xpym

Karma: 404

xpym 17 Apr 2026 13:30 UTC
−1 points
−1
in reply to: 0xA’s comment on: Let goodness conquer all that it can defend

If I was reasonably confident I knew better than you, how you should live, under what basis do I have the obligation to take away your agency to elect override your own preferences?

Under the norms of your society/culture. They obviously aren’t static, and can e.g. fade away, having lost to external competition (like vikings had), or change in response to internal critique (like how colonialism became discredited). If you would rather operate under some hypothetical perfect rules derived from first principles, then you will likely be disappointed, seeing how philosophy has for millennia utterly failed to discover those.

xpym 15 Apr 2026 12:21 UTC
1 point
0
on: Beware Natural Language Logic
I think a better way of presenting it is in a different order:
- I think insect suffering might cause a million times more suffering than human suffering
But that’s not the important rhetorical point that the claimant likely intends to make in this case. EAs know that insect suffering sounds obviously crazy to the uninitiated, so the likely target audience here are people who already think that animal suffering charities of some sort (e.g. factory farming-related) satisfy the “effective” criterion, which is equivalent to thinking that animal suffering (at some scale) could be more important than human suffering. From there the claim that suffering among one subset of animals swamps all other by orders of magnitude isn’t crazy at all.

xpym 15 Apr 2026 10:36 UTC
3 points
0
in reply to: Timothy Underwood’s comment on: Only Law Can Prevent Extinction
I think that Palestinians are basically screwed regardless of what they do, but insofar as their goals include weakening/isolating Israel, they have achieved success beyond their wildest dreams (but at a grievous cost).

xpym 14 Apr 2026 16:35 UTC
1 point
1
in reply to: lilkim2025’s comment on: Only Law Can Prevent Extinction

I don’t know that this is as true as it is in the popular mindset. A lot of the Weathermen, who were one of the most prolific terrorist organizations in American history, now hold positions of power, including very in-demand university sinecures.

Not to mention that a movie that’s at least ambivalent towards that sort of thing has literally just won the Best Picture.

Also, being a full-throated Hamas apologist doesn’t disqualify people from many positions of influence these days.

xpym 9 Apr 2026 4:33 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: Vaniver’s comment on: Are there Multiple Moral Endpoints?

I think I buy some of this—some ‘moral progress’ is increasing wealth allowing us to afford more luxuries.

But I think I’m mostly interested in a different sort of progress—the kind where someone’s idea of what ‘the good’ is changes.

But these are largely the same. We are now rich enough to eschew slavery, so we can afford the “luxury” of banning it (and calling it utter evil). It’s plausible that we’ll soon be rich enough that eschewing animal meat will no longer be onerous, et cetera.

There’s a concept that sometimes gets used of ‘technological completion’—that is, you don’t know every logical fact, but you have come across all of the relevant designs.

Relevant to what? As long as our preference/motivation systems are subject to change (both through evolution and eventually through deliberate modification), I don’t see why we’ll ever run out of novel stuff to want. It’s a different story if we’ll get a singleton that decides to implement some sort of lock-in, in which case the talk about completion and end-points makes sense to me, but hopefully that could be avoided.

xpym 8 Apr 2026 15:49 UTC
3 points
0
on: Are there Multiple Moral Endpoints?

In particular, one of the reasons I think progress happens is that some things are pinned down by reality.

Indeed. To put it another way, what we call progress is mainly adaptation to changing material circumstances. So, there are uncountably many greatly diverging counterfactual moral endpoints, similarly to how there are uncountably many possible configurations of matter. Of course, some possibilities are more likely than others, in either realm.

xpym 7 Apr 2026 18:08 UTC
3 points
0
in reply to: Kaj_Sotala’s comment on: How social ideas get corrupt

Often, beliefs are adopted not because of their truth value but because they allow a person to do something they wanted to do.

I was mainly going of off this, the perceived implication being that there is a widely-applicable truth value in the uncorrupted idea.

xpym 7 Apr 2026 17:13 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: Kaj_Sotala’s comment on: How social ideas get corrupt

If you mean that NVC hasn’t managed to completely take over the world, bring world peace and reshape everyone’s language, that’s of course true.

No, I thought that’s what you thought about its potential (minus the comedic exaggeration), if everybody got the uncorrupted message. If you simply meant that ten million might benefit instead of one million, I have no objections.

xpym 7 Apr 2026 16:54 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: Benquo’s comment on: The Corner-Stone
Well, I do agree that either an especially benign new religious movement or an especially benign communist dictatorship might be the way forward, but that still leaves more questions than answers.

xpym 7 Apr 2026 14:41 UTC
1 point
0
on: How social ideas get corrupt
Here’s a more cynical take: if a seemingly good “social idea” retains this status for a long time without making much progress beyond its most passionate proponents, it’s strong evidence that the idea isn’t good enough even in its “uncorrupted” form to be widely applicable.

It’s similar to how everybody and their grandma know all about cognitive biases these days, and yet they mysteriously refuse to go away even so—they’re there for a reason. Likewise, I’d imagine that there are good reasons for why people communicate “violently” by default, and unilaterally straying from this equilibrium puts one at a disadvantage.

This is not to say that nothing can ever be improved in the social realm, but IMO it’s not the sort of domain where “twenty-dollar bills” are plentiful and low-hanging.

xpym 7 Apr 2026 13:46 UTC
0 points
0
in reply to: Benquo’s comment on: The Corner-Stone
Is it an attainable counterfactual, though? The only positive counterexamples you presented were a centuries-old Ottoman practice, and the aftermath of the worst war ever. These days, though, it doesn’t seem like anybody anywhere in the world does meritocracy better than the US, however faint a praise this might be, so clearly the problem is far from trivial.

xpym 26 Mar 2026 4:39 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: no name’s comment on: China Derangement Syndrome

What exactly leads you to believe that, under such repression, China could never reach the level of development enjoyed by the United States? Why not consider what might happen if the repression were relaxed?

My impression is that things are as relaxed as they are going to get, and the trend these days seems to be in the direction of increasing repression.

xpym 24 Mar 2026 11:28 UTC
−1 points
0
in reply to: cousin_it’s comment on: China Derangement Syndrome

Well, I mean, congrats on your choice, but why are your numbers more indicative than mine? Looks to me like you’re just cherrypicking. Everyone can cherrypick.

I’m not claiming that they’re more indicative, but I do claim that they aren’t obviously less indicative. Since everyone can cherrypick, it’s not clear in what way are objective numbers better than vibes anyhow.

Ok, cool, imagine China becomes as rich per capita as the US.

IMO CCP-led China will never come close, and the level of repression is an important factor of that. Small-ish petrostates aren’t relevant here.

xpym 24 Mar 2026 10:43 UTC
2 points
1
in reply to: cousin_it’s comment on: China Derangement Syndrome

You’ve got to choose some objective numbers that reflect reality.

Fair. I choose the number of legal oppositional parties and the number of peasants prevented from migrating to cities by the hukou system.

the repression in today’s China is much lower than these historical examples, and not obviously worse than in the US

The former is obvious, the latter is a spicy take. Of course, the US isn’t exactly having its best moment these days, but I still doubt that the percentage of Americans who would prefer living in China would be even within one order of magnitude of that of hopeful Chinese immigrants.

xpym 23 Mar 2026 15:50 UTC
6 points
2
in reply to: cousin_it’s comment on: China Derangement Syndrome

They are: how many people the country represses internally, and how many people the country kills in foreign wars. These are the topline metrics for a government being good domestically and being good internationally. For example, Nazi Germany had horrible repression internally and started horrible aggressive wars, and that’s the entire reason we think it was bad. Well, today’s US has much higher incarceration rate than today’s China and also kills much more people in foreign wars, so there’s that.

Is your claim that non-imprisoned Chinese should be considered non-repressed, or at least comparably repressed to Americans?

xpym 21 Jan 2026 8:34 UTC
1 point
−9
on: Deep learning as program synthesis

Second, deep learning works in practice, using a reasonable amount of computational resources; meanwhile, even the most efficient versions of Solomonoff induction like speed induction run in exponential time or worse.

But doesn’t increasing the accuracy of DL outputs require exponentially more compute? It only “works” to the extent that labs have been able to afford exponential compute scaling so far.

xpym 21 Jan 2026 5:51 UTC
4 points
2
in reply to: quinoa marisa’s comment on: Why I Transitioned: A Response

irrational reaction to anything “sex” and it is useful to give people space to talk about gender variance without it being inherently sexual

Yeah, “sex” itself is also problematic of course, referring both to essential characteristics of individuals and to complicated social interactions.

My biggest problem with “transgender” is that it implies the desirability of grave, not-entirely-reversible hormonal/surgical transition to people that are only uncomfortable with their gender role, but have no body map issues. I’d say that decoupling (temporary, reversible) social transition from HRT/surgery should be in the interest of large swathes of the political spectrum, only excluding extremists on both sides.

xpym 20 Jan 2026 8:50 UTC
11 points
8
on: Why I Transitioned: A Response

There is evidence of a biological basis for trans identity.

It’s plausible that there is a biological basis for feelings of body-map mismatch, but categorizing all of this under the rubric of “trans identity” continues to seem like a horrible civilization-wide confusion-inducing mistake to me.

The deprecated term “transsexual” also had its issues, of course (the confusion about whether the “sexual” part refers to your sex or the sex of people you are attracted to, like it does in e.g. “homosexual”), but it at least clearly pointed to the fact that it isn’t entirely about “gender identity” qua social role-play.

xpym 25 Dec 2025 11:05 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: dr_s’s comment on: Technoromanticism
I would still use an actual mp3 player, but ReplayGain (volume adjustment) has irrevocably spoiled me. And also, wireless earbuds have finally gotten good since then. So, phone-as-a-mp3-player it is.

xpym 17 Dec 2025 8:53 UTC
4 points
−12
on: Dancing in a World of Horseradish

For the former-maids now working in the modern service sector, this was a major step up.

Seems doubtful tbh. I think that being a maid/manservant to a one-percenter could in theory be a much better gig, but society apparently collectively decided that such jobs are inherently degrading and fundamentally conflict with the Egalitarian Spirit, and abolished them on moral grounds instead of economic ones.