questionasker
No bio...
User ID: 2119
questionasker
1yr ago
Appreciate the lesswrong link. I'm interested in conjecture and wild predictions and I don't particularly care about accuracy so its exactly what I'm looking for.
questionasker
1yr ago
I'd advise to forget all the stuff about "the brain is like a computer".
The brain is a computer and I'm not sure how you can meaningfully argue that it isn't
questionasker
1yr ago
What do you mean, human brains "might" use analog computation? I wasn't aware human brains did any digital computation.
? The conventional view is that human brains are digital computers. Information is represented symbolically in the form of nerve impulses, which is what enables the otherwise uniform computational substrate of the cerebrum to otherwise be able to process such a variety of different things from simple sensation to the considerations involved in complex planning etc.
questionasker
1yr ago
You seem dismissive of your own comment, but the last three paragraphs here seem incredibly profound to me. Thanks for your interesting reply.
questionasker
1yr ago
To clarify before anything else: I want to avoid making a value judgement about what is 'good' or 'just' or 'moral.' For example, I don't have any particular leaning as to whether a multipolar world where, as you've put it, China gets a say, or a unipolar one dominated by American colonial interests, is better or more just than the other. Instead, I'm merely trying to think about what's actually most likely to come to pass.
That's what I took away from your comments regarding 'return to the historical norm;' that you were implying that a world with a major pole centered around Beijing is the likely future, considering it has been such a frequent theme of history, at least before quite recently. This, e.g. that the future will contain a world where China is the suzerain of at least most of East Asia (if by historical example it is we are reasoning) is what in particular I'm not convinced is true. Again, perhaps it would be more fair... but I what I want to try and figure out right now is how likely it is, really.
Do you yourself really have any reason to think a continued Chinese rise is particularly likely, other than because of China's historical global centrality? Again, I'm not solely convinced of the likelihood of a Chinese-centric world (or at least one with a major pole emerging from Beijing) by way of the fact that historically this was often true, because again historically it was also true that the US didn't even exist, and yet, the US does exist. With this in mind, what's your main reason to believe that for example China will eventually continue to rise to such a strength that it can feasibly challenge the US over something like Taiwan, or (perhaps because that is too narrow of scope) anything beyond that, such as the Philipines, South Korea, South Asia, etc. ?
I think that many of the counter-arguments to China bullishness are relatively strong. For example it seems that a significant portion of China's growth has occurred in the exact way that leaves it vulnerable to the middle income trap -- do you think that they will navigate this problem, or that the middle income trap isn't real, or that I'm wrong with the premise, or what? What about the supposed demographic decline? Do you think the birth rate problem is overstated, or somehow fixable, etc.? What about the lack of allies -- i.e. it seems for the most part that given the choice between CCP suzerainty and US-American-UN-GloboHomo colonial apparatus, most Asian nations would actually choose American Globohomo status quo rather than Chinese authority, even including e.g. Vietnam and South Korea, two historical Chinese vassals.
These in general seem like strong arguments as to why, even without directly being decisively smashed/disassembled by the West, the Chinese rise might peter out at around the [Extremely major regional power]/[Second-degree global power] level, e.g. without constituting a major pole of a multipolar world order in their own right. But I very much want to hear what you have to say -- if you think that the GDP/capita of China really can reach even half that of the US, or greater, as I think would be required for them to 'erect' such a pole -- what do you see as the route there? Again, currently they're so reliant on their manufacturing economy that seems exactly like it would be middle-income-trapped -- are they going to shift numbers of people on the scale of hundreds of millions to employment in higher-paying services-economy jobs? For what, 'inward consumption' as Xi Jinping has put it? Is there even really theoretical economic demand within China, or worldwide for that matter, for even e.g. 300 million Chinese services-economy jobs in the first place?
questionasker
1yr ago
China in the Late Qing to Deng period is the only time when it was not the center of the world economy, when global trade did not center around obtaining Chinese goods and moving them West. The ascent of a unified, modern China as the center of the world economy is a return to historical norms, not a new aberration.
I appreciate the wisdom of your comment for the most part, but these assertions in particular seem like the largest flaw.
True, always in world history before late Qing was China in large part the economic center of the world. However, it is just as true that never before during that span of world history did something like the USA even exist. The conditions of the world are different than they were before, in a major relevant way: 330 million people live in a powerful, technologically advanced, industrial, resource rich nation across the ocean from China. I think this idea of 'returning to the historical norm' loses credibility as something so inevitable when you consider how irrevocably different the world is with the USA existing in its current form across the Pacific from China rather than e.g. geopolitically irrelevant Native American tribes (or really, just unexplored ocean).
And this is to mention nothing of India. I think you overstate just exactly how central China was to the historical world economy, not that it wasn't central in a major way. But my understanding is that India shared a significant portion of that economic centrality throughout history, as well. It seems to me that a 'return to the historical norm' would be an economically multipolar world split with China and India as focal points both in their own right, not China alone.
questionasker
1yr ago
I'll also start by answering the question first: it seems to me like it might be most rational for the US to concede Taiwan to China. Overall, cooperation with China in a broad range of other areas such as economy seems ideal if possible, and excepting that, at least avoiding war or any significant possibility of it. In order to avoid being enemies and thus able to cooperate, at least one side ceding, or at least, accepting something other than their ideal outcome re: Taiwan seems necessary. Additionally, despite many arguments I've heard to the contrary, I haven't been convinced that Taiwan is of significant geopolitical importance to the US in the grand scheme of things, at least enough to justify large risks like nuclear war or even large opportunity costs like not being able to cooperate with China. The biggest obstacles for the US to simply concede Taiwan to China seem to me to be 1. doing so publicly would damage US credibility with its allies 2. control of semiconductor production and 3. ideology/public opinion/feelings. Of these, only 1. and 2. are really rational reasons to attempt to prevent Chinese absorption of Taiwan. It seems to me that if the US could construct conditions where Taiwan actually became willing to join China i.e. anything from encouraging cross strait relations to conducting psy-ops intended to influence Taiwanese public opinion towards reunification, then obstacles 1. and 3. could be abrogated. Obstacle 2. could be abrogated simply by constructing alternative equally-advanced semiconductor plants in places fully within US control. Thus, it seems to me that the most rational course of US action regarding Taiwan might be to construct alternative semiconductor plants, influence public opinion in Taiwan toward reunification, and then permit as much with China. At least, this seems rational in a situation where one expects China not to themselves be willing to cede Taiwan, or continue to be satisfied with the currently-acceptable status-quo for much longer, at least not without the US having to resort to unacceptably-risky brinksmanship or war, or even at the price of significant economic opportunity cost such as fully decoupling the two economies.
questionasker
1yr ago
Looking forward to your further answers and elaborations.
Thank you for your thorough explanation. I don't think the lengths of your posts were inappropriate (I at least read them all without becoming bored, if that means anything to you.) I'm also not sure there needs to be much back-and-forth here, either, as you consider there might need to be at the very beginning of your writing: it seems as though you have been sufficiently thorough in your explanation of your idealized conception of sex relations to the extent that I have no further questions to ask you, at least on that topic. However, I have some further questions about your other beliefs.
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You mention a belief in God. Although I appreciated the lengths of your earlier posts, can you explain somewhat briefly how you justify a belief in God in the first place, and how your spirituality plays into your beliefs? I suppose I can imagine how traditional Christian doctrines would actually quite firmly support what you are mostly already saying here but if you could be specific that would be very interesting. I'm not exactly interested in having a theological discussion and if you believe in God I doubt either of our points regarding its existence or lack-thereof will be particularly convincing to one another, so I wouldn't mind if you kept your response to this point relative short and more explanatory rather than persuasive. I enjoyed the persuasive nature of your other posts though just to be clear, so I would not be opposed to you continuing that persuasive approach when addressing my points/questions beyond this one.
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In your bio you mention an endorsement of anti-semitism and also being a (libert)Aryan. Can you explain how your conception of race relations relates to your beliefs? Similar to the previous point, I can assume how Aryan supremacism based on HBD might quite naturally play into your beliefs. But if having the most socially productive organ of society sit in the captain's chair is how you are orienting your idealized conception of society, how do you approach the fact that most IQ studies list east asian and jewish IQs as superior to those possessed by the traditionally 'Aryan' races? Should east asian and/or at least ethnically jewish men, assuming they are religiously Christian, be the ones we try and promote to the highest decision making positions in our society?
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Also in your bio you mention 'natural femininity replacement.' By this do you just mean 'replacing' the set of currently acceptable female gender roles with those that existed before the 1960s? Or is this some other thing that perhaps you think I might be interested in hearing about from you more in depth, considering I've been very interested in hearing about your elaborations on your other beliefs?
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You mention a lot of theory as to why it would be better if men and women reverted back to some more traditional conception of gender roles/sexual relations, but do you have any proposed praxis as to go about achieving (and preserving) this reversion? For example, if women came to wrongfully desire equality in our present world, and they hold some meaningful measure of political power now, is there really any feasible way they could be convinced they are wrong about this? Are women too far gone as a demographic, and it would be more-so a task of red-pilling all men and then having them seize back what is rightfully theirs? If, as you say in your posts, more and more people are beginning to have thoughts such as yours regarding the 'proper' conception of gender roles, is it just a matter of waiting until society self-corrects?
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Perhaps most importantly out of any of these five points/questions: Indeed, as you mention toward the end of your post, I would like to hear your best attempt at a defense/endorsement of pedophilia as you might be so inclined to write. I'm less interested in hearing your defense of fascism as I have heard steel-manned arguments for fascism by nominally intelligent people many times before, and in the typical way for most political ideologies, the argument was somewhat convincing and somewhat not. If you really think you'd have something new to bring to the table regarding an argument for fascism feel free to describe it, but if your beliefs are more or less the steel-manned position already held by most neofascists, then feel free to skip that particular elaboration.
Rarely, though, if ever, have I heard a defense of pedophilia from an intelligent and well-spoken person. At least, I haven't heard such a defense of the type of pedophilia that wasn't pederasty. So more than anything I'm fascinated by the prospect of hearing what you have to say about that in general, 'why it would be good,' how it would be justified, how it would be spiritually and morally uplifting -- and how it plays into any conception of a political program beyond the premise that i.e. it would be spiritually or morally uplifting, which even if true seems like insufficient basis for any sort of political program beyond the scope of 'social movement.' Thanks again in advance for taking the time to thoughtfully share your perspectives.
I've always scored around 130
In the interest of calibrating my understanding of this, anecdotal experience by anecdotal experience, may I ask what score you received on the SAT?
questionasker
1yr ago
pedofascism, androsupremacy
I appreciate your in-depth elaboration on what your ideal society would look like, but can you explain to me why this would be good, other than because men would return to 'appreciating and affirming youth' ? Is that goal the only reason you advocate said conception of masculine-feminine relations? If so, what is particularly desirable about that goal to justify what seems to me like the significant cost to the well-being of women to achieving it? To clarify, I am honestly interested in learning more about your beliefs and am not here to annoy you, shame you, or attempt to defeat you in debate. If you care to do so, could you do your best to try and convince me that returning to this full affirmation of youth would be a significant good? To me, it seems like most women probably wouldn't want to be treated as children/pets/slaves. Is your contention that they would actually be happier in this arrangement, or that their wishes aren't morally relevant, or that their wishes are relevant but less relevant than the good that would be done by allowing men to return to this lost appreciation and affirmation of youth?
Thanks in advance.
questionasker
1yr ago
Interesting perspective, thanks for the response.
questionasker
1yr ago
I don't believe him to actually be a virulent racist or antisemite or whatever. I don't even think he is a particularly political person.
Can you explain your thoughts on this?
I wrote a long post for this before realizing it was basically stupid.
What is Sam Hyde?
My read on him is that he is basically a very far-right person who sort of realizes you can't be openly far-right even ironically without choosing to sacrifice basically all the benefits of participating in mainstream society. So because his political beliefs, aka, what he thinks is true about the world, need to buried under many, many layers of irony in order to allow him to semi-exist in and benefit from the mainstream, everything he says or does ends up being buried under many layers of irony.
But at a certain point I don't even know. Apparently he was dating a transgender person a few years ago. Not that you can't be far-right politically and do this. But it throws me for a loop. This is also something that Hyde might just make up about himself as a rumor to spread around. Not exactly sure why he would, but I'm not exactly sure why he does much of what he does.
Is he smart? He bragged about being admitted to Mensa on twitter, which strikes me as actually not something that a smart person would do, but also something he would absolutely do ironically. But that aside, he actually did join mensa, meaning he has at least 98th percentile IQ, regardless of how 'smart' that makes him.
Is he a sociopath? His acting ability is extremely good and he's able to avoid dropping character for really long periods of time, to the point if I question whether or not a typical (non-sociopath) person would even be capable of doing the kinds of acts he does.
What's anyone's best read they think they have on him as a person? He's stumps me in a way few other people who nominally don elaborate public-facing facades still don't.
questionasker
1yr ago
You're right that many female streamers cultivate an audience in this way, but some female streamers do not and yet still have deepfake porn of them made. So to avoid getting caught up in this we can just restrict the discussion to solely what is right or wrong regarding the porn made of the latter group.
questionasker
1yr ago
Along those lines, I'd say the only context in which the information that you've generated (hence your information) of a perfect prediction of the appearance of my naked body can become equivalent to the actual information of the actual appearance of my naked body is if you can see me naked and can confirm that it's a perfect prediction.
I suppose you're right about this.
questionasker
1yr ago
I suppose you're right.
If someone (not dearly beloved but clinically demented) cannot/isn't willing to distinguish real and fake images based on context, or just has strong emotional reactions to highly-likely-fake images and can change attitude towards me on their basis, that person is a long-term liability and should be discarded.
I think the matter is more subtle than this.
I obviously think most people can, on the abstract level, distinguish between real and fake images. However I'm not willing to use this fact to jump to the conclusion that most people, including many people valuable enough to keep in one's life, wouldn't have strong emotional reactions to some types of even fake images depicting a person, especially images of a sexual nature. And again however much on conscious level they know the images are fake, I feel like the reactions many people have to these images could at least somewhat change their attitude towards the person ostensibly depicted in a real and meaningful way.
I think most people think differently about a person after fantasizing about having sex with them, than they did before such a fantasy crossed their minds. I certainly think that most people would think differently about them, and would almost certainly in some unconscious way treat them differently, after fantasizing about such a thing 100 times. And I think as much is even more true if they've had access to photorealistic depictions of this fantasy that are fake but produced by something other than their imagination, in other words, images that are much easier for their sexual-lizard-brain to believe are real even if they on a higher more abstract level know that the images are fake.
Other than that, you're right that legally these things shouldn't literally be banned. It was a mistake to include that set of questions in the body of my post. And you're right that I think most of the online discourse surrounding the subject misses the mark one way or another, which is nothing new when it comes to subtle moral/ethical issues.
Aside from all this, though, the disconnect I felt existed in my intuition was resolved by another commenter, who described the delineation as such: anything in my head or on my hard-drive, and exclusively in my head or on my hard-drive, is entirely my business. But as soon as I i.e. start to publish online what is on my hard drive, the probability that persons depicted in even fake pornography will find out that someone has done as much starts to approach 1. And, that's where I've started to cross a line. This is more or less what the quoted 'steelman' arguments you found on twitter are getting at, even if still for somewhat wrong reasons: publishing that material, making it highly likely if not certain that the depicted persons will be made to know of it, is what is wrong, at least morally/ethically. By doing so I've made it their business, where previously it was only my own. Regardless of the particular way in which they're affected, that you might personally think shouldn't matter to them, i.e. loss of followers, family/friends potentially seeing it and not knowing its fake, or at minimum, that they just don't like having to know about it -- ultimately it wasn't necessarily my right to make them deal with any of these things, even if I think they shouldn't care about them. The commenter who described the analogy I found so apt likened it to fantasizing about a person sexually, and then directly telling them that you have, in fact, have fantasized about them sexually. Maybe you think they still shouldn't care. But as far as I'm concerned, by doing this you've made something that was formerly solely your business, into their business, in a way I don't think you should.
questionasker
1yr ago
Interesting perspective.
questionasker
1yr ago
But they can always just not look.
If it's there, though, they'll still know it's there, even when they're not looking at it. Thus they will suffer some psychological harm they otherwise wouldn't have suffered, if it just wasn't published in the first place.
Is it moral for me to publish something, if the very fact that it has been published will cause someone to suffer psychologically? I think unless the value gained by publishing that thing is high (high in a relative sense, as in, greater than zero) it is immoral to do this. And I think the value gained by something like porn is basically zero.
questionasker
1yr ago
Women's breasts, in particular, come in a variety of shapes, and they are frequently not symmetric. Older women's breasts tend to be flat--think more like those pictures in the old National Geographic depicting women in some far-away hunter-gatherer tribe. The nipples and areolae come in various shapes and sizes, and change with temperature. Some have inverted nipples. Practically all of this variability is hidden by the kinds of clothes women wear, especially if they are into padded bras.
I'm aware of this. The point is that not everyone with good-looking (pornstar-like, if you would) breasts, decides to become a pornstar. Thus, these types of people are vulnerable to having very realistic versions of their breasts recreated with pornstar data, despite never themselves putting images of their actual breasts out onto the internet. Additionally, there's plenty of data of non-pornstar-like breasts out there to train data on. The point is not that AI will always generate topless versions of people that are very much like what their breasts actually look like, its that it can with at least some relatively degree of frequency.
questionasker
1yr ago
it's at least information that I wouldn't want to know about my friend's attraction to my wife.
The main body of your post seems basically right. But in regards to this bit in particular, I have to say from a purely anthropological standpoint I'm fascinated with how much unanimity of agreement there is in this thread that 'whether or not one knows that the act has taken place' is a very important element of the quandary.
Are there many other acts for which whether or not they have taken place isn't nearly as important as whether or not the relevant parties know that those acts have taken place?
questionasker
1yr ago
What's in your head (or on your hard drive) is nobody else's business. Putting it in public is like telling your neighbor's daughter that you jack off thinking about her. If you make it public, you make it her business.
I'm amazed at how succinctly this delineates ethical boundaries that appear basically airtight to my intuition (my intuition being where the problem lay in the first place). I'd go as far as to say that this essentially resolves the topic for me.
questionasker
1yr ago
Maybe true, but I guarantee you that the vast majority of people paying money to host websites that distribute deepfakes are doing so for commercial purposes. I.e. the streamer in question had accessed a website which required him to pay 15 dollars to use
This just means that neurons don't work in binary like most artificial electrical computers, it doesn't mean they aren't components of a digital computer. Digital doesn't mean binary.
From your comment I'm afraid you might just have no idea what a digital computer actually is. Whether information is transferred electrically or not isn't what separates digital computers from analog ones, but rather the fact that information is represented symbolically in digital computers and not in analog ones. Information is represented symbolically in the form of action potentials in neurons in the brain meaning it is a digital computer.
When you want to be a dick, you should at least try and know something of what you're talking about so you don't come across as both needlessly overconfident and a dick. The fact that neurons can process both sense information as well as consider things like complex planning means that by definition they must be the components of a digital computer. What is uniform about the substrate is that it is all composed of neurons, not whether the architecture happens to be similar or not across various cortical layers (just as the architecture of different computer processors is not uniform despite all being made of transistors.)
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