sodiummuffin
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User ID: 420
sodiummuffin
1yr ago
The point isn't whether such an outcome is particularly likely, it's that it's more likely than being kept barely alive by a series of staggeringly unlikely macroscopic quantum events. The idea behind quantum immortality is that, if many-worlds is true and all the worlds in it are truly "real", there will always be some small subset of worlds where you continue existing so long as this is physically possible. And a lot of things are physically possible if you get into extremely unlikely quantum fluctuations. Since you don't experience the worlds where you are already dead, an increasing percentage of your remaining future selves would have experienced whatever unlikely events are required to keep you alive. When I said "your society" that wasn't meant to refer to any current society, it was meant to refer to the idea of surviving as part of a society at all. As opposed to most of your future copies surviving as the only remaining human in your universe, floating in space after the destruction of Earth and staying alive only because in some tiny fraction of the Everett branches splitting off each instant some oxygen/etc. randomly appears and and keeps you alive. Any future that doesn't require such a continuous series of coincidences will be a much larger fraction of the branches where you survive, and the most obvious such future is one where people deliberately invent the required technology. So whether quantum immortality is true or not, and whether or not you decide to care about the fate of future selves even if they only exist in a small fraction of branches, the expected outcomes of quantum immortality being true aren't the "kept barely alive by randomness" scenarios.
sodiummuffin
1yr ago
Your argument is backwards, most of the probability mass with conscious humans will be in those world's where immortality is nice and easy, but I know which world I live in now.
The chance of quantum fluctuations repeatedly keeping you barely alive through random chance is incredibly unlikely, far more unlikely than them resulting in a world where someone develops the necessary technology faster than you think is plausible. In his scenario you're lying "with third degree burns buried in a garbage dump", that means we need absurd quantum events happening continuously for years to prevent you dying of shock, infection, suffocation, starvation, etc. Each unlikely event multiplies the improbability further. Even under the logic of quantum immortality, this only matters if they're the only branches where you survive. Far more probable is that, for instance, quantum fluctuations in some neurons results in someone trying the right ideas to develop an AI that can do superhuman medical research or develop brain-uploading. Indeed, even if it was somehow truly unreachable through normal research, I think it would be more likely that fluctuations in a computer's RAM result in file corruption that happens to correspond to a functioning file containing correct information on the required technology. Because at least that only really has to happen once, rather than happening again and again in the conventional form of quantum immortality. Eventually the sun is going to expand into a red giant and similarly worlds where you survive through your society developing space-travel are going to dominate worlds where you survive being inside the sun through unlikely quantum events happening many times per second.
Also, more importantly I don't see why if by the Born rule I end up in a world where I am dead, I won't just be dead. There is nothing in physics that says that option is off limits; though, of course, other copies would still exist in agony.
The premise of quantum immortality is that if 1+ copies of you still exist, then you are still alive even if you no longer exist in the vast majority of worlds. If many-worlds is true and corresponds to worlds that are all "real", then there will virtually always be surviving copies. You don't "end up" in any individual world, all the copies diverging from your current self which haven't been destroyed (or altered in ways you consider incompatible with being yourself) are you.
It's not necessary to the argument but I would argue that under a sensible definition some of the copies that have already diverged are you as well. People don't consider it death when they get drunk and don't retain hours of memories. This isn't too relevant now but it's potentially relevant to a future self on the verge of death, since under that definition most of your selves that survive are ones that already diverged, rather than more obvious but unlikely quantum immortality scenarios like "in some worlds your brain is preserved in a freak accident and then used to reconstruct your mind centuries later". But ultimately these definitions are an arbitrary decision, humans intuitions regarding wanting to live aren't well-equipped to deal with multiple future selves in the first place, whether due to many-worlds or something like multiple software copies. However under many-worlds you can't just go with the "my current brain is me and copies aren't" option, because all your future selves are copies diverging from your current self.
sodiummuffin
1yr ago
No. To quote a post I made in response to someone expressing the same concern:
Is the thing you're afraid of the idea that quantum immortality would involve something like a near-eternity of horrible lives where you're almost but not quite dead? Because if so, I think you're badly misjudging the probability distribution. Those situations are associated with quantum immortality only because they're so incredibly unlikely that if they happen it'll be obvious that quantum immortality is true - but by definition that means they are absurdly unlikely to happen! Something like "you get shot and almost die, but random quantum fluctuations cause a lump of graphite to spontaneously appear inside your chest and barely stop the bleeding" are unlikely on a truly cosmic scale, even under the logic of quantum immortality it only matters if it's the only future where you don't die. And that sort of quantum immortality would require it happen again and again, multiplying the improbability each time.
Even if quantum immortality is true, anything the slightest bit plausible will completely dominate the probability distribution. There is no reason that technology granting near-immortality is impossible, so in virtually every Everett branch where you survive the reason is just that the technology is invented and you use it. Which is generally going to correspond to a technologically advanced and prosperous society. Quantum immortality wouldn't feel like a series of staggering coincidences barely preserving your life, it would feel like living in a universe where everything went surprisingly well. Billions of years from now your society is harvesting energy from black holes and maybe occasionally during get-togethers with your friends you debate whether this outcome was unlikely enough that quantum immortality is probably true.
sodiummuffin
1yr ago
This would also explain why previous iterations of 'fake nudes' weren't as highly debated: because they weren't as commonly distributed until now (perhaps because they weren't as realistic, and thus not as popular).
Manually created photoshops are generally higher quality than deepfakes, doing it with AI is just more automated, and thus more useful for applications like video, more obscure celebrities, or larger quantities. I'd say that as a proportion of the internet and of internet pornography, celeb nudes (both real and fake) have noticeably gone down. In 2006 one of the earlier Simpsons episodes referencing the internet has Comic Book Guy downloading nude Captain Janeway. (I'm not sure if Kate Mulgrew had any real nudes, but I guess that might be different in the world of The Simpsons anyway.) Janet Jackson's 2004 Superbowl nipslip was a major inspiration for creating Youtube. It's just that the internet as a whole has grown, so celeb nudes are now smaller compared to behemoths like Pornhub even if larger in absolute terms. And of course now celebrities themselves have an internet presence, and there are all sorts of micro-celebrities, while the culture might be less focused on the biggest celebrities than it was.
sodiummuffin
1yr ago
Fake celeb nudes created with programs like Photoshop have been popular for decades, I remember there being sites dedicated to them, how porn forums would have subforums for them, and how people got annoyed when they inevitably got mixed into collections of actual celeb nudes. (During the moral panic about deepfakes a few years ago the subreddit for them was banned.) So discussion of deepfakes should account for the fact that they aren't particularly novel. The main difference is that they can be used for video.
Incidentally while I don't think I ever heard of a celebrity commenting on nude photoshops, I remember at least one who stopped doing nude/sex scenes because with the internet people could share videos of those scenes without the rest of the movie.
sodiummuffin
1yr ago
Option c: blacks are 5x as much "overpoliced" or white criminals are 1/5 as likely to be caught and convicted.
Studies based on the National Crime Victimization Survey show a close match between the racial demographics of criminals as reported by those claiming to have been victimized and the racial demographics of those arrested for those crimes. The 13/53 figure is specifically based on murder and is thus technically not covered since murder victims cannot be surveyed, but violent crimes in general are included and show a similar but somewhat lesser disparity. (Generally the racial disparity is larger the more violent and severe the crime is, so murder has a larger disparity than violent crime in general, which has a larger disparity than crime in general. So while the crime victimization survey also doesn't cover crimes without victims, those have a smaller disparity to begin with, and white criminals with victims answering the National Crime Victimization Survey don't seem to be getting away with it more.)
sodiummuffin
1yr ago
The 13/53 figure is for murder not crime in general. Which is something the rest of your post should be taking into account. For instance there aren't a lot of murderers being let out of prison to commit murder again 4 more times, though I suppose you could have an altered but similar hypothesis like "failing to sufficiently catch and punish black criminals before they commit murder" or black career criminals being more severe in that they escalate to violence more often.
sodiummuffin
1yr ago
Bots that copy old Reddit posts or old comments on the same submission have been around for years. There are ones that copy Youtube comments on a video into Reddit submissions of that video too, I remember a /r/videos thread where one of those attracted attention because the Youtube comment mentioned the current year and the Reddit comment copying it was in a different year. The goal is presumably to automatically create large numbers of spam accounts with a human-like history of upvoted comments to get past Reddit's anti-spam measures. The only new thing I'm seeing here is that it looks like they've worked in some program to rephrase the comment, maybe Reddit implemented some measure to detect the direct copies.
sodiummuffin
1yr ago
The facts that need to be explained is a 2012 blog post compiling some of the arguments in favor of gap being at least partially genetic. Of course it is now outdated, I don't follow the subject closely but I know that for instance there are now better admixture studies like this one. But some of the arguments gave me a better sense of why so many researchers in the field consider genetic causes the most parsimonious explanation.
sodiummuffin
1yr ago
An anonymous survey from the mid 10s, which I'll see if I can find, polled experts and had on average them privately thinking about 50% of the achievement gap is genetic.
You are thinking of the Rindermann survey from 2014, which was the basis for these publications:
Prior to that there was the Snyderman survey from 1984:
Survey of Expert Opinion on Intelligence and Aptitude Testing
sodiummuffin
1yr ago
It is precisely the ability to convert between mild experiences and extreme experiences at some ratio that allows everything to add up to something resembling common-sense morality. If you don't, if the ranking of bad experiences from most mild to most severe has one considered infinitely worse than the one that came before, then your decision-making will be dominated by whichever potential consequences pass that threshold while completely disregarding everything below that threshold, regardless of how unlikely those extreme consequences are. You seem to be taking the fact that the risks in these hypotheticals are not worth actual consideration as a point against these hypotheticals, but of course that is the point the hypotheticals are making.
Moral reasoning is not really meant for such extreme numbers
Nothing in the universe will ever be 3↑↑↑3, but 7 billion people is already far beyond intuitive moral reasoning. We still have to make decisions affecting them whether our moral reasoning is meant for it or not. Which includes reacting differently to something bad happening to one person out of millions of beneficiaries than to one person out of hundreds of beneficiaries.
Has anyone ever experienced such nerve damage as a result of a decision they took? Do we know that it's even theoretically possible? I can't imagine that really any amount of carpal tunnel is actually equivalent to many years of deliberate torture, even if 3↑↑↑3 worlds exist and we choose the person who suffers the worst carpal tunnel out of all of them. So I'd probably say that this risk is literally 0, not just arbitrarily small.
In some percentage of cases the cancer spreads to your brain, you get surgery to remove the tumor, and the brain surgeon messes up in precisely the right way. Both "locked-in syndrome" and chronic pain are things that happen, it's hardly a stretch to think a combination of both that paralyzes you for 50 years while you experience continuous agony is physically possible. And of course even if you were uncertain whether it was physically possible, that's just another thing to multiply the improbability by. It's not that rounding the probability down to 0 doesn't make sense in terms of practical decision-making, it's that "1 in 3↑↑↑3" odds are unimaginably less likely, so you should round them down to 0 too.
If you sum up all of the suffering and give it to a single person, IMO the minimal suffering will add up to a lot less than the maximal suffering.
I do not think this is a meaningful statement. We can decide which scenario is preferable and call that something like "net utility" but we can't literally "add up" multiple people's experiences within a single person. It doesn't have a coherent meaning so we are free to arbitrarily imagine whatever we want. That said, to the extent that its meaning can be nailed down at all, I think it would favor avoiding the 3↑↑↑3 option. My understanding is that a single pain receptor firing once is not noticeable. If a form of suffering is instead barely noticeable, it is presumably "bigger" than a single pain receptor firing. There are only 37 trillion cells the the human body, so the number of pain receptors is something smaller than that. So the first step in multiplying barely-noticeable suffering by 3↑↑↑3 is that it goes from "worse than a pain receptor firing" to "worse than every pain receptor firing continuously for an extended period". And that doesn't make a dent in 3↑↑↑3, so we multiply further, such as by making it last unimaginably longer than merely 10^100 times the lifespan of the universe.
That is a pretty arbitrary and meaningless matter of interpretation though. A more meaningful measure would be the Rawlsian veil of ignorance, You're a random member of a population of 3↑↑↑3, is it better for you that 10^100 of them be tortured or all of them experience a dropped frame in a video? This is equivalent to what I answered in my previous post, that it would be foolish to sacrifice anything to avoid such odds.
sodiummuffin
1yr ago
Also, real life is nowhere near as clean as these hypotheticals, and focusing more on safety has many negative knock-on effects elsewhere.
Sure, that's the cost of using real-life comparisons, but do you really think that's the only thing making some of those tradeoffs worthwhile? That in a situation where it didn't also affect economic growth and immortality research and so on, it would be immoral to accept trades between even miniscule risks of horrific consequences and very small dispersed benefits? We make such tradeoffs constantly and I don't think they need such secondary consequences to justify them. Say someone is writing a novel and thinks of a very slightly better word choice, but editing in the word would require typing 5 more letters, slightly increasing his risk of developing carpal-tunnel, which increases his risk of needing surgery, which increases his risk of the surgeon inflicting accidental nerve damage that inflicts incredibly bad chronic pain the rest of his life equivalent to being continuously tortured. Yes, in real life this would be dominated by other effects like "the author being annoyed at not using the optimal word" or "the author wasting his time thinking about it" - but I don't think that's what is necessary to make it a reasonable choice. I think it's perfectly reasonable to say that on its own very slightly benefiting your thousands of readers outweighs sufficiently small risks, even if the worst-case scenario for the edit is much worse than the worst-case scenario for not editing. And by extension, if you replicated this scenario enough times with enough sets of authors and readers, then long before you got to 3↑↑↑3 readers enough authors would have made this tradeoff that some of them would really have that scenario happen.
While the number 3↑↑↑3 is obviously completely irrelevant to real-life events in our universe, the underlying point about scale insensitivity and tradeoffs between mild and severe events is not. Yudkowsky just picked a particularly extreme example, perhaps because he thought it would better focus on the underlying idea rather than an example where the specifics are more debatable. But of course "unlikely incident causes people to flip out and implement safety measures that do more damage than they solve" is a classic of public policy. We will never live in a society of 3↑↑↑3 people, but we do live in a society of billions while having mentalities that react to individual publicized incidents much like if we lived in societies of hundreds. And the thing about thinking "I'd never make tradeoffs like that!" is that they are sufficiently unavoidable in public policy that this just means you'll arbitrarily decide some of them don't count. E.g. if the FDA sincerely decided that "even a single death from regulatory negligence is too much!", probably that would really mean that they would stop approving novel foods and drugs entirely and decide that anyone who died from their lack wasn't their responsibility. (And that mild effects, like people not getting to eat slightly nicer foods, were doubly not their responsibility.)
Many people enjoying a game is (imo) much more significant than many people getting dust specks, while a few people getting skin cancer is much less significant than one person getting tortured for 50 years.
But it isn't nullifying their enjoyment of the game, it's a slight barely-noticeable flicker in the broadcast. (If you want something even smaller, I suppose a single dropped frame would be even smaller than a flicker but still barely noticeable to some people.) If you're making media for millions of people I think it's perfectly reasonable to care about even small barely-noticeable imperfections. And while the primary cost of this is the small amount of effort to notice and fix the problem, this also includes taking minuscule risks of horrific costs. And it isn't a few people getting skin cancer, it's the fraction of the people who get skin cancer that then have something go wrong with surgery such that they suffer torture. I just said torture during the surgery, but of course if you multiply the number of planets enough you would eventually get high odds of at least one planet's broadcast operator suffering something like the aforementioned ultra-severe chronic pain for a more direct comparison.
Genuinely, even going so far as to write out a company policy for that ridiculous scenario (where 3^^^3 people risk skin cancer) would mean asking all of your employees to familiarize themselves with it, which would mean wasting many lifetimes just to save one lifetime from skin cancer.
Feel free to modify it to "making a design tradeoff that either causes a single dropped frame in the broadcast or a millisecond of more-than-optimal sunlight on the broadcast operator", so that it doesn't consume the operator's time. I just chose something that was easily comparable between a single operator making the choice and making the choice for so many operators that the incredibly unlikely risk actually happens.
Would you choose Maximal Suffering above Maximally Miniscule Suffering?
Sure. Same way that if I had a personal choice between "10^100 out of 3↑↑↑3 odds of suffering the fate you describe" and "100% chance of having a single additional dropped frame in the next video I watch" (and neither the time spent thinking about the question nor uncertainty about the scenario and whether I'm correctly interpreting the math factored into the decision), I would choose to avoid the dropped frame. I'm not even one of the people who finds dropped frames noticeable unless it's very bad, but I figure it has some slight but not-absurdly-unlikely chance of having a noticeable impact on my enjoyment, very much unlike the alternative. Obviously neither number is intuitively understandable to humans but "10^100 out of 3↑↑↑3" is a lot closer to "0" than to "1 out of the highest number I can intuitively understand".
sodiummuffin
1yr ago
It's pretty annoying that 16 years ago Yudkowsky wrote a blog post that was deliberately unintuitive due to scope insensitivity (seemingly as some sort of test to spark discussion) and as a result there are people who to this day talk about it without considering the implications of the contrary view. In real life we embrace ratios that are unimaginably worse than 1 person's torture vs. "3↑↑↑3 in Knuth's up-arrow notation" dust specks. People should read OSHA's accident report list sometime. All human activity that isn't purely optimized to maximize safety - every building designed with aesthetics in mind, every spice to make our food a bit nicer, every time we put up Christmas decorations (sometimes getting up on ladders!) - is built at the cost of human suffering and death. If the ratio was 1 torturous work accident to 3↑↑↑3 slight beneficiaries, there would never have been a work accident in human history. Indeed, there are only 10^86 atoms in the known universe, even if each of those atoms was somehow transformed into another Earth with billions of residents, and this civilization lasted until the heat-death of the universe, the number of that civilization's members would be an unimaginably tiny fraction of 3↑↑↑3, and thus embracing a ratio of 1 to 3↑↑↑3 would almost certainly not result in a single accident throughout that civilization's history.
A more intuitive hypothetical wouldn't just throw out the incomprehensible number and see who gets it, it would make the real-life comparisons or try to make the ratio between the beneficiaries and the cost more understandable. The easiest way to do this with such extreme ratios is with very small risks (though using risks is not actually necessary). For instance, lets say you're helping broadcast the World Cup, and you realize there will shortly be a slight flicker in the broadcast. You can prevent this flicker by pressing a button, but there's a problem: a stream of direct sunlight is on the button, so pressing it will expose the tip of your finger to sunlight for a second. This slightly increases your risk of skin cancer, which risks getting worse in a way that requires major surgery, which slightly risks one of those freak reactions to anesthesia where you're paralyzed but conscious and in torturous pain the whole surgery. (You believe you have gotten sufficient sunlight exposure for benefits like Vitamin D already, so more exposure at this point would be net-negative in terms of health.) Is it worth the risk to press the button?
If someone thinks there's something fundamentally different about small risks, the same scenario works without them, it just requires a weirder hypothetical. Let us say that human civilization has created and colonized earth-like planets on every star in the universe, and further has invented a universe-creation machine, created a number of universes like ours equal to the number of atoms in the original universe, and colonized at least one planet for every star in every universe. On every one of those planets they broadcast a sports match, and you work for the franchised broadcasting company that sets policy for every broadcast. Your job consists of deciding policy for a single question: if the above scenario occurs, should franchise operators press the button despite the tiny risk? You have done the research and know that, thanks to the sheer number of affected planets, it is a statistical near-certainty that a few operators will get skin cancer from the second of finger sunlight exposure and then have something go wrong with surgery such that they experience torture. Does the answer somehow change from the answer for a single operator on a single planet, since it is no longer just a "risk"? Is the morality different if instead of a single franchise it's split up into 10 companies, and it works out so that each company has a less than 50% chance of the torture occurring? What if instead of 10 companies it's a different company on each planet making the decision, so for each one it's no different from the single-planet question? Even though the number of people in this multiverse hypothetical is still a tiny fraction of 3↑↑↑3, I think a lot more people would say that it's worth it to spare them that flicker, because the scale of the ratio has been made more clear.
sodiummuffin
1yr ago
And gas is much less efficient energy-wise; not only does it shed a lot of heat in the energy transfer to the cooking vessel, it's in general less efficient than electric (but often cheaper depending on your locale).
I very much doubt that burning natural gas in a power plant, converting the heat into electricity, transferring it to your home, and then converting it back into heat is more efficient than transporting the gas and burning it for heat directly, even if electric is more efficient at transmitting the heat to the cookware. The first source I found with a quick search said the same:
https://home.howstuffworks.com/gas-vs-electric-stoves.htm
The clear winner in the energy efficiency battle between gas and electric is gas. It takes about three times as much energy to produce and deliver electricity to your stove. According to the California Energy Commission, a gas stove will cost you less than half as much to operate (provided that you have an electronic ignition--not a pilot light).
The potential climate-change argument against gas stoves would be that, in a hypothetical future with plentiful and very low-carbon electricity generation, a gas stove might lock in fossil fuel consumption. But unless you live in an area where the electricity is already all hydroelectric/nuclear this is a risky gamble, if during the timeframe the stove is operating your area is still using fossil fuels to generate electricity the electric stove will cause more emissions. I don't anticipate the energy-generation mix changing that dramatically early in the lifespan of a stove bought today. (If the "three times" figure is true it would have to happen less than a third of the way through its lifespan.)
sodiummuffin
1yr ago
Relevant themotte posts I made a year ago (the decision is currently being appealed):
sodiummuffin
1yr ago
Back on the object level of the issue at hand, for all it's worth, reports of Russians abusing or executing PoWs so far - especially after the chaos of the first few days - are very thin on the ground, despite what I assume must have been a very large number of people looking very hard for evidence.
I think the main reason you haven't heard about it is that Russia's torture of both POWs and civilians is so routine and well-known that it isn't considered very newsworthy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_torture_chambers_in_Ukraine
Speaking of tech company censorship: Youtube deleted a video from pharmaceutical company Aytu Bioscience about a proposed technology for using UV light inside the lungs, which they released a press-release about a few days before Trump's comments and was developed by researchers at Cedars-Sinai who had been working on it since 2016. Their Twitter account was also suspended for a little while. (I wonder if there was any internal discussion about that the Twitter Files journalists could look up?) Given the timing it seems very likely it was what Trump's comment was referring to (or at least the part of the comment mentioning light), it was probably mentioned to him in one of his regular coronavirus meetings. Youtube deleted the video because a New York Times reporter reported it to them:
I contacted YouTube about this video, which is being shared on tons of replies on Twitter & on Facebook, by people asserting that it backs up Trump's idea throwing it out there that UV rays kill coronavirus. YouTube just said it removed it for violating its community guidelines.
He also wrote a NYT article about it in which he talked to a Youtube spokesperson, which confirms the removal was intentional rather than purely automated. You'd think that if nothing else Youtube would have sufficient double-standards favoring credible institutions to not censor pharmaceutical companies talking about research they're involved with in cooperation with Cedars-Sinai, but apparently not.
sodiummuffin
1yr ago
It's called "representation" and while it has assorted supplementary arguments (e.g. "minority children benefit from seeing people like them in fiction"), at its core it isn't anything as coherent as a proposition. Like Scott discusses in Ethnic Tension and Meaningless Arguments:
In a way, when we round people off to the Philosophy 101 kind of arguments, we are failing to respect their self-description. People aren’t out on the streets saying “By my cost-benefit analysis, Israel was in the right to invade Gaza, although it may be in the wrong on many of its other actions.” They’re waving little Israeli flags and holding up signs saying “ISRAEL: OUR STAUNCHEST ALLY”. Maybe we should take them at face value.
If it was a specific proposition it might have a stopping point. But it isn't "demographics in fiction should match the demographics of your real-life country", it isn't even "at least 50% of characters should be non-white'. It's that SJW types cheer or boo characters based on whether they're members of their favored or disfavored identity groups. So fiction influenced by them often ends up with demographics ranging from noticeably influenced to completely absurd. (And that isn't a stopping point either, even completely absurd levels of representation are often criticized for the representation being problematic in some way, having attracted a SJW-inclined audience that doesn't notice how hard it's trying to cater to people like them.)
Of course, this sort of sentiment regarding identity groups is not limited to fiction. For instance a major stated reason why the CDC recommended a COVID-19 vaccine-prioritization scheme that depriorited the elderly relative to "essential workers", contrary to their own estimates on what would save more lives, was because the elderly are more likely to be white, as I discussed in this post. Similarly various governments such as Vermont prioritized non-whites outright. As a matter of strict logical argument it doesn't seem like these things should be related, but in reality someone predisposed to like arguments in favor of the "underprivileged" will generally apply that bias whether the stakes are "realism in a fictional setting" or "many thousands of lives".
sodiummuffin
1yr ago
This rephrasing still implies that the rioters are not people who voted for him.
No, it says he is not referring to that set of people. Let us say that someone writes an article saying "email is an insecure medium, since it is transmitted in plain text". Someone writes a headline about it saying "Computer researcher says Yahoo Mail is insecure". Even though Yahoo Mail is a subset of email, he was not referring to it, he was referring to a broader category that it happens to be a subset of.
sodiummuffin
1yr ago
Of course the sentence could have been clearer. It's sloppy conversational English relying on the reader to fill in part of the sentence which accidentally ended up having a more straightforward meaning that the writer did not intend, something akin to a garden-path sentence. If there was no context your interpretation would have been the more intuitive one. But there is context, and it's very unlikely that a Twitter employee would claim the rioters were all false flaggers rather than Trump voters, or argue it that particular way if he did. And I think that not only does my reading of it match what he meant, it matches how the other Twitter employees in the conversation interpreted it, how the reporters posting the conversation interpreted it, and how the people responding to you in this thread are interpreting it. So while it's a bit interesting that your reading of it is also possible based on the text it doesn't seem particularly significant.
sodiummuffin
1yr ago
Is this just confusion about the Twitter staffer's unclear grammar? The "not" in that sentence refers to the "he's saying" part, not the "voted for him" part. Another way to say it would be "It's pretty clear he's referring to people who voted for him, not the rioters". The Twitter staffer was not denying that the rioters were a subset of the voters, he was claiming they were not the group Trump was referring to, because Trump was referring to the set of all Trump voters.
I think the unnessesary "and" might be adding more ambiguity to an already ambiguous sentence, would it have been clearer if he said "He's saying the "American Patriots" are the ones who voted for him, not the terrorists"? Of course it also comes from whatever the grammatical term is for the thing where you omit the verb-phrase in the second half rather than repeating it from the first half, it would have been clear if he said "It's pretty clear he's saying the "American Patriots" are the ones who voted for him, not saying the "American Patriots" are the terrorists"). For instance:
https://www.usingenglish.com/forum/threads/omitting-a-verb-when-it-appears-the-second-time.170698/
Sheet 1 of the attached file shows the data on the male students and Sheet 2 the female students.
And then all the people replying to you are confused because they don't understand that you're interpreting the "not" as meaning "the rioters are not Trump voters" and think you mean that referring to a superset necessarily must be referring to each individual subset.
sodiummuffin
1yr ago
See my post above, more subtle forms of shadowbanning like Twitter uses have been called "shadowbans" for many years. Including by the shadowban.eu site that everyone used to check.
It was also something most right wing accounts I followed were subject to. People like Nick Land, 0hp Lovecraft (still has a search suggestion ban), Steve Sailer etc.
I did a search and all 3 of those accounts used the term "shadowban" that way years ago:
https://twitter.com/Outsideness/status/934264497639899136
https://twitter.com/Outsideness/status/1184531291741577217
https://twitter.com/Steve_Sailer/status/1588375202953854976
https://twitter.com/Steve_Sailer/status/1192976470802460673
https://twitter.com/0x49fa98/status/1311276706553094146
People on Twitter talking about shadowbanning were referring to the Twitter form of shadowbanning, not the too-obvious Reddit method.
This is completely false, shadowbanning has been for used for many years to refer to any kind of ban or hiding of someone's posts that is hidden from the shadowbanned user even if they are still possible to access to some degree. The website everyone used to check if they were shadowbanned on Twitter was shadowban.eu, which specifically checked for "Search Suggestion Ban", "Search Ban", "Ghost Ban", "Reply Deboosting" and (until it was deprecated) "Quality Filter Discrimination". Today other websites like this one also use the term shadowban for the same methods.
Nobody tweeting about how they were shadowbanned was claiming that their tweets were completely invisible - obviously so, since there would be no point in tweeting about it and everyone would have already noticed. Reddit-style complete shadowbans are trivial to see by just looking at your own posts with an incognito window or TOR, and on Twitter would be immediately noticed for anyone with followers, making them a much less effective form of shadowbanning. Reddit's shadowban system was originally designed for use against spambots, while Twitter's was designed for use against humans.
EDIT: Also this is the opening of the Wikipedia article which calls Twitter shadowbanning a conspiracy theory:
Shadow banning, also called stealth banning, hellbanning, ghost banning and comment ghosting, is the practice of blocking or partially blocking a user or the user's content from some areas of an online community in such a way that the ban is not readily apparent to the user. For instance, shadow banned comments posted to a blog or media website will not be visible to other persons accessing that site from their computers.
By partly concealing, or making a user's contributions invisible or less prominent to other members of the service, the hope may be that in the absence of reactions to their comments, the problematic or otherwise out-of-favour user will become bored or frustrated and leave the site, and that spammers and trolls will be discouraged to continue their unwanted behavior or create new accounts
The "less prominent" part has been in the article since 2017, since before the "conspiracy theory" part.
sodiummuffin
1yr ago
Fetish communities seem to have figured out a method that is at least somewhat effective, it's just neither psychiatrists nor Christian groups are interested. And the time investment, unclear reliability, and possible side-effects are such that it's hard to see it being worthwhile under most circumstances. The basic method is that you masturbate (and possibly edge), a lot, to the thing you want to be attracted to. To do this you generally couple it with something you are already interested in. Examples:
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Fetish acquisition and drift. It is common for people to pick up new fetishes (and strengthen existing ones) over time. It is also common for those fetishes to become more extreme and/or more abstract over time, more distant from baseline sexuality. Unlike most of the other examples, I think this one is sufficiently well-known on the internet that it's almost considered common-sense. People masturbate to something with content they like, it also has other fetish content, and over time they find the other fetish content arousing as well and may seek it out. It's not the origin of every fetish, plenty of people talk about having certain fetishes arousing from very early on, but it clearly happens. On places like 4chan you can see people talking about the progressions like this they have gone down. Sometimes they end up doing something like deliberately going back to more vanilla porn or cutting back on porn in general because their fetishes ended up in an extreme and emotionally unpleasant place. I remember a Reddit comment by someone claiming to be involved in prosecuting child-pornography offenses claiming around 50% of cases are people who seem to have been pedophiles to begin with while the other 50% are like this, people who sought out increasingly extreme pornography until getting caught with child porn.
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Fetish sponging. You see people in fetish communities talk about picking up fetishes from sexual partners. It's a similar principle but with sex instead of masturbation.
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Sissy/humiliation/chastity/hard-femdom/etc. fetishists who fetishize the idea of being turned gay . Here we get into sexual orientation. For various reasons related to humiliation/submission/transformation fetishes/etc. some men are not attracted to men but do find the idea of being turned gay sexy in the abstract. In this case part of "something you are already interested in" is the idea of being gay, but also that sort of porn is generally focused on women even if it claims not to be. 4chan's /gif/ had regular "gifs that make you want to suck cock" threads but they had women doing the sucking, their "sissy hypno" threads would straight-up alternate between women/straight-sex and images of penises, chastity-cage image-captions where the reader is forced to sexually serve men while being caged still use images of sexy women, etc. Trans porn is often used, combining both elements in a single individual. Screenshots I've seen floating around claim with seeming sincerity to have become sexually interested in men for real after masturbating to enough content like this. (I also remember seeing one that claims to have arranged a meeting to give a gay blowjob and then backed out because it wasn't at all sexy like the abstract fantasy was.) While someone could argue anyone like that had unconscious/suppressed desires all along and sought out that sort of porn for that reason, that is not the impression I get from the accounts and from my understanding of how the relevant fetishes work. Now, obviously comments on the internet are untrustworthy and comments about fulfilling sexual fantasies especially so, but it seems plausible enough as an extension of the fetish drift phenomenon.
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This Medium article, linked by a post here a while back, describes a similar fetish community that is gay to straight instead. I'm not familiar enough with it to guess if they've had actual success or just fantasies.
Regarding time investment to do this sort of thing on purpose, a lot of people don't specify and obviously it hadn't been studied so its hard to guess. Probably stuff like fetish drift doesn't necessarily take that much. But you do encounter people mentioning edging to relevant content for hours almost every day for months or years, so possibly more extreme changes like sexual orientation take something like that. This could also have unwanted side-effects, such as increasing or decreasing your sex drive. (Would an exclusive pedophile trying to shift his desires over to adults risk increasing his sexual desires generally? It's a pity that a study examining this can't happen for a variety of reasons.) Or increasing tolerance for extreme sexual stuff in general, particularly with edging. I guess someone who already masturbated a lot could change his habits to fit the desires he wants to have. Mostly I think this concept is potentially useful in avoiding doing it by accident, don't make a habit of porn involving X if increasing your interest in X would be undesirable.
Okay, but most people want to classify the guy who wakes up tomorrow with their memory and personality as being themselves. (Or rather a sufficiently similar memory and personality, since those change over time.) If many-worlds is true and the worlds literally exist, then each instant you're splitting into countless copies, all of whom have your memory/personality/continuity-of-consciousness. Under your interpretation none of them are the same person they were, so nobody is the same person from moment to moment. Which doesn't seem like a terribly useful definition of selfhood.
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