Jiro

Karma: 5,037

Jiro Jun 6, 2025, 12:25 AM
2 points
0
in reply to: Richard_Kennaway’s comment on: The Stereotype of the Stereotype
Also Hades in DC comics.

Jiro Jun 6, 2025, 12:21 AM
6 points
4
on: The Stereotype of the Stereotype

What is a stereotypical male action hero?

Tough. Stiff upper lip. Never cries, never loses his cool, never loses his temper. Never has mental illness, never suffers mental trauma. Handles everything. Knows how to do everything. Never gets in over his head. Never relies on others for help.

The answer to this problem is that few action heroes have all of these traits, but a fair number of them have most of those traits. When people think of an average action hero, the fact that each individual hero lacks a small portion of the traits is going to get averaged out, so the “average” hero has all the traits even though each particular hero only has most.

As for the Death example,

I’m sure there are occasional negative portrayals … but those seldom qualify as “characters.”

basically defines away the counterexamples. People saying that death is normally portrayed as cruel and evil probably are thinking of those examples, even if they don’t count as “characters”. Furthermore, excluding examples that aren’t “characters” inherently stacks the deck towards happy Deaths because making Death have feelings is characterization, so the same example wouldn’t count if Death is evil but would count if Death is affable.

Jiro Jun 4, 2025, 4:10 PM
4 points
2
in reply to: MillardJMelnyk’s comment on: Ownership: the principle of “Deprive first, ask questions later”

If you can’t answer foundational questions, you literally don’t know what “it” is, so how are you going to make “it” work?

Because your “foundational questions” are not the type of questions that describe what it is. They are the type of questions whose answers depend on whether we can make it work. The answers to your questions would be something like:

Why haven’t we noticed that we’ve been trying to achieve fairness and prosperity on the basis of such a perverse principle?

Because if other principles don’t work, picking the one that does work, even if it has problems, isn’t perverse.

How could we be so naive as to think that we can make anything work until we figure out what went wrong with our thinking?

Because if getting rid of property doesn’t work, this question is based on a false premise—there isn’t actually anything wrong with our thinking.

What repulses us from the idea of a society founded on the principle of provide-first?

People are repulsed by running society based on something that doesn’t work.

If you can’t even get people to think about an idea rationally, openly, and honestly, how the heck are they ever going to experiment with it properly to gain an intelligent basis for answering the “make it work” question?

If it doesn’t work, this question is based on a false premise, because if it doesn’t work, they have in fact answered the question intelligently.

Jiro Jun 4, 2025, 4:00 PM
3 points
4
in reply to: MillardJMelnyk’s comment on: Ownership: the principle of “Deprive first, ask questions later”

Your upshot was that I wasn’t very nice to ownership because I said negative things about it that, according to you, don’t apply. That’s so vague it’s worthless.

No it isn’t, I gave a specific example.

Jiro Jun 4, 2025, 2:54 AM
2 points
0
in reply to: MillardJMelnyk’s comment on: Ownership: the principle of “Deprive first, ask questions later”

There are far more important and foundational questions to deal with first:

Those “foundational questions”, however, depend on whether we can make it work. You can’t just ignore that there’s no way to make it work and yet ask questions that depend on it!

For instance, if it’s impossible to make it work, then the answer to “What repulses us from the idea of a society founded on the principle of provide-first? ” is “because we are repulsed from ideas that don’t work”.

Jiro Jun 4, 2025, 2:49 AM
6 points
2
in reply to: MillardJMelnyk’s comment on: Ownership: the principle of “Deprive first, ask questions later”
You gave an invitation to discuss it, and then got upset when I accepted the invitation and started to discuss it.

“Discuss” doesn’t mean “praise”.

Jiro Jun 3, 2025, 5:14 PM
11 points
6
in reply to: MillardJMelnyk’s comment on: Ownership: the principle of “Deprive first, ask questions later”
Responded as I did? Questioned its implications, you mean? That’s to be expected when you put out ideas.

Jiro Jun 3, 2025, 1:08 AM
4 points
0
in reply to: MillardJMelnyk’s comment on: Ownership: the principle of “Deprive first, ask questions later”
By that definition, refusing to have sex with someone is ownership. You might call it self-ownership, but you’ve said a lot of negative things about ownership that don’t really apply to it.

Jiro Jun 3, 2025, 12:27 AM
3 points
0
in reply to: InvisiblePlatypus’s comment on: Virtues related to honesty

A politician who lies about his or her intentions to implement an unpopular policy which they believe serves the greater good is telling a white lie, but this is not an example of deceptive honesty. … On the other hand, even though it is a lame example, an atheist who, when asked if he or she believes in god, lies— for the purpose of not being misperceived as a intrinsically immoral person and remaining in the running— is doing something more than just telling a white lie. This politician is seeking to be seen and evaluated for what he or she actually is, rather than being misperceived and misunderstood.

How are those different, though?

You think the atheist is different because he wants to be evaluated for what he “actually is”, but that’s a matter of definition. He actually is an atheist, but he isn’t actually an evil person. Whether the lie makes people know more about what he actually is or less about what he actually is depends on which part you’re counting.

Needless to say, I could say the same thing about the policy guy. The lie makes people know less about one thing (what his position really is) but more about another thing (that he has good policies).

Jiro Jun 2, 2025, 5:54 PM
2 points
−5
in reply to: gwern’s comment on: Virtues related to honesty
He probably used a LLM and lightly edited it. The non-LLM punctuation and references would come from the editing.

Jiro Jun 2, 2025, 6:35 AM
8 points
12
in reply to: InvisiblePlatypus’s comment on: Virtues related to honesty

In a straight-forward sense, they’re lying, but by lying they hope to counter unwarranted assumptions and unjustified biases.

If you don’t count this as lying, the exception will swallow the rule. Everyone who is trying to convince someone of something believes their target has unwarranted assumptions and biases, or at least can convince themselves that the target does.

What if the politician isn’t an atheist, he just wants to implement some unpopular policy? He believes this policy is good, so he lies about his intentions to implement the policy because the general public is unfairly biased against the policy. By your reasoning he isn’t really lying.

Jiro May 29, 2025, 3:21 AM
4 points
−2
in reply to: JenniferRM’s comment on: Meditations on Doge

If asked to do evil, they should educate in a face saving way,… Broadly, they have a duty to correct the public, and elected officials, and anyone who is actually wrong… or at least they have a duty to not enthusiastically conform to the public’s stupid, and self-harming, and commercial-propaganda-based opinions

If asked to do evil, they should do evil. Because I don’t trust the judgment of bureaucrats to decide what is evil, and we’d be better off with them following what elected officials tell them to do and not deciding to become a shadow government that slow walks everything they don’t like. This is where you get the deep state from.

You yourself mentioned claiming that racism is a public health problem. But consider how “evil” goes with racism. Failure to do something about racism is evil—in fact to some people it’s one of the worst evils possible. Calling racism a public health problem is an example of bureaucrats seeing evil and deciding that they just have to fight the evil by any means necessary.

Jiro May 26, 2025, 10:33 PM
1 point
−3
on: On ‘On Caring’

Having a thriving 10,000 person society seems much more appealing than a dysfunctional society of a million people

This implies that you have some method of avoiding the Repugnant Conclusion.

Jiro May 26, 2025, 10:30 PM
2 points
0
in reply to: Said Achmiz’s comment on: Interest In Conflict Is Instrumentally Convergent

I agree that calling Superman a “one man nanny state” would be inaccurate, and I would certainly not use any such term.

It’s inaccurate for how Superman typically behaves, but it’s accurate in that it matches your claims about him. You said:

The point I am making is that “might makes right, and right is this ideology that I have which involves various things that I claim are good” is still “might makes right”. Superman isn’t “in it for himself”, he’s in it for other people—which in fact is much worse.

The term for a government which harms people for their own good is a nanny state. Superman doing similar things all on his own using his great power makes him a one man nanny state.

Jiro May 26, 2025, 2:06 AM
2 points
0
in reply to: Said Achmiz’s comment on: Interest In Conflict Is Instrumentally Convergent
The connotation is all that stuff I described. “Might makes right” implies that it is being done for personal gain, not for good, and that there aren’t limits to it beyond the use of more might.

And what term would you prefer for the phenomenon which I described?

You could call him a one man nanny state. But I would disagree that even this accurately describes Superman. Just like Superman doesn’t casually do bad things for personal gain, he doesn’t casually do them to benefit others. Stories where Superman runs the world as a dictatorship are explicitly meant as Superman being evil.

Jiro May 26, 2025, 12:57 AM
2 points
0
in reply to: Said Achmiz’s comment on: Interest In Conflict Is Instrumentally Convergent

do you just dislike the use of the term “might makes right” here?

Your term carries with it an inaccurate connotation.

(And if you didn’t intend that connotation, it doesn’t make sense as a criticism of Superman or a reason to call him evil anyway.)

Jiro May 26, 2025, 12:22 AM
2 points
0
in reply to: Said Achmiz’s comment on: Interest In Conflict Is Instrumentally Convergent

The point I am making is that “might makes right, and right is this ideology that I have which involves various things that I claim are good” is still “might makes right”. Superman isn’t “in it for himself”, he’s in it for other people—which in fact is much worse.

Central examples of might makes right have many prominent aspects that are absent from what Superman does, even if in some technical sense it’s “might makes right”. Being in it for other people is one of those, but I mentioned several others.

Jiro May 25, 2025, 11:41 PM
2 points
0
in reply to: Said Achmiz’s comment on: Interest In Conflict Is Instrumentally Convergent

I’m sure that you know quite well that people with power are exceptionally skilled at finding justifications for how they use their power, even if what they’re actually doing is enriching and aggrandizing themselves and suppressing dissent.

But Superman isn’t, in typical Superman stories. Superman just doesn’t do the kind of things that would be done by someone who’s really in it for themselves but is trying to justify it as needed for the greater good. (Subject to the same caveats as you—I’m sure that over 80+ years of comics, someone’s written Superman that way a few times, but that’s unusual.)

You could argue that actual real world people would and that Superman is thus unrealistic, but in terms of “is Superman evil” and “is Superman just using ‘might makes right’”, the answer is no, even if real world people would act differently.

I’m also skeptical of even this much. Not all real people are the same, after all. I could lie like Cade Metz with no consequence other than some disdain, but I have not, in fact, done so.

When do we see Superman exhibit a careful consideration of what steps are reasonable to take to minimize property damage?

Probably most of the time. Few Superman stories show people complaining about the damage Superman causes, and I don’t think that’s because Superman would beat them up. Just because there isn’t a word balloon saying “I must minimize the damage!” doesn’t change this.

Jiro May 25, 2025, 7:37 PM
2 points
0
in reply to: Said Achmiz’s comment on: Interest In Conflict Is Instrumentally Convergent

But then result of this is: “With great power comes great moral leeway”.

Which is just “might makes right”.

That doesn’t follow. The result of combining these two things is that with great power comes great moral leeway when doing specific things. He can violate the law by breaking into a home to catch a villain, but he can’t if he just sees someone’s big TV and wants to take it for himself. He doesn’t get moral leeway to do things just because he personally benefits from them, and “might makes right” is typically assumed to include that. Furthermore, he doesn’t get unlimited leeway bounded by people’s ability to stop him, like “might makes right” also assumes. If he has to destroy property to save lives, he can, but he still needs to take reasonable steps to minimize property damage.

(And he only gets moral leeway on a stricter standard than utilitarianism. He can’t steal that TV just because he gets more utility from it than its current owner. He can’t even steal it to sell it, donate the money to charity, and help 100 malaria victims.)

Jiro May 21, 2025, 6:04 AM
2 points
0
on: Shortest damn doomsplainer in world history

Computers get smarter. People don’t.

Because asymptotes exist, this doesn’t imply that computers pass humans.

Besides, transhumanist people could get smarter.