591–600 of 952 posts
[Former member of that world, roommates with one of Ziz's friends for a while, so I feel reasonably qualified to speak on this.] The problem with rationalists/EA as a group has never been the rationality, but the people practicing it and the cultural norms they endorse as a community. As relevant here: 1) While following logical threads to their conclusions is a useful exercise, each logical step often involves some…
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In what way is this supposed to be a relevant detail? Unless you think that they are killing people because they are trans, why should you report that they are part of a marginalized group? If they were mostly blondes or had freckles, should that be part of the story too?
It's basically impossible that it's a random irrelevant detail, I'd say any such detail is fair to share. For example, if every member of this group was Indian American I'd consider that a fair detail to note, the chances of that happening at random are minuscule, yet that's orders of magnitude more probable than all of them being trans for no reason.
No it's not, what? People tend to hang out with people similar to them. Most gangs are racially or ethnically homogenous. That's fairly normal.
In fact, there are commonly Indian-origin gangs in Canada (I haven't heard of it in the US, but the US has much higher-income immigrants from India overall)
Most of the news coverage I've seen of this story is omitting what some might consider a relevant detail: almost all the members of this group are trans. This is a divisive topic, but failing to mention this makes me worry a story is pushing a particular agenda rather than trying to tell the facts. Here's what the story looks like if the trans activism is considered central to the story: https://thepostmillennial.com…
it's been an exhausting couple of weeks for me, as a trans person. one executive order after another, explicitly attacking us. scrambling to update all my documents, navigating a Kafkaesque bureaucracy with constantly shifting rules. now this. there are like six Zizians. there are millions of trans people. I'm sure that many of the Zizians being trans says something about the Ziz cult, but Ziz doesn't say anything ab…
Most US cults are made up almost entirely of cis people, but nobody jumps to conclusions about the impact of cisness on indoctrination susceptibility.
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Leftists also support rule of law and universal constitutional law.
The distinction is is in the derivative: progressives ("leftist" is less well defined) support the expansion of universal constitution law (which, right or wrong, is a change to the existing law), whereas conservatives except in the case of compelling evidence default to making no changes. Hence, being "conservative" about making changes.
Most of the news coverage I've seen of this story is omitting what some might consider a relevant detail: almost all the members of this group are trans. This is a divisive topic, but failing to mention this makes me worry a story is pushing a particular agenda rather than trying to tell the facts. Here's what the story looks like if the trans activism is considered central to the story: https://thepostmillennial.com…
Marginalized groups seem to be a target / susceptible to this kind of thing. I had a weird encounter on reddit with some users who expressed that "only X people understand how this character in the movie feels". Interestingly, there was no indication that the movie intended this interpenetration. But the idea wasn't unusual or all that out there so I didn't think much of it. But that group showed up again and again a…
The death of the author is a reasonable approach to reading a work. But what you said reminded me of the more delusional view in which a) the watcher/reader's approach is the only "correct" one, and b) anyone who disagrees is *EVIL*. An instance of this happened among Tumblrinas obsessed with the supposed homosexual relationship between Holmes and Watson on BBC's Sherlock, and who were certain that the next episode of the show would reveal this to the world. Welp. https://np.reddit.com/r/the_meltdown/comments/5oc59t/tumblr_...>
Not to imply the Zizians aren't embracing some dangerous ideas, but this is the strangest use of "string of killings" I've ever seen. Author could have gone with "wave of violence," but even then they'd be talking about a "wave" of three incidents in three years.
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Plenty of incompatibilist determinists agree that choices exist, they just deny that they are in any meaningful sense "free" Whereas you said "No one chooses to be anything", which is a denial of the existence of choice altogether Whether or not you are confused inside your own head, you are expressing yourself in an imprecise and confusing way
Yes, we probably are using the word "choice" differently.
And you aren't using the standard common sense definition either – for, surely per the common sense definition, this is true: "I can choose what I eat for breakfast, but I can't choose what Donald Trump eats for breakfast" (because the first is clearly within the scope of my own personal causal power and influence, the second is well outside it) – yet by your own definitions you'd have to reject that statement, and say "no, you're wrong, you can't choose what you eat for breakfast" – whereas most incompatiblists would instead say "yes, you can choose what you can eat for breakfast, and you can't choose what Donald Trump eats for breakfast – but your choice of what to eat for breakfast isn't free"
So I'm using the word "choice" in the standard way, and you're using it in your own personal idiosyncratic way
[Former member of that world, roommates with one of Ziz's friends for a while, so I feel reasonably qualified to speak on this.] The problem with rationalists/EA as a group has never been the rationality, but the people practicing it and the cultural norms they endorse as a community. As relevant here: 1) While following logical threads to their conclusions is a useful exercise, each logical step often involves some…
Wow, what a perfect description of why their probability-logic leads to silly beliefs. I've been wondering how to argue within their frame for a while, and here's what I've come up with: Is the likelihood that aliens exist, are unfriendly, and AGI will help us beat them higher or lower than the likelihood that the AGI itself that we develop is unfriendly to us and wants to FOOM us? Show your work.
I think philosophy is a noble pursuit, but it's worth noting how often people drew very broad conclusions, and then acted on them, from not very much data. Consider the dozens of theories of the constitution of the world from the time of the Greek thinkers (even the atomic theory doesn't look very much at all like atoms as we now understand them), or the myriad examples of political philosophies that ran up against people simply not acting the way the philosophy needed them to act to cohere.
The investigation of possibility is laudable, but a healthy and regular dose of evidence is important.