If the actions and beliefs of a group are fundamentally morally repugnant to me, I think that it is reasonable to not expect me to be able to find "something positive" in it. We are not amoral automata with grocery-list style utility functions.
I have people in my personal sphere that make this sort of argument and it honestly feels like gaslighting. The undercurrent is: "Look, you don't like this guy, I get it. But if you can't see that he does some good, then you are the one who is irrational and not really in a sound state of mind." Meanwhile completely preventable, life-threatening, life-destroying diseases such as measles are back because of the obscurantist beliefs that come with this "new refreshing outlook". This is a bit like saying: "look, you can say what you want about the Spanish inquisition but they kept rates of extra-marital affairs down."
Corporations love this sort of feel-good campaign (the same way they love performative LGBTQ / feminism / diversity when the culture wars swing the other way) for two main reasons: (1) they distract from fundamental issues that threaten their real interests; (2) they shift the blame on big societal issues completely to the public. They do this with climate change, they do it with increase of wealth inequality and they most certainly do it with public health.
All developed nations have a problem with processed food. Granted, it is particularly severe in the USA, but the ONE THING that separates the USA from almost every other developed nation in our planet is the absence of socialized healthcare. This is the obvious salient thing to look at before all others, so also obviously, a lot of money will be spent to misdirect and distract from this very topic.
>If the actions and beliefs of a group are fundamentally morally repugnant to me,
sure, although if tribal differences are always experienced as fundamentally morally repugnant one might think the moral calibration is screwed a bit too tight.
>I think that it is reasonable to not expect me to be able to find "something positive" in it.
Sure, I do think it is possible that some groups are so morally repugnant that they have absolutely nothing to offer whatsoever. For example that tribe of cave dwelling cannibals in the film The 13th Warrior, man those guys sucked! But the comment seemed more to be about how it is weird that when you find some group does some things that you find morally repugnant then they have nothing they do that can ever be good.
I have lived in places in which I find much of the surrounding culture to have behaviors that I found morally repugnant, or intellectually repugnant for that matter, but even at my most contemptuous of a culture and a people I will at times be forced to admit, honestly, that they have behaviors that can also be considered admirable (in many cultures the repugnant bits are so tightly bound to the admirable bits though I can see how it is difficult not to condemn everything)
> sure, although if tribal differences are always experienced as fundamentally morally repugnant one might think the moral calibration is screwed a bit too tight.
They're not always experienced this way. But that's the trend in America.
> but even at my most contemptuous of a culture and a people I will at times be forced to admit, honestly, that they have behaviors that can also be considered admirable
Ya, I think it's something along the lines of "even a broken clock is right twice a day".
Do I need to give out a cookie when the clock tells me the correct time if it's fucking me on the time the rest of the day?
Even a developmentally disabled human tends to be significantly more complex than a stopped clock so the analogy doesn't work well.
if anything it is more than a computer with a lousy video and sound card, you don't use it for games or streaming movies or most things, but due to some other things (which I am not going to take the time to create a plausible scenario why this should be) the computer is actually really superior as a server, so you have set it up for that. Do you give out a cookie for the computer that works really well at serving content over port 80 despite it sucks for anything you enjoy?
> Even a developmentally disabled human tends to be significantly more complex than a stopped clock so the analogy doesn't work well.
I think it works perfectly, honestly. Maybe moreso after the above statement.
> Do you give out a cookie for the computer that works really well at serving content over port 80 despite it sucks for anything you enjoy?
No, I do not. Nor does the server ask for a cookie. It just does its job consistently without making a fuss. If governments could do that bare minimum thing, the world would be a better place.
> If the actions and beliefs of a group are fundamentally morally repugnant to me, I think that it is reasonable to not expect me to be able to find "something positive" in it.
I'm not sure you appreciate how symmetrical this statement is. You are on Team A, saying it about Team B, but nothing in the statement actually depends on that permutation of teams -- it could be equally compellingly said by a Team B member about Team A.
> If the actions and beliefs of a group are fundamentally morally repugnant to me, I think that it is reasonable to not expect me to be able to find "something positive" in it.
No it isn't reasonable. In fact it is one of the stupidest things you can do. If you read any history, you will see that failures in military, politics, science etc. (really pick anything) are often due to key people simply refusing to learn from their opponents and/or refusing to adjust to the new reality. Often this is done because they find their opponents morally repugnant, or lacking in some virtue they happen to hold as important.
It is fine if you don't like the current US Administration. However if they do something that happens to be good, it is fine to acknowledge it as such, while still pointing out what else they are doing wrong. Otherwise you just come off as a sore loser and people will stop taking any notice of you.
I think this is true, and the broad sense of that website is an improvement on what went before, so we should acknowledge that. But it's also right that people point out the moralising tone and connect other administration actions and policies with an assessment of whether these principles will be backed by policies that actually make any difference in real life. My suspicion is that this will be part of an effort to further stigmatise people damaged by the industrial food industry without doing anything to make healthy food cheaper or more accessible, but I'd love to be wrong!
That is misinformation. Very few developed nations have socialized healthcare. Many of them do better in terms of universal coverage and cost control but they don't have a single-payer system or force healthcare providers to be government employees. For examples see Germany, Switzerland, Japan, Australia, Israel, etc.
Those diseases are back because of rampant immigration. People from other countries bring them here. It has nothing to do with "obscurantist beliefs", whatever those might be.
I was raised catholic and I now consider it a form of abuse. Someone close to me was raised evangelic and thinking about this makes her want to puke.
The psychological damage from this sort of thing is probably so prevalent that it looks like water to a fish. Not to speak of the sleepless nights at 7 years old worrying about eternal damnation.
This is all abuse and it should be treated as such by any decent and civilised society.
I was not raised Christian growing up, but I still recall believing someone was always watching me as a kid. It was likely because so many around me were religious, and I had been told so many dead relatives were "up there smiling down on us" when they died. I thought both that someone was looking through my windows and that people "up there" could see me.
Until I got access to pornography (too early) and then I guess the tradeoffs changed, and I eventually got over it. I do distinctly remember wondering what grandma thinks of me at that time. But not for long, logic kicks in to explain anything away when you've got fast internet to exploit.
> But not for long, logic kicks in to explain anything away when you've got fast internet to exploit.
Not everyone is so lucky; for some, the feelings of guilt and shame never get dissolved through logic, it's just the dopamine loop is strong enough that the person keeps doing things they later despise themselves for.
Guess how that can impact the psyche over a decade or two.
> Maybe not psychologically healthy for the individual, but likely provides some social benefits.
I never understood this line of reasoning. What good are "social benefits" if the happiness and well being of the human beings that make up that society are sacrificed? Isn't this the basis of totalitarianism? "Everything for the State, nothing against the State".
Well ya I don't say I condone, I'm very much an individualist (to a fault).
But also, we don't exist in isolation, and there are reasons societies evolve as they do. There has to be some level of social control and belief in being watched over at all times was probably pretty handy for emperors and to some extent those who would be victimized. At least back when it worked wide scale.
Why do we need this myth of things working in the past? It didn't work and was a horror show. This is bordering on the absurd "what doesn't kill you makes you stronger" logic that doesn't ever really work outside the heros journey and action movies.
There are reasons things evolved as they did. Societies with forms of social cohesion beat those without. Maybe it's different now but then again, maybe it's not.
Did you even read the declaration? It is precisely about commitments to spend more and buying a string defense.
Also, despite what some sources in the US claim, Europe has been contributing quite a lot to the Ukraine war effort, in fact slightly more than the US.
Singapore has not managed it by being a "much smaller state", it managed it by being a highly repressive and authoritarian state. Myself, I prefer the junkies on the streets.
I actually grew up in another relatively small state that had a huge heroin problem in the 80s: Portugal. Portugal solved it by decriminalizing drugs and by making treatment modalities available for the people who needed help, namely methadone. This worked spectacularly well.
By the way, if you want to make it "impossible to buy drugs without proper authorization", I imagine you will want to include one of the most dangerous hard drugs there is: alcohol. We all know how well that worked the last time it was tried...
Thank you for using this term instead of calling Singapore a dictatorship (as many others are wont to do). It's a much more accurate description of Singapore's style of governance.
> Consciousness seems to be a word that is poorly defined.
I will give you my favorite definition, given to me by my friend Bruno Marchal, a brilliant mathematician from Brussels who spent his life thinking about such topics:
"Consciousness is that which cannot be doubted."
It felt insufficient when he told me, but now I am convinced. It may require some introspection to "get it". It did for me.
That's just objectivity, and I don't think consciousness is synonymous with objectivity at all!
Cogitoist propaganda. The appearance of thought is not necessarily the same as thought, so you don't actually know you think just because you believe you think. The cogito (I think therefor I am), like your statement, is incoherent.
LLMs will swear up and down (with a prompt) that they are thinking beings, therefor "they are". They are not ontological actors because of their appearance of doubting their own existence. That's not thought!
Addressing your first thought…anything that you would call “objective” can be “doubted” by ceding the tiny tiny possibility that you are a simulation or Boltzmann brain or brain in a vat. The evidence before you may not actually be representative of the “objective” reality.
The fact that there is experience at all, the contents of which may be “doubted”, cannot be doubted.
I’m not unequivocally claiming this but that’s the thrust of the argument.
I'm sorry, but this makes me cringe. When we learn science, there's always some level of rigor with the ideas. Maybe there's some kind of justification with math, or some kind of experiment we can perform to remove doubt. The important features are reductionism and verifiability. It's not a weird introspection riddle.
I'm sure Bruno is brilliant. But I still don't know what consciousness is. And I think that "definition" doesn't meet the modern scientific standard. And I strongly oppose the idea that in order to learn science I should have to spend time introspecting.
Introspection is "looking within". Why should science not be interested in that? It is an aspect of reality. It is not more or less real than galaxies or atoms. I know that it is a very perplexing one when one holds a physicalist metaphysical commitment, which is easy to confuse with some notion of "no-nonsense modern scientific standard", and so there is a temptation to pretend the undeniable is not there, or that it is "ill defined" in some way.
Think about what things "cannot be doubted", with all the brain-in-a-vat types of caveats. It's not trying to be a scientific definition. It operates earlier on the epistemological ladder than science can be meaningfully applied, and that might well be the only reasonable place to define consciousness. (I still can't call it a great definition, even if it did perfectly correspond with the concept. Too indirect.)
There are lots of statements we can form that "make sense" on a linguistic level. It's easy to convince yourself of something when the only standard is "linguistic plausibility." Consciousness is presumably a physical process. When you say "It operates earlier on the epistemological ladder than science can be meaningfully applied", I just don't know what that means. You're going to have to give me examples of what other beliefs we hold that occupy that space. Justified belief about reality has to be based on measurement (science).
If consciousness isn't a physical process, then you've lost me again. People have discussed these things for hundreds of years.
> You're going to have to give me examples of what other beliefs we hold that occupy that space.
Yeah, there's not a lot down there, mostly your assumptions about your sense inputs corresponding to some kind of causally consistent external reality. It's the same region as the lead up to what you seem to take as an axiom, "Justified belief about reality has to be based on measurement".
I think I just experienced how much self-deception there is about the world. So it's not really an axiom. There's no shortage of metaphysical ideas from the past, from well-intentioned people who thought they could intuit the world, that we have had to throw out.
> I think I just experienced how much self-deception there is about the world.
This is not actually a proof. It is, however, exactly the kind of soft reasoning that motivates reasonable axioms. I'm not saying it's a bad axiom, I'm saying you should know what you're doing. That way when you run into a domain where it doesn't apply very well, you know where and how to back up and restart.
Bathrooms need icons because they have to assume users who can't read, or don't know the local language. None of these two problems apply to language selection 99.9999% of the time: if you can't read, you can't use a system based on reading no matter the language, and if you don't recognize the name of a language in a list, you also do not want to select it.
Quite obviously you never interacted with any software which defaults to the language you can't read, despite having a support for the language you do understand.
How would flags in the language selection help? The actual problem is finding the language selection at all (which still has an icon of a (stylised) globe on MacOS).
Language select used to have a flag of current language. Political correctness might have made companies change that convention making it hard to find as you say, but it used to be that you looked for flags to find the language setting.
I remember windows having flags for the languages, but now it is a strange A symbol that I have no clue what it is and I'd have no chance of finding if it was in the wrong language.
Come on now. Can you point to one single case of something close to this scenario having happened in real life to a small self-hosted WordPress blog? Or even a big one? Governments are not that stupid, they are not that malicious and they do not have infinite resources to pursue such frivolous and nonsensical activities. This reads like some weird sort of paranoid legal fanfic.
I wonder if advertisers feel the same way. If I was buying ads on YouTube, my least favorite audience would be the people who go out of their way to not see them.
Versus what, tv where the medium demand the highest cost per eyeball and every single person is a captive audience (unless you DVR)? Still smells like a good deal for advertisers unless the idea have changed significantly in the years since I cared to know anything about the ad markets.
I think advertisers haven't adapted well to the youtube market at all. They're still operating under the TV model where ad breaks are an expected part of the tv viewing experience and don't understand that on youtube they are intrusive as hell . This also couples negatively with advertisers viewing youtube apparently not putting any limits on ad length as an opportunity to deliver a sermon. I think most people would be annoyed but not totally put off by a couple 15 seconds ads but the issue is that users just have no idea if they'll get a 15 second ad or a 15 minute ad so they skip everything out of extreme frustration with the entire experience.
Its like they forget people go to the fridge or bathroom or pull up the phone when there is a commercial. No one watches the shamwow slot with bated breath unless they have a mental illness.
Advertisers have zero self awareness how stupid their copy is. Ever see the latest reddit ads? “TIL the acura rdx is best in class edmons power train muh lease rates” yeah, its not pretty but its obvious the people defining this ad spend are just throwing shit at the wall and hoping some of it sticks.
Try to find out why, and please avoid Internet "red pill" stuff. I'm not telling you this as any sort of political statement nor am I trying to fight any culture wars here. This is just the advice of a middle-age guy with perfectly mediocre / average looks, and some life experience.
From what I observe, 9 times out of 10 the problem lies in personality. I know plenty of guys with no money and no looks that have no trouble attracting the interest of the opposite sex. Why? Because they have a great personality, as in, it feels good to be around them. Furthermore, people who rely only on look and status to attract a partner and do not work on themselves are unlikely to have a happy relationship in the long term.
I am not blaming people for having unappealing personalities. This is usually the product of things that are outside of their control, usually some sort of trauma. Life is not fair. A lot of people are traumatized and do not realize it. This can be overcome, but you must want to overcame it and you must be able to face harsh truths. Maybe therapy can help, maybe meditation, maybe even things that are considered "woo" but that allow you to face your demons. Whatever works and clicks with you is a valid answer. All roads lead to Rome if you are courageous enough.
I also don't want to dredge up culture wars stuff, but just wanted to say it's really nice to see men warning other men away from the redpill path. Thanks for encouraging therapy and self-healing.
Personality is everything, and can be developed from leveraging one's sincere ability to be curious.
As someone who accidentally outgrew gaming after playing them more than anyone I knew, a channel by this name, with this kind of content can shine the path forward to other equally interesting sides of one's self.
In my case, I rediscovered creating and building things was more interesting than playing in others worlds.
I never really quit gaming. I just didn't identify as someone who played games any longer.
In my observation, especially as you get out of your 20s, single guys are… kinda phone it in for various reasons. Even moderate effort makes a dude a rockstar.
No, reading "come as you are" or any of the shit bell hooks writes doesn't just fix issues for people like the OP. Telling them then that they have a "bad personality" is so fucked up. Personality is subjective, and most people on earth can find others who believe that their own personality is "perfect".
Someone not being successful in the dating market does not necessarily imply that their personality is bad. Saying they have no game and implying that this speaks about their personality is really hurtful. Women's sexual selection is not the arbiter of a good personality - and indeed, given what we know about how seductive dark triad traits are, it may in fact be a signal of a bad personality.
It's pretty bad when you straight up recommend "woo" to people, and effectively say "all roads lead to rome... EXCEPT THE RED PILL!"
The reality is that no matter how garbage Tate et all are, the alternative explanations for why increasingly large amounts of men have no game are so bad that huge swaths of men get seduced by tate's bullshit.
Your kind of response only takes impressionable men who would fall for it and further entrenches their beliefs that the red pill is the "subversive", "real" way that alpha men are ending up with harems while billy the beta ends up making another HN post about typescript
To be clear, I didn't tell OP that he has a bad personality. I don't know OP, how could I know that? What I told him, and do know, is that in my set of experiences this is usually the problem. And I include myself in that set of experiences, to be clear.
I completely agree with you that "women's sexual selection is not the arbiter of a good personality". Women are not immune to having terrible personalities. Women, like men, are highly flawed beings. We are all human. We all have to work on ourselves. What I will say is that if you have a good personality, you are more likely to attract a partner that you can be happy with for the long term. This is precisely how you avoid dark triad people, by being self-confident, by knowing who you are, by not needing constant external validation, by not being so influenced by what other people thing of you, by being empathic but not a people pleaser.
You talk about "game". Game is transactional. Thinking in those terms attracts people with transactional mindsets. That is precisely the problem with the red pill, it guides you towards that world. It is self-reinforcing. It leads to depression and despair, because it guarantees to make you more and more aligned with the sort of people that you should avoid. It thrives on the funhouse mirror that is social media, where if you don't make a million a year and are more than 6 feet tall you might as well shoot yourself in the head, unless you use "game" (i.e. deceive people). It's a path to hell.
I did not "straight up recommend woo". What I talked about is "things that sound like woo". Which is another way to say, have an open mind to things that might seem mushy to your male brain, that are not necessarily supported by peer-reviewed studies. Be less mentally rigid, is what I am saying. Men tend to fall very easily in this trap, again me included.
I love subversive stuff. I was a teenager in the 90s, we were all edge lords back then. I miss the time when conspiracy theories were fun. We are not in that time anymore. Tate is vile. He is an abuser of men and women, and he is the one selling impressionable men on lies that will destroy their lives.
You are probably quite young or inexperienced yourself if you think that having and harem will make you happy. The idea makes me shudder. Is it possible to have an "harem"? Sure. You will be surrounded by dark triad women, or by victims who need your money. None of them will love you. Why would you want that?
The advice is "find out why" and "work on yourself." I wasn't aware these were at all controversial, even within red-pill spheres.
You seem to be rejecting personality as something to be addressed at all, which is frankly shocking. I'm fascinated to know what alternatives you suggest, as your comment contains no actionable advice.
> These were not AIs but rule-based systems with if elses.
What is fashionable to call AI these days are ultimately rule-based systems with if elses. It just so happens that it's a bazillion of those, and they are created by gradient descent.
That's one example of a nonlinear function, yes. You also have (eˣ)/(1+eˣ), or (e²ˣ-1)/(e²ˣ+1), or a host of others which don't contain anything if-like at all.
I don’t know what point you’re trying to make. Neural nets are fundamentally different from rule-based systems. The fact that one of the non-linear functions which is sometimes used in neural nets can be implemented using an if statement seems utterly irrelevant.
I have people in my personal sphere that make this sort of argument and it honestly feels like gaslighting. The undercurrent is: "Look, you don't like this guy, I get it. But if you can't see that he does some good, then you are the one who is irrational and not really in a sound state of mind." Meanwhile completely preventable, life-threatening, life-destroying diseases such as measles are back because of the obscurantist beliefs that come with this "new refreshing outlook". This is a bit like saying: "look, you can say what you want about the Spanish inquisition but they kept rates of extra-marital affairs down."
Corporations love this sort of feel-good campaign (the same way they love performative LGBTQ / feminism / diversity when the culture wars swing the other way) for two main reasons: (1) they distract from fundamental issues that threaten their real interests; (2) they shift the blame on big societal issues completely to the public. They do this with climate change, they do it with increase of wealth inequality and they most certainly do it with public health.
All developed nations have a problem with processed food. Granted, it is particularly severe in the USA, but the ONE THING that separates the USA from almost every other developed nation in our planet is the absence of socialized healthcare. This is the obvious salient thing to look at before all others, so also obviously, a lot of money will be spent to misdirect and distract from this very topic.
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