foyrkopp @ foyrkopp @lemmy.world

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2 yr. ago

Alien intelligence is not required to follow human reasoning.

The Lords of Alpha Centauri could run a long-term social engineering program on Earth because they believe capitalism, conflict and social darwinism are objectively Good for You and we need to be purged of the folly of humanistic ideology before we can be allowed to join the galactic civilization market.

Or because they find our struggles entertaining.

What I can tell you is that no rational spacefaring civilization would need to resort to social engineering if they just want to kill us. Just toss a bit (or a lot) of spare delta v on a sufficiently large asteroid (or five) and humanity goes the way of the dinosaur.

(Different story if they want us dead, but want to make it look like suicide because of the space police.)

My take:

Most things (especially abstract ones) that exists beyond the scope of the small-hunter-gatherer-tribe setup our brain is developed for: Quantum mechanics, climate change, racism, relativity, spherical earth, ...

What separates us from the dogs is that we've developed abstract analytical tools (language, stories, mathematics, the scientific method,....) that allow us to infer the existence of those things and, eventually try to predict, model and manipulate them.

But we don't "grasp" them as we'd grasp a tangled leash, which is why it is even possible for medically sane people to doubt them.

I'd argue that you can even flip this around into a definition:

If a person with no medical mental deficiencies can honestly deny a fact (as in: without consciously lying), then that fact is either actually wrong, or it falls into the "tangled leash" category.

This.

There are already people who are doing selfish/immoral/illegal things because they can get away with it.

And there are people who don't.

Giving either of those superpowers would (mostly) only increase the magnitude of things they would or would not do.

That's a fairly good point, but I'd argue that it'd depend on how subtle the application of your superpower is.

My overall assumption would be that any application that doesn't raise red flags will probably require enough work and moderation that it'd be more like a job - but it could be a very well-paying job.

I.e. for the time freeze: You could acquire a well-paid reputation as a freelancer troubleshooter for a certain type of WFH desk job (analyst? translator?) that can finish any overdue project in record time. Or, easier, become a stage magician.

You'd probably still eventually wind up in a situation where you watch some sort of unacceptable crisis on the news and think "well, I could do something about this" - be it removing a mass-murdering dictator or dismantling a hostage situation.

I genuinely believe it'd depend on the person.

First: Most people who use cheats in video games eventually either stop using them or stop playing the game altogether, because it gets boring.

Many people who win the lottery get a bit of splurging out of their system, then invest the rest into financial security but keep living their loves mostly like before.

So there genuinely might be some people who will eventually settle into just fixing their most glaring problems and then just keep living "regularly", possibly with the occasional minor indulgence.

Then there's people who are willing to go to extreme lengths to enforce their beliefs even without superpowers - imagine super-powered criminals and terrorists, but also super-powered firefighters, doctors or scientists.

And then there's everything in between.

So, if it's just one (or maybe five) people getting superpowers, it'd probably be a roll of the dice. Maybe there'd just be one person going through life easier. Maybe we'd get lucky and someone solves a major problem for us. Maybe we get unlucky and every president that doesn't reinstate segregation gets assassinated.

If it's more people getting powers... well, there's already a lot of fiction exploring that in-depth.

Good to know, thanks.

I genuinely can't parse this argument.

Criminalizing the victims of human trafficking makes said crime easier, because it creates hurdles for it's victims to report it.

To cut back on the hyperbole that you're receiving for your comment: Even badly managed oversight would be better than none at all.

Amazon warehouse workers are being exploited brutally in a system that needs fixing, but there's much less trafficking and violent coercion involved.

There is no way to save those people without destroying privacy.

I disagree. Legalizing prostitution and fighting the social stigma would prevent many of those crimes.

If you criminalize a service that will always be in demand, you won't kill the market - you'll just turn it into an unregulated black market run by criminals, who are much less inhibited than legal employers to use any means at their disposal (even threats and violence) to maximize their profit.

The exact same thing happened during the prohibition.

But if you have a legalized market... using threats and violence to force people to perform i.e. call center work is much less common.

Cheating on taxes is a crime, but in certain circles it's nit stigmatized.

The same goes for ignoring the speed limit in other circles.

A desperate mother shoplifting to feed her child would probably get compassion from many.

On a side note, it is also possible for something to be a crime and not be punished. It is a way for a society to condemn something, but acknowledge that is just necessary under certain conditions.

(Some countries use this trick for contentious topics like abortion and, yes, prostitution.)

Nah, I'd argue that you're both partially correct.

The romanticized ideal of starting a family/marriage on the basis of "true love" has been around forever.

Reality has been more of a mixed bag throughout large patches of human history. Accidental pregnancies, dynastic politics and plain economical necessities were probably foundations for many more marriages than actual love.

(There's also that whole can of worms of whether "True Love at First Sight(tm)" even is a good foundation for marriage, but that's neither here nor there.)

Whatsapp is encrypted. The problem is the Metadata they want - i.e. your whole address book.

I do not agree to Facebook having my phone number, but if you use WA and have my number, they have it, too - even if I don't use WA myself.

If you can convince your family to switch, use Signal or Matrix.

Otherwise, use Shelter on your phone with a limited, WA-ony address book.

Well, it works well for some people.

Once you get used to it, it can be a dang powerful tool. For people doing a lot of config-wrangling on the CLI (i.e. admins working a lot ovet SSH), overcoming the learning curve will pay dividends.

If you're working mostly locally and in a GUI environment environment, it's probably not worth it - there's a reason most devs use more specialized IDE's.

Midnight Commander has been around for ages. It's a straight ripoff/homage to the original Norton Commander, a full-fledged file manager and a godsend on week-kneed machines (like old netbooks).

ps ax?

As long as people keep voting for deregulative capitalists and engaging in the consumer mill, megacorps with too much power are all but inevitable.

I am frustrated with human nature, but hating Google is just like hating a tornado because it might hurt you.

I really hop you're trolling, because you're letting out some pretty crucial parts here.

Democracy is also when you vote and your voted-for result doesn't happen. More than 40% of the state just had that experience.

Democracy isn't about you. Or me. It's about the majority.

Option 1: Take the plunge as a DM, announce before hand that you're new at this. Everyone who thinks they can do better is free to give it a try.

Option 2: Local Game Store.

Option 3: reddit /r/lfg. Google how to turn a search into an RSS stream, set up a search, be ready to jump into worthwhile-seeming posts quickly. Be ready to go through a few bad/mediocre groups until you find something that clicks.

You'd need to significantly increase overall education (both among voters ans legislators) on how science works to make the latter feasible.

Scientists are human. Scientists have opinions. Scientists require funding. Scientists disagree.

Simple example: The heliocentric model didn't become accepted knowledge because the "earth is the center of the universe" crowd (who *were? scientists) was convinced by scientific argument - they weren't. It did when they died.

Science holds a lot of high-likelihood facts. This is what we call the "generally accepted body of knowledge". We know that the earth is round. We can predict gravity in most circumstances. And yes, we know that anthromorphic climate change is real.

But there's also a lot of "game-changing" studies/experiments out there that are still to be debunked without ever making it into said body of accepted knowledge. This is normal, it is how science works.

Yet it also means that for virtually any hair-brained opinion that is not already strongly refuted by said body of knowledge (flat earth, for example, is refuted), you can find some not yet debunked science to support it.

Separating the wheat from the chaff here requires insight into the scientific process (and it's assorted politics and market mechanisms) most people (and voters) don't have.

And no, just telling people whether a fact is broadly accepted in the scientific community or fringe science doesn't work. We tried that with the topic of anthromorphic climate change.

https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/happiness-spigot

Best summary to this topic I've ever seen.