Where is all the furry AI porn you'd expect to be generated with PonyDiffusion, anyway?
From my experience, it's on Telegram groups (maybe Discord ones too, but I don't use it myself). There are furries who love to generate hundreds of images around a certain theme, typically on their own desktop computers where they have full control and can tweak parameters until they get what they wanted exactly right. They share the best ones, sometimes with the recipes. People comment, and quickly move on.
At the same time, when someone gets something with meaning at...
People comment, and quickly move on.
That's the problem, of course, and why it can't replace the mainstream sites. It's trapped in fast mode and has no endurance or cumulative effect. So it sounds like there is plenty of demand (especially allowing for how terrible Telegram is as a medium for this), it's just suppressed and fugitive - which is what we would expect from the cartel model.
...At the same time, when someone gets something with meaning attached, such as a drawing they commissioned from an artist they like, or that someone gifted them, it has mo
This probably doesn't generalize beyond very niche subcultures, but in the one I'm a member of, the Furry Fandom, art drawn by real artists is such a core aspect that, even though furries use generative AI for fun, we don't value it. One reason behind this is that, different from more typical fandoms, in which members are fans of something specific made by a 3rd party, in the Furry Fandom members are fans of each other.
Give that, and assuming the Furry Fandom continues existing in the future, I expect members will continue commissioning art from each other...
I was surprised to hear this, given how the fur flew back when we released This Pony Does Not Exist & This Fursona Does Not Exist, and how well AstraliteHeart went on to create furry imagegen with PonyDiffusion (now v6); I don't pay any attention to furry porn per se but I had assumed that it was probably going the way regular stock photos / illustrations / porn / hentai were going, as the quality of samples rapidly escalated over time & workflows developed - the bottom was falling out of the commission market with jobs cratering and AI-only 'artis...
I'd like to provide a qualitative counterpoint.
Aren't these arguments valid for almost all welfare programs provided by a first-world country to anyone but the base of the social pyramid? For one example, let's take retirement. All the tax money that goes into paying retirees to do nothing would be much better spent by helping victims of malaria etc. in 3rd world countries. If they weren't responsible enough to save during their working years to be able to live without working for the last 10 to 30 years of their lives, especially those from the lower midd...
When this person goes to post the answer to the alignment problem to LessWrong, they will have low enough accumulated karma that the post will be poorly received.
I don't think this is accurate, it depends more on how it's presented.
In my experience, if someone posts something that's controversial to the general LW consensus, but argues carefully and in details, addressing the likely conflicts and recognizing where their position differs from the consensus, how, why, etc., in short, if they do the hard work of properly presenting it, it's well receive...
The answer is threefold.
a) First, religious and spiritual perspectives are a primarily a perceptual experience, not a set of beliefs. For those who have this perception, the object of which is technically named "the numinous", it is self-evident. The numinous stuff clearly "is there", for anyone to see/feel/notice/perceive/experience/etc., and they cannot quite grasp the concept of someone saying they notice nothing.
Here are two analogies of how this works.
For people with numinal perception, hearing "it's pretty, but that's all" is somewhat similar to some...
I mean sure if you take self-reports as the absolute truth (...)
Absolute truth doesn't exist, the range is always ]0;1[. 0 and 1 require infinitely strong evidence. What imprecisions in self-reporting do generate is higher variance, skewing, bias etc., and these can be solved by better causal hypotheses. However, those causal hypotheses must be predictive and falsifiable.
why go with the convoluted point about aro-ace trans women (...)
Because that's central to the falsifiability requirement. Consider: if transgender individuals explicitly telling res...
Feels like an example of bad discourse that you dismiss it on the basis of ace trans women without responding to what Blanchardians have to say about ace trans women.
Thanks for the link, but I'd say the text actually confirms my point rather than contradicting it. The numbers referred to:
"In this study, Blanchard (...) found that 75% of his asexual group answered yes. Similarly, Nuttbrock found that 67% of his asexual group had experienced transvestic arousal at some point in their lives. (...) 45.2% of the asexuals feel that it applies at least a littl...
Yep, the idea autogynephilia explains transgender identities can be shown to be false by referring a single piece of direct evidence: it isn't difficult to find aro-ace trans people. That right there shows autogynephilia isn't a universal explanation. It may apply to some cases, maybe, but transgender identities definitely go way beyond that.
Besides, but also mainly, we have evidence for physiological causes:
Which texts is Hegel responding too? Is it ultimately rooted in Aristotle/Plato/Socretes? How much work does one have to do to get up to speed?
I'm not well versed in Hegel's philosophy, but I know he does three things (and probably more).
First, he builds upon Kant, who himself is moving against all philosophy that came before him and refunding the entire thing so as to be compatible with modern scientific inquiry.
Second, he changes the concept of truth, from static to dynamic, not in the sense that what we think is true may be wrong and so we fix our kn...
... this quote ... was used by Scott Alexander in his Nonfiction Writing Advice as an example of entirely
unreadableabstract paragraph.
It isn't unreadable. Hegel is arguing with concepts from previous philosophies which he presumes the reader already knows and understands well. If one begins reading him possessing the prerequisite knowledge one can understand him just fine. Besides, this is a point in the middle of a long discussion, so he already presumes the reader understood the previous points and is connecting the dots.
Great philosophers are great...
Either that, or instead this happens. I guess by this point we're in Schrödinger's Cat territory:
Humans also bottleneck the maritime side of cargo shipments via artificial scarcity in the form of cartels and monopolies. The referred $2k shipments could have costed even less, but there's rent capture in it driving final transportation prices higher than they could be, and payments to on the ground operators lower than those, too, could be, the resulting spread going into the hands of the monopolists who successfully work around legal impositions from as many jurisdictions as possible.
I wouldn't say it's a matter of validity, exactly, but of suitability to different circumstances.
In my own personal ethics I mix a majority of Western virtues with a few Eastern ones, filter them through my own brand of consequentialism in which I give preference to actions that preserve information to actions that destroy it, ignore deontology almost entirely, take into consideration the distribution of moral reasoning stages as well as which of the 20 natural desires may be at play, and leave utilitarian reasoning proper to solve edge cases and gray areas.
The Moriori massacre is precisely one of the references I keep in mind when balancing all of these influences into taking a concrete action.
This analysis shows one advantage virtue ethics has over utilitarianism and deontology with its strong focus on internal states as compared to these and their focus on external reality. And it also shows aspects of the Kohlbergian analysis of the different levels of cognitive complexity possible in the moral reasoning of moral agents. Well done!
One concrete example I like to refer to is the Maori massacre of the Moriori tribe. The Moriori were radical non-violence practitioners who lived in their own island, to the point even Gandhi would be considered too...
Thanks. Now I'm torn between my own take and a possibly improved version of this one. :-)
Thanks for this review. I have done evil in the past due to similar reasons the author points. Not huge evils, smaller evil, but evils nonetheless. Afterwards I learned to be on guard against those small causal chains, but even so, even having began being on guard, I still did evil one more time afterwards. I hope my future rate will go down to zero and stay there. We'll see.
By the way, an additional factor not mentioned in the review, and thus, I suppose, on the book, is the matter of evil governments manipulating the few who are good so they, too, serve ...
"The Worst Mistake in the History of Ethics"
I'm curious what GPT-3 would output for this one. :-)
PS: And I have my own answer for that: Aristotle's development of the concept of eudaimonia, "the good life", meaning the realization of all human potential. For him it was such a desirable outcome, so valuable, that it's existence justified slavery, since those many working allowed a few to realize it. Advance 2,400 years of people also finding it incredibly desirable, and we end up with, among others, Marx and Engels defending revolutionary terror, massacres, and mass political persecution so that it could be realized for all, rather than for a few.
The Worst Mistake in the History of Ethics is a book by philosopher Peter Singer. It has been published in the United Kingdom, the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa. It was also published in Germany in 2004 with the title "Der größte Fehler der Geschichte der Ethik".
In this book, Singer attacks what he calls "the myth of sanctity," which he says pervades discussions of ethical issues. He asserts that there is no such thing as a human being who is essentially holy or sacred, and that any being that has a capacity to suffer is en...
I personally think quotation-over-punctuation would solve this nicely. Here's an example from someone who managed to have his TeX documents do exactly that:
Minor curiosity: originally, back in old printing days, quotations marks went neither before nor after punctuation marks, but above these, after all, it's a half-height symbol with empty space below it, and another half-height symbol with empty space above it, so both merged well into a single combined glyph, saving space.
When movable types entered the picture almost no types set had unified quotation+punctuation types, so both were physically distinct symbols that needed a sequence when placed on the printing board. Over time the US mostly settled with pu...
I'm intrigued – google gives only porn videos as search results.
The tongue is very sensitive. A very skilled kisser knows how to intensely stimulate the top of their partner's tongue with theirs while French kissing, to the point one or both of them get a very specific kind of orgasm different from any other. In my case I got spasms while washed in endorphins, which took several minutes to subside. :-)
Also, I assume you mean a P-spot orgasm when you say "female orgasm"?
No, I mean actual female orgasm. I can provide exactly zero evidence for this, wh...
Ditto, or more precisely, no one from my graduation class has any interest in paying for one, so we all got our certificates by mail. I suppose it helps that most everyone was 30+, and the major was Philosophy, neither of which predisposes one to care much about such things, much less when put together.
Looking at the pain scale, I guess I'm somewhat atypical. On the pleasurable experiences I had, I'd order them such:
(Yes, I've had the last one despite being 100% a cis-male....
That depends. Several metaphysical systems develop ontologies, with concepts such as "objects" and "properties". Couple that with the subfield of Applied Metaphysics, which informs other areas of knowledge by providing systematic means to deal with those foundations. So it's no surprise that one such application, several steps down the line, was the development of object-oriented programming with its "objects possessing properties" ordered in "ontologies" via inheritance, interfaces and the like.
Thanks! And done! :-)
I've tried adding spoiler tags, but it isn't working. According the FAQ for Markdown it's three colons and the word "spoiler" at the beginning, followed by three colons at the end, but no luck. Any suggestion?
I think that was the one, yes. It's been years and I forgot the name.
I'll add the tags, thanks!
There's a Naruto fanfic (much better than the actual manga, mind) with this trope, except the author adds a cool extra at the end. In that, it turns out one with looping power only goes back to the same point in time because
they haven't learned how to set a new, so to speak, "save point". This mechanic became clear to the characters after they had decades of experience in child bodies, so that they began to carefully plan the world they wanted to have, and exhaustively time looped until they managed to set things perfectly aligned for the next stage of their plan, at which point they "saved", and went for it.
To complement @Dagon's comment, another difficulty is that Skepticism itself is also a philosophical model, which can be taken either as merely epistemological, or as a metaphysical model unto itself, so the initial 1:1 model actually giving Skepticism a 50% prior vs. all other models. And then we have some relatively weird models such as Nominalism, which is metaphysically skeptical except for affirming, atop a sea of complete no-rules free-formness, the absolute will of an absolute god who decides everything just because.
Fun detail: my Philosophy major f...
This was extremely informative! Thank you!
A few points I'd like to comment on:
"So eager were poor farmers for dirty, dangerous factory jobs (...)"
There's an underlying question on why those farmers were that poor and such dire need for those factory jobs. One reason I've seen given was in Hillaire Belloc's 1912 book The Servile State, one of the first books of the Distributist school of economics. According him, the end of the feudal system in England, and its turning into a modern nation-state, involved among other things the closing off and appropria...
I have the impression you're confounding the terms "freedom" and "democracy", themselves quite broad. The contents of your post suggest what you're seeking is to live in a country that are representative liberal democracies, and whose electoral process results in specific representativeness quotients, as well as in other specific features. But that doesn't exactly overlap with any specific notion of "freedom", such as that of "true freedom", unless you also were to provide a specific definition of both.
I imagine you're going to find a better response if you were to taboo the words "democracy", "freedom", and "true freedom", so as to restate what you're seeking in more objective, concrete terms.
I can vouch for Aigent's effectiveness! It even help with hobbies! Why, over the last month it earned me about +30 karma on LW alone!
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About this:
People reproduce at an exponential rate. The amount of food we can create is finite. Population growth will eventually outstrip production. Humanity will starve unless population control is implemented by governments.
The calculation and the predictions were correct until the 1960's, including very gloomy views that wars around food would begin happening by the 1980's. What changed things was the Green Revolution. Weren't for this technological breakthrough no one could actually have predicted, and right now we might be looking back at 40 yea...
You're welcome. There's a stronger continuity if you look at pre-modern Catholicism and Orthodoxy, but yes, Christianity changed a lot over time.
By the way, something that may help you locate your own personal moment in your relation towards the religious teachings you received are in light of Piaget's theory of cognitive development, Kohlberg's theory of stages of moral development, and Fowler's theory of stages of faith development, as these helped me understand my own. They build one atop the other in this same sequence, Fowler's depending on Kolhberg's...
There is an element of submission, but originally it meant submission of the will to the knowledge of those who know better even when what they say goes counter your base interests.
For example, going back to praus/taming/meekness, one reference Jesus use is that of his "yoke" being easy and with a light load. Yoke is a U-shaped bar used to fix two draft animals together, so they can pull loads together. One way animal trainers used back then (and maybe still use today) to train an animal in a new job is to fix his neck on one side of a yoke, and on the oth...
The English work "meek" is a problematic translation of the original Greek "praus". Praus refers to a wild animal who's been tamed, the connotation being that such a person hasn't lost the virtue of strength of their wild nature, but added to it the virtue of civilized interaction, similar to how a tamed animal learns to do things their wild counterparts would never do.
This links to several other similar notions spread through the New Testament. For example, when Jesus:
a) Tells his disciples to be "harmless as doves" but "wise as serpents";
b) When he order...
Regarding 1 and 3, good points, and I agree.
On 2, when I say formalizable, I mean in terms of giving the original arguments a symbolic formal treatment, that is, converting them into formal logical statements. Much of non-analytic philosophy has to do with criticizing this kind of procedure. For an example among many, check this recent one from a Neo-Thomistic perspective (I refer to this one because it's fresh on my mind, I read it a few days ago).
On 4, maybe a practical alternative would be to substitute vaguer but broader relations, such as "agrees", "p...
My comments:
That's actually not the case. Analytic Philosophy is preeminent in the US and, to some extent, the UK. Everywhere else it's a topic that one learns among others, and usually in a secondary and subsidiary manner. For example, I majored in Philosophy in 2009. My university's Philosophy department, which happens to be the most important in my country and therefore the source of that vast majority of Philosophy undergraduates and graduates who then go on to influence other Philosophy departments, was founded by Continental philosophers, and rema
It seems to me this would work for Analytic Philosophy, but not for other philosophical traditions. For instance:
a. Continental Philosophy has, since Heidegger (or, arguably, Husserl) taken a turn away from conceptual definitions towards phenomenological descriptions, so anything concept-based is subject, as a whole, to all manners of phenomenological criticisms;
b. Classic Philosophy frequently isn't formalizable, with its nuclear terms overlapping in a very interdependent manner, the same applying to some Modern ones. Splitting them into separate concepts...
These a few problems with that. One is that you just figured out how the universe works without examining the the universe. Another is that it you can't get MWI out if it...unless you regard it as a statement only about subjective probability.
I'm not sure I understood these two points. Can you elaborate?
The unstated part of the argument being that free will must be neither-deterministic nor probabilistic?
Actually, the state part. It's my original comment. Although maybe I wasn't as clear as I thought I was about it.
...I know what "reductionism" means
the branching structure as whole is deterministic, not that the branches are individually.
That depends on how you consider probabilities. One usual take, when it comes to concrete events, is that the probability of something that actually happened is 1.0, since it actually happened. Therefore, when you look at a sequence of causes and events backwards, that is, as history, this after-the-fact sequence is always strictly deterministic even if every single one of its links had a less-than-1.0 probability of happening before it actually happened in that sp...
That's a contradiction in terms
Not really. The sentence you split forms a single reasoning. The first part is the claim, the second is the justification for the claim. You can read them in reverse if you prefer, which would gives it a more syllogistic form.
Which? Logical or causal?
Both, since causal determinism is logically modelled. More specifically, causal determinism is a subset and a consequence of logical determinism, which is inherent to all forms of logical reasoning, including this one.
...In any case, the point of causal determinism is that
Formal logic, mathematics, informal deductive reasoning, algorithmics etc. are all interchangeable for the effects of my point, and usually also mutually translatable. Using any of them to model reality always yields a deterministic chain even when probabilistic paths are involved, because on can always think of these as branching in a manner similar to MWI: starting from such and such probabilities (or likelihoods, if the question is about one's knowledge of the world rather than about the world itself) we end up with a causal tree, each of whose branches...
"Probably most ambitious people are starved for the sort of encouragement they'd get from ambitious peers"
This, I think, is one of the roots of smart people getting into weird stuff. Contrarians, contra-cultural types, conspiracy theorists (the inventors, not the believers) and the like are usually very smart, they just don't optimize their smarts in a good direction, so a newly minted smart person will feel attracted to them. The end result are very suboptimal communities of smart individuals going in all kinds of weird directions.
That's my case, mind....
I would VERY strongly argue this place also lacks brakes.
A fundamental difficulty in thinking logically about free will is that it involves thinking logically.
Logic, by its very nature, has embedded as its most essential hidden premise a deterministic structure. This makes all reasoning chains, no matter what their subject (including this one), to be deterministic. In other words, a deterministic structure is imposed upon the elements that will be logically analyzed so that they can be logically analyzed.
This leads one, if they ignore this structure is present as the very first link in chain, then proceeds to an...
I wonder if more positive encounters would help gradually change the bias, also for your own well-being (...)
Ah! I have plenty of extremely positive experiences with black people, from black friends, to coworkers, to acquaintances, to (awesome!) teachers, to college friends. For me, people are all individuals, no exception, and I cannot think in terms of groups or collectivities even if I tried forcing myself to do so. As such, I have always been extremely careful not to allow this irrational trigger to affect anything real, and this is why I described ...
Which subcultures are these?
The furry fandom and the otherkin community here in Brazil.
It's okay if you don't want to answer.
Nah, I'm an open book. I make a point of not keeping secrets unless absolutely necessary. There's no risk in doxing if you yourself provide the doxa beforehand. ;-)
I would indeed be interested in your mention of this sort of thing having "changed in a bad way".
Well, in my case it came due to robbery. Until my late teens / early adulthood I was robbed four times, which wasn't uncommon in the region of Brazil I lived at the time (crime rates have diminished a lot in the intervening decades). From those, three were by black thieves, blacks being a very discriminated-against group here, even if not as much as in the US. The third time has caused in me what I suppose I could describe as a "micro-PTSD", because from tha...
I'm not sure what it means for a newborn to be transgendered.
Over the last two to three decades many clinical studies have been developed scanning the brains of transgendered individuals. Brain regions have been identified that mark brains as clearly masculine, feminine, or somewhere in between, and transgendered individuals' brains show the properties of the brains typical of the other sex, meaning trans women have structurally female brains in male bodies, and trans men have structurally male brain in female bodies. You can find a fairly comprehensive...
A few remarks that don't add up to either agreement or disagreement with any point here:
Considering rivers conscious hasn't been a difficulty for humans, as animism is a baseline impulse that develops even in absence of theism, and it takes effort, at either the individual or cultural levels, for people to learn not to anthropomorphize the world. As such, I'd suggest a thought experiment that allows for the possibility of a conscious river, even if composed of atomic moments of consciousness arising from strange flows through an extremely complex network o... (read more)