I know you've missed my rules
Deleted
fantasizing rule
Jump
Just like when I give Ted talks while taking a shower
Not really "one of the few." Variations of this idea have existed for millenia. It's just eternal judgment for atheists.
If someone isn't a hedonistic nihilist, they're not acknowledging the obvious truth
The artists need to break those assumptions
Yup. He was a spoiler personable economic right wing candidate who won despite the party not favoring him. They feared he would be weak in the general, but couldn't stop him from winning the primary. He clashed heavily with the establishment who were MORE left wing than him. Of course, he was still too nice to satisfy conservatives, so Reagan defeated him in a landslide.
I know about those models, which is why I'm bringing this up. Communists just need to make more stuff!
It's like with misgendering trans people who do shitty things or are shitty people like Ava Tyson or Caitlin Jenner. They might be pieces of shit, but they're still women. You don't get an n word pass just because a Black person does something bad.
My dog enjoying a delicious piece of chicken:
Me watching her eat my dinner:
It's only immoral, not inherently of lower quality. Aesthetics and ethics aren't about what actually is, but about what should be. Even if an AI and a person produce the same image, the AI isn't a living, breathing human. AI art isn't slop because of its content, but because of the economic context. That's a far better reason to hate it than its mistakes and shortcomings.
A lot of insights in neuroscience and psychology come from tragic incidents rather than experiments. The function of various brain regions has mostly been deduced by studying people with traumatic brain injuries. What little we do know about atypical development in children comes from tragedy as well.
There was a case study of a neglected child who experienced nearly no human contact for most of her life, and she had severe developmental delays compared to everyone else. The doctors mismanaged her care to an absurd degree, but not intentionally. From what they did observe, she was mentally typical outside of her lack of human contact. Her progress mostly stalled because the system didn't let her form meaningful relationships with parental figures. It's a really sad story.
In terms of gender, significant insights have been gained by misguided attempts to treat people with atypical sexual development. Intersex children still regularly undergo "corrective" surgeries to make their genitals fit the male/female binary. Many intersex people come out as transgender, only to realize that their genitals were altered at birth in unnecessary ways.
The doctors have tried to compensate by studying prenatal hormones to more accurately assign genitals, but the whole thing is fundamentally flawed. So long as the genitals don't pose a risk to the child's health, the reasons for doing the surgeries are purely normative. They just want the genitals to fit a binary because having them exist outside the binary is "abnormal," which they see as inherently bad.
............
The surprising truth is that doctors are biased to believe that gender can be forced. It all comes back to persistent philosophical assumptions about identity that date back centuries.
- Descartes viewed the self as something fundamental, the first thing we could be certain of. In actuality, our sense of self can be wrong, as demonstrated by trans people who thought they were cis, only to learn that they hate being their assigned gender and love being another.
- Locke viewed human beings as blank slates that are shaped by our environment. While we are strongly shaped by our environment, case studies of separated identical twins show that many psychological traits are strongly biological, while almost all traits are a mix of both. If an identical clone with the same DNA as you is trans, the chances of you being trans are only ~50%
- We can be any gender and gender differences are purely cultural. Western philosophy has a strong bias towards believing in free will; that everyone is created equal and that we each have the freedom of self determination. We are rational beings that aren't constrained by nature like simple animals that operate purely on instinct. These ideas are more reflective of what we want to believe and what is useful to believe.
The last case study I'll mention is the case of the guy who was forcibly feminized and gaslit into believing he was a girl. After a botched circumcision that completely destroyed his phallus, David Reimer's parents were told that they should just raise him as female. They touted "Brenda" as proof of gender being arbitrary, even as David began to insist that he was a boy. He was given estrogen and experienced crippling gender dysphoria as a result. When he was finally told the truth, he adopted a male identity.
Sadly, David committed suicide at the age of 38, going public with his story before then. Over the 3 decades that his false story was left uncontested, the view of his psychologist had dominated, doing irreparable damage to gender science. Afterall, if a cis boy could be made a girl, why couldn't intersex and trans people just live as the gender they were told they were?
The truth doesn't just undermine gender, but fundamental biases embedded in most people believe about the world. False ideas can be more useful that unfortunate truths, as believing in free will, believing in self determination, believing that things are just and fair helps the machinery ramble on. You're more likely to succeed if you think you can, so believing we have control of ourselves is appealing.
All of these faces make physical sense, while AI art often doesn't.
You might be right, but it is gatekeeping, and that argument itself isn't an argument I give much merit. People don't need hormones to transition, nor do they need to change their bodies. A consensus for gender isn't something that often works in our favor, even for binary trans folks like me.
The way we characterize species is wack. The whole origin of species is that we like to categorize. Evolution doesn't care about our classifications; only that the organisms can continue replicating. Classifications are just mental boxes that serve a purpose, not anything real. There is no spoon except in our mind.
Like I said, I suspect there is something more to other kin than gender, as they might be simply using the only language they have available. If there is to be another way to define them, it must come from them. When cishets try to categorize trans people, they often use the categories to constrain us, so I'll let the other kin handle how they're defined. Living without having a perfect way of labeling them is hard, but I won't be part of efforts to force them into a box.
Science can get us closer to fundamental truth, but like the speed of light, it isn't something we have any hope of reaching.
IP, like every part of capitalism, has been totally turned against the artists it claimed to protect. If they want it to only be a chain that binds us, we need to break it. They had their chance to make it work for workers, and they squashed it. If we can't buy into the system, we have every reason to oppose it.
On a large scale, this will come in the form of "crime," not revolutionary action. With no social contract binding anyone voluntarily, people will do what they must to serve their own interests. Any criminal activity that weakens the system more than the people must be supported whole heartedly. Smuggling and theft from the wealthy; true Robin Hood marks; are worthy of support. Vengeance from those scarred by the system is more justice than state justice. Revolution isn't what the fat cats need to fear.
I'm not saying it's doomed! I literally said that it's cool and useful. It's a revolutionary technology in many respects, but not for everything. It cannot replace the things computers have always been good at, but business people don't seem to realize that. They assume that it can fix anything, not understanding that it will only make certain things worse. The trade-off is counterproductive for tasks where you need consistent indexing.
For instance, Google's search AI turns primary sources into secondary or tertiary sources by trying to cut corners. I have zero trust in anything it tries to tell me, while all the problems it had before AI have continued to worsen. They could've used machine learning to better understand search queries, or diversify results to compensate for vagueness in language, or to fucking combat SEO, but they instead clog up the results with even more bullshit! It's a war against curiosity at this point! 😫
He always seemed like a theatre kid, so it's not really surprising.
Marketing American products with American culture? It's not that bad all things considered. Enjoying this country's natural beauty on a Harley is a genuine vibe that exists here. American motorcycle culture isn't just a Hollywood creation, but a real thing.
It is still marketing, but it probably is true. I wouldn't doubt that a German dude could've genuinely experienced what he saw in movies and found a bunch of cool foods along the way. There are plenty of cool restaurants on the road, and when you're traveling long distances, finding cool places to eat is a big part of the experience. He probably enjoyed simple staples like maple syrup, which is delicious.
All arguments about definitions are about what words should mean to best serve us. All ideas work this way, especially scientific ideas. They're all just tools, not objective or stable forms that we discover. The line between scientifically validated understandings and pseudoscience isn't sacred, but constantly in flux. This isn't a fault of science, but its greatest strength. We only make progress by testing limits and attempting to falsify what we assume to be true.
Using science to exclude other kin from gender identity overestimates our knowledge. I don't personally think it's just a part of gender identity, but related to some other aspect of identity. At the same time, science is barely starting to understand gender, and currently knows almost nothing about nonbinary identities.
There is no scientific explanation for drag, so anything we come up with is total conjecture. As a result, we should just accept our ignorance for now and move on. Doing otherwise is denying the limits to our knowledge.
The constructed simulation we live in gets constantly updated based on real world stimuli, but we often overwrite that stimuli with expectations. So long as it helps us get what we want, our perception doesn't need to be accurate. We sometimes can't see reality until it smacks us in the face; forcing us to accept it or die.
It's painful to face unfortunate realities, so we often refuse perceive them. This is not an unnecessary constraint, but a humbling truth. The only way we could ever avoid this is by becoming an omniscient god with infinite processing power.
This is where I'm coming from. Generative AI is pretty cool and useful, but it has severe limitations that most people don't comprehend. Machine learning can automate countless time consuming tasks. This is especially true in the entertainment industry, where it's just another tool for production to use.
Businesses fail to understand is that it cannot perform deductive tasks without necessarily making errors. It can only give probable outputs, not outputs that must be correct based on the input. It goes against the very assumptions we make about computer logic, as it doesn't work on deductive reasoning.
Generative AI works by emulating biological intelligence, taking principles of neuroscience to solve problems quickly and efficiently. However, this gives AI similar weaknesses to our own minds, imagining things and baking in bias. It can never give the accurate summaries Google hopes it can, as it will only ever tell us what it thinks we want to hear. They keep misusing it in ways that either waste everyone's time, or do serious harm.
Taken too soon 😭