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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   37122 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 10, 2023

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We’re animals in pursuit of pleasure and status, and those who expect some kind of moral or cultural elevation in a labor-less future are kidding themselves.

Contrast:

“Goyim were born only to serve us. Without that, they have no place in the world; only to serve the People of Israel,” he said during a public discussion of what kind of work non-Jews are allowed to perform on Shabbat. “Why are gentiles needed? They will work, they will plow, they will reap. We will sit like an effendi and eat,” he said to some laughter. Yosef, the spiritual leader of the Shas Party and the former chief Sephardi rabbi of Israel, also said that the lives of non-Jews are protected in order to prevent financial loss to Jews. “With gentiles, it will be like any person: They need to die, but God will give them longevity. Why? Imagine that one’s donkey would die, they’d lose their money. This is his servant. That’s why he gets a long life, to work well for this Jew,” said the rabbi, who recently turned 90.

I'll commend you for being more of an equal-opportunity dehumanizer. But on the other hand Yosef at least allowed that some group of people be above beasts of burden, be meaningful ends unto themselves; the whole point of his not-exactly-marginal interpretation of Judaism is that Jews are such people. (An "effendi" is a lord, or a master, in Arabic, or so I'm told). And presumably he did more than eat, seeing his station. How about a deal: we appoint tool AI as «goyim», and be done with this ugly business.

I have never bought a Funko Pop, nor watched reality TV or played slot machine or a true gacha game for any length of time greater than needed to understand the principle. (This is not something to be proud of but more a consequence of boring behavioral rigidity. Also I basically cannot watch long-form videos, including podcasts and those vaunted American TV series that have replaced almost all culture for the middle class; this is a bit of a problem, another small problem a sufficiently developed AI will solve, opening up new troves of meaning. «Jarvis, boil down Yud's kvetching on Bankless, Fridman and Patel into a timeline of diffs with his previous eras, then superimpose on that substack about Extropia's Children!»).

Well, there have been some more addictive games I'll admit. But it's like with drugs: a perfect stimulant without burnout, or a psychedelic/opioid without tolerance, is a pipe dream. Our wetware that compels us to waste time on it also bounds the possible range of experiences, and thus makes it a finite journey. Even current games, trying to prevent disengagement, introduce additional mechanics almost as fast as humans grow tired of old ones and can learn new tricks (what fun is playing a game you can't grasp?), yet it still gets old, fast – faster than I can imagine any generative AI adapting. Even if it keeps up, at some not too distant point it will either saturate my bandwidth and close the category of «games» for good, like Tic-Tac-Toe, a fully solved space of behaviors; or, perhaps, it will deliver something that deserves a more serious term than a «game». And if I pursue richer modalities to appreciate new and fancier games – what's to stop me from modification in other directions, such as direct tampering with my reward system? Then, it's either switching off to exist in a pod as a wireheaded bugman, as you suggest, or evolution. Do we differ only in whether 0% or some fraction of humanity chooses the latter?

As for porn, it seems to me that its consumption drastically increases when I do not have fun and meaningful things to do and relationships to be part of. In any case, the same principle applies.

It also seems to me that I'm not exceptional. People who keep up the civilization around me from decaying do not watch reality TV only because they are bored out of their skulls: it's their cope. Like me, they have big or small real-world dreams – dreams they've put into the backlog and let them fall prey to decay. My backlog will plausibly span centuries if I can execute on it.

Even if theirs terminates on saturation with synthetic stimuli, I do not assert the right to condemn it. We – rather, Hajnali, East Asians and associates, for I have to remind you that «Работать западло» … oh God, I repeat myself so much – have evolved to condemn it out of necessity, to prevent slacking off and subsequent ruin. We don't have to do that anymore.

Have you read any Greg Egan? I think not. We usually discuss Iain Banks' Culture series (again series) as a portrayal of an advanced post-scarcity society. Anyway, Ehan's Diaspora is perhaps more in line with the good outcome I expect (with two the major caveats that a) my theory of personal identity does not allow surviving naive uploads and b) they do not have vastly superhuman AIs; but Citizens are for all intents and purposes AIs anyway, plugged into tools). The vast majority of Diaspora inhabitants are members of solipsistic «Polises», taken care of by AIs and having fun in their bespoke virtual utopias. This is fine. The self-selected minority explores physical universe. They, too, can turn back into virtuality or reach the end of their journey and accept expiration. This is fine as well.

Let us even be rain: the flight to the bottom is so long and exciting.

Diaspora is also close to my favored world, the journey of discovery is especially tantalizing. I also love the concept of the math mines.

I’m also skeptical on a personal identity level of totally copying the brain or uploading fully. I can’t quite bring myself to be sure that an uploaded me would be me, even with all the arguments about dreams unconsciousness etc.

I may choose to preserve my biological brain as long as possible for the safest form of identity transfer. Even once others have done it you can’t be sure they’re not just p-zombie copies. I imagine this could be quite controversial once these problems come up.

(An "effendi" is a lord, or a master, in Arabic, or so I'm told)

Effendi is actually a Turkish word. It's very Indo-European in its structure, I don't think it comes from Arabic. Perhaps Persian or maybe Greek.

Never trust a Christian Scientist I guess. Especially when looking up a Rabbi's quote.

Borrowed from Ottoman Turkish افندی (efendi), from Greek αφέντη (afénti), vocative of αφέντης (aféntis), from Ancient Greek αὐθέντης (authéntēs, “lord, master”).

The last term is related to English authentic.

Surely authority is a more probative example - but thank you for teaching me something

Authority is from latin iirc, based on auctor like author.

Authority:

From Middle English auctorite, autorite (“authority, book or quotation that settles an argument”), from Old French auctorité, from Latin stem of auctōritās (“invention, advice, opinion, influence, command”), from auctor (“master, leader, author”). For the presence of the h, compare the etymology of author.

Author:

From Middle English auctour, from Anglo-Norman autour, from Old French autor, from Latin auctor, from augeō (“to increase, originate”). The h, also found in Middle French autheur, is unetymological as there is no h in the original Latin spelling. The OED attributes the h to contamination by authentic.

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Appendix:Glossary#contamination

@SanDiegoJuryDuty

(An "effendi" is a lord, or a master, in Arabic, or so I'm told)

Prince of the moonbeams, son of the Sun, the light of a thousand stars...

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