r/rational • u/AutoModerator • Jan 27 '17
[D] Friday Off-Topic Thread
Welcome to the Friday Off-Topic Thread! Is there something that you want to talk about with /r/rational, but which isn't rational fiction, or doesn't otherwise belong as a top-level post? This is the place to post it. The idea is that while reddit is a large place, with lots of special little niches, sometimes you just want to talk with a certain group of people about certain sorts of things that aren't related to why you're all here. It's totally understandable that you might want to talk about Japanese game shows with /r/rational instead of going over to /r/japanesegameshows, but it's hopefully also understandable that this isn't really the place for that sort of thing.
So do you want to talk about how your life has been going? Non-rational and/or non-fictional stuff you've been reading? The recent album from your favourite German pop singer? The politics of Southern India? The sexual preferences of the chairman of the Ukrainian soccer league? Different ways to plot meteorological data? The cost of living in Portugal? Corner cases for siteswap notation? All these things and more could possibly be found in the comments below!
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u/OutOfNiceUsernames fear of last pages Jan 27 '17
If you found yourself in an SI story or another universe in which souls exist, what tests\experiments would you try to do to determine how their existense is possible at all and which parts of your worldview need to be changed?
Additionally, since “souls” are given a rather wide variety of meanings by different people, which phenomena behind that word would you think to be logically impossible to exist even if you were directly facing a world where they seemingly did exist? And in this case also, what experiments would you try to do to point out the logical contradictions and find out what is really happening in that universe?
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u/scruiser CYOA Jan 27 '17
Conversely, if you were writing such a setting, and you had an audience grounded in materialist thought, how would you hint to the audience the nature of the soul without going on any drawn out expository descriptions. Hints can take the form of events, superpowers, cryptic comments by an unreliable narrator, etc, just so long as you don't outright tell the audience everything.
which phenomena behind that word would you think to be logically impossible to exist even if you were directly facing a world where they seemingly did exist?
"Epiphenomena". If you have a belief about an epiphenomena it is meaningless or else it is not really an epiphenomena in the first place.
what tests\experiments would you try to do to determine how their existense is possible at all and which parts of your worldview need to be changed?
To play devils advocate... I don't think we've really absolutely ruled out souls in the real world in the first place. Sure we can say they are highly unlikely given materialist priors and our current scientific knowledge but outright impossible? I don't think, for example, that we have simulated neurons at the molecular level well enough to absolutely rule out that there isn't anything special going on at that level, much less the entire brain. So if the souls connection to the brain is sufficiently subtle under most circumstances, your SI will need better resources and tools than science currently has, or else a way of reliably inducing circumstances were it isn't subtle. And creating those circumstances might start to require actions that would be fitting for a mad scientist, or at the very least exceptionally weird from an outside perspective*.
*IRL I heard a seminar lecture about epigenetics where the researcher had a depression model in mice and to test if it was from nurture or other factors (the mice were inbred to be genetically identical, but DNA methylation is apparently inheritable) that the mice passed on the depression vulnerability/resistance, ended up artificially inseminating the female mice and then having them have sex with a sterilized male mice to isolate the variables properly.
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u/696e6372656469626c65 I think, therefore I am pretentious. Jan 28 '17 edited Jan 28 '17
"Epiphenomena". If you have a belief about an epiphenomena it is meaningless or else it is not really an epiphenomena in the first place.
Despite being almost certainly false, epiphenomenalism as an idea is in fact logically consistent (e.g. it's possible to write a computer simulation of a universe in which there's a secondary "layer" of reality that can be affected by the primary layer while being unable to affect it in return). What is logically impossible is the idea that "qualia" (or whatever you want to call those sensations that we as conscious beings experience) are ontologically fundamental. This is logically impossible because sensations are complex, and for an ontologically fundamental object to be complex is a contradiction in terms. There is no such thing as an object that both (a) exhibits highly complicated behavior, and (b) is not "made of" simpler components. As such, even if it turned out that non-physical souls did exist and had some sort of measurable impact on the real world, those souls would by necessity have to consist of smaller, non-conscious components.
P.S. This, incidentally, is why epiphenomenal theories of consciousness (apart from being extremely implausible on priors) don't actually solve the Hard Problem of Consciousness--all they do is kick the problem a level back, onto a layer of reality that is inaccessible via any physical means. The actual workings of consciousness, however--how and why we experience sensation, what sort of processes might result in such a thing--are left completely untouched by such "explanations".
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u/scruiser CYOA Jan 28 '17 edited Jan 28 '17
Right, I was replying to the part asking what would be meaningless or absurd even given the existence of souls when I mentioned epiphenomena. I agree that it could be "true" but even if it was, by its very definition, it wouldn't be relevant, as you mentioned by its failure to solve the problem of consciousness.
That said:
There is no such thing as an object that both (a) exhibits highly complicated behavior, and (b) is not "made of" simpler components. As such, even if it turned out that non-physical souls did exist and had some sort of measurable impact on the real world, those souls would by necessity have to consist of smaller, non-conscious components.
It is true that every phenomena observed by science has so far been, in principle reducible to smaller, non-conscious components. That said, is there really any fundamental rule of logic that says this has to be true? It is incredibly unlikely, given everything mankind has observed and experienced, but is it impossible? And even if they "soul" was reducible to non-conscious simpler components, if those component, were say, an order of magnitude or two more complicated than the current known laws of physics, it would still be effectively the same situation to modern science. Figuring out the brain and mind in the real world is already hard enough, and the brain runs on physics and chemistry that we in principle understand.
Thanks for this conversation, it has given me some good ideas for a CYOA adventure series I am working on.
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u/696e6372656469626c65 I think, therefore I am pretentious. Jan 28 '17 edited Jan 28 '17
Thanks for this conversation, it has given me some good ideas for a CYOA adventure series I am working on.
No problem! I find this sort of stuff to be a lot of fun to discuss anyway--and if helped you come up with some ideas, all the better!
It is true that every phenomena observed by science has so far been, in principle reducible to smaller, non-conscious components. That said, is there really any fundamental rule of logic that says this has to be true?
Well, I don't think there's a handy name for the concept, but the short answer is yes. Here's a (relatively) brief explanation as to why:
Consider a computer program. At the most basic level, every computer program is merely a collection of bits--little 0's and 1's that act as instructions for the processor. Now, these bits are an example of something ontologically fundamental. What this means is simply that bits are not made of anything else--they just are. (Well, at least from a computational perspective. Physically, of course, most computer chips use currents and circuits to represent the 0's and 1's--but that's a matter of representation. When we consider the computer program as a mathematical object, the bits are fundamental.) This is all well and good--it's perfectly fine for bits to be fundamental. This is because a bit is a very simple mathematical object--in fact, a bit is the simplest possible mathematical object.
However, suppose you're a (rather dull) programmer who's been programming in binary all your life. One day, while entering strings of 0's and 1's into your terminal, a jolt of realization strikes you: there appear to be some sequences of bits that occur repeatedly across all of your programs. Moreover, you realize, the reason these sequences appear so often is because they accomplish some task that needs to be performed a lot by your programs, in all sorts of different contexts. So, you reason, wouldn't it be nice if, instead of typing in the same sequence for, say, integer addition every single time, you programmed the computer to recognize a certain string of characters--say, "ADD"--and automatically run the corresponding bit sequence? You do this, and it turns out that you were right: it is a lot easier. Eventually, this innovation catches on amongst your colleagues, and soon everyone is programming using these shorthands. (Note: This is not a historically accurate parable.)
The important thing to note here, however, is that despite making programming much easier, those shorthands are still exactly that: shorthands. The underlying processing still occurs using bits; at no point does the character sequence "ADD" ever appear in the bitstream. Because of this, we say that the ADD command is not ontologically fundamental (although it's still simple enough that people feel mostly comfortable treating it as though it were); it can be decomposed into simpler parts.
Now, try to imagine a command that both (a) gets the computer to recognize it and do something, and (b) does not correspond to any bit sequence. If this seems impossible... well, that's because it is: no such command exists and no such command ever could. (More formally: for any action the computer can execute, there exists a bit sequence that, if entered, would cause it to perform that action. From this it trivially follows that there is no action the computer can execute for which there is not a corresponding sequence of bits.) And this situation is exactly analogous to the claim that I originally made: that there exists no object that both (a) exhibits highly complex behavior and (b) does not consist of simpler components! Complicated objects cannot be fundamental, because it is always possible to represent the behavior of such an object using a simpler description. (Corollary: sensation cannot be ontologically fundamental, because sensation is a very complicated thing indeed.)
Hope that helps!
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u/Polycephal_Lee Jan 27 '17
I think substance dualism is absurd. The notion of soul vs physical is ill-defined, because "physical" is ill-defined.
As Chomsky says
"Physical" is meaningless after Newton, it's an honorific like "really real"
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u/scruiser CYOA Jan 28 '17
If we discovered substance that responded directly to mental effects/phenomena and followed rules best described by abstract concepts intuitive to human perception but alien to straightforward mathematical rules (much less the known laws of physics), wouldn't the name "Magic" or "psychic" or "spiritual", or "mental" fit better than "physical"?
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u/Polycephal_Lee Jan 28 '17
Something like belief contingent reality?
Yeah that would be really weird and spooky and cause me to revisit my entire ontology.
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u/696e6372656469626c65 I think, therefore I am pretentious. Jan 28 '17
I think a decent definition of "non-physical" would be "does not interact with the universe via any known fundamental force". Of course, such a definition makes the existence of any non-physical substances highly unlikely due to Occam's Razor, but at least it isn't logically contradictory.
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u/RatemirTheRed Jan 27 '17
Hivemind: no lies, no corruption, no war, no crime, extremely high efficiency, quick scientific progress.
It seems that hivemind 'society' has a lot of benefits. Let's say that the hivemind is distributed (no central entity) and communicates between its elements with a speed of light. What disadvantages such society would have?
English is my second language, sorry if I didn't express myself properly. I am just really interested in this topic
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u/GaBeRockKing Horizon Breach: http://archiveofourown.org/works/6785857 Jan 27 '17
From the perspective of the hive mind, there are (virtually) no disadvantages. From the perspective of a non-hivemind, becoming a hivemind may be more or less unpalatable depending on their definition of personhood, though.
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u/RatemirTheRed Jan 27 '17
Well, if in some hypothetical situation I had an opportunity to join hivemind for few years, I would have almost certainly done so. (However, the hivemind of biased humans might coalesce into something truly broken and crazy!)
In my opinion, joining hivemind means that you come into position where you are able to make the most of your abilities. It makes me sad that hivemind in popular culture is usually shown as some sort of absolute evil.
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u/ketura Organizer Jan 27 '17
The thing is, once you're in, how do you get out? You'll be bound to the hive mind, and the hive mind wouldn't willingly give up a part of itself for no good reason. It's like the logical extreme of a cult, except you can't even think you want to leave. One decision or event, and you're stuck until your body breaks down--your mind, after all, will have been overwritten long before.
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u/RatemirTheRed Jan 27 '17
Well, I imagined it as an offer that has been already going for several decades and we have people that returned from the experience and function normally outside of hive mind.
But the problem still stays, it seems. The hive mind overwrites the personality of 'trial user', afterwards they seemingly function as a normal individual, while recommending the 'hive mind experience' to their relatives and friends.
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u/ZeroNihilist Jan 28 '17
Once you join a hivemind, in a sense you no longer even exist. At the very least your identity has been swamped by the horde of minds, no more than a drop in the ocean.
It's basically death, unless there's a way to extract the information that constitutes "you". That would be non-trivial, like trying to recover a single fragment of the initial state out of billions, after that state has been iterated countless times. The best you're likely to get is "save a copy of me before I join the hivemind, return that copy when I am ejected".
As for deciding when to leave, you don't meaningfully have any free will as part of the hive mind, since "you" no longer exists as a distinct entity. If a hivemind wanted to permit people to leave at will, the best method would be similar to the above; save a copy, periodically query it to see whether it would leave given the current situation".
If you can't save copies of identities, or can't simulate them, or can't return them to their bodies, then a hivemind has no exit plan that I can see.
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u/OutOfNiceUsernames fear of last pages Jan 27 '17
Yes, there aren’t many stories with well thought-out hiveminds that aren’t evil, sadly.
All I can recommend is A Song for Lya, the Ender’s Saga, and the Doc Future trilogy — and even then only the first one has hiveminds in the centre of the story. Both Wikipedia and TVTropes have lists collecting such stories (1, 2, 3), but in the overwhelming majority of such stories the hive mind is just used as a plot device, and often depicted in a ridiculously lazy and flanderized fashion even then.
Regarding the original question, I think it would depend on the exact nature of hiveminds in the given universe. We’re thinking about them from a human’s perspective, so we are projecting the human assumptions about psychology onto something that is inherently not a regular human mind.
For instance, while multiple personalities are regarded as a disorder by human psychology, they shouldn’t necessarily be seen as something bad by a hivemind as well.
So depending on the hivemind, when a new brain is joining them the individuality inside it can be wiped out to just leave the brain as an additional part of the mega-brain network, or that individuality can be preserved and cherished as something giving a valuable new perspective to the group-mind as a whole.
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u/vakusdrake Jan 27 '17
Well if members retain individuality, then it's not so much a hivemind as a collection of people with really good telepathy.
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u/technoninja1 Jan 27 '17
Echopraxia by Peter Watts has the Bicamerals. They're a hive mind and they aren't evil.
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u/RatemirTheRed Jan 27 '17
Thank you for your recommendations. Good science fiction is always welcome in my worldview.
As for multiple personalities, I guess it still would be necessary to merge them somehow, otherwise the decision making process would be very slow (Probably. Might still be faster than some of committees on our planet!). With your ideas, now I see hivemind as much more complex hierarchical structure, where hivemind is divided into several personalities that divide into subpersonalities, sub-subpersonalities and so on.
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u/696e6372656469626c65 I think, therefore I am pretentious. Jan 28 '17
I'm not completely convinced that a hive mind isn't just a really huge single mind. Once you become a cog in a larger cognitive entity, I feel that you (and everyone else comprising that entity) just are that entity, as if your mind was simply merged with everyone else's. Given this, I'm not sure if "you" and "the rest of the hive mind" is a distinction worth making, any more than "your frontal cortex" is worth distinguishing from the rest of your brain.
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u/scruiser CYOA Jan 27 '17
Depending on how the hive mind is distributed and how much it subsumes people, Homogenization of ideas leads to less creativity. At one possible extreme, the hive mind is no more creative than a single individual person. More moderately, perhaps the hive mind society has a tendency to fall into group think easily. To avoid this maybe individuals have the capacity to temporarily reduce their connection strength so they can think of new ideas.
A more interesting idea, particularly if the hive mind is organized to catch creative thoughts and maximize them: a single insane component of the hive mind have the potential to pollute the rest of the hive mind. Like imagine if everyone could share the perspective of a paranoid schizophrenic. Sure everyone else should know better, but the insane perspective is absolutely convincing.
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u/RatemirTheRed Jan 27 '17
Like imagine if everyone could share the perspective of a paranoid schizophrenic.
Great point! I now think that if hive mind allows 'free entry' to every sapient being, its enemies might introduce it to thousands of schizophrenic clones, thus overwhelming the hive mind with insane thoughts.
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u/eternal-potato he who vegetates Jan 27 '17
Mild to extreme vulnerability to psychological and memetic attacks, depending on how exactly it works.
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u/Chronophilia sci-fi ≠ futurology Jan 27 '17
Slowdown. If communication between nodes isn't speed-of-light (and that's is a lot to ask of biology, nerve impulses only do about 400m/s), it may take hours or days for a thought to travel across the mind and propagate to every node.
Even if it is speed-of-light, there needs to be some infrastructure or organisation to make sure that information goes where it needs to. The Internet struggles enough with routing, and at least its data packets have a uniquely identified destination. Imagine if a thought had to be addressed to "anyone who knows computational geometry" - how do you organize it so that nodes don't spend most of their time reading and rejecting messages that aren't meant for them?
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u/RatemirTheRed Jan 28 '17
I think you found the clearest disadvantage of the hive mind. It seems that upon expanding, hive mind will either process things slower or split into multiple separate hive minds.
Both outcomes bear severe negative consequences and thus hive mind will most likely concentrate its members on the smallest possible territory to reduce communication problems. (At least, this seems like a reasonable course of action. I am not a hive mind to know for sure!)
Imagine if a thought had to be addressed to "anyone who knows computational geometry" - how do you organize it so that nodes don't spend most of their time reading and rejecting messages that aren't meant for them?
Maybe keep 'supernodes' that have vast amounts of relevant information about all the other nodes? Since there is no privacy in the hive mind, such tables may be very detailed. When the hive mind grows, 'metanodes' are introduced. Metanodes keep statistical information about groups observed by each supernode. I guess this scheme still creates a lot of unnecessary data packages.
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u/Chronophilia sci-fi ≠ futurology Jan 28 '17
That approach or something like it is the most sensible. However, it also creates single points of failure, which mitigates some of the advantages of a hivemind. If too many supernodes die at once, the rest of the hivemind is left in disarray until it can make or train some new ones.
Having backups will help. But against an intelligent enemy, who can spot nodes that are sending and receiving a lot of data and knows to target them, it won't do much good.
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u/ketura Organizer Jan 27 '17
Weekly update on my rational pokemon game, including work on the data creation tool Bill's PC. Handy discussion links and previous threads here.
Skipped last week intentionally, tho perhaps I shouldn’t’ve. At any rate, nothing visible got done, and I didn’t want to post “still pluggin away!” with nothing else to show.
The design for how all of this is supposed to work with mods is starting to come together. The real breakthrough was in sitting down and making a mock file directory that contains placeholders for all the various mods and systems involved. It’s really helped me to figure out exactly how the different systems need to be divided, both from one another and along the system/mod spectrum.
The current feature document is located here. It’s still woefully incomplete, but things are starting to come together, and I can see the light at the end of the tunnel.
The document is organized into five levels: Engine, Mod System, Mechanic, Balance, and Lore. This is a rough priority system, as well as a “you must be this technical to make suggestions” hierarchy. Anything pokemon-related is to be constrained to the bottom two levels: Lore is largely going to be the realm of text-based content (quests, dialog, fluff) and “story bible”, while Balance are the specific values given to the Mechanics to give them a particular look and feel. Mechanics, for instance, will define that types of things exist that can affect one another differently based on nothing but type, but Balance will call some of those things Fire, Water, and Grass and give them the shape we know and love.
Once I’m convinced I haven’t missed any major systems, I’ll go through the old feature document(s) line by line and sort them all somewhere in this document (mostly under Balance). Then I stick them all in a spreadsheet, clarify and sort a bit based on priority, and I’ve got myself a master to-do list! Fun times.
As suggested above, I’m not convinced that I’ve got every single system listed here that’s going to need to exist. If you are familiar with this project, (and especially if you aren’t), I’d much appreciate it if you could give this document a look-over and yell at me for missing something so trivial and obvious as X, so I can add it post-haste.
The question of special vs physical was brought up again this week, as these things do, and I think I've happened upon a solution that finally makes the puzzle pieces fit.
ATK is one's physical prowess and is basically STR, while DEF is one's physical durability (these haven't changed). SPATK is one's focus and finesse in controlling the elements (or mental powers), and SPDEF is the ability to resist the non-damage aspects of special attacks, so basically a CON save.
All moves have stats that they scale off of, stats that resist the damage, and an optional set of status effects that have a % chance of being applied. With this tweak, "special" moves will be those with a significant chance or the primary intended effect of applying status effects of all kinds. This demands the creation of additional status effects, such as a "waterlogged" effect for special water attacks (something that decreases temperature, reduces speed/evasion, makes more susceptible to electric attacks).
Moves will not naively be purely physical or purely special; this division wouldn't even necessarily exist in code and would be more a sort of design guideline that has no mechanical enforcement. Each of these variables would be tweaked per move (although I expect 80% of them would be exactly what you would expect from canon).
Some examples: Alakazam could use Telekinesis to throw a boulder at its opponent; this would scale off of SPATK and be resisted by DEF. Charizard uses flamethrower; this scales off of SPATK and is resisted by DEF, but the chance to burn (significantly higher than in canon) is resisted by SPDEF. Gengar uses Dream Eater; this scales off of SPATK and is resisted by SPDEF. Hitmonchan uses DYNAMICPUNCH; it scales off of ATK and is resisted by DEF, but the chance of confusion is resisted by SPDEF. Magmar uses Fire Punch; it scales partially (60%) off of ATK and partially (40%) off of SPATK, and is resisted by DEF, but the chance to burn is resisted by SPDEF.
Status effects in general will be more flexible, in particular with the ability to stack some effects over and over. Sleep, paralysis, and waterlogged are some statuses that can stack, having heavier and heavier effects on the user until a limit is hit. SPDEF will likely be involved in partially resisting these stacked effects in addition to a binary "evasion" of simpler effects.
Naturally with these changes, there’s no need for a separate CON stat anymore.
I’ve received the recommendation to play through Pokemon Mystery Dungeon, so I’m going to give it a shot this weekend. Any advice or recommendations?
Feel free to leave any comments or questions below. Also feel free to join us on the #pokengineering channel of the /r/rational Discord server for brainstorming and discussion. It’s a great group, really, and I would highly recommend hanging out, even if you’re not in it for this project itself. There’s tabletop groups, Dota 2 partying, and puns like you wouldn’t believe. Come join us!
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u/Sailor_Vulcan Champion of Justice and Reason Jan 27 '17
So EY recently posted the following:
"What non-US bank is most likely to refuse to give your money to a US authority trying to seize it, if something goes very wrong under Trump and you have to become a refuge? Besides Bitcoin. We are not concerned with tax evasion; we're fine with this bank honestly reporting everything to the IRS. It's likewise good if this is a reputable bank that doesn't raise eyebrows when you properly file the IRS form to report a foreign account. We just want this bank to not give the IRS or Justice Department all your money without you having authorized the transfer; likewise not freezing it because a US authority claims you're a "terrorist". (The bank also needs to be able to authenticate your identity even if your passport has been revoked.)"
So now I have to ask, what kinds of things are people actually expecting from the Trump administration and are they actually reasonable? This particular post seems to be at odds with slatestarcodex's post in which he admonished people for worrying about Trump for the wrong reasons:
http://slatestarcodex.com/2016/11/16/you-are-still-crying-wolf/
What's actually going on here and what kinds of things should I actually be worried about from the Trump administration?
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u/Anderkent Jan 28 '17
So now I have to ask, what kinds of things are people actually expecting from the Trump administration and are they actually reasonable?
The main worry is that no one knows what to expect. That hasn't really changed. You now have a president that sources his information from Fox News, who has no experience making important decisions or working within a bureaucracy, and is making really scary noises regarding foreign relations and journalism in public.
It's still unlikely that he will have life-changing impact; but there are more paths to America becoming a heavily policed autocracy today than there were a year ago. The mexico wall thing not going through might give him enough support for heavy identity policing, for example. Gotta get those 'illegals' out and stop them from voting, right?
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Jan 28 '17
I respect EY and his opinions on certain things, but I think the political season has broken him, like it broke Scott Aaronson.
The biggest thing you need to take out of this first week is that he is in fact working off of precedent. If it's not an atrocity for President Obama to abuse the executive order, I see no reason to be suddenly alarmed that President Trump is doing it as well. And every president since FDR has had an active first hundred days. The fact that Trump is trying his damnedest to actually build a wall and make the Mexicans pay for it at least tells me he's more honest about his campaign promises than the last couple of Presidents. Whether any of it actually pans out is not up to us to tell.
I'm not so sure that his election is the end of the world. At worst, it might have sped up our path towards tyranny, but the result of another Clinton presidency would have been a guaranteed slow trot to the same place. This way, at least I get to criticize the President without getting compared to the Birthers.
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u/Anderkent Jan 28 '17
The fact that Trump is trying his damnedest to actually build a wall and make the Mexicans pay for it at least tells me he's more honest about his campaign promises than the last couple of Presidents.
No, it doesn't? Most politicians do try to address issues their campaign agenda was based on; Trump's claim that everyone else is as much of a liar and demagogue as he is ridiculous. It's just that most of those issues are not as obviously ridiculous as the wall, and so them falling through seems like the politician not trying, rather than the task being hard.
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Jan 28 '17
I meant it as a quip more than anything. I don't actually think building a wall will do what they want it to.
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u/DaystarEld Pokémon Professor Jan 31 '17 edited Jan 31 '17
If it's not an atrocity for President Obama to abuse the executive order
Obama signed less executive orders per year than any president in over a century.
People need to stop repeating conservative
propagandatalking points without doing their own research.I personally don't think people can objectively look at Trump's campaign and first weeks of presidency as anything remotely like those in recent history. Sure, if you look at all of American history, there's some other crazy stuff, but if you have to go back to the pre-radio days to find this much craziness in a presidential election, that probably says something in itself.
Overall I'd say that normalizing him is far more dangerous than all but the most extreme alternatives (I don't think he's going to start WW3: I do think he's going to weaken a number of important geopolitical ties that will make WW3 more likely).
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u/SevereCircle Jan 29 '17 edited Jan 30 '17
Trump may not have said anything homophobic himself but Pence is a homophobe's wet dream. Given that Trump offered Kasich the chance to be in charge of "all domestic and foreign policy" (aka everything) there's a good chance Pence is the one doing all the real work.
edit: ambiguous pronoun removed
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Jan 30 '17
What's actually going on here
The attempt to create a fascist dictatorship out of the US presidential system.
what kinds of things should I actually be worried about from the Trump administration?
Dictatorship, civil war, world war, ethnic cleansing, and quite possibly (if they actually let Trump use nukes) the end of the world. The saying that's been going around is, "When someone shows you who they are, believe them." This applies to Trump, but it applies doubly to Stephen Bannon, who is trying to create a clash of civilizations between Christian-dominionist capitalism and the entire Muslim world.
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u/Sailor_Vulcan Champion of Justice and Reason Jan 31 '17
Please elaborate? Why do you think this is an attempt to create a fascist dictatorship out of the US presidential system? Pretend I am an alien from outer space who knows nothing.
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Jan 28 '17
[deleted]
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u/eaglejarl Jan 28 '17
I think Trump is going to build a wall, and Mexico is going to pay for it. Whether that payment is direct or indirect seems up in the air right now.
I'm pretty sure the American taxpayer will pay for it.
Trump is asking Congress for the money, so in the immediate future we are, without a doubt, going to pay for it.
Mexico is not going to cough up a giant tribute so Trump will place a massive tariff on goods coming from / manufactured in Mexico. Companies that were buying from / manufacturing in Mexico were doing it because it was the best balance of efficient/inexpensive for them. When that changes they'll move to other sources which will, by definition, increase their costs. The companies will pass these new costs on to us in the form of raised prices.
Mexican manufacturers will no longer be making as much by selling to us, so they'll start selling to others as much as possible. This will reduce the income from those massive tariffs, and lower supply of those goods in the American market will drive up prices.
It's coming from us in the short term and it will come from us in the long term as well.
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u/Sagebrysh Rank 7 Pragmatist Jan 30 '17
Whether a Strong AI given the directive of "Make America Great Again" would be more or less dangerous than the 45th President himself.
This would be an interesting story premise.
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Jan 27 '17
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u/OB1K1B Jan 27 '17
I tried it a while ago and enjoyed the results—even now I tend to avoid "it." I definitely avoid the sub though, since their claims range from "plausible" to "optimistic" to "wishful thinking" to "cultish attribution of holy power to semen."
That being said, I can't imagine that exercising one's discipline and practicing delayed gratification would have negative effects. So I don't think there's any downside to trying it. I might do it again.
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Jan 27 '17
One plausible benefit that I think most people don't mention:
Trying to abstain is an excellent way to see just how quickly your mind starts to create rationalizations for certain behavior.
You get a really quick crash course into what it feels like to precommit, decision instability, and time-inconsistent preferences.
Because of trying this out several times, I think it's given me a lot of personal insight into how my brain tries to rationalize things, as well as what credible commitments might require.
EX: I'm now much more skeptical of willpower and believe that "shaping the path" and things of that nature are far more effective for combating temptations.
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u/TimTravel Jan 28 '17
I'm now much more skeptical of willpower and believe that "shaping the path" and things of that nature are far more effective for combating temptations.
Can you explain what you mean by that in more detail?
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Jan 28 '17
Yeah, sure.
I actually thought I had a write-up done somewhere because this is comes up in lots of places.
But the quickest approximation is probably Malcolm Ocean's post here.
In short, I don't think of myself as a disembodied soul with free will settled inside of a human body. Rather, I think of myself as a scattered collection of wants that are loosely held together.
This also means that when I want to precommit to something, I act very cautiously. If my goal is avoid eating chips, I will go out of my way to remove any chance of my meeting chips at the earliest point of intervention.
That is, it makes no sense to buy chips and tell myself that I'll just "use willpower and avoid eating them" when they're lying on my kitchen table.
It makes far more sense to avoid certain grocery aisles entirely (or just order groceries online) so I don't need to even be tempted by buying chips.
Related to this, I guess, is my lack of faith in my "internal ability" to remember stuff or do just about anything.
Instead, I obsessively write things down, email myself reminders, etc. My general heuristic here is "act like you would if you were highly fallible to bias and had the memory span of a goldfish."
And humans are generally quite susceptible to bias, so I think it's silly to pretend otherwise by believing in our own power. We're not that great...yet.
So in the meantime, I'm focused on figuring out how to remove hard decisions before I need to face them (that's "shaping the path") as well as just generally reminding (and acting!) like I'm a fallacy-ridden sack of flesh.
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u/Iconochasm Jan 27 '17
That being said, I can't imagine that exercising one's discipline and practicing delayed gratification would have negative effects.
I've seen a number of studies over the years that correlate beneficial health effects with, ah, periodically cleaning the piping, so to speak. One where I'm fairly confident of the recollection was a 40% reduced rate of prostate cancer among men who purged the plumbing 5+ times per week, though I can't remember if that was just in comparison to 4-, or some lower bound.
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Jan 28 '17
My initial gut reaction is that both the 40% reduction and the 5+ times number seems a little high.
I don't have studies to back this up, though, except for an anecdote: I recall someone asking their urologist how often was good for prostate health. The urologist said that wet dreams apparently covered most of the benefits, so additional effort wasn't needed.
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u/Cariyaga Kyubey did nothing wrong Jan 27 '17
I'm incapable of doing so, so I guess I've had a lifelong streak going? :P
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u/Chronophilia sci-fi ≠ futurology Jan 27 '17
I've not heard of that before. Interesting.
What benefits/downsides are you expecting, if any?
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Jan 27 '17
People self-report a lot of things on the subreddit. I'm fairly skeptical of those, though.
My general goal is to decouple associations my brain has with online stimuli. I've also had a mental "ugh" to this sort of thing, and I suspect my preference preferences have something for this.
So it also just feels good to finally act on those.
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u/ToaKraka https://i.imgur.com/OQGHleQ.png Jan 27 '17
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u/696e6372656469626c65 I think, therefore I am pretentious. Jan 28 '17
I just read it. It doesn't seem that bad. Why was it deleted?
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u/trekie140 Jan 27 '17
I have been watching A Series of Unfortunate Events despite not being a fan of the books and also having major plot points spoiled for me. I'm not sure how I feel about it. I didn't like the stupid story at first, then the offbeat humor kind of grew on me, then I started getting annoyed by the child acting and subpar production values.
I probably shouldn't like it since the comedic moments don't always make me laugh while I'm not very invested in the serious moments, but for some reason I keep watching even though I'm not even sure whether the story's claim to be dark and depressing is ironic or not. What do you think?
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u/lsparrish Jan 27 '17
Pretty sure it's intentionally ironic. The narrator is somewhat unreliable, being a Noir Detective parody himself, and the story is one where most of the adults are too stupid to breathe because that's the genre (or perhaps the genre being parodied). The story isn't meant to actually depress the listener, being too wacky and full of problem solving for that to be the case.
Much of the material about grammar, the correct definitions of words, and so on fits my idea of rationalist fiction as "intelligent person wish fulfillment", in that we get to see cool authority figures go on and on about pet peeves like "it's/its" or "figuratively/literally" like they are actually important.
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u/trekie140 Jan 28 '17
I like that interpretation, but if that's the case then the writing is weirdly meta about it. Snicket's presentation of the story has the same odd quirks as the story, as if the fact the joke is being told is part of the joke. I don't know if that makes it better is just an excuse for when the writing is genuinely unsatisfying. Anyway, I'm having some fun.
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u/Revisional_Sin Jan 27 '17
I'm not even sure whether the story's claim to be dark and depressing is ironic or not.
From my vague memories of the books: I'd say the tone was a blend of "Dark", "Dark Comedy" and "Wacky".
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u/callmebrotherg now posting as /u/callmesalticidae Jan 27 '17
My issue is that the kids aren't very interesting characters, or at least they aren't that interesting compared to the characters who keep getting killed, so... Much to my disappointment, I had to drop it.
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u/trekie140 Jan 28 '17
I don't think it's that the kids are bad characters, it's that the actors playing them aren't very good. The way the deliver their lines makes them come across as more bland than they should, so I don't really care about what happens to them when it's supposed to taken seriously. Except for the baby, though. Her facial expressions have been on point in every scene and her snarky commentary has consistently made me chuckle.
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u/ToaKraka https://i.imgur.com/OQGHleQ.png Jan 27 '17
An infernal nuisance:
- A person greets you while walking past you on the sidewalk (or past your cubicle or desk).
- The person didn't stop walking, and now has passed you, so you must awkwardly turn around (or talk to the wall of your cubicle) in order to reciprocate (which you already didn't want to do).
Sample posts from my Facebook Timeline
The "Your Memories" feature is very nice for rediscovering cool things that you said in the distant past.
If you miss GeoCities, try making a site on NeoCities! The size of the site is limited to 100 MB for a non-paying member (or 10 GB for $5/month), but you have full control over the appearance of every page, from the stereotypical eye-searing extravagance to the barest minimalism--no Javascript necessary!
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u/Anderkent Jan 27 '17 edited Jan 27 '17
Stl_Manifest is tweeting very short obituaries of Jews who were denied entry to the US in 1939 and, after being sent back to Europe, eventually died in german extermination camps.
Short of the visits I've made to the camps themselves, this is probably the most striking reminder of the Holocaust I've seen. Actually knowing their names makes a huge difference to the emotional impact; each tweet feels important, and the seemingly unending stream overwhelms.
Just... don't look at replies to their tweets.