Yeah, I’m not gonna get baited into getting rate-limited by downvotes that easily. All you need to know, if you care to, is that my values and goals differ drastically from most other people here.
EDIT: A mod rate-limited me anyway, perfectly illustrating the stark value difference: I consider that kind of abuse of power an atrocity.
a shallow clone
I don’t know what that is. Genetically identical but not possessing my memories?
2. I wouldn’t use the term “art” for that, no.
4. I don’t have a constructive definition for what counts as an “artistic process,” but I certainly wouldn’t say the past holds no value for me: I like ancient sculptures and the like more than the next guy, and generally loathe iconoclasts and book burners. But if, say, the Library of Alexandria had books that had been printed instead of scribed by hand, I would not consider its burning any less of a loss.
5. No, I wouldn’t. I have never used heroin, but its effects on others don’t seem like the kind of thing I’d wish for myself permanently.
6–10 are easy. I’d consider the clone at least family.
I don’t care to answer 1. and 3.
The “Disneyland without Children” short story? Yeah, I did. I’d read it before, and found it a nice fleshing-out of Bostrom’s phrase. I do find it dystopic, but don’t consider it illustrative of a likely future.
I don’t think my disagreement is particularly insightful, but sure: if the painting is beautiful, I don’t care if the artist is ugly or blind. With AI/ML image generation, we now have “beauty too cheap to meter” (Scott Alexander’s phrase), and I don’t see that as a bad thing. What “being human” means is something you construct for yourself, and a worry that it will somehow be lost or replaced is misguided.
Less high-mindedly, the (overwhelming majority of) human artists in power, writing novels, playing music, making movies, creating video games, translating anime/manga, have been telling me loudly and repeatedly for several years now that they despise me and everything I value, so fuck ’em (especially the anime/manga localizers); anything that democratizes their power, diminishes their status, throws open the gates they keep, is good, both for my community as a whole, as well as for me in particular.
Mukami-sama, the God of Atheism
Relevant smbc: link
There’s another post in that series the first link missed. Look at the end of this one: link (sorry, low res image).
You might like this classic 4chan greentext: link.
What do most people gain from knowing this trivium? It’s useful if you’re signaling that you’re on the side of “Science!” (which requires you to similarly “know” a lot of things that’re a lot more dubious, and many things are are meaningless or outright false) but otherwise, unless you’re an astrophysicist or similar, it makes no difference to you one way or the other.
The first few videos will necessarily be terrible, especially, hopefully, by the standards of the 47th video.
Suggestion: do them out of order.
“hey, your kids have a real chance of dying in the next decade”
Yes, every four years, if the good guys don’t win the next (US) presidential election. Or if people don’t switch to/away from nuclear power. Or they’re killed by immigrants/cops. Or they die of a fentanyl overdose. Or in a school shooting. Or if the Iraqis/Russians/Chinese invade. Or if taxes are lowered/raised.
Perhaps telling people they or their children are going to die imminently isn’t a standard tactic of “mere politics” where you are; you did say you’re not American.
You’d think, but I wasn’t been able to find such a thing despite looking pretty hard a few years ago; there might be a more recent AI approach to this though. A useful search term might be “audio to midi conversion”. (Stem separation, for which Spleeter works well, might be a necessary preprocessing step.)
I’m not. I find your deontological murder exception ad hoc. My hypothetical hitman’s moral foundations rest solidly on the notions, standard among “Effective Altruists,” that one can value human lives in terms of money, that one can engage in tradeoffs involving lives, that the lives of people in Africa or wherever aren’t worth more an order of magnitude less than those of people in, say, America, and that GiveWell’s estimates of how much it costs to save a life are reasonable.
don’t do work that is illegal, or that would be illegal if the public knew what you were really doing.
This rule only makes sense if you trust this “system for declaring profitable activities with negative externalities off limits” (ignoring that it pretends the law reflects the public’s will far more than it actually does, and problems with manufactured consent) more than your own moral judgment, self-serving as it may be. Perhaps you believe the law is mostly just, or that your own moral reasoning is horribly flawed (side note: either both of these are true, or neither). I don’t.
some kinds of harm (ex: murder) do not seem like the kind of thing you ought to be able to “cancel out” through donation, even if the donation clearly has larger benefits (ex: saves vastly many lives).
I disagree. An earning-to-give hitman is the epitome of the EA philosophy.
I hate the terms Concave and Convex in relation to functions.
Agreed.
the line (which should be considered to be the open side because integration makes the side below the line the solid side)
This is terrible: one pretty basic property you want in your definition describing the shape of functions is that it shouldn’t change if you translate the function around.
Consider (for ). Pretty much the point of this definition is to be able to say it’s the opposite kind as , but your choice wouldn’t have that feature.
The “line at infinity” is a better choice for the imagined boundary. That’s how we can think of parabolae as a kind of ellipse, for example.
if we called them decelerating (concave) or accelerating (convex) functions.
That’d be at least as confusing as the current terms for functions like or or .
You wrote “the world will always be exactly as it is.” I don’t see the difference.
until soon with SD3
I’ll believe it when I see it. The man who said it would be an open release has just been fired stepped down as CEO.
Let the Lower Lights Be Burning
I had not heard this hymn before, but I love it! Thank you!
Hopefully, we’ll have to write some new verses about polio soon.
And guinea worm.
Wtf? “God Wrote the Rocks” (which I love, and am grateful to the Solstice post a few months ago for pointing me to it) serves as excellent contrast to “Humans Wrote the Bible.” These rewritten lyrics are just bizarre. The “book of earth”, “book of night”, “book of names”? “Humans write the book of truth” seems to be missing the whole point! It sounds good as long as you don’t think about it, which strikes me as contrary to the whole “rationalism” schtick.
Also, the original lyrics are already pretty irreligious deism: this attempt at secularizing them is misguided in addition to being poorly executed.
I doubt you could have picked a worse example to make your point that contrarian takes are usually wrong than racial differences in IQ/intelligence.