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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   2997 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for September 3, 2023

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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We take politics pretty seriously in the main thread. Maybe too seriously. What are your political cocktail party ideas? (the link is a good piece). Maybe you haven't thought it through, maybe it's totally unimplementable, maybe it's in an area you know nothing about. They don't have to be dumb, just fun or pretty out there.

Two problems:

Pedophiles are out there, one of their common hobbies is collecting huge amounts of kiddie porn. We think this is bad, so we spend effort investigating it and jailing people we find processing it or producing it. When we find collectors, we lock them in jail for a while and probably mark them on a sex offender registry.

Moderating big social media sites is a headache. People post huge amounts of kiddie porn and gore and other such things, and they all employ moderators to review reported content. Many of those moderators end up mentally disturbed due to viewing huge amounts of this stuff in the course of their job. Many complain about needing therapy, never being the same again, etc.

Obvious and possibly stupid solution:

When we find people collecting kiddie porn, we make them be social media moderators (of that particular type). They shouldn't mind seeing the kiddie porn since they like it. We let them keep anything they find in their private collection as long as they never share it, in return they work at checking whether reported social media posts really are or aren't kiddie porn.

What could possibly go wrong?

Related is Aella's suggestion that we make AI generated kiddie porn (I think the original suggestion was 'old cp from adults who now consent', but AI is easier) available to people who want it. This way, there'll be no incentive to create or look for new kiddie porn.

While I think most negative reactions to this aren't well considered, I'm not sure how valuable it is. My sense is that some child abuse is actually caused by demand for images, but it's a very small percent of all abuse. And I strongly suspect the 'people see more child porn so they want to offend more' effect is either nonexistent or tiny, but now we're comparing two small things. Maybe some law enforcement agency should flood the dark web (more realistically, the twitter/reddit/facebook pages where people exchange ids for platforms with encrypted dms) with fake accounts selling AI stuff.

And I strongly suspect the 'people see more child porn so they want to offend more' effect is either nonexistent or tiny

I eh, disagree emphatically with your suspicion. If cp doesn't make people into more vigourous paedophiles, then we have to assume also assume the whole wild explosion of paraphilias and perversion that's come out in the past 20 years has just, by remarkable fluke, happened to co-incide with the ubiquity of online porn. I don't think the evidence supports that position, and I think wider availability of cruelty-free fairtrade child porn would likewise increase paedos' appetite for real-world abusing.

My intuition is based on 'did rape porn make rape more common'? Child sexual abuse (both of prepubescent and post-pubescent, the latter is much more common) was common before porn existed, so I think it's closer to rape, where I don't think the availability of porn made it more common. Also, 'loli' is readily available on the web and quite popular among people who enjoy anime-style porn, whether drawn or animated, and I don't think that's translated to real offenses against children.

Could be wrong though, hence 'strongly suspect' instead of a statement.

there'll be no incentive to create or look for new kiddie porn.

Oh there still will be. People would exchange "organic" cp images, just because it's the "real thing". Yes, it'd be dangerous - so what, it's dangerous now, it doesn't stop them. If somebody's brain is broken in this particular way, it's what they'd do.

With sufficiently good AI art, it won't be possible to tell the difference. If nothing else, it craters the value for anyone who would create the real deal for money. People would still exchange verifiably older images sure, but crushing the creation of new stuff is the goal.

With sufficiently good AI art, it won't be possible to tell the difference. If nothing else, it craters the value for anyone who would create the real deal for money.

I don't know that it wouldn't have the opposite effect. We won't be able to tell the difference just from the pixels, but the pixels aren't the only way to tell the difference. If there's enough demand for the real deal, then people will provide the requisite verification and certification of the unethical sourcing, and that extra status - compared to all the unverified images that could very well be AI generations where the viewer can't be sure that no child suffered to produce it - could very well allow them to demand more money.

With sufficiently good AI art, it won't be possible to tell the difference.

It's not the point. I'm pretty sure there are copies of famous paintings that are so good only the topmost experts using advanced methods of analysis, including radiocarbon dating, spectroscopy and other exciting geek stuff, can tell the different. Yet, as soon as it is known it's not the original, its value becomes a minuscule part of the original. I'm sure it's reasonably cheap to order a copy of any famous painting that would look like the original to a casual observer. If somebody does that and pretends it's the real thing, they'd be laughed at. In fact, among the real connoisseurs, nobody would likely even dare to do something so low-class as to exhibit a copy. Either you own the real thing, or you own nothing.

I understand, of course, that the comparison is not exact, and in a way the comparison is kinda offensive to art collectors, for which I apologize. But the point is that the history of an item matters, or at least it matters to some people. Some people would be fine with a fake. But there always would be those that aren't. And among those, the value of the real thing would not crater - it would, in fact, raise greatly, comparable to the danger and the exclusivity of owning it.

I don't doubt that what you and @07mk is true, but it's worth acknowledging that a situation where 1Cp gets sold for 100X is far better than a situation where 100Cp get sold for 1X. I don't doubt some will continue to want real stuff, but the point is that it would be possible to reduce the amount that is produced.

You can solve the opiate crisis by setting up “pro-social behavioral clinics” where opiates are administered surreptitiously under the contextual cues of prosocial behavior. This works to create a natural association where the addict expects to receive opiates during the behavior in which it is released endogenously. This would be iterative, so maybe the first time they have an opiate when coming in to visit, next time it’s when they talk about positive behaviors, etc. The opiate would he administered without any cues, in the form of either a drink or a food or a gum. Then what you do is you implement the reverse side of the equation: put them in a room filled with the cues of drugs (needles, pills, shady people, etc), then administer an opiate blocker like ibogaine, which has the added benefit of increasing up regulation of endogenous opioid receptors! (I’ve thought also either electric shocks or cold plunges to increase endogenous opioid up regulation as much as possible, along with curcumin and sulforaphane which do the same)

This could be an easy daily regimen, it’s very cost effective, at the tail end of the regimen you would have them exercise to receive ever-decreasing opioid administration — this is ideal because eventually their body will just release them naturally which happens from exercise.

I would bet all of my money that this is the most efficient and effective way to solve addiction and am confident in a few decades it will be implemented and proven

This is one of those classic early 20th century psychology ideas that unfortunate things like the emergence of ethics committees and litigation culture has halted, but I’m all for it.

Can you summarize the article? I started to read it but it was quite dry and I lost interest hah.

My cocktail party idea recently has be introducing (or re-introducing) slight psychedelic substances to the Christian Eucharist, or other similar religious traditions. Not enough for a full blown trip, just microdosing to get a little bit of enhanced sensation. There's even some slight evidence that this was done historically.

I'd also like to add WAY more holidays, and make them longer. There should be at least four week-long feast holidays, in my opinion. The ancient world had a lot more brutal material things to deal with than we do, but their social fabric was way richer and more fun. I mean come on, for the Romans they had holidays where priests would whip naked women running through the streets, there would be public drunkenness and masks, servants would order around masters, et cetera. I have no idea why we got rid of awesome holidays (even the Christians used to have a ton, see Orthodox Christianity) but it was a huge fucking mistake! Bring back the celebrations!!!

Another one would be to force psychologists, before getting their degree, to drop a huge dose of acid and go through some ritual basically. Maybe anthropology would make more sense here. But damn our modern rituals are so defanged and boring they might as well be skipped. Most people are bored at graduation, and just go for their parents. That's so sad! These rites of passage used to be the highlight and pride of people's entire life!

The anointing oil of ancient Judaism is very likely to have had cannabis in it.

What makes you say that? Haven't actually seen sources for that.

https://old.reddit.com/r/AcademicBiblical/comments/xoabeg/qanehbosm_possible_mistranslation/

https://old.reddit.com/r/AcademicBiblical/comments/zm3l4u/could_the_hebrew_word_kaneh_actually_be_cannabis/

https://old.reddit.com/r/AcademicBiblical/comments/pi7ovs/comment/hbqfky9/

Ty!!!! I want to do some writing on this but need to do a way deeper dive into the research first. It's a pretty fucking exciting topic of scholarship if you ask me.

(a bit less small scale than I intended...)

Prisons notoriously suck. Inmates have nothing to do, violence and abuse is rampant. Even worse, the only peers inmates have are other criminals, entrenching whatever culture leads people to crime. Solution: give them all the cheapest possible phone/tablets with internet internet access. Instead of fighting over cigarettes, they can watch the latest MrBeast. To avoid problems, maybe give them something really locked-down - read-only access to a small number of approved sites (but those sites have almost all of the content on the net anyway), harsh term filters for anything violence / crime related. Probably include some porn. The disciplinary society's time has come and gone, give the prisoners their Soma, it can't be worse.

Mandatory information preservation. We've lost hundreds of millions of words and images to link rot since the dawn of the internet - image hosts and social media sites dying, accounts deleted or suspended and taking their posts with them, etc. Last copies of books forgotten, paperwork shredded. Archive.org and friends do great work here, but the web's just too vast, and copyright law is painful. Why let this happen? There are policy solutions. Some are realistic and even prudent. Every time you sell a copyrighted work online, send a copy of it to the Library of Congress, encrypted with this year's public key, and they host the blob. The private key is in a HSM in Fort Knox, and when your work's copyright expires, the key is released and it's free for everyone. Books, substacks, movies, etc. More out there - If you run a public social media site with >10k users, same obligation - all public posts that haven't been deleted after a year get sent to LoC (they'll help you out, but you're required to whitelist their scrapers) and remain public forever. But you can take it farther, and here we enter the fantastical - how about preservation of all internal corporate and government documents? They'll be kept private for 50-100 years. And at that point ... why not private communication? Who needs privacy after you're dead? Imagine what today's historians (or openai) would give to get access to that for the past few hundred years.

edit: coming back to this a day later, I think the prison tablet idea might make prison too comfortable. Especially if you don't make it read-only, I wonder how many people would give up freedom and physical comfort to not have any obligations and watch youtube all day.

Is there a way to make prisoners use their tablets to somehow manually work on archiving that internet content? Maybe they could earn their fun time on the internet by putting in work time on the internet that benefits the rest of society.

I thought that what prison already is like, at least in the UK.

https://news.sky.com/story/prisons-criticised-over-inmates-doing-little-but-watching-daytime-tv-and-sleeping-12629039

Probably the worst thing about prison is the company.

Prisons notoriously suck. Inmates have nothing to do, violence and abuse is rampant. Even worse, the only peers inmates have are other criminals, entrenching whatever culture leads people to crime. Solution: give them all the cheapest possible phone/tablets with internet internet access. Instead of fighting over cigarettes, they can watch the latest MrBeast. To avoid problems, maybe give them something really locked-down - read-only access to a small number of approved sites (but those sites have almost all of the content on the net anyway), harsh term filters for anything violence / crime related. Probably include some porn. The disciplinary society's time has come and gone, give the prisoners their Soma, it can't be worse.

And you can charge them 500 bucks a gig!

I like the data archive idea, I had this similar thought for a universal, freely accessible digital archive of all the content anyone's ever produced, replacing copyright entirely. You produce your work, you upload it and get paid by govt for a combination of viewtime, likes and superlikes (which would be finite, perhaps you get 5 per year), comments and so on. Like youtube but with no ads and for more things.

Of course it doesn't really work that well since people would try to game the algorithm and I'm not sure how much this would cost. Seems unfair, taxwise as well. It'd probably hurt cinemas and book sellers. A significant quality of life increase though IMO, perhaps more appropriate for post-scarcity civilizations.

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