Where (outside of widely-recognized-as-totalitarian societies) are VPNs illegal?
Roger Scott
Karma: 40
For context, I’m 65. “Back in the day” for most people, most of the time, phone calls were rare enough that no one worried about being interrupted by them coming in randomly. I suspect the frequency with which people send text messages, combined with the effectively zero cost of phone calls (hint: they weren’t always that way!), raised the frequency (or potential frequency) of phone calls to the level where people started worrying about the interruptions. Just a theory.
“If it’s a social taboo to harm you, then that’s a type of power.”—that thrid to last word is crucial. Throughout that whole paragraph you’re treating power as a binary which a group either has or doesn’t have and then using that simplification to argue that the power (of any kind) held by one group is equivalent to the power (of any kind) held by another group. Just because a group has some non-zero power afforded to them by a social taboo doesn’t mean that other groups don’t have far more power over them through any number of other means.
We had basically the same game (until it was banned) many years (I presume) before your experience. I’m not even sure the game made sense in your day, with the sort of information you describe, let alone in the modern day. We have made a profound transition from a world where you didn’t know most (theoretically knowable) things to one where at near zero cost you can know anything.
“start behaving as if you’re being watched”—I’m not sure what to make of the fact that the chillingness of these words isn’t overwhelmingly self-evident. It is much easier for a totalitarian government to pick off a few isolated dissenters than a group that was able to gather and organize “in secret” at least up until they reached a viable size.
“develop new immigration rules that cities across America would be comfortable cooperating with”—this is the “make government super-efficient because, of course, we can be certain it is always doing what we want” argument. The alternative is “always make sure there’s some sand in the gears of government because when it is not doing what we want things can go really badly, so let’s limit the velocity with which that can happen”.
Yet, ironically(?), your emotions are telling you to rely more narrowly on your estimation of the person’s intellect? I think that’s what had me confused—I was assuming you were saying your intellect wanted you to focus on intellect while your emotions were urging you to include emotions, among possibly other factors. One would hope that the emotional drive to use narrower criteria would be short-lived in comparison to your more deeply rooted (?) intellectual position.
If you’d be so kind, could you clarify whether it is your (intellectual?) knowing or your emotional (feeling?) that is broader/more inclusive w.r.t. personhood? And am I correct to read this as saying you believe the former should trump the latter? Or is it just that the lack of agreement troubles you without your needing to “choose sides” between the two?
That’s not what I hear moridinamael saying. We all make mistakes constantly, and rarely are even aware of them, so focusing on the mistakes of others as a basis for assessing them as inferior is one more mistake to add to our personal collections.
“they just also sucked ass at reasoning”—did they claim to be trying to reason? There are plenty of forms of discussion other than reasoning, and it’s also possible you are a fan of only one of multiple flavors of reasoning and dismiss the practice of other forms.
Your recollections of spending time with your inlaws brings up an interesting asymmetry: you only talk about you adjusting to fit with their ways of being. If, apart from any intellectual disparity between you and them, you view them to be social or humanistic equals, should you expect them to have an equal obligation to fit with you as you have to fit with them? Put another way, what does it imply about your view of them socially or humanistically that you (apparently) do not have this symmetrical expectation?
“many people kind of construct a self-serving moral system that overweights the virtues they themselves possess”—or wish/believe themselves to possess.
“when i am around people i find intellectually unserious, i deny them personhood”—this seems like a great jumping off point for contemplating what “personhood” means, both in general and to you, specifically. In particular, if the partial derivative of someone’s personhood with respect their intellectual seriousness is so large does that mean you’re overweighting intellectual seriousness among all of the possible contributors to personhood? If so, is this because you genuinely value intellectual seriousness that much more than all those other factors, or is it just that you’re paying more attention to it and, perhaps, not making the effort to recognize and/or suitably value the other factors when (implicitly) evaluating their personhood?
How does one who, like all of us, has only lived in one narrow slice of time assess that the time they are living in is different, particularly “much more X” for any given X, than other times? My knee-jerk old person reaction to this is that everyone wants to think their time, their circumstance is special, significant, important, dire, whatever. As at least one other person has pointed out, those of us who lived through the 60s-80s lived with the every day fear of nuclear war—not something that might happen some day if a bunch of other uncertain things happened first, but something for which all necessary elements were already in place and a trial run had already been done in the form of the Cuban missile crisis.
Christians are an out group? Tell that to any non-Christian living in the American South.
Why would a rational person expend any effort to “defend” a belief? Shouldn’t all such effort be spent exposing one’s beliefs to potential refutation and weighing alternatives? Otoh, if we substitute the word “faith” for “belief” then we’ve got the answer to your question about rationality right there.
Would a Christian (or any other ) superintelligence also be able to remove heterosexual urges? If not, I don’t think there’s much hope for removing homosexual urges.
Why would the same sort of AIs that are doing all the bad things that people would be looking to shield themselves from be willing to genuinely help people shield themselves? In this doomsday scenario isn’t it more likely that these supposedly-shielding AIs would, in fact, be manipulating those expecting to be shielded for the AI’s own purposes? This seems very similar to fake apparent alignment.
Well, if you’re already ignoring history, science, and chronology why stop?
Isn’t what information shouldn’t (and should) influence people constantly changing?