PravlageTiem

Played WoW for years. Grinded most of my members to rank 14.

Ran a PvP guild that lost three times in 6 months during this grind.

Tricked the entire horde to split forces in AV with 3 deep operatives, allowing Alliance to engage with the horde in two 37 vs. 20 waves, allowing them to win for the first time on that server in a year.

I regret none of it. I learned how to lead people in high-stress situations, how to build loyalty, and how to handle high-performance people while feeding their never-ending urge for conquest. I took all those skills and now I run multiple companies in different sectors, all designed to achieve a singular goal when they are all put together.

Did the pixels offend you? Block everyone who disagrees with you.

Now you know why no one you knew voted for Trump.

If the left is obsessed with turning their entire belief system into a remake of the 1930s radio model (One story teller allowed, millions of listeners), then we will get 1930s results.

Meanwhile, I'll be using the internet the way Jesus 2.0 intended and engaging in robust anonymous communication networks to inoculate myself from feinting pearl-clutchers and other paid government emotion hackers.

I'll give you one guess which ecosystem will survive when the powers that be realized their precious fourth estate no longer works like it did in the 1930s.

You're on to something!

When most people talk about "politics" what they really mean is they want to recite talking points told to them from their favorite dying old media echo chamber.

Reddit went full political and I left. The chans went full political and I left. Facebook went full political and I left. Twitter went full political and I left.

I go on the internet to escape being repeatedly told I'm not doing enough to live up to the moral supremacist standards set by the Baby Boomers in the 1960s.

Nearly every single massive social network on the internet exists and have for a decade to cater to your daily fill of Silicon Valley bicoastal "look down the nose of the flyover plebs" equality porn. Go there for your schadenfreude. Don't bring it here.

Spirituality means having an imaginary friend. Politics means having imaginary enemies.

I gotta say, watching the political ideology that doubled down on postmodernism massively backpedal on the "truth is relative" meme is endlessly entertaining.

No one is making irrational judgments based off of the amount of photons that are being reflected.

Many Indians can't reflect many photons, either. Police aren't shooting them.

Let's see if you can make the leap into what is being inferred with this obvious observation.

So you're saying it's okay to be prejudiced against people because of religious beliefs?

Like... say... Judaism, for example?

Keep your weird contained to your monoliths and stop trying to colonize JavaScript!

The arguments are so bitter because the stakes are so low.

To kill two birds with one stone, as soon as animals demonstrate something more akin to tribal-level human behavior of religious worship (the grand fusion of self, environment, social, and mystery into the realm of higher powers that must be feared) and not postmodernist definitions of worship (the grand disconnection of the self from all other factors to appeal to an idealized self that can never manifest thank you CIA involvement in the postmodernist art movement and their unique ability to capture scary mommies everywhere) then I'll consider the idea that animals are demonstrating religious behavior.

And further more, if animals DO have religious behavior, then artificial intelligence research across the entire board is WOEFULLY inadequate to represent such a core part of the neurological interaction that generates religious behavior... a core behavioral capacity that was somehow missed in every single behaviorist research paper ever published since mankind mastered animal husbandry.

You either get in bed with the idea that only humans worship gods or you have to fundamentally throw all of psychology, sociology, and animal behavior studies completely out the window.

I'm being downvoted because my comment spat in the face of those who think general artificial intelligence automatically implies some superior Nietzschean post-human that is qualified to run the perfect communist utopia since it no longer has distracting human emotions like greed or envy. Somewhere, a Sanfraninite spurted himself to completion while watching a live feed of indigenous humans tending to some noble savage rice field he rented on AgroBnb with Bitcoin, mined entirely by solar powered GPUs made out of free trade copper.

When you drag people out of their fantasies, they used to kill you. At least they downvote you these days, so I supposed that's better.

Yes, this is an incredibly unique view. Yes, people are going to react negatively to it because it fundamentally undermines their revenge fantasies. Yes, I can call them out on their unspoken biases no matter how uncomfortable that makes them.

I provided the very best and most recent research for the absurd position that animals supposedly have their own animal gods, attend regular communal worshipping ceremonies, engage in animal religious ritual, and demonstrate religious behavior outside of a priori instinct and social fitnesses.

You provided... passive aggressiveness.

And if animals now engage in religious ritual, doesn't that make them stupid for not being atheist like you? I expect several YouTube videos of you trying to convert your cat into the enlightened ways of post-theism.

What is monotheism but a comprehensive collection of thought experiments regarding the behavior of a Bronze Age singularity? :D

I didn't say "intelligent". I said "AI", as in "artificial intelligence" which implies a simulation of human intelligence. Machine processes already exist that demonstrate, say, ant-like intelligence.

The best case for animals demonstrating religious behavior (which is fundamentally different than believing in a god, mind you) is from a very convoluted interpretation of a food coma.

http://bigthink.com/videos/can-animals-be-religious

Outside of that considerable stretching, it doesn't exist. Also, I challenge your premise that conflates "belief" with "constructing narratives"

Do you believe you will be alive tomorrow? If so, are you constructing a grand-weaving narrative... or simply making a singular belief? Or, more simply, are you just extrapolating off of past experiences?

Believing in a god is unique to the human species. No other animal does this. Thus, if you want full and complete simulation of human intelligence, this is the ultimate benchmark to test against.

Furthermore, the purpose of this thought experiment is that you CANNOT know what god an AI would end up believing in. That should make you rethink everything you think you know about theology and reexamine it under epistemological terms

Being made to believe in a god isn't the same as believing in one.

Silicon Valley thinks AI is not an epistemological problem, as if neurons can be perfectly simulated atomically and that all intelligence processes can be categorized as structured vs. unstructured. Very naive conclusions.

Ironically, they BELIEVE if you simulate the axiomatic neuron perfectly, emergent properties of intelligence will mystically emerge after some undefined threshold of complexity. They are permanently unable to simulate the two billion years of neurological evolution and natural selection for such a belief to hold.

If you must emulate human intelligence, you must be able to navigate the realm of distilling reality from the overlap between truth and belief. Mocking how humans observe reality isn't enough.

Abrahamic religion explored the alternative intelligence problem in great depth over two thousand years ago. It's a pity the results have been lost to Progressive axe grinding.

A machine process qualifies as AI if it believes in a god.

EDIT: I see the nuances of epistemological problems are lost to HN and knee-jerk culture war atheism still rules supreme.

Your model expects your child not to be attacked.

The child was attacked.

You suddenly have the energy for resynchronization so that your model can persist despite this exception.

I would argue that China, Japan, Korea, and other Buddhist-heavy nations have other cultural mechanisms to prompt one to remodel reality. Buddhist teachings make it very clear the desire is the source of suffering, and this axiom weaves its way through cultural institutions and norms in these countries.

If we accept this, then I would argue "anger suppression" in said countries isn't anger suppression in the Western sense ("We have to prevent the next Hitler at all costs!!!! No moar hate guise, kthx love all yaaaaay :) :) :) ") as much as it is part of an overall suppression of desire.

Western culture is so obsessed about suppressing anger at all costs. Like each person is a nuclear weapon that needs to be aggressively contained or else the entire fabric of civilization will collapse.

Anger exists for a reason and it exists for good reasons. The manifestation of anger means some model you are holding onto is no longer in sync with reality and that resynchronization costs more than your time preferences will allow. (Using the authors scenario, your expectation was for a reasonably timed phone call, not a 35 minute wait.)

It's not that anger is wrong. The anger is correct. The expectation was wrong. The West automatically assumes all instances of anger are permanently wrong, and this child-like ritual prevents one from appreciated the value of anger as a compulsion that tells you in no uncertain terms that your expectation is completely out of whack and you need to either cut your losses or resynchronize the expectation.

Anger becomes fuel for remodeling reality once you understand what is is trying to tell you. Putting taboos up around it prevents this realization, which in turn, creates people who are trained to perpetually cling to false models of reality out of fear of violating the taboo.

It's not the others that cause cognitive dissonance. The dissonance is caused when your in-group AGREES with the others.

Without an in-group, the others are just datum to digest and process.

Without others, the in-group is just casually asserting the supremacy of its models over reality.

Your borderline autistic model of privilege is being used as club to justify systemic abuse from the same authoritarian forces you are attempting to describe with your faulty model.

You should feel bad, but I know you won't.