Earlier quoted context omitted.
[flagged]
> I don't know why you would write that Really?
I mean it's a pretty serious accusation, and it's false, so just throwing it around like that is not cool.
String of recent killings linked to Bay Area 'Zizians'
891–900 of 952 posts
Re: String of recent killings linked to Bay Area 'Zizians'
#892Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
> Is it trans people who have caused women's sports to be second-class, or the patriarchy enforced by cisgender men? Is there any possible other reason than these two things, do you think, for this state of affairs? > making a class of women inherently lesser. A sort of Morton's fork here would be that transwomen are lesser women because they have to assume that identity instead of starting there (to say nothing of t…
> The trivial solution to avoid this is to simply acknowledge that trans women are neither men nor women (nor trans men) and are a category unto themselves worth valuing on their own merits and characteristics.
The forcible third-gendering of trans women is one of the greatest crimes of the culture I grew up in, so I'd rather we move past all traditionalism entirely.
> If it is reasonable to believe--as everybody seems told to--that constant exposure to right-wing media and bigotry can turn somebody into a bigot, is it really a stretch to believe that for some chunk of the trans population the same has taken place?
Constant exposure to virtue makes you more likely to be virtuous.
> Further, do you see why such doublethink would make the trans folks who preach it suspect to normies who see the obvious?
See the obvious what? The normies are simply wrong about a lot of this.
> Morality does not exist unless free will does
This is simply false. Free will is linked to moral responsibility, not the existence of morals. How moral we are is out of our control (Thomas Nagle called this moral luck).
Re: String of recent killings linked to Bay Area 'Zizians'
#893Re: String of recent killings linked to Bay Area 'Zizians'
#894Earlier quoted context omitted.
I know I sound crazy saying what I'm about to say but it is the truth as I understand it and I think it's important. It appears to me that there is a certain modality of thought that occurs much more often in people with hEDS, specifically those with TNXB SNPs. If you're super deep into type theory the odds substantially increase that you have hEDS - it's how I found out that I had it. And this same group is far more…
This is a new and interesting idea to me. Have you or your serial killer obsessed friend written up any of this?
For a variety of reasons we prefer to stay anonymous. I just throw info over a wall every now and then to see if anyone will catch it. The serial killer aspect to me seems to be a simple function of mental illness/autoimmune and there is no doubt hEDS has numerous autoimmune comorbidities so it would stand to reason they would be overrepresented. No one would bother to look for a link if they assumed hEDS is as rare as medical researchers currently think it is. So the real question that needs answering; is hEDS even rare or is it just uncommon. I have my reasons for thinking it’s far more common than currently thought.
I think this could all be answered rather quickly with high quality Whole Genome Sequencing and a bunch of math so I’ve been going around evangelizing that idea and am working with some people who have independently come to the same conclusions.
Re: String of recent killings linked to Bay Area 'Zizians'
#895Earlier quoted context omitted.
G.K.Chesterton knew it, 100 years ago: "... insanity is often marked by the dominance of reason and the exclusion of creativity and humour. Pure reason is inhuman. The madman’s mind moves in a perfect, but narrow, circle, and his explanation of the world is comprehensive, at least to him."
Or David Hume, 300 years ago: "Reason is, and ought only to be, the slave of the passions"
To be fair it did work out suprisingly well in the early days, even the really weird comment chains attracted only a small minority of the bizarrely deranged. Probably because back then the median LW commentator was noticeably smarter than the median HN commentator.
Pascal’s mugging was even coined there I believe, but then as it grew… whatever communal anti-derangement protections existed gradually declined.
And it now is more often than not a negative example.
Re: String of recent killings linked to Bay Area 'Zizians'
#896Earlier quoted context omitted.
Anything about the self bumps into an immediate problem here. For instance I cannot prove to you that I'm conscious and not simply an automaton who's not actually thinking. My evidence for such is strictly personal - I can personally testify to my own experience of consciousness, but you have no reason to believe me since that's not evidence. And in fact even for myself - perception is not necessarily valid evidence…
... so at some point, one realizes one has pondered one's way into untestables and goes back to living. Or doesn't, I guess, and then gets kept up at night anxious about the notion that in some as-yet-unrealized future, an AI is forever torturing an identical copy of oneself that one cannot possibly ever meet. The programming analogy to this kind of philosophy is writing design docs (or building a class hierarchy of…
It contradicts the ideals of an evidence based system of values. Most of what we believe we believe because we think it is right, and there's always , more or less, viable arguments for most of any remotely reasonable view. And this applies to all people. For instance it was none other than Max Planck that observed, "Science progresses one funeral at a time."
I also think this is for the best. If one looks at the evidence of the skies it's indisputable that humanity lies at the center of the cosmos, with everything revolving around us - which, in turn, naturally leads into religious narratives around Earth. It's only thanks to these weirdos that adopted quite absurd sounding (for the time) systems of views and values, completely without meaningful evidence at first, that we were able to gradually expand, and correct, our understanding of the universe.
And this doesn't just apply to the ancient past. Einstein's observation that the speed of light stays fixed while the rate of passage of time itself is variable, to enable the former, sounds so utterly and absolutely absurd. In many ways the real challenge in breaking through to relativity wasn't the math or anything like that (which, in fact, Einstein himself lacked when first developing the concept) but accepting that a concept that sounds so wrong might actually be right.
Re: String of recent killings linked to Bay Area 'Zizians'
#897Who are these people?
Some sort or EA on steroids?
Eugenics?
Genuinely curious: what are their typical beliefs?
Re: String of recent killings linked to Bay Area 'Zizians'
#898Earlier quoted context omitted.
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, an…
Regarding your point about moral responsibility: while I agree it is a major motivator for human belief in free will, it isn’t the only one. Added to that, while belief in free will and belief in moral responsibility are strongly correlated, neither is a necessary logical consequence of the other - believing in either but not the other is a facially logically coherent, even if somewhat rare, position
> This argument doesn't engage with the fact that the common understanding of free will is as a fundamentally supernatural belief,
I disagree. I don’t think the average person’s belief in “free will” is “fundamentally supernatural”. Most people say they believe in “free will”, but (unless they’ve had some exposure to philosophy) they are pretty vague about what it actually is.
If by “supernatural” you mean “religious”, I think you might be overestimating how much influence religion has on the average person’s views on the topic. While it is true the majority of Christian denominations will endorse some version of metaphysical libertarianism in theory, it is a rather secondary doctrine - the Bible never explicitly discusses the topic, and opinions differ on whether or not it presumes it implicitly. [0] The Nicene Creed, which most Christians accept as a statement of the most important points of Christian teaching, never explicitly mentions it either. In many denominations, services will rarely or never address it. Hence, for many Christians, Christianity doesn’t contribute a lot to their understanding of “free will”, because it just isn’t the focus of a great deal of Christian teaching
Now, of course, there are exceptions: for example, there are the Free Will Baptists, for whom the concept of “free will” is so important, they even put it in their name-but they are minuscule in comparison to Christianity as a whole
In fact, some Christians are compatibilist determinists. There are actually two main forms of determinism - physical determinism (all our choices are predetermined by physical processes) and theological determinism (all our choices are predetermined by God’s will)-and the compatibilist versus incompatibilist distinction exists for both. Most Calvinists reject metaphysical libertarianism in favour of compatibilist theological determinism, although a minority (primarily the so-called “hyper-Calvinists”) are incompatibilist theological determinists instead.
[0] I’ll limit the discussion to Christianity, in part for reasons of space, but I think if you look at Judaism or Islam you will find it is a similar situation - most Jews and Muslims will affirm belief in “free will”, but both religions tend to spend relatively little time on this topic in comparison to others, especially if one is talking about the experiences of the average follower, as opposed to the arcane theological debates covered in advanced study
Re: String of recent killings linked to Bay Area 'Zizians'
#899Earlier quoted context omitted.
I noticed years ago too that AI doomers and rationalist type were very prone to (infinity * 0 = infinity) types of traps, which is a fairly autistic way of thinking. Humanity long time ago decided that infinity * 0 = 0 for very good practical reasons.
> Humanity long time ago decided that infinity * 0 = 0 for very good practical reasons. Among them being that ∞ × 0 = ∞ makes no mathematical sense. Multiplying literally any other number by zero results in zero. I see no reason to believe that infinity (positive or negative) would be some exception; infinity instances of nothing is still nothing.
The problem is that infinity is neither a real nor a complex number, nor an element of any algebraic field, and the proposition that "x * 0 = 0" only holds if x is an element of some algebraic field. It is a theorem that depends on the field axioms.
The real numbers can be extended to include two special elements ∞ and -∞, but this extension does not constitute a field, and the range of expressions in which these symbols make sense is very strictly and narrowly defined (see Rudin's PMA, Definition 1.23):
(a) If x is real then
x + ∞ = +∞, x - ∞ = -∞, x / +∞ = x / -∞ = 0.
(b) If x > 0 then x * (+∞) = +∞, x * (-∞) = -∞.
(c) If x 3.15 Definition Let {sₙ} be a sequence of real numbers with the following property: For every real M there is an integer N such that n ≥ N implies sₙ ≥ M. We then write
sₙ ⟶ +∞.
It's usually the case that when you see people discussing infinity that they are actually talking about sequences of numbers that are unbounded above (or below). The expression "sₙ ⟶ +∞" is meant to denote such a sequence, and the definitions that extend the real number line (as in Definition 1.23 above) are used to do some higher-level algebra on limits of sums and products of sequences (e.g. the limit of sₙ + tₙ as n becomes "very large" for two sequences {sₙ}, {tₙ}) to shortcut around the lower-level formalisms of epsilons and neighborhoods of limit points in some metric space, which is how the limits of sequences are rigorously defined.
In no case do the symbols ∞ and -∞ refer to actual numbers. They are used in expressions that refer to properties of certain sequences once you look far enough down the sequence, past its first, second, hundredth, umpteenth, "Nth" terms, and so on.
Thus when you see people informally and loosely use expressions such as "infinity times zero" they're not actually multiplying two numbers together, but rather talking about the behavior of the product of two sequences as you evaluate terms further down both sequences; one of which is unbounded, while the other can be brought arbitrarily close to (but not necessarily equal to) zero. You will notice that no conclusions can be drawn regarding the behavior of such a product in general, whether referencing the definitions comprising the extended real number system or the lower-level definitions in terms of epsilons and neighborhoods of limit points.
So much confusion today comes down to people confidently using words, symbols, and signs they don't understand the definitions nor meanings of. Sometimes I wonder if this is the real esoteric meaning of the ancient Tower of Babel mythos.
Re: String of recent killings linked to Bay Area 'Zizians'
#900[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…
It is like they actually managed to install a shitty low precision distilled llm in their brain.
What does this mean?