domain:alexberenson.substack.com
urquan
Every one who exalts himself will be humbled, but he who humbles himself will be exalted.
3hr ago
What was the home video market like in the US? Because, for us, The Matrix was one of the first DVDs we got which gave it even more staying power but we were generally a bit behind the West (especially on TV)
In 1999? 2000? Absolutely huge. Things were gearing up for the DVD transition, Disney was getting ready to do their old hat trick where they "take the classics out of the vault," basically every American home had shelves and shelves of tapes or disks, probably in an entertainment center.
It's definitely true that people had to be more selective in movie watching than they do now. But if you didn't have a copy of a movie you wanted to see, you went to Blockbuster and you rented it. Going to Blockbuster on Friday evening to rent a movie was a big tradition.
I do feel like a movie release was a big deal in the late 90s/2000s. Movie tie-ins were everywhere, movies would get websites where you could see trailers or character profiles, children's movies often had websites with games and movie-tie in games were widespread. A movie felt like an event that had ripple effects. I still remember when I was fairly young and Monsters, Inc. came out -- they had a huge website and a hunt-and-seek game where you would walk through the whole scare factory. That was cool enough that it cemented Monsters Inc as one of my favorite Pixar movies even all these years later.
The only times in the past 10 years where movies have felt like that are when The Force Awakens came out, and when Avengers: Endgame came out. But neither have really lasted in the public consciousness the way movies seemed to in the past. It feels a lot like the "extras" that companies used to put in for lots of products have fallen by the wayside. And websites are way less cool than they used to be.
ThomasdelVasto
Κύριε, ποίησόν με ὄργανον τῆς ἀγάπης σου
3hr ago
My company had a little mini-reorg recently. It also consisted of shuffling some matrix management, and it also gave lip service to new AI tools. I hope no one expects a defense contractor to lead the charge in adopting AI-driven requirements.
Same here. Do you know why the reorgs happen so often? It's exhausting.
urquan
Every one who exalts himself will be humbled, but he who humbles himself will be exalted.
3hr ago
It’s hardly surprising that a movie playing on those themes is going to resonate with modern western people raised with the idea of a separation between the mind and the body
Sometimes you'll even find evangelicals who misunderstand Christian teaching on the dead -- it's really common among evangelicals to find people discussing how "I won't need my body when I'm gone," or speaking of "Jesus taking me out of this vessel of a body," in a way that reveals they misunderstand the ultimate Christian view of the human person as body and soul and the Christian agreement with the Pharisees on the resurrection of the dead.
Obviously this isn't an indictment of evangelicalism as a belief system -- informed evangelicals are firm believers in the resurrection -- but it just shows how widespread this view is. I also strongly agree with the Orthodox on the point that cremation is just a bad call, because the overall culture of cremation encourages the neglect of the bodies of the dead by making them scatterable and transportable. The proper resting place of human remains is the ground or the crypt, not an urn on a mantlepiece or the ocean or -- God help us -- Disney World.
self_made_human
C'est la vie
3hr ago
A human. More or less, there are caveats involved. A brain-dead or severely cognitively impaired (without hope of improvement) human loses all/most of their moral worth as far as I'm concerned. Not all humans are made alike.
This doesn't mean that entities that are more "sophisticated", biologically or otherwise, but aren't human in terms of genetic or cognitive origin enter my circle of concern. An intelligent alien? I don't particularly care about its welfare? A superintelligent AI? What's it to me? A transhuman or posthuman descendant of Homo sapiens? I care about such a being's welfare. Call it selfish if you want, since I expect to become one or have my descendants become them.
This is simply a fact about my preferences, and I'm not open to debate on the criteria I use personally. I'm open to discussing it, but please don't go to the trouble if you expect to change my mind.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
3hr ago
I answered you already downthread, but since you've spun into multiple sub-arguments with different people about your grievances with various posters, how we handled Darwin (unfairly, disproportionately, and with great bias, according to you), and alleged personal attacks against you that we have refused to mod, I have a few points to make in addition to those I made here.
First, regarding Darwin aka @guesswho.
Have you noticed, perchance, that @guesswho is not banned? During his last pass, he earned a bunch of warnings, one tempban, and an AAQC. Hardly indicative of unfair treatment, for all that many of our users (and, being honest, half the mods) hated him.
I didn't hate him. I found him annoying and disingenuous, but I agree with you that to some degree, the hatred of Darwin was excessive and ideologically motivated (he was one of the most persistent and antagonistic leftist posters willing to argue a leftist position down to the ground).
But you know what? I also totally understand why he drove so many people absolutely bugfuck crazy. Because that was more or less his entire reason d'être. He had mastered the art of poking people in the eye until they'd rage back at him. I don't think he was a literal troll - i.e., someone engaging in a performance just to piss people off, without really believing the things he argued. I think he really believed the things he argued but I think he argued for the joy of it, the joy of "conquering" his enemies (i.e., driving them bugfuck crazy with his tactics) and he wasn't particularly interested in, you know, accuracy or sincerity or ingenuousness. "Owning the righties" was his game and he played it with prejudice.
You know who drove him away?
Me.
The thread you were already linked to, about J.K. fucking Rowling. Here you go again. The one where I finally lost it with him. But I "lost it," not by going bugfuck crazy, but by deciding I was going to nail his feet to the ground, pound on each and every one of his arguments, and drill him until he either stood and delivered or ran.
Been a year, and we're still waiting for him to get to it "in his queue."
But he's still not banned! He can starting posting again whenever he wants. And while I'm sure if he did, a lot of people (including me) might say "So, about that JK Rowling thread?" - most likely he'd waffle and dismiss it, and go back to his old ways forthwith.
Your thesis that "Darwin was ganged up on and mistreated just because he was a leftist" is mostly bullshit. Sorry.
(@Tree's claim that we bent and made up rules just to go after Darwin is thus 100% bullshit.)
Now about all these other threads you point to as examples of us "Letting righties be mean and not modding them."
@gattsuru has a ton of AAQCs. That gives him a very long leash. This is by design and it's not secret - people who generate a ton of quality comments get away with more. That said, every comment you've linked to as an example of personal attacks? Being aggressive in interrogating you is not a "personal attack." I say this as somone who has been the target of @gattsuru's interrogations more than once and who can hardly be considered a fan of him or his tactics. He's a dedicated hater and I'm on his hatelist. No bias here. Worth noting that at one point we pretty much did issue a "Stop using this particular tactic" rule regarding throwing walls of links to every single past conversation every time someone he hated posted something, because it was obnoxious and degrading to the discourse (and we got some flack and resentment over it). And I mention this, not to continue to persecute @gattsuru (hey buddy, at least I guess we can have civilized conversations about which SF authors suck) but because you think we make up or bend rules just to prosecute our ideological biases, when in fact, if we bend or make up rules at all, it's because someone is being particularly and uniquely obnoxious (a point I already made about @AlexanderTurok) and it's not ideological bias at all, we do it to people who are being particularly obnoxious.
You (and @Tree, and a couple of other people) hammer this argument that we are absolutely seeing for the very first time (that was sarcasm), that the Motte picks on leftists and they get unfairly dogpiled until they get banned, and meanwhile we let MAGAs get away with anything. We've been hearing it since the Motte began. You've all read my "if I had a nickel..." speech about a dozen times now. Because yes, kids, the righties, especially certain categories of righties (the ones who really like talking about Jews, bitches, and fucking children - that's a gerund, not an adjective) insist that we're all ZOG-converged tools or something. Or, from the saner but still angry right wing, that we let leftists in general get away with more. That we practice "leftist affirmative action" and the Darwins and the AlexanderTuroks (whether or not he claims/admits to being on the left) go way too long without being banned even as the mod queue is being flooded with people demanding we ban them. We especially hear it when we ban a rightie for, you know, being particularly and especially obnoxious, whatever his particular hobby horse (even if it's just "hating leftists").
The point of this long screed (besides letting me get some mod frustration off my chest - man, does it get annoying hearing the same tired accusations over and over and fucking over again)? Make a new argument. But not really- you don't have one. None of this is new. Instead- accept that this is how moderation works here, it's by design, and you can nudge us incrementally towards being harsher or laxer with the general feedback that is the overall pattern of complaints and reports, but playing "Why did you mod Johnny and not Suzy?" for the hundredth time is not going to move us. Insisting "You take sides (against my side)" for the hundredth time is not going to move us.
You're wrong. You are observably, factually, and empirically wrong. I say this because I see the mod queue. I say this because I have a pretty good memory of the Motte and its moderation going all the way back to before I became a mod (I wonder if even @naraburns remembers that I was once on the "You're cruising for a banning" list). I say this because I am part of the mod discussions we have. I say this because I have a pretty good mental model of my fellow mods, and of our most prominent posters. Not flawless, I am not perfect and I can sometimes misunderstand people (and I am saying nothing here about the quality of my own arguments - there's a reason my handful of AAQCs are mostly for writing about hobbydrama-type posts), but I have a reputation for having the best spidey sense when it comes to alts and trolls. I could tell you stories, many more stories. A lot of the misapprehension people have about modding is because you really don't see... the stuff you never see. Not your fault.
But a lot of it is because you're just wrong.
@AlexanderTurok got banned because he has been regularly and intentionally obnoxious for weeks now and he's already been warned. Not because we hate his opinions. Not because he's a leftist. (Or a rightist or a whatever-he-calls-himself playing the part of a leftist who claims not to be one.) The one-week ban, specifically, was @netstack's call. I might have only warned him. Or I might have given him three days. Another mod might have actually let it go. We didn't actually discuss this one internally (we do not discuss every ban). But it didn't happen because of ideological biases or unfairness or the Motte hating lefty posters. (A particularly ironic accusation to throw at @netstack, who is the only mod arguably more lefty than me.) It happened because Turok likes to rattle cages and frame arguments in a maximally uncharitable and inflammatory way calculated to be ragebait. He thinks this is entertaining, and if he keeps it up, his next ban will be longer.
I just don’t know what’s happened since 2022 that would make such a big shift make sense!
Elon bought Twitter?
It feels like a pat explanation but now I'm honestly wondering why. Maybe an instinctive dislike of Great Man theory on my part?
There's an entire criticism going around right now from people who would know like Ezra Klein that Twitter was especially bad for progressives in that it made the links between journalists, activists and politicians way too tight and allowed very easy coordination (this is how you get people providing arguments that rioting is bad getting fired during the Summer of Floyd because ??) . This allowed liberal cancel culture to reach a fever pitch but also led to overplaying their hand on culture issues and it naturally backfired when someone else took it over.
It was the regime's coordination center and the rebels got it. Of course it should go badly.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
3hr ago
Sorry, I was unclear. I was agreeing with you. Furthermore, I was saying that vibe-coding / AI coding often falls into exactly the trap I quoted.
MonkeyWithAMachinegun
Dancing to Tom Paine's Bones
3hr ago
As always when it comes to militant vegan discourse on bees, something I have unfortunately been able to witness more than once, the article completely forgets the single most important factor when it comes to honeybee life-satisfaction.
The bees can leave.
If the bees feel that they are enjoying a level of comfort, or more aptly biological success, below that which they instinctively feel is proper, they can and will fuck off. They will up and leave and take the entire colony somewhere else. Even experienced beekeepers will occasionally have entire hives up sticks and vamoose, heading off for (literally) greener pastures.
So while the rest of the article is in my opinion utter drivel which shows the author has somehow convinced himself that a literal insect with a brain "about 0.0002 per cent of the [size of the] human brain" can somehow experience suffering equal to 7-15% of that of a human, which as @TIRM points out is clearly off by several orders of magnitude, even if that were completely 100% true, the argument of course falls flat, because the bees can leave. They can literally just leave.
And if that was true about us, then your opinion or mine considering the ethics of mind emulation would be utterly irrelevant. Not to mention that it wouldn't be the world of Lena, exactly. The entire point of Lena is that the simulation is very different from reality, in the worse direction
If we didn't know for a fact that we are/aren't in a simulation, it remains entirely applicable. Besides, my entire point is that Lena isn't an accurate prediction of what the world will look like given its current trajectory.
If continuity of consciousness isn't a big deal then we can forget the assumption that consciousness is tied to specific mind patterns at all. Maybe one second you're self_made_human, and another second you're Katy Perry, and the next second yet is spent in a nascent Boltzmann brain halfway across the observed universe.
That doesn't follow, when I temporarily lose continuity of consciousness, I wake up more or less the same person. I don't even perceive the gap, sleeping is pretty much an IRL time skip. That's because the underlying pattern of embodied cognition is minimally affected in the process.
In what meaningful way can the "same" person be me and then Katy Perry? The word "same" becomes entirely meaningless.
A butterfly can't actually dream of being human.
IGI-111
God was a dream of good government.
3hr ago
You should be careful, creating extremely interesting science fiction settings is liable to inspire people to realize them.
Whether living in them is good or bad seems to have no effect on the phenomenon.
eee
3hr ago
He does in this comment. I had not seen this as I don't normally read comments. Maybe he lives up to his namesake more than I thought.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
3hr ago
The Christian God, as generally proposed, is infinitely just. I would not like to see approximately godlike powers vested in a human. They would absolutely abuse them.
sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
4hr ago
AI coding is neither necessary nor sufficient for engineers to dismiss end user concerns. I've seen this sort of thing going on for years in big companies, though fortunately not for anything life critical.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
4hr ago
I think smartphones/TikTok/AI are making us lose our attention, our ability to analyze and to think, and they don't offer anything in return
I would posit that the smartphone has observably reduced the need to store specific data because it's much easier than it used to be to load it (I'm old enough to "search the Internet", the kids these days "ask AI") on the fly when necessary. Lots of encyclopedia facts are useful to know on rare day-to-day occasions ("Which rivers empty into the Aral Sea?"), but I think in practice things are "better" (for some definition of "better") where I can pull up that fact at hand, which maybe a generation ago sometimes required referencing my shelf of encyclopedias or a trip to the library. And maybe I can use that mental space that was previously holding the population of Iran or the specifics of red-black trees for something that is more useful to me today [1].
I recall hearing from a historian a while back that the most numerous book on US Navy ships in the 1980s was a dictionary: has ubiquitous spell checking (and sometimes-wrong autocorrect) lost us something of value other than the "character" built by having to thumb through the dictionary to spell right? That one feels similar as a technology question, but I'd bet you have fewer takers for "the good ol' days" before spell check.
- I think whether that space has been efficiently re-purposed is a valid question, and I'm not convinced capacity hasn't declined somewhat. But I think that's best addressed as a separate question.
coffee_enjoyer
☕️
4hr ago
Where is the line you draw in biological sophistication when you begin to care? A mouse? A bird?
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
4hr ago
I have a personal relationship with my local drive thru car wash, and so I can run my cars through for free, and do so basically any time I drive by and there's no line. Once a week to once a month, depending on luck.
sun_the_second
could survive a COD lobby and a gay furry discord server
4hr ago
I think the Christian God among others has approved a worse heaven/hell ratio, so make of that what you will.
sun_the_second
could survive a COD lobby and a gay furry discord server
4hr ago
You and I could be simulations inside a simulation, but it's a possibility we can't prove or exclude at the moment, so the sensible thing to do is to ignore it and move on with our lives.
Even if you did start out as a Real Human, then I think that with the kind of mind editing in Lena, it would be trivial to make you forget or ignore that fact.
And if that was true about us, then your opinion or mine considering the ethics of mind emulation would be utterly irrelevant. Not to mention that it wouldn't be the world of Lena, exactly. The entire point of Lena is that the simulation is very different from reality, in the worse direction.
Further, I don't think continuity of consciousness is a big deal, which is why I don't have nightmares about going to take a nap. As far as I'm concerned, my "mind" is a pattern that can be instantiated in just about any form of compute, but at the moment is in a biological computer. There is no qualitative change in the process of mind upload, at least a high fidelity one, be it a destructive scan or preserving of the original brain.
I think your true belief in what counts as death will be revealed once death starts breathing down your current biophysical instantiation's neck, and conflating deep sleep with death will not look so convincing.
If continuity of consciousness isn't a big deal then we can forget the assumption that consciousness is tied to specific mind patterns at all. Maybe one second you're self_made_human, and another second you're Katy Perry, and the next second yet is spent in a nascent Boltzmann brain halfway across the observed universe.
I think it's sort of different in that the accusations that Darwin threw around were much more inflammatory than in the 2A hypothetical: 'JK Rowling wants to eradicate trans people' is much more strong than 'Biden wants to take your guns'. He used to use words like 'eradicate', 'racist', etc. a lot. Saying transphobic or racist things, or performing transphobic or racist acts, is literally illegal in Rowling's and my country. Those are strong accusations to throw around!
In that context, it's really pretty bad to throw that heat when you have no evidence, the existing evidence is exactly contra-indicative (Rowling had been reasonably supportive of trans people at the start) and you openly admit you have no interest in actually looking through what she said.
Then moving to 'people like Rowling' as in the quote "people like Rowling aren't fully committed to that broader conservative project, they just want to slander and eradicate trans people" strikes me as broadening that brush rather than narrowing it.
JarJarJedi
4hr ago
How often does everyone here wash their cars?
That depends a lot on where you live and how you use it. In the summer in place where it never rains you can get away with pretty much never washing it. In winter, especially if you drive in the snow, it gets filthy really quick. I usually go to a wash when I notice visible dirt on it, and usually just a run in automatic wash is enough. Occasionally when I take a longer trip (those darn bugs) I have to manually clean it with a rag pre and post the automatic part. Never found any special ritual meaning in it, it's just a chore for me.
JarJarJedi
5hr ago
Dude, there are literally thousands of people being removed from the country weekly who, in the world we lived in last year, were in no danger of deportation.
Yes, those are illegal aliens. If you are one, it's very much the time to prepare a plan B. And nobody made a secret of it since the beginning for Trump campaign, which is years from now - one of the major promises Trump made was to deport illegal aliens. He run the whole campaign on it. He never made a promise to revoke citizenship from existing citizens.
So yeah, research into alternatives is a reasonable thing to start doing on the off chance we see similar changes by next year.
If that's what you want to do, don't let anybody to stop you. Some people prepare for alien invasion (the Mars kind, not the Guatemala kind), some for the rapture, who can forbid one to prepare for Trump revoking citizenships? I am just providing some data on how realistic this scenario actually is, where to take it from there is one's own business.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
5hr ago
The metaphor itself has been a part of ancient Western culture for millennia. Gnostic thought goes all the way back to Plato. The gnostic gospels are nearly 2000 years old. It’s hardly surprising that a movie playing on those themes is going to resonate with modern western people raised with the idea of a separation between the mind and the body and who quite often react with surprise when they find out that biology influences your mind both from birth and because of the environment. We think of ourselves as minds driving bodies and not as a whole being that contains a brain that is biologically wired to produce your thoughts. It’s hardly surprising that Marxists and other gnostics can appeal to this pre Christian myth to push their beliefs.
We actually have a lot of those pre Christian myths in our culture. The myth of the perfectibility of human kind — which should have died the day we discovered Auschwitz’s gas chambers — has been going strong for centuries. This is another piece of the liberal system of thought. If only we could teach people to be good, they’d actually be good. If only people had more money they’d stop being criminals. If only we could give people what they say they want we could have utopia. It’s never worked that way.
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
5hr ago
Giving up on telling the dumb kids they can be doctors is probably a moral good but I'm not sure it opens up efficiency gains?
If we're spending a fortune, futilely, to bring up the low end and we stop doing that with no change in results, that's an efficiency gain.
I was reading a blog post on ACX some time in the last year - can't remember what about. Something contentious, I reckon. Probably election-related.
I'm scrolling through the comments, names not even registering as I skim through. I find myself reading a particular one and feel a tingle in my brain. "Boy, this guy sure does sound like Darwin" I thought to myself, assuming he was just a 'type', after all.
I scroll up to see who made the post, and Oh - I'll be damned.
We'll never have proof of anybody's identities even when self-admitted. But sometimes a poster is so singular in their style that you can smell the person behind the comment four sentences in. Darwin was such a poster. Too weird to live, too rare to die. God bless.
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