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String of recent killings linked to Bay Area 'Zizians'

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Re: String of recent killings linked to Bay Area 'Zizians'

#871

Post by sunshowers »

PaulHoule wrote: post #868
sunshowers wrote: post #862

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> progressives haven't had a message that reconciles the rights of 0.6% of people with many concerns that the 99.4% have It is an objectively true moral statement that minority rights ought not depend on majority opinion (that is the whole point of constitutionalism). To the extent that minority rights depend on majority opinion in reality, that is a deficiency of political systems. All of us exist in deficient polit…

I should have said "interests" rather than rights, although one thing I know is that when this civilization collapses people will turn their back on everything it stood for and the idea of individualism and rights will be gone ("my carbon my choice"), the next culture will have a bill of responsibilities. Sports is a clear example. Nobody has a 'right' to be on a sports team. Women have been working for years to buil…

> when this civilization collapses people will turn their back on everything it stood for and the idea of individualism and rights will be gone ("my carbon my choice"), the next culture will have a bill of responsibilities.

I agree that Americans don't think enough about their responsibilities. I fully support a bill of responsibilities paired with rights. Several countries have that kind of list already. They're not mutually exclusive.

> Nobody has a 'right' to be on a sports team. Women have been working for years to build the opportunity to have a pro career. Until tests were developed (1970 or so) it was a chronic problem that men would crash women's events in the Olympics to steal gold medals.

Yet women's sports are still second-class, outside of exceptions like tennis. Is it trans people who have caused women's sports to be second-class, or the patriarchy enforced by cisgender men?

FWIW, I think it's reasonable to require that trans women be on HRT for a while before playing professional women's sports. But categorical bans are horribly unjust—making a class of women inherently lesser. So yes, as a kind of woman, trans women ought to have the right to be on women's sports teams.

> J. K. Rowling didn't start out in the place where she ended up.

True. Her brain was cooked by constant exposure to right-wing bigotry on social media, like many others'.

I am a very firm believer that there is no free will. We are entirely the products of our genetics and our environments. Social media creates extraordinarily bad environments.

> 'Virtue' and 'Vice' are a frame that makes all problems impossible to solve and leaves people talking past each other.

Well, no, it just makes it clear that (a) morality is objective and (b) societies are better when people are more virtuous. The solution is to not make people talk to or past each other, the solution is to effect environmental changes such that people are less exposed to vice and more exposed to virtue.

Re: String of recent killings linked to Bay Area 'Zizians'

#872

Post by mbonnet »

rachofsunshine wrote: post #149

[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…

"the problem with rationalism is that you're a fucking idiot" never fails

Re: String of recent killings linked to Bay Area 'Zizians'

#873

Post by immibis »

b800h wrote: post #640
shadowgovt wrote: post #595

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This reasoning implies the current President and his party are not conservative, which is an interesting conclusion.

Little is left of what (real) Conservatives were trying to conserve. Now they have to become radicals to shift things back.

If they're going backwards, and a conservative is someone who wants things to stay the same, then they are not conservatives.

Re: String of recent killings linked to Bay Area 'Zizians'

#874

Post by api »

rachofsunshine wrote: post #870
api wrote: post #725

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, it’s the “rationality.” Well maybe the people too, but the ideas are at fault. As I posted elsewhere on this subject: these people are rationalizing, not rational. They’re writing cliche sci-fi and bizarre secularized imitations of baroque theology and then reasoning from these narratives as if they are reality. Reason is a tool not a magic superpower enabling one to see beyond the bounds of available information…

> As I posted elsewhere on this subject: these people are rationalizing, not rational. That is sometimes true, but as I said in another comment, I think this is on the weaker end of criticisms because it doesn't really apply to the best of that community's members and the best of its claims, and in either case isn't really a consequence of their explicit values. > Logic, like software and for the same reason, is “gar…

> "um actually you can never be certain so trying to reason about things is stupid"

I didn't mean to say that, just that logic and reason are not infallible and have to be checked. Sure we use complex software to detect cancer in MRI images, but we constantly check that this software works by... you know... seeing if there's actual cancer where it says there is, and if there's not we go back around the engineering circle and refine the design.

Let's say I use the most painstaking, arduous, careful methods to design an orbital rocket. I take extreme care to make every design decision on the basis of physics and use elaborate simulations that my designs are correct. I check, re-check, and re-check. Then I build it. It's never flown before. You getting on board?

Obviously riding on an untested rocket would be insane no matter how high-IQ and "rational" its engineers tried to be. So is revamping our entire political, economic, or social system on the basis of someone's longtermist model of the future that is untestable and unverifiable. So is banning beneficial technologies on the basis of hypothetical dangers built on hypothetical reasoning from untestable priors. And so on...

... and so is, apparently, killing people, because reasons?

Re: String of recent killings linked to Bay Area 'Zizians'

#875

Post by sunshowers »

skissane wrote: post #860
dutchbookmaker wrote: post #811

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sapolsky's book Determined is really the counter to your post. I don't want to believe what that book says but it is quite a strong argument. It is really too sweeping and complicated to discuss in this format though. It really would need an entire counter book to it that dissects each point.

I don't agree. The point of my comment was not whether free will exists or not – it was whether choices exist or not. I haven't read Salopsky's book myself, but I don't believe it argues that choices don't exist, only that they aren't free. And the comment to which you are replying wasn't expressing any stance on the question of whether our choices are "free" or not, only distinguishing it from the separate question…

Thank you for referring to that review [0]. I think it is a pretty standard compatibilist argument, which accepts that everything about a person, including the degree of "willpower" one has, is determined by prior causes, and yet still attempts to salvage a notion of free will out of it.

This argument doesn't engage with the fact that the common understanding of free will is as a fundamentally supernatural belief, and also intricately tied to moral responsibility. So compatibilists might be better served by tabooing the phrase—which some do, replacing it with "free choice" or similar.

There's also this bit:

> Still, when you act with indifference to the rights and needs of others, we can blame you for what you do—unless you have a good excuse. What counts as an excuse is a question of morality, not metaphysics.

When developers write code with security bugs, there are sometimes "good" excuses for it and sometimes not. We tried apportioning blame for many years, and it never worked. What worked is large-scale tooling and environment changes. I believe this generalizes quote broadly.

[0] https://archive.is/20231223221002/https://www.theatlantic.co...

Re: String of recent killings linked to Bay Area 'Zizians'

#876

Post by nkrisc »

HeatrayEnjoyer wrote: post #799
nkrisc wrote: post #700

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s pointless. They aren’t rational. Any argument you come up with that contradicts their personal desires will be successfully “reasoned” away by them because they want it to be. Your mistake was ever thinking they had a rational thought to begin with, they think they are infallible.

"Widespread robots that make their own decisions autonomously will probably be very bad for humans if they make decisions that aren't in our interest" isn't really that much of a stretch is it? If we were going slower maybe it would seem more theoretical. But there are multiple Manhattan-Project-level or (often, much) larger efforts ongoing to explicitly create software and robotic hardware that makes decisions and t…

> "Widespread robots that make their own decisions autonomously will probably be very bad for humans if they make decisions that aren't in our interest" isn't really that much of a stretch is it?

We already have widespread humans making their own decisions autonomously that aren’t in the best interest of humans, and we’re all still here.

Re: String of recent killings linked to Bay Area 'Zizians'

#877

Post by esperent »

kragen wrote: post #852
esperent wrote: post #576

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It’s hard to find a not traumatized autistic person for example. This is an extraordinary claim and needs evidence. Do you have a source for this?

This is not an extraordinary claim; it's an obvious one. Autistic sensory processing deficits make many everyday interactions traumatic, especially in childhood. It infuriates me that this isn't obvious to you and yet you posted a comment anyway.

The commenter above was claiming that trauma causes autism, not the other way around.

> it can often be trauma that causes the auto immunes... It’s hard to find a not traumatized autistic person

Re: String of recent killings linked to Bay Area 'Zizians'

#878

Post by gerdesj »

DaftDank wrote: post #519
porknubbins wrote: post #445

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Keeping quiet about your faith is probably a wise and respectful way of navigating a multi-cultural, multi-religious society but I don’t think its particulally supported Bibically as most of the New Testamemt after the gospels is about spreading the faith. Jesus says not to pray loudly like the Pharisees which could be interpreted as not bragging about ones faith, but he also says “Whoever acknowledges me before men,…

The most genuinely good person I've known, my wife's very devout grandmother, who belonged to the United Church of Christ and whose husband was a preacher for a United Methodist Church, never once went out of her way to proselytize (in my presence at least.) That's not to say she wouldn't talk about God or her beliefs if it was somehow directly relevant to a conversation, but I never saw her trying to "spread the wor…

I seem to have dug out quite a few notions on what religion is all about here on HN, from the shout from the roof tops to "a bit of a chat" - obviously my original comment was DV'd to oblivion.

For me, religion starts and stops from within. I am not an evangelist - my God is mine and your's is yours. I'll tell you what I'm about and no more.

"Still small Voice of quiet" not "Hell fire and damnation".

I will dive in with a gentle nudge but never an exhortation.

Re: String of recent killings linked to Bay Area 'Zizians'

#879

Post by novok »

lupusreal wrote: post #859
dinkumthinkum wrote: post #841

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's true in the informal sense. Normal people, when considering an "infinitely" bad thing happening (being killed, losing their home, etc) with a very low probability will round that probability to zero ("It won't happen to ME"), multiply the two and resultantly spend zero time worrying about it, planning for it, etc. Is this the kind of thing that is part of the Less Wrong cult? I see this "multiply" word being u…

> "I don't know what talking about "Infinity * 0" means in an informal sense means" I'm not a rationalist, I'm only using their language to make the mapping to their ideology simpler. A comet striking earth would be "infinitely bad". The chance of that happening is, as far as I'm concerned, zero (its not zero, but I round it down.) If you multiply the infinitely bad outcome by the zero percent chance of it happening,…

Yeah pretty much. If I was to write it out further: "near infinity bad thing could happen but it has a near infinitesimal chance of it happening, what is the amount of finite resources you should spend to prevent it?". The numbers are probabilities and how much of an effect it is. It really is infinity * epsilon but that would confuse more people so I decided to say infinity * 0.

I was very explicit when I said "humanity decided". It doesn't matter if one or the other is the actual formal system math system result either way, it was chosen out of practicality that in this kind of philosophical issue, the more pragmatic thing was to axiomatically choose that "infinity * 0 = 0" when faced with things like this. The rationalists in a more meta/broader sense have decided that it's infinity * epsilon = infinity even if they say it is not on the surface. Their actions show they believe the other direction.

In math infinity * epsilon is indeterminate until you decide what the details of infinity & epsilon is, which I find quite fitting.

Re: String of recent killings linked to Bay Area 'Zizians'

#880

Post by scotteric »

alain94040 wrote: post #797
harrison_clarke wrote: post #776

Earlier quoted context omitted.

not exactly a rationalist thing, but a lot of bay-area people will tell you that exponential growth exists, and it's everywhere i can't think of any case where exponential growth actually happens, though. exponential decay and logistic curves are common enough, but not exponential growth

Viruses until they reach their plateau of course.

That would be the logistic curve then
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