like and cannot really tell a dyson swarm from ordinary interstellar dust that covers a star.
Yes, we can, actually. Look up Tabby's Star, where they found something like this and used the differential blocking of different wavelengths to prove it had to be dust and not macroscopic objects.
magic9mushroom
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23hr ago
For example, if there were a civilization comparable in sophistication to Renaissance Italy 150 light years away from us, right now, how would we even know?
Renaissance Italy, maybe not (although we're making progress on our ability to detect even that). But "Renaissance Italy" is a tiny slice of time compared to the amount of time a civilisation could persist at Kardashev II (unless Late Filters are a thing, which seems like something we want to know about!), and K2 likely would be visible to us over much of the galaxy - Dyson Spheres are not stealthy and deploying them en-masse is even less so (antimatter rockets are also pretty obvious, although solar sails admittedly aren't).
magic9mushroom
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1d ago
· Edited 23hr ago
A new paper is out(https://arxiv.org/pdf/1806.02404)
That paper is eight years old.
Also, this is one of the better papers in the "claims to dissolve the Fermi Paradox" genre (I remember reading at least three) in that its thesis, if proven true, would solve the Fermi Paradox. It's still not actually good; for one, their estimates are basically a lot of irrelevant set-dressing on "if you assume that there's a 40% chance abiogenesis is a universe-scale Great Filter and that there's no panspermia, you'll find that there's a >40% chance that we're alone in the universe" (yes, almost all of it is that one element), and for two, saying "the Filter might be abiogenesis" doesn't actually solve the Fermi Paradox - people have been saying that since before I was born, and I remember September 11. Solving the Fermi Paradox, for real, requires positively identifying the Filter, not saying "a Filter exists and it's probably either abiogenesis+no-panspermia or one of the increases in complexity between minimum-viable-lifeform and tool-users that can take over their planet" (note that "Earthlike planets are rare" used to be a live option, but we've proven that one wrong - this is what real progress on the Fermi Paradox looks like, and it involved a lot of fiddling with telescopes).
(Betteridge's Law strikes again.)
magic9mushroom
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1d ago
You need to put the word "(North)east" before "Asian" to be technically correct (I'm not saying that there aren't lookers from the rest of Asia, but there are definitely those I'd rate well below 8). I think white women can push a bit higher than that, also.
magic9mushroom
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1d ago
Perhaps I didn't make myself clear. There is a legitimate tradeoff for the programmer when deciding which language to use. It is sensible for people to pick one for some things, and another for others - and for this division to differ between people. A restriction one imposes on oneself cannot be unreasonable.
If there were some movement to arrest everyone who didn't program in Rust, that would be insane (within organisations gets more complicated; there are moral hazard issues), but @ZorbaTHut does not appear to have been ordered by anyone to use Rust.
magic9mushroom
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1d ago
Yes, the "context" link used to work. I thought I said that, but maybe I wasn't clear.
RR is saying that it doesn't anymore, and I can confirm (I got served immediately after making that post, and indeed used the workaround I stated).
magic9mushroom
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1d ago
· Edited 1d ago
Surely there's a type I/type II error dichotomy there, where you know you have some chance of accidentally writing something unintended (e.g. "goto fail"), and so there's a legitimate tradeoff between protecting you from those (which is serving your intended expression) vs. stopping you from doing things you actually intended? It seems reasonable to have various options in that regard lying around - even leaving aside personal differences, there are task differences in which is more important.
Unless it stops you from writing politically "bad" code? Does it stop you from naming variables "nigger" or something?
magic9mushroom
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1d ago
I think there are basically two assumptions that one kinda has to make in order to have a philosophical discussion:
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No Cartesian Daemon fucking with our ability to do logic and philosophy.
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The world exists - not necessarily "for real", but still as a whole. If we are brains in jars being fed simulated sense data, the simulation does at least model Earth and thus it is possible to deduce things about the simulation.
You need assumption #1 because if there is such fuckery, then it fatally undermines any attempt to search for philosophical truths, so what's the point?
You need assumption #2 because if the world doesn't exist, you (or from your perspective, I) probably don't exist and the discussion would again appear pointless. Also, because a deus deceptor even restricted from directly messing with our ability to do philosophy closes off huge swathes of questions to anything beyond "well, I dunno".
You do not actually need assumption #2, though, to prove that 2 + 2 = 4. Proof:
2 + 2 = 2 + (1+1) = (2 + 1) + 1 = 3 + 1 = 4.
First step is the definition of 2, second step is the associative property of addition, third step is the definition of 3, fourth step is the definition of 4. All of these are axioms (as is the transitive property of =). Maths is only ever asserted to be true with respect to some set of axioms; sure, this isn't true in Tropical but we're not talking about Tropical. Either my ability to do logic is being fucked with, or 2 + 2 = 4, no empiricism required.
magic9mushroom
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1d ago
Remind me, what is it that makes people consider Rust "captured"? Do they have some sort of control over who can legally compile with it, or something?
magic9mushroom
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1d ago
Who said it was intentionally hidden, but the "context" link worked, and the context is frequently relevant.
I will note that hiding the "context" link doesn't actually prevent people from figuring out whose it is, as it's possible to Ctrl-C/Ctrl-V the post into the search bar in another tab.
magic9mushroom
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3d ago
We would have no beef with China if not for South Korea.
What? All else aside, the alliance with Japan is a far-bigger deal.
magic9mushroom
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3d ago
I'm not American, so you're right that I've never voted Republican, but I'm probably going to vote National (our conservative party) at the Victorian election in a couple of weeks.
(Our hardcore-SJ party, the Greens, have gone psycho and want to ban our alt-right party, One Nation, so they're on the NOPE list. Our neoliberal party - the Liberals - won't be running a candidate in my electorate due to being in coalition with the Nationals. I'd be willing to vote Labour - our centre-left party, although with more SJ than I'd like - or One Nation if either had a civil defence policy, but they haven't got back to me yet and One Nation has a couple of positions that annoy me like wanting to ban abortion and build new coal-fired power plants (they have some good policies, too, but the Liberal/National Coalition has appropriated most of them).)
magic9mushroom
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5d ago
What you've described is basically just "one sin (defeat), one grace (victory)", though, and there's a reason that that saying is put in the mouths of a group called the Legions of Terror. I wouldn't say that they're never words to live by*, but the only typically-accepted reason is emergency - total war, human extinction, that sort of thing. To engage that mentality outside a true emergency is a mark of delusion or evil, and usually results in atrocity.
*I have to admit to holding that mentality with regard to stopping AI, because yeah, I believe basically anything's justified to prevent the end of the world. I'm not a terrorist, and I recommend against terrorism, purely on practical grounds (i.e. I cannot come up with any terrorist acts - at least in present conditions - that both are plausibly achievable and actually lower P(Doom)).
magic9mushroom
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5d ago
I put that down mainly to the Motte having an unusually high quotient of neo-Nazis.
I'd generally object to the categorisation of "choosing a partner based on genetics" as necessarily "neo-Nazi". There's a pretty-clear distinction here between the HBD-believers (the majority, including me) and the specific neo-Nazis, the Jew-exclusionary white supremacists (a subset and a minority, who catch a fair amount of downvotes and probably a larger amount of eye-rolls). The main thrust of that post is not specific to Nazis, and I imagine a lot of non-Nazis upvoted/AAQCed that post.
magic9mushroom
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7d ago
I agree that the specific Rat community tends strongly to have a particular set of views on those topics (though I'll note that I do go to LW meetups), and the Rat community is the most active in trying to stop/align AI.
My point is that the Rat community isn't identical to "the set of people who think AI might kill us all". Trump is pro-AI; much of the alt-right is pro-AI for tribal reasons. Actual conservatives... I know one IRL, and he's got a higher P(Doom) than me even if he doesn't use that term. One can hate the Rats and also hate AI.
(I mean, sure, "existential" in this sense is to a fair degree Rat jargon and will mess with your poll results compared to "is it possible AI will kill us all", but I understood you as making a point about people's predictions of worldstate, not about vocabulary.)
magic9mushroom
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7d ago
Based on people's answers to questions like "does AI pose an existential threat to the human race?", you should not be able to predict their opinions about completely unrelated topics like polyamory, gender ideology and factory farming. But in practice, you can, and with remarkable accuracy.
This isn't really true. I mean, if you applied that to me you'd get 0.5/3 (I think polyamory works for some people, but I imagine I'd wind up stabbing someone if I did it, and I think a lot of people have similar inclinations and less self-awareness than I). More generally, conservatives are generally pretty worried about AI; they just aren't particularly organised around doing something about it.
magic9mushroom
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8d ago
The interesting question is why corporate America (including but not limited to Big Tech) went full woke during the first Trump administration.
SJ escalated massively in response to the Trump campaign, and then again in response to COVID. The SJ-sympathetic personnel were already mostly in place by 2015 AIUI; Trump just created perceived urgency.
magic9mushroom
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8d ago
Definitely not the post I was thinking of, although there's a similar point in there. The one I was thinking of was specifically reacting to a memo to doctors advising them to frame things in a way that blames the people SJ wanted to blame.
I don't remember enough about what the political environment was like in 2017 to remember if this is absurdly prescient, or if enough of this stuff was already in place to make it a pretty straightforward expansion of visible trends.
Not prescient; I'd already seen an SJ forum go down exactly that path before 2017 (I know this, because I got politely asked to leave in early 2016 which gives a point of reference for my memories).
magic9mushroom
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9d ago
Communism is a political and economic system under which the means of production are under state ownership rather than private property.
No, that's socialism. Communism, as the name suggests, is "commune-ism", where there's no need for individual ownership because people care about others as much as themselves. This works pretty well at small scales and utterly-terribly at country scales due to human nature.
The confusion is because Marx claimed that socialism was a necessary stepping-stone to achieving successful large-scale communism, and hence the Marxist countries (which were socialist, and said as much - "Union of Soviet Socialist Republics", "socialism with Chinese characteristics") were/are frequently governed by Communist Parties (named such aspirationally).
magic9mushroom
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9d ago
The post might have been before then, yeah.
magic9mushroom
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10d ago
I remember this post (maybe by Scott, maybe not) discussing some SJ-aligned advice to doctors (essentially, trying to use conservatives' trust of doctors to push SJ framing of issues, I remember an anti-corporate point in there though I forget exact wording) and pointing out that this would merely cause conservatives to stop trusting doctors, with horrible side-effects. Can't find it. Anybody remember what I'm talking about?
No, that's not what I'm saying. There is some probability that Cartesian-Daemon shenanigans are occurring. There's just obviously no point in discussing that scenario or even contemplating it, so we might as well act as if they're not.
There is a difference between assuming something and asserting it. I assume that AI will not destroy the world when I'm making plans for the long-term. This isn't because I think AI will definitely not destroy the world (I think it's about 30% we all die); it's just that you can't actually execute on plans, or collect on investments, if you're dead, so that chunk of possibility-space is not useful to plan for.
I have not found you explaining what this is.
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