B.A. in Philosophy by University of Sao Paulo (USP), Brazil, and technical analyst at a Brazilian railway lab.
alexgieg
Karma: 546
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 attached, such as a drawing they commissioned from an artist they like, or that someone gifted them, it has more weight both for themselves, as well as friends who share on their emotional attachment to it.
I guess the difference is similar to that many (a few? most?) notice between a handcrafted vs an industrialized good: even if the industrialized one is better by objetive parameters, the handcrafted one is perceived as qualitatively distinct. So I can imagine a scenario in which there are automated, generative websites for quick consumption—especially video, as you mentioned—and Etsy-like made-by-a-real-person premium ones, with most of the associated social status geared towards the later.
A smart group of furry advertisers would look at this situation and see a commoditize-your-complement play: if you can break the censorship and everyone switches to the preferred equilibrium of AI art, that frees up a ton of money.
I don’t know about sexual toys specifically, but something like that has been attempted with fursuits. There are cheap, knockoff Chinese fursuit sellers on sites such as Alibaba, and there’s a market for those somewhere otherwise those wouldn’t be advertised, but I’ve never seen someone wearing one of those on either big cons or small local meetups I attended, nor have I heard of someone who does. As with handcrafted art, it seems furries prefer handcrafted fursuits made either by the user themselves, or by artisan fursuit makers.
I suppose that might all change if the fandom grows to the point of becoming fully mainstream. If at some point there are tens to hundreds of millions of furries, most of whom carrying furry-related fetishes (sexual or otherwise), real industries might form around us to the point of breaking through the traditional handcraft focus. But I confess I have difficulty even visualizing such a scenario.
Hmm… maybe a good source for potential analogies would be Renaissance Fairs scene. I don’t know much about them, but they’re (as far as I can gather) more mainstream than the Furry Fandom. Do you know if such commoditization happens there? That might be a good model for what’s likely to happen with the Furry Fandom as it further mainstreams.
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 or, at the very least, will continue wanting to be able to commission art from each other, and will use AI-generated art as a temporary stand in while they save to commission real pieces from the actual artists they admire.
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 middle class and above, or to have had 10 kids who would sustain them in their late years, each with 10% of their income, that increases the burden on society etc. And thus similarly for other programs targeting the middle class. So why not redirect most or even all of this to those more in need?
A possible answer, covering the specific case you brought as well as the generalized version above, counterintuitive as it may be, is that the original intent of welfare seems to have been forgotten nowadays, which makes it worth bringing it back.
Welfare wasn’t originally implemented due to charitable impulses of those in power. Rather, it was first implemented to increase worker productivity, as in the programs pioneered by Bismarck in the 19th century. After that, it went on being implemented to reduce the working class’s drive to become revolutionaries, as Marx noticed would happen in his Critique of the Gotha Program, which is why he opposed such programs. And in fact, wherever extensive welfare programs were instituted early empirical observations showed they did in fact reduce the revolutionary impulse.
Add to that the well observed fact mass revolutions over the last century and half, both left- and right-wing alike, have been strongly driven by dispossessed but well-educated, and thus entitled, young adults whose social and economic status were below their perceived self-worth, and we have the recipe for why providing welfare directed at those who traditionally form a revolutionary vanguard so they don’t become a vanguard may be a reasonable long-term strategy, supposing we consider such movements, and what they result in, a net negative.
Hence the baseline question, as I see it, isn’t as much in regard to the raw economics of the issue, but on how likely a revolution in the US due to the worsening economic conditions of its young middle class versus the changing shape of the US age pyramid is, and, based on a cost-benefit analysis, how much a revolution not happening in the US over the next generation or two is worth in monetary terms. Is a US revolution strictly impossible? If it’s possible, is its likelihood high enough that reducing that likelihood is worth $1 trillion?
The same goes for all welfare aimed at this socio-economic/age-bracket group.
EDIT: Typo and punctuation corrections, and minor clarifications.
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 received. It may earn an agreement downvote, which is natural and expected, but it also earns a karma upvote for the effort put into exposing the point, plus those who disagreed engaging with the person explaining their points of disagreement.
Your point would be valid on most online forums, as people who aren’t as careful about arguments as LWers tend to conflate disliking with disagreeing, which results in a downvote is a downvote is a downvote. Most LWers, in contrast, tend to be well skilled at treating the two axes as orthogonal, and it shows.
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 someone with perfect vision hearing from a born blind person they don’t see anything. The person with vision can only imagine “not seeing” as “seeing a black background”, similar to what they perceive when they close their eyes or are in a perfectly dark room. Not seeing isn’t seeing black, it’s not seeing.
Consider, for another analogy, that a dove with normally functioning magnetic field sensing were able to talk, and it asked you: “So, if you don’t feel North, which direction do you feel?” You’d reply “none”, and the dove would at most be able to imagine you feel something like up or down, because they cannot grasp what it is like not to physically feel cardinal directions.
The opposite also applies. People with no numinous perception at all are baffled by those with it describing they perceive something that quite evidently isn’t there. Their immediate take is that the person is self-deluded, or maybe suffering from some perceptual issue, maybe even schizophrenic, if not outright lying. At their most charitable, they’ll attribute this perceptual error to a form of synesthesia.
Unsurprisingly, it’s much more likely to be a Theist or similar if one has numinous perception, and much easier to be an Atheist if one doesn’t have it, though there are exceptions. I don’t remember if it was Carl Sagan or Isaac Asimov, but I recall one of them explaining in an interview they did have this perception of a “something” there (I don’t think they referred to it by its name), and were thus constantly tempted towards becoming religious, but kept fighting against that impulse due to knowing it as a mental trick.
b) Thus, if we establish numinal perception is a thing, it becomes easy to understand what religions and spiritual beliefs are. Supernatural belief system are attempts, some tentative and in broad strokes, others quite systematic, to account for these perceptions, starting from the premise they’re perceptions of objective phenomena, not of merely subjective, mental constructs.
Interestingly, in my experience talking with people with this perception, what’s perceived as numinal varies from one to the other, which likely account for religious preferences when one has a choice.
For example, for some the navy of a Catholic cathedral is shock full of the numinal, while a crystal clear waterfall in a forest is just pretty but not numinal at all. Those with this kind of numinal perception are more likely to be Christian.
For others, it’s the reverse. Those are more likely to go for some religion more focused on nature things, some form of native religiosity, unstructured spirituality, animism or the like.
For others yet, they feel the numinal in both contexts. These will be all in with syncretisms, complex ontological takes, and the like.
c) Finally, on whether perceived numinous thingies are objectively real or not depends on one’s philosophical assumptions.
If one’s on the side of reductionism, then they’re clearly some kind of mental epiphenomena either advantageous or at least not-disadvantegeous for survival, so it keeps being expressed.
If one’s an antireductionist, they can say numinous thingies are quite real, but made of pure qualia, without any measurable counterpart to make it numerically apprehensible, so either one has the sensory apparatus to perceive them, or they don’t, external devices won’t help.
And the main issue here is the choice for either reductionism or antireductionism is axiomatic. One either prefers one, and goes with it, or prefers the other, and goes with it. There’s no extrinsic way to decide, only opposite arguments that tend to cancel out.
In conclusion:
To more directly answer the question then, when someone says they believe in God, what they mean is they perceive a certain numinal thing-y, and that the most accurate way to describe that numinal thing-y is with the word “God”, plus the entire set of concepts that come with it in the belief system they’re attuned with.
If they abandoned this specific explanatory system, that wouldn’t affect their numinal perception qua perception, so they’d likely either go with another explanation they felt covered their perception even better, or more rarely actively force themselves to resist accepting the reality of that perception. The perception itself would remain there, calling for their attention.
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 researchers they never experienced autogynephilic impulses, nor any sexual impulse or attraction at all, is dismissed by the autogynephilic hypothesis proponents and considered invalid, with proponents suggesting they actually did experience it but {ad hoc rationalization follows}, then what is the autogynephilic hypothesis’ falsifiability criteria? Is there any?
More studies != better integration of the information from those studies into a coherent explanation.
There are several moments in research.
The initial hypothesis is simple: there are identifiable physiological differences between human male and female brains, and transgender individuals’ brains show distinctive traits typical of the brains of the other sex, while cisgender individuals don’t.
This is testable, with clear falsifiability criteria, and provides a pathway for the development of a taxonomy of such differences, including typical values, typical variances, normal distributions for each sex, a full binomial distribution to cover both sexes, and the ability to position an individual’s brain somewhere along that binomial distribution.
Following that taxonomic mapping, if it pans out, there come questions of causality, such as what causes some individual brains to fall so distantly from the average for their birth sex. But that’s a further development way down the line. Right now what matters is the first stage is falsifiable and has been experiencing constant corroboration, not constant falsification.
So now it’s a matter of contrasting this theory’s falsifiability track record with the autogynephilic hypothesis’s falsifiability track record—supposing there’s one.
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 little bit to them (...)”
Can all be reversed to show that, respectively, 25% / 33% / 54.8% of aro-ace trans individuals answer in the negative, and the rebuttal of the universality of the hypothesis needs only these numbers to be non-zero. That they’re this high comes as an added bonus, so to speak.
I would enjoy if someone could lay it out in a more comprehensible manner.
This is being constantly done. Over the last 20+ years, as neuroimaging and autopsy techniques advance, and new studies are done using those more advanced techniques, we mostly get corroborations with more precision, not falsifications. There are occasional null results, so that isn’t strictly always the case, but those come as outliers, not forming a new, contrary body of evidence, and not significantly affecting the trend identified as meta-analyses keep being done.
I’m not aware of someone having done a formal Bayesian calculation on this, but my impression is it’d show the scale constantly sliding toward the physiological hypothesis, and away from the autogynephilic one, as time advances, with only small backslides along the way.
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:
Frigerio, Alberto, Lucia Ballerini, and Maria Valdés Hernández. “Structural, Functional, and Metabolic Brain Differences as a Function of Gender Identity or Sexual Orientation: A Systematic Review of the Human Neuroimaging Literature.” Archives of Sexual Behavior 50, no. 8 (November 2021): 3329–52. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10508-021-02005-9.
And it takes lots of handwaving, or deliberately ignoring the data, to stick with the autogynephilic hypothesis as the most general explanation.
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 knowledge until it becomes actually true, but in the sense that the very notion of “truth” itself changes over time, and hence a knowledge that was true once becomes false not because it was incorrect, but because it’s aligned with a notion of truth that isn’t valid anymore. This comes on the heels of a new analysis methodology he invented for this purpose, and that you need to master before seeing it in use.
Third, he tries to integrate notions of justice, rights etc. that are still grounded on pre-Kantian notion with all the above.
That paragraph quoted touches on all of the above, so it takes a knowledge of classic metaphysics, plus Kantian anti-metaphysics, plus classic political philosophy, plus Hegel’s own take on words such as “truth”, “rights” etc. actually refer to.
It’s an extremely ambitious project, and on top of that he has to deal with the potential censorship of rulers and church, so even in parts in which he could be clearer he has to deliberately obfuscate things so that censors don’t catch up with what he’s actually trying to say (this was a usual procedure for many philosophers, and continues being among some).
(...) when I read Bostrom, Parfait, or Focault or listen to Amanda Askill or Agnes Callard or Amia Srinivasan I don’t get the sense that they’re necessarily trying to bring fundamentally new objects into our ontology or metaphysics, but rather that they’re trying to clarify and tease apart distinctions and think through implications;
I don’t know the last three, but the first two basically go in the opposite direction. They take all these complex novel notions of the genius philosophers and distillate them down into useable bits by applying them to specific problems, with some small insights of theirs sprinkled here and there. Foucault in particular also did some of the “big insight” thing, but on a more limited fashion and with a narrower focus, so it isn’t as earth-shattering as what the major philosophers did.
Besides, there are movements among professional academic philosophers that propose developing philosophy in small bits, one tiny problem at a time worked to exhaustion. Much of what they do is in fact this. But how that’s seen varies. When I was majoring in Philosophy in the 2000′s, for example, there was an opinion shared by all professors and teachers in the Philosophy Department that from all of them who worked there since it was founded in the 1930′s until that date, only one single professor has been seen as a real philosopher. Everyone else were historians of philosophy, which indeed was how they described what we were learning how to do. :-)
is that a project that tends to lend itself to a really different, “clearer” way of using language?
Yes, undoubtedly. On the flip side, it doesn’t lend itself to noticing large scale structural issues. For instance, from working tiny problem by tiny problem, one after the other, one would never do as Hegel did, stop, look at things from a distance, and perceive the very concept of truth everyone was using is itself full of assumptions that need unpacking and criticizing, in particular the assumption of the atemporality of truth. Rather, they will all tend to keep working from within that very concept of truth, assumed wholesale, doing their 9-to-5 job, accumulating their quotations so as to get a higher pay, and not really looking outside any of it.
A rule of thumb is that major philosophers make you feel ill. They destroy your certainties by showing what you used to consider solid ground were mirages. Minor philosophers and professional philosophers, in contrast, feel safe. At most a little inconvenient here and there, but still safe, since with them the ground is still the same, and still mostly as firm as before.
… 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 because they notice something no one has noticed before and are thus the very first person in History to try and express that. They have no tool for doing so other than everything that was said before, which, by definition, doesn’t include what they’re trying to say. So, on top of trying to say something utterly, absolutely novel, they must invent the language and semantics with which to say it by repurposing words and concepts that aren’t appropriate for the task. Eventually (measured in decades to centuries) students of that philosopher figure out better ways to express the same novel notions he pioneered, and cause the learning curve to become less and less steep. In the extreme this is so well done, and that philosopher’s ideas and terminology gain such widespread adoption, that language itself adapts to the way the philosopher used it. And then everyone is talking from within that philosopher’s terminology, and wondering, when they read the original work, what was the big deal with someone who was all about stating, and badly at that, mere truisms.
If philosophers wrote presuming their readers have no philosophical knowledge at all, and under the requirement that all words they use must retain their current, commonsensical meaning, every sentence of theirs would balloon into an entire book. The philosopher would die of old age before having presented 1% of what they wanted to say.
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 angry of a person to their tastes. The Maori, in contrast, had a culture that valued war. When the Maori invaded the Moriori’s island, they announced it by torturing a Moriori girl to death and waited for them to attack, expecting a worthy battle. The Moriori didn’t attack, they tried to flee and submit. The Maori were so offended by having their worthy battle denied that they hunted the Moriori to extinction, and not via quick deaths, no. Via days-long torture. This is the one tale that helps me to weight down my own non-violence preferences down into reasonableness, to avoid over-abstracting things.
On the last point, you reminded me of a comedian impersonating different MBTI types. When playing the INTP profile he began acting as a teacher reading a math question from the textbook to his students: “There are 40 bananas on the table. If Suzy eats 32 bananas, how many bananas...”, then stops, looks up at the camera while throwing the book away, and asks “Why is Suzy eating 32 bananas? What’s wrong with her!?” 😁
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 evil purposes. This is something major powers do regularly. Their strategists identify some injustice going on in enemy territory, and induce those there who care to seek justice in specific ways calculated to cause the most disruption to the enemy government. Power structures thus destabilized result in social chaos, which can grow, when properly nurtured, into extreme violence, blood feuds, crackdowns, oppression, and generations-long prejudice and hatred. All by manipulating the goodness and sense of justice of the gullible.
To avoid that and do true good one needs to think from the perspective of evil. To imagine the many ways in which one’s good impulses could be redirected into evil deeds, and to act one or more layers above that.
“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.
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 punctuation-then-quotation, while most other countries went mostly with quotation-then-punctuation—which on further analysis (and then with programming languages) proved more sensible.
Nowadays with modern Unicode ligatures we could easily go back to quotation-over-punctuation for display purposes, while allowing the writing to be either way, but I suppose after 200 years of printing these glyphs separately no one has much interest in that.
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 of pipes, taps back, into that underlying animistic impulse, and so will only seem weird to those who’ve previously managed to supress it either via effort or nurture.
Conversely, as one can learn to suppress their animistic impulse towards the world, one can also suppress their animistic impulse towards themselves. Buddhism is the paradigmatic example of that effort. Most Buddhist schools of thought deny the reality of any kind of permanent self, asserting the perception of an “I” emerges from atomistic moments as an effect of those interactions, not as their cause or as a parallel process to them. From this perspective we may have a “non-conscious in itself” river whose pipe flows, interrupted or otherwise, cause the emergence of consciousness, exactly the same and in no way differently from what human minds do.
But even those Buddhist schools that do admit of a “something extra” at the root of the experience of consciousness, consider it as a form of matter that binds to ordinary matter to, operating as a single organic mixture, give rise to those moments of consciousness. This might correspond, or be an analogous on some level, to Searle’s symbols, at least going from the summarized view presented in this post. Now, irrespective of such symbols being or not reducible to ordinary matter, if they can “attach” to human brain’s matter to form, er, “carbon-based neuro-symbolic aggregates”, nothing in principle (that I can imagine, at least) prevents them from attaching to any other substrate, such a water pipes, at which point we’d have “water-based pipe-symbolic” ones. Such an aggregate might develop a mind of its own, and even a human-like mind, complete with a self-delusion that similarly believes that emergent self as essential.
As such, it’d seem to me that, without a fully developed “physics of symbols”, such speculations may go either way and don’t really help solve the issue. A full treatment of the topic would need to expand on all such possibilities, and then analyse them from perspectives such as the ones above, before properly contrasting them.