problem_redditor
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User ID: 1083
We kind of are getting there, though. As an example, there is a growing class of proposals to make the blind sighted again by introducing optogenetic actuators - proteins that modify cellular activity in response to light - into neurons via transfection, and then using patterns of light to induce vision. If that's not an attempt to Write to minds, I don't know what is.
This has also found a good amount of success in practice - this paper describes a patient that was blind and who was given an injection containing a viral vector that encoded for the channelrhodopsin protein ChrimsonR in his retinal ganglia. He was then provided a pair of light-stimulating goggles that translated visual stimuli into a form processable by him and subjected to some visual tests, and when wearing the goggles he could actually attempt to engage with objects in front of him. Of course, stimulation of the retina won't work for other issues such as glaucoma or trauma, so there have also been attempts to stimulate the V1 visual cortex directly, and on that front there are primate experiments showing that stimulating the visual cortex through optogenetics induces perception of visuals (see this paper and this paper).
DARPA has even funded such research in their NESD (Neural Engineering System Design) program, with some of their funding going to a Dr Ehud Isacoff whose goal is to stimulate neurons via optogenetics to encode perceptions into the human cortex. It's certainly in its infancy, but already there is a good amount of evidence that manipulating the mind is very, very possible.
“Women don’t actually want to be raped by literally every man ever” is not in the slightest incompatible with “many women genuinely quite like perceiving themselves as victims or potential victims, enjoy the social power assuming that mantle gives them over others, and will often happily recontextualise their prior experiences as victimhood in order to capitalise on social sympathy”. Given how we relate to the sexes and the amount of empathy afforded to each, the return-on-investment of damselling is probably higher for women than men.
Victimhood politics only exist because portraying oneself as a victim lacking agency can be a very useful power to wield over others. It gives one the sledgehammer of social power and moral superiority, and is sufficiently covert and by-proxy so as to allow one a huge amount of plausible deniability. Voicing one’s (real or imagined) victimhood can certainly also foster internal feelings of being Stunning And Brave.
In other words, I don’t think people actually have this aversion to victimhood. It’s a status that lots of people, and I suspect particularly women, actively seek out, at least in terms of how they are perceived. It’s probably a less healthy self-concept than viewing oneself as effectual and capable, but it is adaptive, it can be utterly intoxicating to wield, and it is often the case that telling someone that they are not in fact uniquely victimised or at risk of such invokes outrage, not relief. Non-binary identification is just another facet of these kinds of status games.
So, this ended up being not as small-scale as I would like. It is 1:40am on a Tuesday. I can't sleep, because my work is causing me to inappropriately panic. Not sure how I fix this.
My tasks for a week can be as follows (here is an anonymised version of the notes I made just to keep track of all the tasks that I needed to either finish, or at least make good progress on, in one of my work weeks - IIRC, this list was made early in the week and more stuff was thrown at me I didn't expect later that week, so this list is an underestimate):
- setting up a service for Client A, which I need to contact the ATO for
- looking through and fixing the review points for Client A’s quarter-end reporting for seven to nine entities
- having a meeting so we can discuss a different approval process regarding accounts payable for Client A
- processing the weekly payments and staff reimbursements for Client A
- doing weekly bookkeeping and bank reconciliation for Client A
- working on improving the process for Client A
- looking through the documentation that Client B has provided, understanding the workpaper provided to me for preparing financial statements and calculating tax owed to the ATO, and requesting information from the client if necessary
- finishing off the financial statements and income tax returns for Client C, which is a group consisting of two individuals, two trusts and one company
- setting up two trusts in our internal system for Client D
- training at 8:30am on Friday
- Correcting Client A’s setup forms for connecting a bank feed to an accounting software
- requesting deferral for an ABS survey Client A neglected to fill out
- Fill out timesheet at COB Friday.
I have taken to working overtime and/or on the weekends fairly frequently because my work somehow seems to endlessly keep piling on, and requires so much multitasking and deadline juggling that it feels like overload (many of the tasks in question are detailed work that if you get wrong have consequences further down the line). A good portion of these are the type of tasks that need to be done yesterday. And it's worse now because it's tax season, and the deadlines for all the clients I've put off due to being swamped with other work are coming due.
What makes this really sting is that my current workload got the way it did because according to them I was competent and people thought I could take on tasks effectively, so a really big client (Client A in the list) that's currently expanding got delegated to me. The sheer volume of work coming from that one client is truly immense, and a lot of the work is new and novel, and the deadlines are incredibly tight. They basically use us to perform an array of admin tasks, and often just spontaneously spring poorly articulated requests on us which then need to be taken up by someone (performing these tasks often requires a large amount of back-and-forth before one realises what they even want). The diversions are incredibly distracting and when I get back to my other work, I effectively need to get reacquainted with it, which takes a large amount of time.
I think that at this point, I'm working more than any of the other juniors in my place despite having been there for less than a year. Perhaps I am just inefficient, that's a distinct possibility I don't necessarily discount. But I believe this is almost entirely because of one incredibly pesky client which swallows up anywhere from 40-90% of my time depending on the week in question (no other junior is working on this client).
It doesn't help that I'm getting quite burned out, and am increasingly finding it difficult to concentrate on anything at work which results in more procrastination than I'm proud to admit, especially because I know I can be pulled right out of what I'm doing in favour of another task. The refrain from many of my managers is that they would prefer me to work on stuff I enjoy. However, in practice it works on a needs basis - this client needs working on, and I can do the work + have demonstrated I am willing to put in the time, so it gets delegated to me. Going to work now feels interminable and like being pummelled, and the dread mounts before every workday in a way it hasn't prior to this.
Sorry, I realise this is basically a long, reprehensibly self-pitying complaint session about how my work sucks. But I am at the end of my rope, and if anyone has any advice, I would like to hear it.
problem_redditor
6mo ago
To be a bit flippant, I feel that in order to consider this a stain on your character, you must have dysfunctionally low levels of Machiavellianism, way below the average and possibly to the point it constitutes a pathology.
You haven't done anything wrong.
I was trying to provide a steelman, not necessarily forward sets of policy preferences of my own (for my part, I don't think a policy proposal that enforces a mostly-male academic environment is doable in the first place, not because I think it would be bad for society but because it's effectively useless as it's too far out of the Overton Window - the second % female drops below a certain threshold, regardless of the reasons for it people will start taking umbrage at it). I also don't think there would have been an explanation I could've given that would have been satisfactory to your specific set of moral preferences.
In any case, I don't think there's anything wrong with applying quantitative thinking to social issues. Different groups of people are different on aggregate, and they shape societies in distinct ways aligned with their preferences. Trying to ignore that when policy-making is folly, in my opinion.
I can't speak for OP, but for my part I assume the rationale is something akin to this.
To sum up the article in a paragraph, women are less pro-free speech and more pro-censorship. In academia, female academics are less likely than male academics to place importance on objectivity and dispassionate inquiry, and more likely to place importance on the ability of their work to be used as a vehicle to deliver views considered "socially good". They are also more supportive of dismissal campaigns and more inclined toward activism. This roughly correlates with the increasing politicisation of the academy as a vehicle for activism, and while the author admits that it is certainly not the only factor contributing to the trend, it is also what you would expect to see when a group with a preference for emotional safety over academic freedom enters a space.
In other words, I don't think it's necessarily a prima facie ridiculous position if OP values academic freedom over censorship and thinks it carries more value for society than having women in academia does. Forcing a state of affairs where the academic environment is mostly comprised of men would be conducive to this goal, and in similar fashion forcing an academic environment that's uncompromising in terms of freedom of speech would disproportionately cause women to self-select out of the academy. Whichever way this goal is reached, greater academic freedom likely entails less women in academia.
I'm currently reading Molecular Biology Of The Cell. It's a big biochemistry text that's over 1,700 pages, a topic which I've long planned to cover in full but have never managed to get the time to do so. I plan to finish it by the end of next month, and have been making notes when I read so as to aid in memorisation of the concepts covered.
In conjunction with this, because deep time is fascinating, I have been reading a large variety of papers on biospheric evolution during the Precambrian while drawing up a timeline of events - there's a long, complex fuse that led up to the explosion of animal life at the beginning of the Phanerozoic and that as far as I can tell is still poorly understood. There is so much from back then that would've been like nothing the world has seen since (the Snowball Earth(s), the Ediacaran biota, and so on - there is even some evidence showing incipient multicellular life all the way back in the early Proterozoic that went nowhere, a dead branch on the evolutionary tree which featured relatively complex lifeforms large enough to be visible to the naked eye). I've been including links in my notes so I don't lose the original sources, I might put it up TheMotte at some point once I'm happy with it.
Different strokes I guess. I think the following points you’ve listed as downsides of living in a rural area are, to me, upsides:
I've lived in villages, and it feels so isolating, it's awful. I like hearing people around me, even, and in fact especially because I have no interest in actually interacting with them. Then there's the other side, where instead of being isolated, people will try to be friendly even when you don't want that.
To offer the perspective of someone else I know, my dad grew up in a village in Malaysia (that has significantly modernised since) and spent his childhood riding up and down forest trails. He remembers that period of his life as being extremely idyllic, and the nostalgia he has for it is clear.
Similarly, I enjoy being isolated, I enjoy proximity to natural spaces, and vastly prefer the “depression” of the outskirts compared to my daily experience of being shoved in with hundreds of people in a tube, packed like sardines. That’s how my morning commute is, and I always come out of the experience mildly frustrated.
When I’ve been in the outskirts I’ve always enjoyed when people have been friendly to me, or when the odd local has tried to make conversation. It’s felt welcoming without being utterly and completely overwhelming the same way the city centre has been.
And at least in my experience, villages are not quiet. There's lots of animal sounds, especially bugs which I personally despise.
To me, this is a bonus: I welcome most if not all animal sounds, including those of insects; crickets and even cicadas do not bother me. Birdsong is especially welcome. I find it much harder to ignore ambient noise in the city, which is far louder in general and much more unpleasant in terms of timbre.
I live in a very small city, so it's not a good comparison to Sydney, I can take the bus and be in a big forest in 15 minutes, but I would never go live rural.
Perhaps I should’ve been more clear as to what I mean when I say "city", which is a major urban hub. I find small cities somewhat fine as long as there are adequate outdoor recreation opportunities in close proximity to the town. But I think you’re underestimating just how much density my partner prefers - he actively enjoys going downtown, and his idea of a “depressing and isolating” place is living in a suburb of a major (and I mean major) North American city. He has some level of flexibility around this, but he does enjoy the density of urban cores quite a bit, and doesn’t enjoy when he’s too far distanced from it.
I have a partner who likes cities. He has always seen himself living in one, and has a certain affinity to the culture and outlook of many city-dwellers. I am having trouble understanding or sympathising with his viewpoint, and vice versa.
This might seem tangential, but bear with me:
I went to the Blue Mountains over Easter - for the unacquainted, it is a large wilderness area outside of Sydney and a World Heritage site. It’s probably one of my most frequented excursion spots due to its proximity to the city, yet it’s a completely different world out there.
The first thing I noticed, as is the case virtually every time I leave a major urban area, is that the silence and solitude is palpable. You can leave the window open and not be assaulted with a storm of noise (which occurs in the city even on the 13th floor of a building, I can attest to that). Leaving for the great outdoors is quite a good way to clear away the mental clutter that accumulates when you are overstimulated for a long period of time. I’ve done this whenever I get the chance, and it never fails to reset my brain. I listen to music a lot in my normal day-to-day life, but here it just felt wrong to do so.
Another thing that stuck out to me is that you can actually see the stars come out at night. The older I get, the more I appreciate this feature of being outdoors. The ability to look up into the heavens on a quiet night and see the universe above you is something that just doesn’t get old.
The natural environment is breathtaking, too. There are dry sclerophyll forests heavy with the aroma of eucalyptus and dotted with the golden blooms of wattles, rainforest-lined valleys and canyons that plunge to depths of 500 metres, beautiful little waterfalls and mossy creeks that swell after rain, and so on. One night when I was there, I did a night hike to a cascade named Cataract Falls, armed with only a headlamp, and when I turned off the light there were glow worms all over the place. The waterfall was like a natural amphitheatre covered in these shining little blue lights, and it was hard to tell where they ended and where the stars began.
I think this, along with many other experiences, has led me to an inevitable conclusion: I really detest city life.
They’re overwhelming, impersonal, noise-filled, cluttered environments, where you’re virtually forced to rub shoulders (in the literal sense) with people if you want to leave your house, and which are incredibly aesthetically alienating, especially ever since the utilitarian commodification of architecture got started, the trend that Bauhaus and other such design schools put into motion.
Keep in mind, Australian cities are probably less “vibrant” and less dense than, say, North American ones. I routinely hear Australians complain that they have no real cities, that everything closes early and that the nightlife is nonexistent, they consider Australia a country you go to for the outdoors and not the city life. Sydney itself is a reasonably well-maintained city, there are no seedy strip malls and it’s fairly walkable - but I still find it to be far too crowded and too noisy for my tastes, and find that the culture and views of the cosmopolitan urban-dwellers range from insipid to downright irritating.
The conveniences that cities offer are nice. But I am frankly struggling to think of any significant conveniences that are offered in a city which aren’t also offered in a small to medium size town that offers far greater recreation opportunities. If you can get a reasonable range of food and lodging, and some medical care, I find that sufficient. If the goal is thriving nightlife, constant activities, cosmopolitan feel and being able to go places at any time of the day then sure, cities are The Place To Be. But I place zero value on any of these things.
Cities are places I live in solely for work-related reasons. I have lived in many, and they are places I would never live in given the choice, and it makes it really difficult for me to even put myself in a frame of mind where I see it as the optimal way to live. Ask him about any of the things I mentioned, and he’ll reveal that none of it actually matters hugely to him. He finds these less urbanised places dead and depressing, a viewpoint which I could never understand - after you’ve lived in a city for any amount of time, it feels interminable - like an endless randomly generated series of the very same hedonistic pleasures expressed in slightly different ways.
Perhaps it really is just tribal affiliation - he identifies more with the outlook of those in the city and less with those in more rural areas. For me, it’s the very opposite.
I’m not sure what the point of writing this post is, I suppose I’m sourcing hot takes. It’s a difference that we’re both somewhat adamant about, and that may cause issues down the road - so maybe I’m asking to understand, or maybe I’m asking if anyone else here feels the same as I do.
The human brain is a "chinese room".
Not exactly, ChatGPT isn't possessed of "understanding" of textual content like humans are, but it can generate text very competently nonetheless.
Also AI has done many agentic things. Any definition of agentic that would exclude everything an AI has done would be so strict as to be obviously fragile and not that meaningful.
I mean, I agree that the distinction between an agent and automation is a completely arbitrary distinction predicated solely on degree, but the fact remains people don't think of AI as agents in any real sense at the moment. I think as the progress of the field goes on that perception will shift.
I just don't understand this perspective, since voice acting, like music, is merely the production of sound waves at the end of the day. AI will only get better at manipulating sound waves, and there's no need to understand the emotions of the character the same way a human actor needs to, merely what sorts of sounds give positive feedback from the human audience (i.e. evokes certain emotions).
I really just think this is based on a lack of understanding of how one can converge on the same outcome through radically different methods, and how meaning can just come along for the ride once you're appropriately good at pattern-generation. So you get all these midwit "critiques" and outlinings of the supposed limitations of AI by people with no grasp on the idea that human-level output can be generated through radically inhuman processes.
I think we're discussing different music crowds here. There's probably a difference in mindset between people who work professionally in music for a wage and "art people" - the young, generally progressive music fanatics who are extremely interested in music as an artform, who really care about cultivating the image and mindset of what they perceive artists are like, and believe that the value of music is in communication between individuals. These people find that AI art devalues artforms and believe it is meaningless due to the lack of human involvement. I will not debate the validity of that position (though I disagree), but it leads them to be disturbed by the idea of AI art and they as a result have a very strong incentive to downplay the capabilities of AI.
Whether this is good or not is a question of values and not really related to the point, the topic of discussion is more about whether it's possible.
I think your scenario is unrealistic in any case - automation of manual labour tasks is certainly feasible (and has been achieved in many cases) and more such jobs in these domains will eventually become obsolete once technological advances make the cost of doing so lower than employing human labour, but that's besides the point. You can be an AI doomer and still realise that AI has immense potential. Plenty of the people discussed on this forum certainly believe so (Yudkowsky, Bostrom, etc). But there are still a lot of people basically treating AI as a hype-fad pushed by techbro caricatures, who regard automation of all these oh-so-human pursuits as practically impossible and scoff at the mention of AGI, and pretty much every two years their predictions get overturned.
Here's Udio, a new AI music generator that has emerged as a competitor to Suno. There's less of the audio "artifacting" that exists in a lot of AI music tools, and it can actually do some pretty decent generation from keywords. It's early days and there are limitations and still identifiable signs of AI-ness, but it's quite a large step forward from the previous iterations.
The emergence of all these musical AIs as of late has been quite validating, especially since I've had a good amount of arguments with art people I know about the ability of AI to create music - as someone who makes music as a hobbyist I've come at it from the perspective of "these are all just patterns and systems of rules, and can be imitated easily by an agent familiar enough with those rules". In similar fashion to those who predicted that visual art would be difficult to achieve via AI, those who were predicting that this ability was not generalisable to music were wrong.
To some extent, it's understandable - it must be a pretty big blow to one's ego for the art one prides themselves on to be so easily recreated and automated by the equivalent of a Chinese Room, especially when the field is still in its infancy and hasn't even come close to anything we would consider agentic - but I can't help but see many of the naysayers about the ability of AI to achieve supposedly uniquely "human" tasks as being clearly myopic and wrong.
You have pretty much also converged on a strategy I had come up with quite a while ago (and didn't talk about because I wanted to potentially implement it in some fiction of my own) - be extremely expansionary, and sterilise/terraform possible habitable planets ahead of time so competition within your Hubble sphere is minimised to the greatest degree possible. The Dark Forest fails to be a satisfactory Fermi paradox solution at least in part because it simply doesn't and can't address why it is that the universe isn't already filled to the brim with intelligent life. On its face it offers up an argument against communication, but that doesn't address the issue of why we don't see grabby aliens everywhere. The utility of expansionism is difficult to ignore.
My personal preferred hypothesis surrounding this (and one I haven't seen in popular discussions of the Fermi paradox) is the idea of an astrobiological phase transition. A possible vehicle for this transition would be gamma-ray bursts (GRBs), which occur when two neutron stars spiral inwards. Star formation peaked 10 billion years ago and has declined since, resulting in a decrease in the rate of GRBs. These bursts are probably capable of sterilising large swaths of the Milky Way possibly hundreds of light years across, and such bursts may have been responsible for some extinctions in earth history.
It seems not implausible that we might be just at a spot in space and time where the frequency of GRBs is low enough to allow for the development of intelligent life (which we would expect to see developing not only here but in many other places concurrently), and we're in a phase transition between an equilibrium state where the universe was devoid of intelligent life and another new equilibrium where the universe would be filled to the brim with it.
So I've recently watched the Netflix adaptation of The Three-Body Problem. One of the central plots of the show (and from what I can gather, also the book series) seems to be disappointingly half-baked, especially considering that the plot device is the namesake of the show and the title of the first book.
Something that's established early on is that the San-Ti (or the Trisolarans) live in a chaotic three-body (really a four-body) system that can't be predicted, and despite having the capability to enter into lungfish-like dormancy their civilisations kept being wiped out due to not being able to predict when destructive climatic shifts would occur. You could, however, probably predict the chaotic orbits of three bodies solely through simulation, the aliens would probably be capable of this. The issue for us and why it is "unsolvable" is that there’s no simple one size fits all solution where you can plug in initial starting conditions and predict the state of three bodies at any point in time - but you can move each ball a little bit as a small amount of time passes, and then recalculate.
Of course, methods which iteratively compute position can and do deviate from reality, a small error can result in large deviations in the model over a very long period of time, but you can minimise error to a very high degree. And if you’re living on the planets themselves, you can constantly update the state of your simulation every time your model observably deviates from reality. So an iteratively computed model, continuously updated to align with current state, would probably help them avoid dying off at any given point, because T = 0 keeps being reset and you only ever need to calculate T + 1.
Note also, these are aliens that can unfold a photon’s higher dimensions, inscribe a supercomputer onto it, fold it back down, send it to a target site then communicate instantaneously with it via quantum entanglement. Aliens capable of incomprehensible space magic aren't capable of simulation, apparently.
Somehow I still haven't watched Fight Club myself and as a result can't comment entirely on what would be its antithesis, but regarding general nihilism-antidote movies: It's Such A Beautiful Day very deeply delves into nihilism and in fact fully accepts every single one of its premises, yet still somehow manages to come out the other end presenting a worldview that's incredibly life-affirming. It's probably my favourite animated movie of all time.
I suppose it is less about Making A Point About Society and more to do with dealing with one's mortality, lack of agency and other such topics, but it is a great movie that's hugely concerned with how to find meaning and beauty in the chaos.
I mean, yeah, I think the heart of the GG movement was trolls trying to harass and victimize women in retaliation for entering their cultural spaces, but my impression is that everyone on the other side vehemently denies that and claims that GG was a lofty movement rooting out corruption and tearing down the lies and abuses of the SJWs.
It's a matter of degree. My perception from being in these spaces at the time that it happened is that GG believed on the balance that they were more correct than the antis, but they were more than well aware that there was a good amount of shit-flinging happening on all sides, and often tried to actively police their own communities in order to weed out that behaviour. Like users of KotakuInAction early on creating "Gamergate harassment patrols" and even Kotaku crediting Gamergate with tracking down someone who was sending threats to Sarkeesian.
There's also the fact that none of the criminal harassment was ever tied to Gamergate. I was in KotakuInAction when the whole thing was going on, and didn't see harassment being celebrated. In addition, the Gamergate surveys basically showed GG to have strongly left wing demographics, so that's some data which should be considered when you're evaluating them.
I will say I hardly ever saw any such caution on the anti side, who seemed to be impressively secure in the belief of their superior morality to the point where they seemed to believe they were just better people who could never be on the “wrong side of history” - in part, I think, because they were offered legitimacy by the mainstream in a way GG was not. I did, however, have an anti private message me to fling racial slurs at me (so much for being against harassment). So you might forgive me if my perception of this whole thing is very different from yours.
There's an angle from which defending a pedophile against false charges of corruption is not different from defending a saint against false charges of corruption. If the charges are false and you are restricting your defense to those charges, someone should be there to stand up for the truth and the integrity of the system that produces and considers those charges.
Of course, anonymous internet flame wars with millions of participants are never that clean. Obviously even if 99% of anti-gg people carefully restrict their defense to the charges of 'corruption in games journalism' alone, that's still 100,000 of the stupidest 1% producing memeable screenshots defending them against the pedo charges or saying they're a great person or whatever else.
The case in question here is not "defending a pedophile against false charges of corruption", but defending a pedophile against verifiable charges of pedophilia. The claims that were being made against Sarah Nyberg in this case were not that she was corrupt, it was that she was a pedophile, and as another user here has already noted GamerGhazi, at the time, basically censored info on their subreddit that might suggest that she was. The defence against her pedophilia was at least widespread enough for the largest anti-GG subreddit to actively police the dissemination of information about it.
I mean, if you can find me something like the mods of KotakuInAction moderating KiA to be an active hub for harassment or something in a similar vein, I will concede the point that yes, "both sides". But I have my doubts.
I’m at work now, so can’t respond appropriately, but one point:
If 99% of the people on both sides are participating in the flame war without really bothering to do the level of research needed to form truly independent opinions, then I'm not sure that the ones who coincidentally happened to be on the right side are any more virtuous than the ones on the wrong side. Perhaps if one side was consistently correct in these types of battles, and allegiance was based on observing that; but I definitely don't think that's true with regards to GG, it was a complete fiasco where both sides believed tons of wrong things at various points.
When making this post, I wasn’t necessarily trying to argue that GG was more virtuous (though I do believe they were) or that GG was more consistently correct (though I believe they were). Rather, the point of this post can be summed up in the following paragraph I wrote:
“[T]he fact that this behaviour has been engaged in by a group of people who make claims of having the moral and intellectual high ground is frankly incredible.”
In other words, anti-GG liked to portray themselves as having the moral and intellectual high ground, and so did the media covering it. They were the ones that made it into a social crusade and claimed they were situated on the right side of history. The mainstream view was that GG were bigoted, biased tyrants using ethics as a shield for actual hatred, and anti-GG were brave activists attempting to “expose” the truth. But when stuff like this happens, it illustrates the falsity of that predominant viewpoint and the utter hypocrisy and lack of self-awareness of those claiming the high ground.
I don’t think it’s unreasonable that if you’re claiming moral and intellectual superiority, you should be held to a higher standard and be penalised appropriately if you fail to fulfil it.
A fact which often has good Bayesian foundations!
Given epistemic learned helplessness and the ability of the internet to invent narratives and fabricate 'evidence', considering the motives of the source when you hear a surprising piece of information meant to motivate you towards some action is often a good idea.
Frankly, reflexively defending someone with the rest of your in-group simply because your out-group attacked them does not have good foundations of any sort. "Considering the motives of a source" is generally a good principle, I agree. That just as much applies to your in-group as it does to your out-group, and defending someone from critique without knowing whether that critique has basis or not is not epistemically justifiable. The motives of those making a claim are ultimately irrelevant to the truth of a claim. "Being skeptical" does not entail "knee-jerk rejection", especially in situations when the evidence is already there for you to look at.
Regarding your other comment on this, I have no doubt that at least some of the people here were ignorant in some way or other (though some, such as Galvez and Ryulong, were almost certainly being dishonest). I tend to believe, however, that this lack of knowledge was because they actively decided not to look at or consider any of the evidence although, again, it was readily available to them at the time, then formed their own opinions based almost solely on preconception. It was wilful ignorance borne out of tribal partisanship that caused them to defend this, and that definitely deserves scorn.
I mean, if you want to subject it to that level of scrutiny, very little other than a full-scale statistical analysis of wokists and their tendency to "rally around" clearly corrupt people, using other political tribes as comparison samples, would suffice to truly demonstrate the point (and in such a study having cases to analyse is still required). Anyway, I think we both know that doesn’t exist, and that TPTB would never conduct that study.
To say something that may get me in trouble, on a more practical level, I think we also both know in colloquial discourse nobody ever adheres to this standard or forms their opinions on it, except Rats, and when you're talking to normies these standards do not apply and you will have to address arguments that do not adhere to that standard of rigour in the slightest. You'll notice I've repeatedly talked about how convincing having these examples is to people. If they are throwing examples of, say, anti-woke bad behaviour at you, having examples such as this to throw back is necessary. Appealing to them with Rat hypotheticals like Chinese Robber isn't going to change their opinion and is going to make you look like you have no counterexamples. Trust me, I've tried, and in the beginning I cited heaps of good sources and made rigorous arguments that would very much make a rationalist piss themselves. In actual debate, this does not work and is completely unrelated to how normies conceptualise things, and you'll very easily find that your rationalist thought experiments fail miserably against an opponent and an audience that doesn't care. How argument should go is not how argument actually goes. Not now, not ever. I wish this was not the case.
Additionally, I'm not even sure how much people here adhere to that standard, either. Applying this standard consistently would exclude a huge portion of content on TheMotte (and an even greater portion of content on most other discussion spaces), and kind of feels like an isolated demand for rigour that almost nothing else here gets subjected to. I'm more than happy and able to submit to that standard of proof for the claims I make, but it is noticeable that in general the standard doesn't seem to be enforced in almost every other situation.
EDIT: added more
The tribal tendency is bad, certainly, and I agree that social justice activists are especially (if not uniquely) vulnerable to it. I just don't think that dredging up a Twitter loudmouth from 2014 is a particular demonstration of any of this.
No, however it's certainly an example of the behaviour in question. I wasn't really trying to make that total, overarching point in this singular post though. I don't believe you need to address every single other case of when this has happened and try to address a general trend in a post meant to hyper-focus on a specific case of this behaviour.
Your claim is that investigating a singular case doesn't prove anything, but trends are made up of collections of individual cases, and without putting work into investigating these cases you can't establish that a trend exists. There's value in putting work into investigating examples that illustrate a larger trend. Sure, everybody here "already knows" that wokes are incredibly tribal and often unprincipled in the name of tribal identity and this doesn't necessarily give anyone who already believes so any new information. But to an uninitiated skeptic, especially one who's heard many examples of how terrible opposition to woke is, being able to rigorously cite many examples of this behaviour does build up the convincingness of the argument.
I notice that I am confused.
Frankly I've noticed I can't predict at all how people will react to things here, or what the basis is for people liking or disliking a post. People here will consistently upvote, say, source-less rants about how they feel like immigrants degrade their home country as top-level posts (which I find to be immensely low-effort content), but will react badly to other posts even if more well sourced. I also don't feel like my post clearly broke any rules in a way most of the other contributions here already don't.
I mean, I understand that people don't necessarily care about this, and that's perfectly fair. There's lots of things I come across here that I don't personally care about either, but I just ignore it and move on. It's a consequence of being in a general purpose political community. I certainly don't go on to leave pithy, low-effort comments about how little I give a shit about what's been posted. I also don't think that it's completely irrelevant to the current political climate.
It seems that people here upvote and downvote posts based on a completely alien set of criteria to me, and I'm too much of an autist to predict what's acceptable posting and what isn't. The only thing I can find that's consistent is that even here, speaking about Gamergate in 2023 is low status, and will be treated as such. It's the closest thing to something everyone has silently agreed not to touch, and doing so is considered a faux pas.
While Quartz had an obligation to make their statements factual, I don't think TYT have to cover the pedophilia allegations if they don't think it's relevant. A story about a bot that angers alt-righters is engaging enough for the left as it is.
I didn't think they had an obligation to cover the pedophilia allegations, but I do think it shows that Nyberg and her actions were engaging and significant enough to warrant coverage. Just not the wrong kind.
I don't think it's a nothingburger either. But I don't think Nyberg is or should be anything other than a third or fourth point at best when talking about how Gamergate was villified by the mainstream. She's just too niche for it to be that strong unless you're a terminally online person with an interest in what is now part of the Internet's ancient history.
To clarify, the primary point of making the post was not to demonstrate how Gamergate was vilified by the mainstream. It was to demonstrate just how far a good portion of the prominent figures in that culture war would go to defend and cover up and ignore acts that were frankly indefensible to score points against their outgroup, while at the same time claiming moral superiority.
The part where I said that I do believe the lack of mainstream coverage is because of the people it would implicate was just a side note towards the end of the post. It was not the main point.
I think we need to talk about definitions of mind control here before we discuss that.
Don't get me wrong, I certainly do think the ability to exact full control over someone's mind would be significant (and terrifying, both philosophically and practically), but I'm also not sure if I see a clear-cut distinction between something like "I can make you see whatever I please through stimulating your neurons in a predictable way" and mind control. If you have designed a system which can predictably induce certain perceptions in someone's mind, how is that not already a restricted form of mind control?
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