I never could empathize with those arguments that go “In the transhumanist future how do you know that you’d make the cutoff for existence?” because i always assumed that (a) obviously I wouldn’t, and (b) it seems entirely sensible to me that if my non-existence were necessary to bring about the existence of a happier or better person then I shouldn’t exist. Like, even if the thought experiment was to kill me and replace me with a clone who has very slightly better eyesight than me and nothing else, I’d still say that you should kill me. At least in principle, who knows how I’d act in reality. This has always seemed obvious to me beyond question. I guess I just have atypical moral intuitions.
Say my wife and I have really good genes, such that our son would be at least equal to you in every regard, and have slightly better eyesight. Would you be alright if I killed you, if it meant that my wife and I then decided to have a child?
I would be bummed, but accepting. Actually, since I probably provide less value to the world than the average human, I’d probably have to accept being killed in exchange for the creation of a random person. And that’s ignoring the extra lifespan of someone two decades younger than me.
I feel like there’s an argument to be made in favor of preserving existing people on purely pragmatic grounds, since we don’t have to spend a couple decades raising them into competent adults. Really depends on how much of the GTH consists of augmentation at/before birth vs augmentation as an adult.
Hypothetical people don’t exist yet, and therefore only count based on their probability of existing in the future, at best.
We here at the Mitigated Chaos blog like to post good, relatable content that’s in touch with honest working joes, such as attempting to bait rationalists into arguing whether using cybernetics to transform yourself into a fetishized cyborg spider monster is beneficial to the economy.
Truly, this blog has its finger on the pulse of America.
It obviously is good for the economy?? I don’t see how anyone could hold the opposing view????
ladies, gentlemen, non-binaries, and cyborg spiders,
We here at the Mitigated Chaos blog like to post good, relatable content that’s in touch with honest working joes, such as attempting to bait rationalists into arguing whether using cybernetics to transform yourself into a fetishized cyborg spider monster is beneficial to the economy.
Truly, this blog has its finger on the pulse of America.
Has anybody ever done Stardestroyer-style ultra-grognardy physics analysis for Gundam?
I think everyone just points out that mobile suits are not an optimal form for military combat vehicles, especially at that size. Even Code Geass’s Knightmare Frames are better, since they’re smaller and have higher mobility due to wheels.
I really do not understand what the Emoji Movie is supposed to be.
I do not understand this one bit.
What are they trying to sell?
I have a strong sensation that it’s bad to acknowledge that that movie even exists; that somehow, some entity is making money because I am even aware that people made such a movie and are commercially releasing it.
Totally not eugenics, then. Just compassion with the poor. Nothing to see here, move along!
CRISPR means we’re going to start getting designer babies soon enough.
Suppose you are from a family with a severe heritable peanut allergy. You contract with Genetic Enhancements, Inc. to create an embryo, modify it to remove the genes for the peanut allergy, and then implant it.
This is technically eugenics.
But, on the other hand, there is no benefit whatsoever to a severe peanut allergy. Not on an individual level. Not on a family level. Not on a societal level. We are much better off if such an allergy doesn’t exist.
But there is a difference between people that are already created and people that don’t yet exist and may never exist, and there is a difference between mandatory, quasi-optional, and payment-based practices.
But I don’t think “is this eugenics or not?” is a good question for untangling the morality of this, because “I refuse to have children because I have a heritable genetic heart problem that will kill me at 50″ is also eugenics.
So to me, the suitable grounds to oppose it on is that they’re in prison, under the state’s care, or something along those lines.
And of course, in the original issue that was brought up, genes may not even be relevant. Fetal Alcohol Syndrome can be extremely expensive, and how much do you want to bet that other kinds of drugs can cause similarly expensive medical disorders?
Murkowski and Collins get a minor shout-out for not doing something horrible I guess, and McCain gets nothing since he had the power to shut the bill down in several ways but chose to do it this way for positive media attention
Right-wing attitudes to Republican “no” votes: These people are turncoats and need to be made an example of
Left-wing attitudes to Republican “no” votes: These guys aren’t completely terrible, I guess. They’re slightly less terrible than the other guys
The left, a few years later: Where have the moderate, principled Republicans gone?
it’s intriguing to imagine the myths you could tell an Iron Age tribe that would actually be correct as well as sounding awesome, like:
humans and apes share a common ancestor, and further back share an ancestor with all mammals, bird, reptiles, fish, and ultimately all living things.
the Earth is over four billion years old.
each of the fixed stars in the sky is another sun like our own.
This is actually something I think about periodically. If religion is true, why doesn’t it contain some scientific fact that couldn’t be proved for another 1,000-2,000 years? Why push only the faith element so hard in a world where spiritual experiences aren’t limited to your religion?
i mean, shit, once we figure out the whole “Cosmic radiation” thing and probably also the gravity thing, colonizing Mars isn’t that far-fetched. No more so than, say, Australia.
did you mean Antarctica :|
One day we wish to have a permanent outpost on the Australian continent
Only once we’ve engineered bacteria to remove the perchlorates from the soil - oh, nvm, that’s Mars.
Wait, does this mean Mars doesn’t have dingos? I’m so confused.
Philosophy is not engineering, but neither is computer science, at least not the good bits. But that’s a bit of a sidetrack.
By making new universes I meant defining possible worlds, either on paper, or better yet in executable form. These can be humdrum, such as the world of Minecraft, made up of discrete cubes of material with certain laws of interaction, or much more abstract, like a distributed database system where there is no global clock to give a single unambiguous ordering of events, and it is a struggle to achieve a consistent interpretation of the current state for every observer. Or you can go even higher and try and define a dependent type theory that can unify mathematical proof and executable code, which is what we really need.
The interesting thing about these worlds is that we have direct access to the underlying laws and can address questions of object properties and identity directly. Most of them are not reductionist in the way that the real world is, so you can have a chair that literally exists as an independent object that is not made up of smaller parts, and lots of traditional reasoning about object identity then applies.
If we look at a reductionist universe like Conway’s Life, then I think there is not much to say about objects. The only fundamental entities in this universe are grid cells, and the absolute time step that updates them. Influences can propagate through the grid, and particular patterns of cells might be labelled as “objects” while analysing their behaviour, eg. gliders. But this is for notational convenience, we can’t actually learn anything at the object level that we couldn’t learn by studying the underlying cells.
You can create Turing machines in Life, and then you can analyse them as if they were abstract computing devices, ignoring the grid cells. But if a stray glider crashes into the machine, it will break, and the analysis will fail, just as if a chair in the real world caught fire: at some point your mental model would shift from chair, to burning chair, to smouldering remains of what once was a chair, or just pile of unidentified ash.
So there is clearly not much point for philosophers to debate the fundamental nature of Conway’s Life (right? I am assuming this).
The real world is still less well-defined, and there is behaviour we have not yet explained, and laws we have not fully worked out. But I have to draw the line somewhere, and if someone thinks that a chair has existence independently of the particles that make it up, well I don’t really know what to say to them. I mean, the question of what objects are was answered 2500 years ago by Democritus: arrangements of atoms in the void. Even I know that :)
Since there are no intrinsic properties of objects that can’t be dissolved into statements about their component parts, the only reason to have a theory of objects at all is for convenience in modelling and communication. But both of those have specific requirements, there is no single model of objects that will be ideal for every use case. You are going to need a very different model of chairs depending on whether you are talking to a furniture designer, a cafe owner, a Roomba, or a hunter gatherer.
I was speaking in a very compressed way about causal bundling just now, but I wasn’t joking.
A chair has qualities that its subcomponent parts do not, in terms of how it deflects the development of the world towards different directions/timelines vs a non-chair.
In this case, a chair is not an absolute definition, but rather a causal bundle - a cluster within the matter configuration space which has a high probability of producing certain related outcomes.
You can, then, learn something at the object level that you couldn’t by studying the atoms of the chair.
Yes, because it’s causally entangled with arrangements of atoms in the brains of a certain species of ape.
Most possible configurations of matter within the same bounding box are not chairs. And at the atomic level, if you take the same atoms, there are almost infinite permutations within the same macro-scale shape of any given chair that have nearly-indentical outcomes in interacting with the environment. Where we put the boundary around the fuzzy cluster is our choice and to some degree arbitrary, but the cluster itself is legitimate macro-scale information.
only because of the entanglement with us
I disagree. The effect on worldlines is also present for animals and plants, particularly less WRT chairs, and moreso with things like boats or rafts, with the propagation of animals across oceans.
Because of the way those parts work together, an animal is functionally more than the sum of its parts: a wave which the parts ride on.
You can get all the behavior of the animal if you simulate the whole thing at the subatomic level, but that’s because you’re including the wave when you do so. 90% of an animal is quite different from 100% of an animal.
Is gut bacteria part of the animal in which it resides? How about a bone replaced with titanium?
Yes, kind of.
Your earlier observation “definition for what purpose?” is relevant here, sort of.
You’re pushing out farther from the center of the cluster, and there is more than one cluster of causative properties or w/e that exist simultaneously. Having a titanium bone is closer in terms of causal influence than missing the leg, but it’s farther out than a natural bone from the primary human cluster.
Breaking these down into linguistic representations for humans, then, gets into your “definition for what?” situation, since not only are there multiple functional/causal groupings, but they may not even be hierarchical, and then you have to draw boundary lines and tie symbols to things.
Not sure if I’ve conveyed the above adequately. Quite tired.
Theres actually a shortage of sand which is crucial to construction we likely won't literally run out of raw materials to mine but it'll become increasingly difficult and expensive not to mention environmentally deleterious where looking to the moon and beyond would seem like a pretty good idea within the next 25-30 years or so this is what we should be focusing on instead of colonies and manned spaced missions or whatever stupid shit elon musk and his cult following want to do
But as wild as the healthcare debate was, the White House communications director going on the record without realizing it and calling the Chief of Staff a “fucking paranoid schizophrenic” and referring to a senior adviser to the president as “trying to suck [his] own cock” is INCREDIBLE. Whoever is writing this season of American politics is on fire
There is only one way to defeat the Trump Whitehouse - low TV ratings.
Until then, the network is going to just keep the show going.
I want to shitpost that Social Justice is White Supremacy.
Because under badly-done Social Justice, we see a pattern where only white males have agency, only white males have power, only white males are capable of action that actually does anything and can cause harm, and their resources are effectively unlimited. Under that same framework, the world is divided into whites and everyone else, and the whites enacted truly stunning and powerful violence on an unimaginable scale that no one else could. Their dominance is so overwhelming that any minorities disagreeing with SJ have “internalized male opinions” or white opinions, like some kind of mind control, and are incapable of deciding their beliefs for themselves. And the white supremacy must be actively held down, or it will inevitably seize control of the world.
But of course, it isn’t really the case that even badly-done SJ is truly white supremacist…
some people seem to use schools as a substitute for some aspects of church.
There are limits to that. People eventually have to leave University (except for professors, potentially).
How can a secular replacement be created with enough motive power to gain the same benefits?
And can it do that without turning into a plague of status locusts that constantly accuse each other of being Problematic pedos and creating hate swarms?
Social Justice? That train caught fire already. It’s a nightmare realm of inverse hierarchies and flash hate mobs that propagate just fine even with real identities revealed, full of fraudulent accusations.
Liberalism? There is no true pure/non-instrumental moral basis for human rights, it’s being stressed pretty significantly right now in ways it can’t address without becoming something other than Liberalism, and it ignores the fact that the way people live has deep impacts on the health and functioning of society. It seems unable to even adequately power an army, as seems to be the case in Europe.
Moral Capitalism? That’s even less human and even more corroding.
And it can’t be National Technocracy or some other kind of ideology which preserves the social fabric while adjusting to modernization, either, because those haven’t even been truly invented yet.
I’m sorry to say this, but as an experienced Gundam fan, you are the DSX-05L Custom Prototype Full-Autonomous Discourse Suit revealed by the World State in episode 18 and added to the ship’s crew, that sides against the mass-production autonomous discourse suits fielded by the Mysterious Organization in season 2.
It’s just how it is. Don’t worry, your self-sacrifice in season 2 episode 23 is touching and heroic.
today this white girl asked me why my hair is so curly and i said im black and she told me to say african american
You hear about this happening in Britain with tourists sometimes, but I’m not sure if it really happens there or if the Brits are just yanking our chains.
If I ever have a live-in partner, or wife, I’m not sure I’d want to share the same bedroom. For a few reasons:
1) Sleep quality. “Brain scans have also
shown that couples who sleep together wake one another continually. Next
morning, their stress hormones are higher while their cognitive ability
is lower. 1” Seriously, how could I sleep well if someone else is moving, shifting, and getting out of my bed? It’s not like I can use Sleep As Android in that case ….
2) Her sense of style might conflict with my taste! It might get messy! How am I suppose dance around in my undergarments to 80s hits in the morning if someone is watching? I mean, I guess she could watch, but I doubt anyone would want to!
in conclusion, I am likely to remain 5evar alone
Just fall asleep in the warm embrace of each other’s arms, then have your butler and maid servants gently carry you to your separate sleeping quarters, where you can awaken in the morning refreshed and clear headed!
#doesn’t everyone do this
It’s always weird when I see these reblog posts from an account that’s been deactivated It’s like the ghosts of Tumblrs past showing us all that social media, like life, is ephemeral and fleeting. Someone arrives, posts for a bit, and then disappears into the ether, never to be seen or heard from again.
Not me.
I’ve been sentenced here by the government of Earth for my many sins, as punishment.
Philosophy is not engineering, but neither is computer science, at least not the good bits. But that’s a bit of a sidetrack.
By making new universes I meant defining possible worlds, either on paper, or better yet in executable form. These can be humdrum, such as the world of Minecraft, made up of discrete cubes of material with certain laws of interaction, or much more abstract, like a distributed database system where there is no global clock to give a single unambiguous ordering of events, and it is a struggle to achieve a consistent interpretation of the current state for every observer. Or you can go even higher and try and define a dependent type theory that can unify mathematical proof and executable code, which is what we really need.
The interesting thing about these worlds is that we have direct access to the underlying laws and can address questions of object properties and identity directly. Most of them are not reductionist in the way that the real world is, so you can have a chair that literally exists as an independent object that is not made up of smaller parts, and lots of traditional reasoning about object identity then applies.
If we look at a reductionist universe like Conway’s Life, then I think there is not much to say about objects. The only fundamental entities in this universe are grid cells, and the absolute time step that updates them. Influences can propagate through the grid, and particular patterns of cells might be labelled as “objects” while analysing their behaviour, eg. gliders. But this is for notational convenience, we can’t actually learn anything at the object level that we couldn’t learn by studying the underlying cells.
You can create Turing machines in Life, and then you can analyse them as if they were abstract computing devices, ignoring the grid cells. But if a stray glider crashes into the machine, it will break, and the analysis will fail, just as if a chair in the real world caught fire: at some point your mental model would shift from chair, to burning chair, to smouldering remains of what once was a chair, or just pile of unidentified ash.
So there is clearly not much point for philosophers to debate the fundamental nature of Conway’s Life (right? I am assuming this).
The real world is still less well-defined, and there is behaviour we have not yet explained, and laws we have not fully worked out. But I have to draw the line somewhere, and if someone thinks that a chair has existence independently of the particles that make it up, well I don’t really know what to say to them. I mean, the question of what objects are was answered 2500 years ago by Democritus: arrangements of atoms in the void. Even I know that :)
Since there are no intrinsic properties of objects that can’t be dissolved into statements about their component parts, the only reason to have a theory of objects at all is for convenience in modelling and communication. But both of those have specific requirements, there is no single model of objects that will be ideal for every use case. You are going to need a very different model of chairs depending on whether you are talking to a furniture designer, a cafe owner, a Roomba, or a hunter gatherer.
I was speaking in a very compressed way about causal bundling just now, but I wasn’t joking.
A chair has qualities that its subcomponent parts do not, in terms of how it deflects the development of the world towards different directions/timelines vs a non-chair.
In this case, a chair is not an absolute definition, but rather a causal bundle - a cluster within the matter configuration space which has a high probability of producing certain related outcomes.
You can, then, learn something at the object level that you couldn’t by studying the atoms of the chair.
Yes, because it’s causally entangled with arrangements of atoms in the brains of a certain species of ape.
Most possible configurations of matter within the same bounding box are not chairs. And at the atomic level, if you take the same atoms, there are almost infinite permutations within the same macro-scale shape of any given chair that have nearly-indentical outcomes in interacting with the environment. Where we put the boundary around the fuzzy cluster is our choice and to some degree arbitrary, but the cluster itself is legitimate macro-scale information.
only because of the entanglement with us
I disagree. The effect on worldlines is also present for animals and plants, particularly less WRT chairs, and moreso with things like boats or rafts, with the propagation of animals across oceans.
Because of the way those parts work together, an animal is functionally more than the sum of its parts: a wave which the parts ride on.
You can get all the behavior of the animal if you simulate the whole thing at the subatomic level, but that’s because you’re including the wave when you do so. 90% of an animal is quite different from 100% of an animal.
this implies that objects and their boundaries are probabilistic, but in practice this is how we treat them anyway! e.g. chairs vs stools classifying, what counts as part of someone’s body, etc
Philosophy is not engineering, but neither is computer science, at least not the good bits. But that’s a bit of a sidetrack.
By making new universes I meant defining possible worlds, either on paper, or better yet in executable form. These can be humdrum, such as the world of Minecraft, made up of discrete cubes of material with certain laws of interaction, or much more abstract, like a distributed database system where there is no global clock to give a single unambiguous ordering of events, and it is a struggle to achieve a consistent interpretation of the current state for every observer. Or you can go even higher and try and define a dependent type theory that can unify mathematical proof and executable code, which is what we really need.
The interesting thing about these worlds is that we have direct access to the underlying laws and can address questions of object properties and identity directly. Most of them are not reductionist in the way that the real world is, so you can have a chair that literally exists as an independent object that is not made up of smaller parts, and lots of traditional reasoning about object identity then applies.
If we look at a reductionist universe like Conway’s Life, then I think there is not much to say about objects. The only fundamental entities in this universe are grid cells, and the absolute time step that updates them. Influences can propagate through the grid, and particular patterns of cells might be labelled as “objects” while analysing their behaviour, eg. gliders. But this is for notational convenience, we can’t actually learn anything at the object level that we couldn’t learn by studying the underlying cells.
You can create Turing machines in Life, and then you can analyse them as if they were abstract computing devices, ignoring the grid cells. But if a stray glider crashes into the machine, it will break, and the analysis will fail, just as if a chair in the real world caught fire: at some point your mental model would shift from chair, to burning chair, to smouldering remains of what once was a chair, or just pile of unidentified ash.
So there is clearly not much point for philosophers to debate the fundamental nature of Conway’s Life (right? I am assuming this).
The real world is still less well-defined, and there is behaviour we have not yet explained, and laws we have not fully worked out. But I have to draw the line somewhere, and if someone thinks that a chair has existence independently of the particles that make it up, well I don’t really know what to say to them. I mean, the question of what objects are was answered 2500 years ago by Democritus: arrangements of atoms in the void. Even I know that :)
Since there are no intrinsic properties of objects that can’t be dissolved into statements about their component parts, the only reason to have a theory of objects at all is for convenience in modelling and communication. But both of those have specific requirements, there is no single model of objects that will be ideal for every use case. You are going to need a very different model of chairs depending on whether you are talking to a furniture designer, a cafe owner, a Roomba, or a hunter gatherer.
I was speaking in a very compressed way about causal bundling just now, but I wasn’t joking.
A chair has qualities that its subcomponent parts do not, in terms of how it deflects the development of the world towards different directions/timelines vs a non-chair.
In this case, a chair is not an absolute definition, but rather a causal bundle - a cluster within the matter configuration space which has a high probability of producing certain related outcomes.
You can, then, learn something at the object level that you couldn’t by studying the atoms of the chair.
Yes, because it’s causally entangled with arrangements of atoms in the brains of a certain species of ape.
Most possible configurations of matter within the same bounding box are not chairs. And at the atomic level, if you take the same atoms, there are almost infinite permutations within the same macro-scale shape of any given chair that have nearly-indentical outcomes in interacting with the environment. Where we put the boundary around the fuzzy cluster is our choice and to some degree arbitrary, but the cluster itself is legitimate macro-scale information.
Philosophy is not engineering, but neither is computer science, at least not the good bits. But that’s a bit of a sidetrack.
By making new universes I meant defining possible worlds, either on paper, or better yet in executable form. These can be humdrum, such as the world of Minecraft, made up of discrete cubes of material with certain laws of interaction, or much more abstract, like a distributed database system where there is no global clock to give a single unambiguous ordering of events, and it is a struggle to achieve a consistent interpretation of the current state for every observer. Or you can go even higher and try and define a dependent type theory that can unify mathematical proof and executable code, which is what we really need.
The interesting thing about these worlds is that we have direct access to the underlying laws and can address questions of object properties and identity directly. Most of them are not reductionist in the way that the real world is, so you can have a chair that literally exists as an independent object that is not made up of smaller parts, and lots of traditional reasoning about object identity then applies.
If we look at a reductionist universe like Conway’s Life, then I think there is not much to say about objects. The only fundamental entities in this universe are grid cells, and the absolute time step that updates them. Influences can propagate through the grid, and particular patterns of cells might be labelled as “objects” while analysing their behaviour, eg. gliders. But this is for notational convenience, we can’t actually learn anything at the object level that we couldn’t learn by studying the underlying cells.
You can create Turing machines in Life, and then you can analyse them as if they were abstract computing devices, ignoring the grid cells. But if a stray glider crashes into the machine, it will break, and the analysis will fail, just as if a chair in the real world caught fire: at some point your mental model would shift from chair, to burning chair, to smouldering remains of what once was a chair, or just pile of unidentified ash.
So there is clearly not much point for philosophers to debate the fundamental nature of Conway’s Life (right? I am assuming this).
The real world is still less well-defined, and there is behaviour we have not yet explained, and laws we have not fully worked out. But I have to draw the line somewhere, and if someone thinks that a chair has existence independently of the particles that make it up, well I don’t really know what to say to them. I mean, the question of what objects are was answered 2500 years ago by Democritus: arrangements of atoms in the void. Even I know that :)
Since there are no intrinsic properties of objects that can’t be dissolved into statements about their component parts, the only reason to have a theory of objects at all is for convenience in modelling and communication. But both of those have specific requirements, there is no single model of objects that will be ideal for every use case. You are going to need a very different model of chairs depending on whether you are talking to a furniture designer, a cafe owner, a Roomba, or a hunter gatherer.
I was speaking in a very compressed way about causal bundling just now, but I wasn’t joking.
A chair has qualities that its subcomponent parts do not, in terms of how it deflects the development of the world towards different directions/timelines vs a non-chair.
In this case, a chair is not an absolute definition, but rather a causal bundle - a cluster within the matter configuration space which has a high probability of producing certain related outcomes.
You can, then, learn something at the object level that you couldn’t by studying the atoms of the chair.
so when are they going to throw the asexuals out of the military
“Never distracted by the baser instincts of lust or love, asexual aromantics are the perfect potential soldiers,” the man said to the gathered audience, activating his next presentation slide. “My company has developed a new generation three training program based on the analysis of double-A characteristics, and so far our test subjects have had great success.”
“But where will we get these asexual aromantics?” Asked a suited man in the audience.
“My company has arranged to purchase an old web 2.0 company, called Tumblr…”
I think this dust-up on transgender soldiers will actually burn some of Trump’s political capital.
I’ll let you in on something about his power - previously, a lot of these things where he got the media all fired up over something, he had at or near majority support from the actual citizens or it was something most people outside of politics just don’t care about.
This one’s gonna be a lot narrower. The opposition will be able to get some actual traction out of it.
I would favour the transition towards “henchmen” if it weren’t gendered. “Henchpeople” just doesn’t sound right.
Agreed. I think I’m going to go with “henchmen” for the time being, because my interest in language-neutering has frankly been long worn away.
My brief search for a gender-neutral version that was still #the aesthetic returned “cronies” and “toadies”, but I think those would make me sound more liks Richard Nixon than Doctor Doom.
“Underlings” also occured to me, but that puts one in mind of a Dilbert-esque CEO. Hmph.
I reiterate the excellent option of just going with “hench”
Although I am also currently considering henchgirl positions
Henchlings! Because underlings sounds like some kind of exotic lingerie.
In my old organization they were just referred to as “personnel”, because true evil is a faceless and impersonal, like a force of nature.
I’m on my own now, though, and there just isn’t a good word in English for a crew of repurposed salvaged mass-production gynoids held together by duct-tape and deep elastomer patches. I know a few good words for it in Channish, but it just doesn’t have the same ring when you know the audience doesn’t understand it and never will.
I’m not trying to sneak in positivism or anything, it seems entirely natural that if someone says “what is an object” that the reply would be do you mean in the actual world, or what people mean when they say object? I mean it is a strictly more ambiguous question than “what is a boat?”
- is it a watercraft as defined by various legal codes - is it what people intuitively think of when you say the word - is there some perfect logical definition of boatness
The first thing you would say is “why are you asking?” because the reason you ask determines what kind of answer is appropriate, and the question by itself is incomplete.
Boat actually causal probability cluster defined by worldpaths through the set of configurations of matter.
assigned human at birth, but determined to change that.
“I will die immortal.” - Eliezer T. Yudkowsky, possibly, maybe (Rotterdam Timeline)
His middle initial is S
The joke is that he never actually said that, but people would think he did. (As far as I know, he didn’t say that, anyway.) Notice the weird hedging (“possibly, maybe”) which makes no sense for a real quote. (Nor the Rotterdam Timeline. But Rotterdam is a weird timeline tbh.)
Therefore it’s entirely appropriate that the middle initial is wrong.
This was said by the Eliezer Yudkowsky of the Rotterdam timeline, whose middle initial is T, not the Eliezer Yudkowsky of our timeline. Rotterdam can be a pretty brutal timeline, but its civilization has not been lost to nuclear war.
When he died, he wasn’t immortal, but he was a hero.
Abortion actually *could be* pretty fatal. Nobody actually knows what happens to the unbaptized infants, though few people believe that they go to the Bad Place.
I’ve always wondered about much more complicated questions of soul mechanics which, as far as I’m aware, are both unanswered and unintuitive:
New clones from existing tissue.
Forks that somehow make one person into two people.
Actually, I’m reminded that the Ranma ½ anime is chock full of filler, and I’d love to see it get a gritty cyberpunk reboot, because I’m an evil person.
Can confirm from reading Feministe for some time in the early to mid-2000s that "Google it" and "I'm not here to educate you" developed in response to trolling and kind of... expanded outward.
“if you really thought that abortion was murder, you would be starting a civil war over it” ….orrrr, as someone who opposes abortion on the grounds that killing humans is bad, I think killing more humans would also be bad
the baby-adoption argument is the worst argument! people are not having abortions because of a shortage of adoptive parents! there are very, very few people who want to go through all the suckiness of being pregnant without the benefit of having a baby after, if they are not coerced into having an adoption
yes yes yes thank you those arguments make me want to scream every time
I hate the “if you REALLY think it’s murder you’d DO SOMETHING” vs “a doctor who does abortions was assaulted NOT SO PRO-LIFE NOW HUH” dichotomy
(not that it’s okay to assault doctors! obviously!)
abortion seems to be one of the worst issues for ideological turing test passing? “you know perfectly well deep down that you’re murdering babies” vs “you just want to Control Women’s Bodies” or maybe everyone is actually trying to do the right thing!
also, the “why aren’t you distributing contraception then?” argument (because a lot of pro-life people believe that contraception is ALSO morally wrong and that the ends don’t justify the means!)
and the ever-classic “if you’re REALLY pro-life you should be [opposing war/providing post-natal support/fighting malaria/etc]” argument (a lot of pro-life people do??? and also that’s a bad argument when people pull it out against any particular cause??)
[sigh] [/rant]
Agree with this.
Although, it is probably a pretty big testament to the strength of political norms against violence that there aren’t really more cases of violence occurring over this issue. Because the stakes are so high.
I don’t mean that in an “it would be the consistent/good thing to do” way, I mean it in the “I’m surprised that some idiot hasn’t yet given a violent pro life group enough tacit political support/cover to exist as a not completely fringe entity” way. Because politics makes people do stupid things (cf. the antifa types on the left, or the stuff that happened at Trump rallies).
yeah holy shit ‘if you were really pro file you’d go to war, not just trying to change legislation’ vs. ‘pro life person isn’t actually ust talking online and went and killed someone who routinely does abortions? wtf? they’re obviously not REALLY pro life because they took a life of someone who has previously in their mind killed people and plans to kill people in the future, you should do it peacefully’ what do you actually want people who are pro life to do apart from ‘admit that they don’t actually care about babies and one care about controlling women’?
If you’re going to point out contradictions between people’s action and professed beliefs, why not go the other way and point out that according to most of them being aborted isn’t even fatal because it doesn’t destroy the soul? I’m not sure where exactly you would go with that line of argument if you did, but it at least isn’t a call to violence.
Doesn’t matter - it’s against the Will of God according to most Pro-Lifers, and the same people that oppose both abortion and contraception do so for that reason.
Which, the last time I read about why contraception was considered unholy, I remember the reasoning being rather stupid, but if you get rid of that previous ruling it starts unwinding the authority of the rest of the church.
you are a legitimate, bona fide fascist. i bet if i wrapped you in Wonder Woman's lasso of truth rn and told you to vocalize your thoughts it'd be "meta levels of feminist sjw cringe last night when those feminazis got triggered over muh privilege; LUUUL" none of that witty counter signaling you train your rationalist housewife to do for you on normal posts
I know the US has been a global force for insatiable greed, corruption, lust for control, etc. I dont see how encouraging a more "progressive" or inclusive military matters in the grand scheme of things. We should be decreasing the military and discouraging "service," not encouraging everyone to contribute to it. Also, *choosing* to opt into such an organization is far worse than being forced to live in a regulated US economy where choice and alternative economic systems are suppressed by design
It’s an extremely common coastal/affluent american perspective to think it’s best to discourage military service in favour of some other vague alternative, with the idea that it’s inherently for the best with regards to any young man or woman seeking work.
But when the economic core of countless, countless US towns look like this:
How can one simply discourage service? For most communities, it is the only exit from poverty or the only guarantor of stability and planning to establish a family. For many towns the options are fast food, walmart and army. Which do you choose when you want to start a career?
like what are these alternative economic systems you envision without an organization such as the army in the meanwhile?
And then for most, say, transgender people from these communities who headass into the military (be it for muh income security or hypermasculine pursuits to deal with trans denial/awareness), before realizing AW sHiT IM A GILR/GUY, where the fuck else do they turn?
While alot of “progressives” are pissed about this situation, they too often forget that army service isn’t a choice but a necessity in getting out of places like this for reasons inherent to daily threats of violence or bigotry ON TOP of poverty, substance addiction and otherwise. Many people on the left misconstrue military service as a simple “queer rights” issue or something akin to fighting for representation in media when it is entirely more complex than that.
We should be decreasing the military and discouraging “service,” not
encouraging everyone to contribute to it. Also, *choosing* to opt into
such an organization is far worse…
The US armed forces is not an inherently evil organization. The evil arises from schemers in the political strata completely detached from the realities on the front line and the reality in these communities most recruits come from.
A military is a natural and obvious part of any organized nation state. That military doesn’t have to be constantly engaged in warfare. Yall are mad at the army and not the politicians that utilize it to fulfill their agendas.
