naraburns
nihil supernum
No bio...
User ID: 100
naraburns
nihil supernum
3mo ago
You, (that is the mod team) have made it clear my dismissal of HBD as a product of Bay-Area rationalists looking to paper over their preexisting racial and class resentments with a thin veneer of "Science!", is uncharitable and unkind and will eventually see me banned and yet if the shoe fits...
Now, hang on.
At this point, my problem as a moderator with "HBD" discussions in this space is that people are far too quick to resort to shorthanded arguments either way. Part of writing to include everyone is writing to include people who aren't already marinated in decades of internet debates concerning (respectively) "the real and charitably-interpreted science of human group differences" and/or "the historic use of 'Science!' to excuse the oppression of disfavored human groups."
Of course, I can't realistically require every poster to relitigate past issues in microscopic detail in every single post. But right now I think I am seeing the opposite problem more often, where the discussion history between community members is functioning as unnecessary conversational baggage.
I'd really like to see more discussion and less axe grinding, I think is what I'm getting at. You get a lot of leeway as a valuable member of the community and, frankly, as a past moderator. The bans you're eating are not because of heresy against the sociopolitical dogmas of Bay Area Rationalists (of any particular tribe). They are because you sometimes decide that a certain argument is worth burning through some of the goodwill you've accumulated over the years. I have definitely been there and done that. But you're doing it a lot lately, and that is a trend I'd like to see reversed.
I am not mod-hatting this comment as a warning. I am mod-hatting this comment because I am speaking as a moderator, here.
Unfortunately the dragnet did not catch context for me, just the comment. But my memory is that @MachineElfPaladin is correct: DignifAI is the opposite of the porn deepfake apps, it puts naked and scantily-clad people into tuxedos and gowns and the like. "Some people" were arguing that this also is sexist or somesuch.
naraburns
nihil supernum
4mo ago
@Rov_Scam's original comment:
I can't comment about your specific situation, since I don't know what kind of committee you sat on or how it was structured. But I sit on the board of directors of a nonprofit organization, and while there are no concerns about entryism right now, since I became involved we've restructured to put up guardrails against it. The bugbear of the ad hoc organization that is formed by a group of like-minded individuals is an overreliance on consensus, and the feeling of ownership among the founders. This is fine for very small, informal organizations, but if you're at the point where you want to start soliciting money from other people, you have to start thinking about making things a bit more formal.
In my case, it's a group focused on outdoor recreation. It was initially more or less a social club in a mountain town that was formed by a retired local businessman, the owner of one of the outfitters, and a friend of theirs who says he "manages money" because he doesn't think he's old enough to call himself retired. They got some seed money from some of the other outfitters in town and just sort of existed for a year or two until a younger friend of theirs came along and started organizing events on social media and growing the membership. That's how I initially got involved around 2018, at first as just a regular member. By this time the group was getting into trail construction and had an agreement with the State Park to take responsibility for trail maintenance in certain areas. The group had big dreams for what they could accomplish. It went from a recreational club that did trail maintenance to a group who wanted to make the area a "destination".
It's at this point where I can tell you how to implement the first fail-safe against entryism: Don't let anyone onto your board of directors unless there's a specific reason why they need to be on the board. The fact that someone is reasonably active on the board and has occasionally agreed to run certain functions isn't enough. I was active in the group for about 2 years before I was asked to join the board. And by active I mean I donated money and showed up at nearly every event. This is part of why I was asked to join the board, but not the whole story. The group had initially formed as a 501(c)(7) social club because the president's attorney at the time said it was less paperwork than forming a 501(c)(3). The problem is that donations to a 501(c)(7) aren't tax-deductable, and most grant money is only available to 501(c)(3)s. I was brought onto the board because I'm a lawyer and I was able to take care of this problem as well as various other legal-related issues that may arise. Of course, my role on the board encompasses the full gamut of what the club does, but that's part of it — you need people who are brought on for a specific reason, but are willing to accept the full range of associated responsibilities.
One of my first orders of business was drafting a set of bylaws. There are two general ways an organization can operate. The first is similar to a publicly-traded company, where members vote on board vacancies and other leadership positions each year. The second is one where the board controls itself, i.e. who sits on the board is determined by the board. There are reasons why a group might choose the first option, but, for small groups especially, I highly recommend the second. One potential downside to this is that active members will start to feel invested in the group but frustrated that they have no voice. Now, if someone is so active that they're showing up for almost every event and are among the first to volunteer whenever there is work to be done, then I'd offer them a board seat. But this isn't most members. A fair amount of people will volunteer a fair amount and want a say in things, but won't rearrange their lives around the organization. The solution to this is to implement committees. The board will form, say, a budget committee, and offer seats on the committee to whoever wants one. One board member will chair the committee to start, but the chair will theoretically be available to anyone who wants to take that ball and run with it. The powers and responsibilities of the committee will be strictly defined by the board, and the board reserves the right to limit membership on the committee. That way, if someone starts causing problems, the board can just remove them. This also significantly reduces the workload of the board itself, who don't have to spend meetings hashing out every detail but can think big picture. For the budget example above, instead of hashing out a budget for three hours they can leave that to the committee, and then discuss the committee's proposal at the next meeting. Or if they want to have an event, they can have an Events Committee who will do all the planning. This is good for the people and the board. Most people don't want full board responsibilities but want to be involved in a more limited way, and planning an event or leading up one project is a good way to include them and give them some real power without having to make them members. It's also good for the board in that if you want to give them certain privileges, like access to a bank account, it's easier to do that for someone with an actual title than for some random member.
naraburns
nihil supernum
4mo ago
@TitaniumButterfly's original comment:
In reality, it’s like being ‘free’ in a post-apocalyptic ‘The Road’ style wasteland versus an all-expenses-paid hotel stay where omnipotent gods protect and serve you for your whole life.
I'm broadly sympathetic to your overall point and would be on your side of such a debate 9/10 times but in this case I do want to push back a bit. I breed and hunt with birds of prey and have had a lot of time to consider this question.
Overall you're more than correct. People will see a falcon sitting on a perch in captivity and say things like "Oh that's so sad, it's tied down and it wants to be free." No, not really. Not at all, actually. Flying is hard work and if (actually when) they get to choose between flying around for a reward and simply sitting and being fed, they will choose the latter every time. And if they're pushed into the former it's not uncommon for them to try to weasel out of it by just sitting somewhere to see if they can outwait you into producing food to get them to return. This is a whole thing, most of them have to be trained out of that instinct, and more than once I've spent a night under a tree, refusing to produce a reward for a falcon until it's gotten back up in the sky and flown around a bit. Reward them for sitting once and they'll never want to fly again.
But there is an exception. Given the choice to sit and be fed, or go out and hunt some real game, they will about destroy themselves in their eagerness for the latter.
I will never forget the sight of my apprentice's hawk on his first live rabbit. He bound to it, we dispatched it, and then he spent roughly the next twenty minutes visibly trembling with emotion. His crest up, his eyes aflame, like every cell of his body was radiating golden light. It was clearly a transformative experience, and I don't think I'm prone to inappropriately romanticizing these creatures.
They live for this stuff. And I think other animals must feel the same way about a lot of things, including securing and defending territory, competing for mates, etc. Yeah, most of them are losers in such processes, but the winners get something I think they'd agree is worth having, and it is the impulse of life to shoot for the stars even if most must fall short.
Animals don't have any kind of abstract notion of freedom or self-determination. But they are wired to appreciate certain things, and I think that the zoo (or household pet) experience is rather like pod life. A lot of men, for example, would be 'happy' with something like state-issued ai robot waifus, plentiful netflix and video games, and enough industrially-produced food to satisfy them, but those who have felt what it is to be chosen by a beautiful mate, to have achieved mastery in their craft, to have lived in real, functional human community, would look at that and be horrified.
No, I don't think that captive animals, except perhaps those taken from the wild, have any idea what they're missing. But that doesn't mean they're not missing it.
To quote Doctor Alan Grant, the T-rex doesn't want to be fed. It wants to hunt. And huskies want to range hundreds of miles, and collies want to herd.
naraburns
nihil supernum
4mo ago
@Folamh3's original comment:
To be pedantic, these are AI-modified images. Twitch thots/OF girls are posting photos of themselves for public consumption on X, and the DignifAI account is replying with an edited version of the same photo. "Bob/Alice posts a public photo or video on a social media platform, and a bunch of people who don't know Bob/Alice create edited versions of said photo or video without Bob's consent" describes hundreds if not thousands of viral memes throughout the history of the internet (e.g. Now We are Homeress, Miss Teen USA, Chocolate Rain, Leave Britney Alone, Boom Goes the Dynamite, You Da Real MVP, the Trump mugshot, Yao Ming Face, Scumbag Steve). Occasionally Bob/Alice may give their blessing and say that they don't have a problem with said memes, but this is the exception rather than the rule (e.g. Kevin Durant made it quite clear that he did not appreciate people making his heartfelt expression of gratitude to his mother into a cheap joke), and generally happens months or years after people have been nonconsensually editing the original photo/video to their heart's content.
Unlike editing a photo of Trump so it looks like he's riding a skateboard or whatever, I don't think it's hard to understand why editing Alice/Bob's publicly posted photo to make it look more sexualised than the original is crossing a line: there's a significant possibility that people might mistake the edited photo for the genuine article, and Alice/Bob will take a reputational hit, as people will assume that they are the kind of person who shares thirst trap photos for public consumption. Even if the photos are obviously fake (as in the recent Taylor Swift "deepfakes", which look more like the kind of stylised fetish fanart which has been around for years before LLMs were a thing), I think it's still demeaning to reduce a real person to the status of a sex object without their consent. But DignifAI is the opposite of that - you're editing a photo clearly intended to titillate to make it look a photo which was not intended to titillate. It's easy to understand why people might be upset that their reputation has suffered as a result of strangers erroneously believing that they are the kind of person who posts thirst trap photos to titillate strangers - but if you are a person who posts thirst trap photos to titillate strangers, how will a photo of you edited to look like you're dressed more modestly affect your reputation at all? Taylor Swift saying "It's disrespectful and demeaning for people to create or edit photos of me which reduce me to the status of a sex object" is a legitimate complaint; a Twitch thot saying "I don't appreciate people taking photos of me which represent me as a sex object and editing them to make me look like an average woman"? Not so much - if for no other reason than, for most of her life, the Twitch thot in question is an average woman. The titillating clothing and makeup that a Twitch thot wears when she's performing is a kind of costume, and all DignifAI is doing is showing what she (might) look like without the costume. Is it wrong to distribute a photo of Corey Taylor without his scary Slipknot mask? I don't think so.
By analogy, if Bob posts a public photo of himself wearing regular clothes, and someone edits it without Bob's consent to make it look like he's wearing a swastika T-shirt, that's a shitty thing to do, and obviously created for the purpose of defaming Bob. But if Bob is an outspoken neo-Nazi who posts a public photo of himself wearing a swastika T-shirt, and someone edits it without Bob's consent to make it look like he's wearing a plain black t-shirt - well, so what? (None of the above is to imply being a neo-Nazi is morally equivalent to being a Twitch thot or OF girl, obviously - it's just to illustrate that reputational hits aren't symmetrical as some people seem to think.)
naraburns
nihil supernum
4mo ago
@FCfromSSC's original comment:
The modern era is best understood as a massive, distributed search for ways to hurt the outgroup as badly as possible without getting in too much trouble. I gotta say, this is certainly one of the more amusing search results, at least in its initial form.
It's interesting watching people here try to figure out what the response is supposed to be. Is it that it's weird to post pictures of other people? No, memes exist, that can't be it. It's wrong to edit pictures of other people? Nope, memes again. It's weird to post pictures of people to make fun of them? Nope, people of Wal-Mart, faces of meth, mugshot collections, and about a million other examples. It's wrong to edit pictures of random people to make them look worse? These pictures are edited to make them look better, though.
Bonus points to the people claiming the objectionable part is politicizing the non-political. I welcome you to 2024, and wish you well in your recovery from long-term cryo-stasis.
So I guess we're down to "It's wrong to edit pictures of random people to make them look better as an implicit criticism of the way they've chosen, of their own free will and for their immediate, personal benefit, to publicly present themselves." But at that point, why not just speak plainly? This is criticism, and people don't like their ingroup being criticized, and they especially don't like criticisms encapsulating a hostile value system presented in a witty fashion by their outgroup. People are objecting not because there's some well-established general rule or value being violated here, but because they don't like having their ingroup's behavior critiqued by their outgroup, and they don't like seeing their outgroup's values expressed, no matter how anodyne the expression.
One option, as @To_Mandalay demonstrates, is to try to exaggerate the critique beyond all reason.
Everyone knows the people behind "it's okay to be white" are /pol/acks and thus everyone knows that what "it's okay to be white" actually means is "I want to ethnically cleanse non-whites and possibly do a full-out Turner Diaries style genocide."
...And this attitude is how we get FBI investigations of "It's ok to be white" flyers on a college campus. The problem is that social critique is a game of subtlety, and treating what is, on the surface level, an extremely mild critique as though it's actually a straight declaration of genocidal hatred just makes one look unhinged. Likewise, it seems to me that the critique here is less "you're a whore and I hate you" and more "you're a whore and you don't have to be." Those two statements are pretty clearly not identical, and the bite of the latter seems, to me, undeniable.
The game-theoretic-optimal response, as with "it's okay to be white", is to simply ignore the issue entirely. The reaction is half the point, and it's the only half containing achievable value, unless you think people are lying when they say that the clothed versions of the pictures legitimately look better. Unfortunately, the social reality we've constructed disproportionately rewards handwaving freakoutery. I suppose we'll see if tribal discipline can beat the implicit reward structure. My bet is that it can't.
And of course, the search goes on. To_Mandalay is correct, I think, in that the hate is really there, and it yearns for expression. This version made me laugh; the ai race-swap-children filter someone else posted in the thread just made me feel sick. The distributed search continues, and the search results accumulate.
naraburns
nihil supernum
4mo ago
@RandomRanger's original comment:
and are actively making the planet less habitable
Have they read the IPCC reports? The planet is going to get marginally warmer over a century which is harmful but not a major problem. I ctrl-Fed 'existential' and there's no such risk in the reports, except to low-lying islands and even then it's manageable. See the Netherlands and their erosion of the North Sea. At any rate, there used to be jungles in Antarctica, we're still in an ice age.
Everything we do makes the planet less habitable from a certain point of view. More habitable from another. Mining rare earths uses toxic acids, releases radioactive materials, industry requires pollution. Drilling oil means oil leaking. But without oil and without mining we're going to starve in enormous numbers, we need fertilizers, mechanized transport and industrial agriculture to survive. If we suddenly lost access to fossil fuels tomorrow, that would be an existential threat to civilization, perhaps even humanity.
Team Blue's responses have not been very helpful either, there are a bunch of these phoney climate conferences where billionaires, celebrities and world leaders fly their private jets to places like Dubai, where the poor countries ask the rich countries for free money and everyone clever acknowledges that they're not going to cut emissions to reach a 1.5 or 2 degree target because it spells death for national prosperity. Blue's been sabotaging nuclear for decades now along with geoengineering, these people apparently won't accept the efficient, progress-based solutions. The harm is not serious enough to justify the cost of preventing it in this particularly silly way, just like how fertilizer runoff into rivers isn't severe enough for us to not use fertilizers.
Anyway, why should A give up coal when B will just burn more and take the profits instead? Team Red may not know what Nash Equilibria means but they at least understand the concept. Calls for unilateral nuclear disarmament also only come from the left wing of politics, something about competitive game theory escapes them.
Team Red’s lifestyle also requires huge amounts of public infrastructure and foreign entanglements
Defending Saudi Arabia /= invading Iraq or Iran. America is a rich country, a diet of meat and V8 engines can be sustained on American resources, especially if they were competently managed. America's post-91 foreign entanglements make the price of energy rise, they're supremely counterproductive - sanctioning Russian, Venezuelan and Iranian energy exports, sanctioning and invading Iraq and creating a giant mess, bombing Libya into chaos, now this Israel-Yemen farce in the Red Sea. States naturally want to sell their oil, if the US just wanted cheap energy all they'd need to do is prevent anyone monopolizing energy supplies by invading other countries.
naraburns
nihil supernum
4mo ago
@mitigatedchaos's original comment:
You can literally just say "it's OK to be black," and dare them to repeat "it's OK to be black." You can put up a sign saying "it's OK to be black" next to their "it's OK to be white" sign.
The reason progressives objected and called it "fascist" rather than counter with "it's OK to be black" is that if they agree that "it's OK to be white," this establishes a point of leverage on them. Progressives want to discriminate against people they deem "white," and that's not subtext, that's just literally the thing that they do. That's what is logically entailed in the combination of the words they say, and the very obvious, glaring, material reality around them. The 'progressive' view is that this will work to close racial outcome gaps somehow. (In general, they haven't actually checked.)
When progressives say what amounts to, "Google has too many whites and asians as a percentage of its staff; this is a problem (that needs to be solved)," the only reason it isn't explicitly a call to fire people for their race is because Google is so profitable that they could hire the difference to do nothing and still make money. At any normal company, with normal revenues, it's a demand to fire people explicitly for their race, to meet numbers that the attacker just made up based on crude demographic estimates that likely don't even match the surrounding area.
But if it's OK to be white, then it isn't OK to do this sort of "corrective" discrimination.
If the target agrees, then later, when they attempt to pull this again, someone can say, "Didn't you say it was OK to be white? So shouldn't this mean it's wrong to discriminate against them?" Progressives objecting to "it's OK to be white" is about this, not about genocide. That's one key reason why they didn't just use the cheap and obvious fork "it's OK to be black" to demonstrate for all on-lookers that the IOTBW guys were genuine white nationalists. (There's also "don't give them an inch!" tribalism, the mechanics of which I could go into, but bottom line, they can't do the strategy because they're not liberal on race - exactly the thing the strategy is supposed to reveal! IOTBW would have just caused confusion back in 2003.)
Leverage is a big factor in the treatment of "Black Lives Matter" - notably, rightists actually did respond with the fork "All Lives Matter" and have it loudly rejected.
Leftists want to get leverage so they can force concessions, rightists don't want leverage established on them. And sure, part of it is that rightists don't want to spend money, and part of it is that rightists don't want to endorse "race conscious" policy, but part of it is also that rightists can't actually give the thing being demanded, because they can't close group outcome gaps - not through any morally acceptable means. This is part of what made "Black Lives Matter" such an effective slogan at the time, only discredited later by the rise in (disproportionately black) homicide victims - as part of the racial peace, Republicans didn't want to unnecessarily antagonize racial minorities in America, and that meant not going out of their way to spread demographically unflattering information. That's the kind of gap Folam3 discussed for right-to-left attacks elsewhere in this thread.
naraburns
nihil supernum
4mo ago
@felis-parenthesis's original comment:
I want natural selection to also apply to God. That is: there are multiple "gods"="meme space egregores" inhabiting the noosphere. Humans are symbionts. They live in symbiosis with meme-space egregores. The humans provide the egregores with the information processing substrate that the egregores (live on | live in | need in order to exist). In return the egregores help humans two ways. They transform human individual intelligence into human group intelligence. They stop intelligence self-destructing.
Is intelligence a good thing? Robinson Crusoe on his desert island had better be clever or he is not going to survive. That is the man-versus-nature context and intelligence is purely positive. But most of the time we live in groups, creating a man-versus-man context. Individual intelligence is what makes you defect in a prisoners dilemma. On its own, more intelligence means more treachery and back-stabbing. Think Lebanon. The Lebanese are intelligent; but in the sense of willy and cunning. Goes badly.
The key observation is the travellers dilemma
The traveler's dilemma is notable in that naive play appears to outperform the Nash equilibrium
We notice individual intelligence turning a tricky situation into a tragedy. We do much better as members of a group, all of us sacrificing for the benefit of the group, and doing well individually through membership of a thriving group. Our egregore orchestrates this transformation of individual intelligence into group intelligence by existing as the ideology to which we submit and which binds us together.
Human rationality isn't really a thing because humans live in groups and what is rational for each individual is in conflict with what is rational for the group.
Meanwhile the human body has animal origins and the human race exists through instincts. Broodiness and lust. Broodiness: we want children so we have sex. Lust: instinctive and pleasurable, children come automatically.
But humans are clever, so we invent contraception and get to enjoy sex without having children and the human race dies out. Maybe broodiness comes to the rescue, maybe not. But while we are inventing contraception we are also inventing super-tasty food and getting too fat for sex. Being clever generally leads to subverting instinctive reward systems and self-destructing. A good egregore teaches us eudaimonia instead of hedonism. It saves us, and since we are its substrate, it saves itself. Symbiosis both ways.
naraburns
nihil supernum
4mo ago
@100ProofTollBooth's original comment:
and to keep on rejecting other anti-scientific ideologies that spring up in the future.
I know this wasn't your intent, but that sounds like scientism. Furthermore, any reading of basic epistemology will show that "science" isn't the Master Truth Substance that exists in the popular conception. Science is far, far more about an ongoing process of discovery and discernment than a universal record of unimpeachable facts.
As @WhiningCoil's excellent posts in this thread point out, rationalism was and is the attempt to Science All The Things (including emotionally influenced human thinking). I would say that, taken to its extreme, it leads to the Effective Altruism shenanigans (self-delusion, and self-absolution for deception and worse offenses) or the often paralyzing over examination of outlets like LessWrong and SSC. Don't get me wrong, I love reading Scott's 10,000 word posts just as much as most Mottizens, but you have to admit that the RAT community discourse can quickly devolve almost to the level of "depends on what the meaning of "is" is".
Rationalism's core flaw, in my opinion, is that you're trying to debug the firmware with the firmware.
"A man's at odds to know his mind cause his mind is aught he has to know it with." - Cormac McCarthy, The Road.
Humanity just hasn't found out how to "debug" the brain. Various religions try to do this by focusing on transcendental exercises and appeals to divine intervention (prayer, meditation). I give them credit because they, at least, often state explicitly that you can and should do these things, but you're not going to ever truly "succeed" while still remaining a human on earth.
Rationalism does a sneaky thing in that it admits no one can actually think "perfectly" yet self-ranks ahead of any other way of knowing by kind of gesturing towards "science" and "better thinking." The retail version of this is companies and people who say they are "data driven." Bayesian inference is the real eye roller here. People who "update their priors" surely don't have a record of all of their priors to understand the system of thought that led them to their present situation. Those that do are fall into the trap of hyper-over-examination and probably fail to make any decisions of consequence in life.
When people (not you) worry about "science deniers" - it's just a very shiny "boo outgroup." The irony of ironic examples here is, in fact, COVID. All of the people who really care about people who are vaxx-suspicious are also probably double masked outdoors in 2024. There's bidirectional "science" denial, but one group's direction is bad and my group's direction is good.
So, what's the cure? Doubt. I've written before about how negative emotions are utterly misunderstood and undervalued by modernist thinking. Guilt is bad because it makes you feel guilty and it's really only a social construct or something, whatever, keep having an affair! Disgust is wrong because you aren't appreciating differences in cultures, you colonist! Doubt is bad because you should just "Do You" and believe that "the universe" will take care of the rest. Believe as you feel!
Well, no. Use doubt as the road to humility. "Here's a bunch of shit I truly believe down to my very bones and I'll literally DIE for it ..... but, shit, I could be wrong" is a far healthier way to go through life than just the first part of that sentence.
naraburns
nihil supernum
4mo ago
@FarNearEverywhere's original comment:
A blankface meets every appeal to facts, logic, and plain compassion with the same repetition of rules and regulations and the same blank stare
Speaking as a former minor local government minion, I recognise this person. No, not the blankface (though at every level in every job and situation in life, there are indeed little tin gods who love exerting whatever scrap of power they possess) but the person making the "appeal to facts, logic and plain compassion".
I don't have a fancy label for them unlike Mr. Aaronson (Dr. Aaronson? Professor Aaronson?) since I don't have the creative big intellect he undoubtedly possesses, but every bureaucrat in a public-facing role (indeed, every worker in a public-facing role) has encountered them at some time.
The people who rock up late after the deadline for submission, without the necessary paperwork or supporting documents, who didn't bother applying and want you to fill it all out for them, breathless because they dashed here at the last minute. The ones who want an exception to the "rules and regulations" because, well, they're just that special and exceptional and their case is unique and not at all like the other fifteen people waiting in line, that they are holding up for the past hour because they've been arguing - sorry, I mean "making appeal to facts, logic and plain compassion".
(I would also venture a lot of people here have been stuck in line behind such a person).
The fact that what they want is against the regulations, because they don't qualify? Irrelevant, and besides, have you no compassion for their special, unique case which should get an exception?
The fact that they had three weeks to get this done, and showed up half an hour after the cut-off? Not their fault! They have busy, important lives unlike you, minor official of no consequence, hence being such important people, they deserve an exception!
The fact that if I accept their application, I'll have to do the same for everybody else who also does not qualify? So what, that's nothing to do with them.
The fact that (1) this is against the regulations and (2) I will get into trouble with my boss, my boss's boss, and the department head? So what? That's not their problem. Why are you being so unreasonable?
The fact that I have explained three different times, in three different ways, why your application is defective? Ah, here we go again with the "same repetition of rules and regulations and the same blank stare".
Clearly, the fault cannot lie with me, Important Busy Smart Person With A Life And Impactful Job. It lies with this blankface who is hiding a contemptuous smile as they tyrannically wield the power entrusted in them to make others miserable. Yes, that must be it!
As I said, I don't deny there are people who won't budge an inch because they like making others squirm. But the 'blankfaces', be it in public service or private businesses, often are not doing this to spite you. We'll like to help, we want to help, but we can't because (a) oftentimes the ability to exercise initiative has been deliberately stripped from fears of setting precedent (if you do this, then all the other applicants/clients will want the same, and will go to court to force us to treat them the same - and yes, this does happen) and in order to keep costs down (b) you are the one genuinely at fault because you don't have the necessary supporting documents. This may or may not be your fault, but if the regulations say "must have proof of identity", I can't take your application just because you show me a crumpled envelope with an address on it.
Often times, other people are at fault - I've mentioned on here before when I assisted in processing student grants, and one award was held up because the parents were in a pissing match after the separation and the father just would not provide three lines of notified statement that he was not paying child support. There's nothing I or anyone else can do there, much as we really do want to help.
Aaronson strikes me as the kind of guy who takes things personally - if there's a holdup, it's not because "well, there are screw-ups in systems all the time", it's because that official there wants to tyrannise him just like the Nazis against the Jews and he's going to be dragged off in chains if only that guy could do so, it's because he's Jewish, he knows it:
I almost wanted to say to the police: where have you been? I’ve been expecting you my whole life. And I wanted to say to Dana: you see?? see what I’ve been telling you all these years, about the nature of the universe we were born into?
naraburns
nihil supernum
4mo ago
@gattsuru's original comment:
Mediated group hallucinations and consensus reality
There's a joking-not-joking post, a while back, from JonSt0kes. At the risk of pulling the setup apart from the punchline, the setup is what I'd like to highlight.
Me: I refused to turn on my AR glasses & see the barista as an anime fox otherkin spirit. Her glasses flagged that my filters were off.
It's a bit of surrealism, and probably intended as foil to comment on more immediate political conflicts outside of the scope of this discussion.
There's certainly people who'd love augmented reality avatars, and while none would want to force them on others, well, tomorrow is another day. It's not even really possible right now. VTubers are a small genre focused on presenting a virtual avatar to their viewers, sometimes in surprising genres, but they generally depend on carefully calibrated cameras and nearly-ideal lighting conditions to correctly recognize precise pose details. Body tracking (and even estimation) works, sometimes, for incredibly controlled environments. Even the best augmented reality systems are too bulky and have too short a battery life to be worn around all day, or even for long parts of a day. And heaven help anyone who wants to implement a standardized communication protocol that works between different headset vendors without a ton of unreliable jank. Some of these technical limitations might not be solvable, period: modern tech has done amazing things with microlenses, but optics are a cruel mistress.
There's spaces where these technical limitations don't exist, or can be maneuvered around. Hence the many references above to tech driven by virtual reality gaming, primarily but not solely chatrooms like VRChat. You can control lighting, and have multiple calibrated cameras at set distances and angles, and have everyone in a room wearing multiple inertial measurement units all speaking the same language. There is little background noise that makes audio transcription and voice manipulation jank in the real world. Far fewer chances for reality to break the illusion, excepting when you find furniture the hard way.
In those environments, it's not only common to define how you and others are presented, and where. It's often unavoidable. In VRChat specifically, some clients ("Questies" and more recently cell phone users, as opposed to those using full-blown computers with connected VR displays) can't see more complicated avatars or even enter some environments, if they use too many resources to be practically implemented on their headsets. Individual users also have a complex system of less direct control through a privileged user system, as well as more traditional block/mute capabilities.
And that, if anything, is the low end: VR environments tend to think of a person's self-presentation as sacrosanct, and as a result, it's much harder to make someone into something they aren't than to hide them.
That's just not some fundamental part of technology.
As a comparison, Final Fantasy XIV is an (acclaimed) MMORPG. Like many MMOs, it officially prohibits third-party modifications. Like many MMO mods, they still exist, and unless you're cheating on a world first race or being incredibly obvious about it, there's not really a lot that the game-runners want to do. There's actually some fascinating technical work being done here; where earlier tools swapped references to asset locations on disk while the client is closed, modern tools can dynamically reload or redraw on arbitrary triggers at arbitrary times, and there's even a tool for synchronizing between users in certain configurations, even transferring mods from one user to another (with accompanying security concerns). This can quickly get bizarrely recursive: there are now mods that exist solely for the purpose of overwriting other people's vanilla glamours.
Some of this goes exactly the direction anyone who's seen Skyrim modding would expect, and there's no small amount of comically oversized dick and/or boob mods, sometimes even for different genders. Some of it's more subtle modifications down that path, as the default models are about as featured as a ken doll even above the hips, or to smooth things out when desired.. Sometimes it's weirder than you would expect [bonus for those willing to log into the site (cw: no genitals or female nipples, possible spoilers? SAN damage for those familiar with those spoilers?)].
But a good portion of it's far more expressive. Tired of Dark Knight being Shadow The Edgehog? Swap to Devil May Cry, floral, or light-themed. Instead of naruto-running as a Ninja, you can practice your gun-kata. A lot of design-space exists and revolves around fluffy tails, goofy dances, capes, bizarre accessories, even posture. And then there's pages after pages of hairstyles, or mods that just turning on hats. Want to get rid of Lalafel or replace every PC with their alternate universe Roe version? There's a tool for it!
Yet it results in a world that's not just distinct from the what the developers designed, or what some unaffiliated observer might see, but where multiple people in the same room might have wildly different worlds that they're interacting with, even when sharing some mods. And there's some easy objections, here.
Sex is the easiest. Someone running male nudity mods in FFXIV will find out the hard way (hurr hurr) that several comedic quest chains normally involve a very animated older gentleman running around in his smallclothes, who is now Very Happy to see you; someone aggressively doing so can change every single player and (humanoid, non-special model) NPC into their desired gender and species. And, of course, someone who wants to do something intentionally has far broader space available.
There's no small number of other ways to embarrass people, of course. If you think a three-foot dong would be a little beneath your standards, there's some political statements that could have far more impact. And that's at the low end of the discussion space, and going into video games is the lower risk environment. Trace has spoken about someone beaten as a nazi in part due to time spent with a (stupid) Garry's Mod avatar. It's easier to think of things that offend Blue Tribe sensibilities that can play that role, over Red Ones, but it's not actually that hard to come up with Red Tribe or more general offenses. As ironic as "don't misgender me" will be when it's some social conservative getting involuntarily catgirl'd, I'm not sure what'll happen if thirty people start passing around screenshots or video of a well-known person's character marching like a member of the SS, but we're probably going to find out eventually. And you don't have to be Neal Stephenson or Cory Doctorow to come up with heavy-handed approaches that these technologies could use.
From the other direction, this (cw: censored 'female' nudity) particular description of events could genuinely reflect someone with neither correct boundaries nor behaviors, and maybe that's more likely than not -- minors getting into adults-only spaces, and adults not acting responsibly in unsecured or insufficiently age-gated areas, have been genuine problems on the internet since usenet. But it could also have happened if the interviewer running default settings was the only person in the room seeing everyone there.
Of course, VR(/AR/XR/spatial computing) is doomed. MMORPGs are funny, but they aren't going to change society, and game mods, no matter how technically impressive, are even less likely to do so. Beyond that, there is an argument, and not an entirely wrong one, that these environments are 'fake' in some philosophically important way. People (mostly) exist playing VRChat, but they don't actually live in VRChat. FFXIV has a single source of truth on its servers, but they're probably stored as a mess of position information and arbitrary numeric values, and definitely not some litrpg virtual world. Even if this expands to other purely-digital or even digitally-augmented fields, why should you care if someone does the 2028-equivalent of a lazy photoshop? This isn't even as life-like as deepfakes, or as humiliating as a really dedicated adversary could go -- the possibility someone on the other end of a conference might be putting your camera feed on top of some nudes would be offputting, but the risk of someone Toobining it has predated modern telephony.
Who cares?
Block these sites in your uBlock Origin so you won't see that shit in your searches.
If you want others to have a clean internet, feel free to share this post!
Download this extension to simplify your BDS commitments. PalestinePact automatically scans products on all major websites and blurs them if they are linked to the BDS list. and By refusing to exit the Russian market and continuing to pay their taxes there, some companies are implicitly supporting the war in Ukraine. This extension identifies their products while shopping online so you can boycott their products.
And, perhaps worse:
There's an old joke, by modern standards, about how once one could be certain that the man in a corner of a subway angrily shouting into the air at a person who wasn't there was a schizophrenic, until cell phones and bluetooth meant that could just be a businessman talking to someone you couldn't see. What happens when ten million people see something you don't? Can't?
To cut to the chase, quite a lot of things that you care about either aren't real (do you think your bank account is a bunch of coins in a safe?) or hasn't reflected the real thing, already. There are already tools, some of which you should already be using (get uBlock!) to filter what you see, in your normal usage of the web. An increasing and surprising amount of your world will be passing through these sort of mediators, unless you put increasing efforts into avoiding it.
There's nothing fundamentally wrong with this! The hallucinating cameras are just trying to get the picture you wanted to take. Blocking results you were never going to check in Google Searches can be one of the few ways to avoid the Dread Pinterest. There's a block function on this site, after all. I try to avoid blocking as a matter of principle, but there are definitely ways that has hurt, rather than helped, my ability to seriously engage with both reality and some political perspectives; it's not something I would recommend for everyone or even most people. And there are defiiiiiiinitely people and tags even I block aggressively in, say, the context of a certain furry booru.
The bare concept is not even new. Filter bubble was popularized as a term in 2010, with Eli Pariser writing a book on it. BlockBots date back to 2015, if not earlier, and filter lists to the usenet era. From the other political valience, progressive views on talk radio or Fox News as a conservative bubble aren't entirely right, but there certainly are a lot of people who even then only listened to (and later, watched) what they wanted to hear.
But I think we're going to see things no one thought anyone would want to implement in 1997, or 2010, driven by forces far more varied and far more subtle than anyone expected.
St0kes mostly highlights the filter bubble from the context of politics, even if he sees, rarely, where it breaks against him. Eli Pariser considered algorithmic (and business drives) toward the separation of filter bubbles. There's no shortage of modern-day writers discussing AI, and a Dead Internet where people find it easier to talk with carefully-tuned ChatGPT instance rather than fight increasingly-useless Google is definitely a possibility.
I think they all overlook the power of human meat and spite.
As far as I know, there is no tool that will filter your Google Map search results by the political donations and rumors thereof. Yet. There is no flight planning website that drops flights where layover or transfer involve states with undesirable gun or gender politics. Yet.
I don't know of a crowdsourced tool to check your phone contacts and Facebook friends for (alleged) criminals or bad actors or meanies. Yet. There's no way to crosscheck a dating profile against social media phrenology. Yet. No off-the-shelf tools to use Nextdoor to hide the neighbor with the yappy dog from my phone or doorbell. Yet. No headphones that noise cancel people you don't want to hear from. Yet.
And a thousand, thousand other things that could be possible, as we invite others have more and more influence on how we see the world in the most literal sense, and make it harder and harder to avoid doing so.
"What is love? What is creation? What is longing? What is a star?"—so asketh the last man and blinketh...
"We have discovered happiness"—say the last men, and blink thereby.
They have left the regions where it is hard to live; for they need warmth. One still loveth one's neighbour and rubbeth against him; for one needeth warmth. Turning ill and being distrustful, they consider sinful: they walk warily. He is a fool who still stumbleth over stones or men! ...
No shepherd, and one herd! Every one wanteth the same; every one is equal: he who hath other sentiments goeth voluntarily into the madhouse.
"Formerly all the world was insane,"—say the subtlest of them, and blink thereby.
They are clever and know all that hath happened: so there is no end to their raillery. People still fall out, but are soon reconciled—otherwise it spoileth their stomachs.
"We have discovered happiness,"—say the last men, and blinketh
naraburns
nihil supernum
4mo ago
The fact that the first person to say "hey maybe the parents don't need to know" wasn't instantly exiled and nuked from orbit is, unto itself, a dog-fucking level offense in my eyes.
This is too much heat, not enough light. Please don't do this.
naraburns
nihil supernum
4mo ago
I'm not going to dig up the post where you made this "joke," but one way to follow the rule requiring charitable interpretation is to take people seriously even when you're unsure about them.
I'm not going to dig up whatever post it was where you did this, but if I see you doing it, I'm going to moderate you for not speaking plainly.
naraburns
nihil supernum
4mo ago
The HBD movement uses that as a motte to silence critics, but it's not their actual project or purpose - their project and purpose is about policy geared towards acknowledging racial inferiority and creating explicit hierarchies thereby.
This reads to me like deliberate weak manning. At minimum you should probably reference a more specific example than "the HBD movement." For example Charles Murray is probably credibly part of any putative "HBD movement" but if you described him as "acknowledging racial inferiority and creating explicit hierarchies" then I would say you either didn't read him, didn't understand him, or are willfully misunderstanding him. I assume there are some people out there using the (as you suggest) "trivial fact" of HBD for purely racist goals, but I have never personally encountered such a person.
I'm here to tell you that you are being used as a useful idiot by a project you don't agree with.
I wasn't going to actually moderate you for the earlier quote but when I got to this one, it pushed you over the edge. I suspect we all get to be someone's useful idiot, sometimes, but "the only reasons you could possibly disagree with me here is that you are evil, or stupid" is not really a permissible discussion posture under our ruleset.
I think maybe the advice I want to give you here is to try to keep your arguments addressed to other arguments, rather than making them about (general or specific) people.
naraburns
nihil supernum
5mo ago
Why not the 90 day ban, though? Isn't that a more reasonable default?
Well, maybe. Back on the subreddit, for a while Zorba set a cap of 1 year on bans. We still perma'd spammers and the like, but the idea (IIRC, this was a while ago) was basically that most users who eat a 1 year ban just won't ever come back, and those who do may very well have changed for the better in the interim. What actually happened was, the best posters who ate a 1 year ban just never came back, while the worst posters did come back, as bad as ever--or worse!
At that point the "perma" slowly crept back in, partly because, as it turns out, there's not really any such thing as a user ban--only an identity ban. On reddit, anyone was free to roll up a new user account at any time. We have a few more tools available here on the Motte, but still it's the case that a determined user could probably find a way to roll a fresh alt. There are costs to that--posts have to be manually approved for a while, for example--but a permaban doesn't strictly mean that a person has been kicked off the site. Rather, in this reputation economy they lose the benefits of being a known quantity. And a new user with no reputation has a harder time getting away with the kind of posts that degrade discourse.
It's far from a perfect system--and even here away from reddit, as a moderator my actual options for responding to posts are extremely limited. I've got a carrot that many people don't care about (AAQC reports) and two sticks (warnings and bans). Beyond that, the only way I can hope to modify anyone's behavior is through direct appeal, which takes a lot of time and doesn't always land the way I want it to.
In the instant case, the user just had a long string of bad posts uninterrupted with anything like an AAQC or other valuable contribution. We don't like to lose interesting perspectives, but at some point the amount of harm someone like that does to the discourse just becomes more than the mod team thinks it's worth.
naraburns
nihil supernum
5mo ago
Welcome to the Motte!
This is a Culture War post; feel free to post it in the Culture War thread.
naraburns
nihil supernum
5mo ago
I apologize that it has taken this long to respond to the reports on this comment, but the mod team discussed it and is very broadly of the view that this is a terrible post. It's antagonistic, primarily, but also stuffs a lot of words into other people's mouths. It doesn't discuss the culture wars, but merely wages them. And this will be the sixth time you're banned for it.
I entertained the idea of making it something long term, like maybe 90 days--we used to do a fair number of those back on the subreddit. But some mods suggested a permaban, and it seems nobody could think of a good reason to not permaban you. So, that's what I'm doing.
"Humor" is often a tough moderation call. I don't know if you have many interactions with children, but "just joking!" is not an uncommon protest from kids who want to say something they know (or suspect) they shouldn't say, because it is actually unkind, or otherwise objectionable, but they understand that humor can sometimes help one speak more plainly than is normally permitted. Well, most of your joke was basically fine. This is the specific part that I found troublesome:
y'all are just misguided victims of radicalizing social media algorithms
This is something people actually claim in earnest about their outgroup, particularly when their outgroup is the alt-right or something similar. So "come on, I'm just joking" becomes a convenient cover for reinforcing a weak man stereotype. If you didn't mean it that way, like... great! Now that I've pointed out the problem with letting "I'm just joking around guys" tempt you to make reductive claims about this community, maybe you can avoid the mistake in the future.
And, I suppose, to take the meta up a notch--there is at least one moderator who has already raised an objection to my moderation here, so don't imagine yourself to be on the wrong side of the mod team or anything. Apparently a lot of people here think you are reddit user darwin2500, in part because you appear to have claimed to be darwin2500, even though on reddit darwin2500 implied (though admittedly did not outright say) that he had left this space and found it amusing that people still imagined him to be here. I do not know whether you are darwin2500; I am actually skeptical because you have yet to post anything approaching the quality and insight that darwin2500 brought to the old subreddit when he wasn't eating bans for various rule violations. But whoever you are, one way to get charity weighing more heavily in your favor in moderation cases is to post good stuff. It would also help if you developed a reputation for posting honestly, instead of a reputation for posting dishonestly. One reason your posts get so heavily reported is that you have taken on darwin2500's burden, whether you are actually him or not: darwin2500 was a notorious troll who repeatedly refused to engage honestly when it became clear that he was wrong about something. Whether you're him or not, that is a behavior you also appear to exhibit here.
In other words--the kind of self-critical humor that you were exercising was not, in fact self critical, as far as I could tell. If you'd been poking fun at yourself instead of everyone else, well, it would have been easier to let that slide.
ETA:
If certain mods have made up their mind or are going to be swayed by number of downvotes and reports, then there's no behavior I can take that protects me.
This is bullshit. No one on the mod team has it out for you; if anything, I think you have a couple mods acting somewhat protectively of you for "affirmative action" reasons. The behavior you can take that protects you is to follow the rules. In particular, I actually have very little time for moderation these days, so unless I see you trashing the community I'm very unlikely to moderate you. Stop imagining yourself to be separate from (much less above) the group, here, and you'll be fine.
naraburns
nihil supernum
5mo ago
A number of users have reported this as "antagonistic" and I rather see their point. We've talked about your trolling before, and while I can appreciate its artfulness, even gentle sneering constitutes objectionable disdain.
You are not stuck in traffic. You are traffic. Or, if you prefer--you're not venturing into the lion's den, you're just another lion. I don't know if you and I have had this particular discussion before, but I've had it with many others: I will always enforce the rules more strictly when the target of criticism is this space and the people in it. That doesn't mean we can't be self-effacing and self-critical, but it does mean that such posts require maximum charity and effort. This post doesn't really cut it.
naraburns
nihil supernum
5mo ago
Does anyone know how old is Jim of Jims blog infamy is?
This is a fine "small question."
Even though I think the world would be a better place with him dead and he goes against basically everything I value I am begrudgingly astounded and impressed by the sheer volume of vitriol in his heart to be able to keep posting pure hate for 4+ decades.
This is unkind, unnecessarily antagonistic, and inflammatory. If it's exaggeration, then it's not plainspoken. If it is plainspoken, then it is too heated. You can say that you vehemently disagree with someone without all the rhetorical sneering.
And if this were your first rodeo, I'd leave it at that.... but in the last five months you've drawn four warnings and two tempbans for unnecessary antagonism. This time you're banned for a week.
naraburns
nihil supernum
5mo ago
Would it be antagonistic or obnoxious if I jumped in to argue with some of this?
It would not!
Well, I suppose you could probably find a way to argue that is antagonistic or obnoxious, but just the fact of arguing by itself wouldn't reach that level automatically. This is a discussion website, so generally argument is not only permitted, but encouraged!
naraburns
nihil supernum
5mo ago
Naraburns is another case that is a little interesting as he opposes liberals on some issues but self identifies IIRC as liberal, and supports mass migration for western countries while opposing it for Israel. Is there also anyone who opposes zionism among the moderators and sympathizes more with the Palestinians than Israel?
Er... I'm "liberal" in the classical sense, most Americans would not identify me as "a liberal" but maybe sometimes as "a libertarian." Even then I am a little too comfortable with government action for the tastes of partisan Libertarians. My progressive friends tend to think I'm too conservative and my conservative friends tend to think I'm too progressive so I don't think it would be wrong to call me a centrist, even though nobody ever does. Maybe it would be better to call me a "skeptic."
Like @Amadan I don't remember making any statements regarding mass migration specifically, in Israel or anywhere else. Even the political philosopher John Rawls (who was liberal and probably also "a liberal") believed that nations possessed qualified rights of exclusion (though I don't know if he ever elaborated on the qualifications). As a classical liberal I am skeptical of the wisdom of ethnostates, but I also see examples in history where soft ethnic cleansing seemed essential for long term peace (e.g. Greece/Turkey) and also where mass migration has collapsed empires. I conclude that I should therefore be neither "for" nor "against" mass migration, but merely open to understanding its likely impact in specific cases.
I was reading a bit about the slow-moving disaster in Haiti today, thanks to Jimmy "Barbecue" Chérizier's declaration:
I'm only vaguely familiar with the events that got Haiti where it is--unchecked rise in gang power, assassination of the President by "foreign mercenaries"--Columbians and Haitian-Americans--apparently hoping to win contracts under a new regime). Apparently Haitians are now in general "angry" with the U.S.:
Because I am hopelessly pedantic, the thing that bothered me most about what I was reading was the notion of "genocide." Now, this is of course a loaded and often contested word. What most people mean by "genocide" is the extermination or perhaps only expulsion of a race or ethnicity, at minimum within certain geographic boundaries. But the internet tells me that Haiti is 95% African, and almost all the rest "mixed European-African." Furthermore:
And from Wikipedia:
So I'm left wondering--what's the "genocide" on offer, here? Is the Haitian gang leader threatening to just... murder everyone? The French speakers? The Protestants and/or Catholics? The infinitesimal population of non-blacks? The country has spent basically its entire existence lurching from crisis to crisis, prompting academics to for some reason describe its history as
and
It would probably be double-pendantic to point out that the inhabitants of Haiti are colonizers, for all their ancestors were brought there on slave ships; descendants of the island's earlier inhabitants are still reportedly out there--just not in Haiti. I say this in part because I have a lot of problems with "colonization" rhetoric, and Haiti helps to illustrate some of the central absurdities. But more than that, I want to drive home the idea that there doesn't seem to be an ethnic minority for Mr. Barbecue to cleanse.
It's possible he intends for "genocide" to simply mean "lots and lots of killing," but of course--he seems to be the one threatening to do the killing.
Civil war, I understand. Military-versus-gangland would be ugly in a so many ways. And given Haiti's history, I can even understand why "international interference" is a sore spot, despite the fact that Haiti seems to do much better under the rule of others than it does when left to its own devices. I am also aware of the urge some readers of this post will doubtless feel to start talking about "magic soil" or the like. But when it comes to Barbecue's prediction-slash-threat of genocide, I find myself quite at a loss. Whose race or tribe ("genos") is supposed to be under threat, here?
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