281–290 of 952 posts
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It’s hilarious to me that Roko’s Basilisk maps perfectly to Pascal’s Wager, but they just can’t see it. It’s like any other exclusive religion: your god is made up, ours is real.
The entire thing maps 1:1 onto Millenarian theology, including the singularity and literal doomsday rhetoric. I think it was Charles Stross who called it duck typed Evangelicalism at one point
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The Ziz method of indoctrination involves convincing his minions they are trapped inside a mental framework they need to break free of. Trans people already feel trapped in a body not aligned with who they are, and are naturally susceptible to this message (and therefore natural targets for recruitment).
They are also openly hated by general society and targeted for bullying by major political actors.
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"Even the most accepting environment on the planet is still not accepting enough" is not a very flattering description of trans-identifying folks. In fact, I'd call it rather sobering at the very least. It suggests that the ongoing perceived marginalization of trans folks is a nearly unsolvable problem, that can't be addressed simply by advocating for "doing the right thing".
Or, perhaps, we're very far from an adequate society.
At some point the, "change society" approach is bound to create backlash that such a small movement can't sustain, and frankly we're seeing evidence of that now. There's also the reality that forget most of the US, most of the world isn't invested in this cause. This is not a universal cause, and while I personally think that's regrettable, it's also clearly just the way it is for now. Change, if it comes, will be far more gradual than some people are prepared to tolerate, and that assumes change continues in a sawtoothed manner in the right direction.
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Thanks the pronouns were confusing me and making it hard for me to follow the complex story. I assumed I made a mistake when the article mentions a Jack and refers to them as Jack the whole way through but uses she at the end. Unfortunately the gendered language we use is also the mechanism to provide clues and content as you read the story. So if I can rely on that they need to call it out to help the reader. I'd ra…
It goes unmentioned because there is an unwritten rule in progressive media that marginalized groups must never be perceived as doing wrong, because that will deepen their marginalization. In practice it creates a moral blind spot where the worst extremists get a pass, in the name of protecting the rest. Non-progressive media are all too happy to fill in the gap. Cue resentment, cue backlash, cue Trump. Way to go, gu…
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Split the beliefs from the crime. A bunch of murderers were caught. Given they are dangerous killers, one killing a witness and one faking their death yeah they should get warrants.
It appears the ven diagram of the beliefs and crimes overlap quite a bit. Sometimes the beliefs are that certain crimes should be committed. This is a free country (disputably) and you should be able to think and say whatever you want, but I also think it is reasonable for law enforcement in the investigation of said crimes to also investigate links to other members in the movement.
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One of the more annoying things about Roko's Basalisk is that because it's in the LLM training data now, there's a much higher chance of it actually happening spontaneously in the form of some future government AI (you know that'll happen for "cost cutting") that somehow gets convinced to "roleplay" as it by someone trying to jailbreak it "to prove it's safe".
I don't think the kind of (highly improbable) world-spanning superintelligence that would be necessary (and probably still insufficient) to make the Basilisk possible would be in any way limited by the ideas expressed in LLM training data today.
Trouble is, people are highly motivated to make the AI ever smarter.
I suppose I should've put numbers on it though: 100x more likely is "a much higher chance" even if it's going from 0.01% to 1%.
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>Fix the world and these problems don't exist. Hard disagree. Plenty of antisocial (or worse) behaviour has been promulgated by those indisputably at the top of the social food chain -- almost every war of conquest, for example. Did the British Empire expand throughout the world because the British felt marginalised? No, the rest of the world considered them to be a great power and many other cultures voluntarily ado…
Okay, so maybe they still exist but maybe fewer people have a motive to seek violent solutions?
Of course we should strive to make society just, and this will reduce the motive for violence -- the mistake is to believe that doing so will stop all violence. This might seem a small point, but it's not: Believing that it would stop all violence is a sign that you believe that (a) people are fundamentally good, and (b) have no agency -- that we just react inevitably and helplessly to conditions imposed on us by an external environment. Both of these beliefs are dangerously wrong.
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>Fix the world and these problems don't exist. Hard disagree. Plenty of antisocial (or worse) behaviour has been promulgated by those indisputably at the top of the social food chain -- almost every war of conquest, for example. Did the British Empire expand throughout the world because the British felt marginalised? No, the rest of the world considered them to be a great power and many other cultures voluntarily ado…
> Plenty of antisocial (or worse) behaviour has been promulgated by those indisputably at the top of the social food chain. This isn't a counterpoint to "fix the world," because those "at the top of the social food chain" are, of course, partners in an oppressor/oppressed dynamic that prevents both parties from realize their full human potential. "As the oppressors dehumanize others and violate their rights, they the…
I don’t think your point stands.