As a transhumanist, that does not follow.
JulianMorrison
Karma: 2,654
Now learn the Portia trick, and don’t be so sure that you can judge power in a mind that doesn’t share our evolutionary history.
Also watch the Alien movies, because those aren’t bad models of what a maximizer would be like if it was somewhere between animalistic and closely subhuman. Xenomorphs are basically xenomorph-maximizers. In the fourth movie, the scientists try to cut a deal. The xenomorph queen plays along—until she doesn’t. She’s always, always plotting. Not evil, just purposeful with purposes that are inimical to ours. (I know, generalizing from fictional evidence—this isn’t evidence, it’s a model to give you an emotional grasp.)
Not unless you like working with an utterly driven monomaniac perfect psychopath. It would always, always be “cannot overpower humans yet”. One slip, and it would turn on you without missing a beat. No deal. Open fire.
Suppose I destroy the timeline, and create an identical one. Have I committed a moral evil? No, because nothing has been lost.
Suppose I destroy the timeline, and restart from an earlier point. Have I committed a moral evil? Very much yes. What was lost? To give only one person’s example from Flight of the Navigator out of a planet of billions, out of a whole universe, the younger brother who was left behind had spent years—of personal growth, of creating value and memories—helping his parents with their quixotic search. And then bonding with the new younger “older” brother, rejoicing with his parents, marvelling at the space ship. And then he was erased.
A time loop amounts to a pocket eternity. How will you power the computer? Drop a sun in there, pick out a brown dwarf. That gives you maybe ten billion years of compute time, which isn’t much.
Yes, I remember when as a teen I first read Diane Duane’s “Door into...” series and found it a beautiful idea, but completely implausible, that a woman could have a wife. And yet it happened. And it isn’t a tenth of the way to what a world would be like without patriarchy.
Let me put it this way—I think that the endpoint would be a culture that doesn’t even socially mark sex as a category, treating it as (in any given pair of a mated group) “biologically compatible as-is” or “biologically compatible with medical help” (such as stem cell gametes, in-vitro organ-printed wombs, etc) that latter encompassing both homogamete and infertile pairs, that does mark gender identity but doesn’t assume there are only two nor does it correlate them with gametes, and in which clothing style, or femme versus butch, doesn’t correlate either with either gametes or gender identity.
Skin colour is a red herring. Race is was originally about rich people with empires and status justifying their success as inevitable and righteous, and still is about their descendants justifying living off the inheritance of empires (and off plundering the bounty of continents already in use by other people). Race-like oppressions can exist where there is no visible distinction (burakumin in Japan). “Where do your family come from?”. Colour blindness (dye or otherwise) without putting inequalities to rights just hides the issue from sight.
And fuel requirements too, for similar reasons.
As someone who cares about anti-sexism and anti-racism, I actually agree that few people can describe the end state of eliminating them. I have difficulty myself. The reason I have difficulty is that sexism and racism are both utterly stonking huge things that distort this culture like an elephant sitting on a soccer ball. What that means is that a world with no trace of patriarchy and no trace of white supremacy would be a “wierdtopia”. Even for those who wanted it, it would be culture shock on the order of a 15th century samurai class retainer suddenly transported to contemporary New York. Feminism is slowed by feminists dragging their feet. Anti-racism is slowed by anti-racists who shy away from how much wealth and resources and control of the future they’d have to give back.
Yeah, if I’m talking to someone from who I can assume rationality, I’ll say all that (and that the sexist gender beliefs and patriarchal power structures that prevent trans people just flipping across in high school like it was a mere incidental fact, like hair colour, should be destroyed anyway for over-determined reasons). But I have no intention to give truth to enemies. Enemy is defined as: a person whose unshakeable beliefs harm the people I care about. If a lie makes them back off, lying is good.
BTW, by “assuming girls are upset where they’d assume boys are angry” I am referring to unconscious fact judgements about infants too young to verbalize the problem. (Cite: “pink brain blue brain” by Lise Eliot). Macho emotions are attributed to babies in who appear male and gentle ones to babies who appear female. Since baby sex is almost unmarked, that means going by the colour of the clothes. (And google “baby Storm” for an example of adults panicking and pillorying the parents if the cues that allow them to gender the baby are intentionally witheld.)
The Star Wars series is about the tragic destruction of one planet and two death stars, and the childish bickering that caused it.
Flight of the Navigator ends the timeline. It destroys every planet, every star, every wandering spaceship billions of light years into the dark, total universal omnicide. And a reboot into a new timeline from a previously existing history.
Re [1] I totally noticed that “Flight of the Navigator” is a story about a kidnapped, returned boy who forges a new relationship with his older parents and ex younger, now older brother, and a cute nurse at the government facility, and then kills them all.
To say understanding this spoiled the story for me is an understatement. That movie has more dead people than Star Wars. It’s a fricken’ tragedy.
We’re willing to do any damn thing that saves the actual people that are hurting.
If this upsets you, I will enjoy schadenfreude.
A not-loaded gun is still a weapon, it’s just one that isn’t useful to somebody lacking in upper-body strength. And they might have loaded guns, and then you’re in a western standoff (cue whistling, tumbleweed) and you’ve brought an awkward metal club to a gunfight. Lets not do that either.
The counterpoint to that is “If you’re interested in being on the right side of disputes, you will refute your opponents’ arguments. But if you’re interested in producing truth, you will fix your opponents’ arguments for them. To win, you must fight not only the creature you encounter; you [also] must fight the most horrible thing that can be constructed from its corpse.” http://www.acceleratingfuture.com/steven/?p=155
The trouble with “Increase expected associated risk” is that catcalling is normalized in this culture as a thing men are allowed to do to women against their will—a response that treats it as an assault (pepper spray to the eyes, for example) would be considered an over-reaction.
I strongly recommend against deploying a weapon as an empty threat. Don’t pull a gun unless you expect to have both the intent and the willingness to kill. Otherwise you just gave them a weapon and an excuse.
I am saying that a trans person can only be diagnosed by saying “I experience myself as [fill in the blank]” because that unspoken, personal experience is what trans is. Not the brain stuff. That may be what trans is caused by. It’s like having a sore toe, that can be caused by a dropped hammer or kicking the door, but the essence of sore toeness can’t be determined by testing for hammers and a negative test for a dropped hammer would not disprove it, the essence of sore toeness is the ouch.
Thwarted+joy beats desolation+schadenfreude as a utility win even if they were dividing a teddy bear.