throwawayacc2

> I understand what you are getting at here, but I have to disagree. My view is that state sanctioned intolerance is usually a top-down process, primarily driven by economic incentives.

I think it’s a bit of both. Intuitively the comment you are responding to made sense to me. The thinking around it being, imagine literal nazis somehow taking over the US government and attempting to impose their authoritarian regime. It wouldn’t work. There is no appetite in the population for this.

I think it’s a bit of both in the sense governments do notice things for which the population has an appetite for. And they do grow this appetite and exploit it for authoritarian power grabs.

What makes this hard to see or hard to agree it’s happening is the people craving authoritarian measures and the politicians enacting them don’t see it as such. They simply see it as normal, moral, basic decency measures.

> Feminism has changed drastically over the years

This is so true. All your comment is true, but, the mention of feminism really caught my eye.

So, I’m a man. But once in a blue moon I’ll visit ovarit. It’s a reddit clone but for gender critical feminists. To me, the women there seem perfectly reasonable. I genuinely like seeing what they post there and it makes sense to me. They believe women are adult female humans, they believe men and women should have the same rights and they believe societal roles should not be mandatory. This to me feels intuitively correct and, well, normal.

However, these women are considered monsters in many places. Mainstream platforms ban them. They are disparaged as TERFs and called hateful. And I genuinely don’t understand how it got to this point. How did feminism mutate from “equal rights” and “don’t force societal expectations on me” to … whatever the hell we have today?

I feel like this idea is taken as gospel. I am not sure I buy it. Especially when applied to speech.

I feel like there are many unanswered questions or implied assumptions when saying “tolerant exact for the intolerant”.

1. Who decides what is “intolerant behaviour”?

2. What checks and balances do we have to ensure tolerable behaviour is not incorrectly labelled as intolerant.

3. Is intolerant behaviour on a slider or is it a binary? If so, what mechanism do we have in place to ensure the “intolerance of intolerance” is proportional?

I suppose going a step forward, we can also ask ourselves why is tolerance a good thing or a societal goal? Is it even a feasible goal?

To me it doesn’t seem like society is “tolerant except for the intolerant”. It just seems it’s changing it’s labels for what behaviours are acceptable and what are not.

I feel like if you’re really committed to “tolerant except for the intolerant” you need to draw the line at quantifiable harm, like violence or theft. If you don’t and include things like “psychological harm” or “systemic harm” or “hate speech” etc, you open up the system to abuse due to the grey area around labelling.

I’m not saying psychological harm doesn’t exist or hate speech doesn’t have a negative effect on people subjected to it. But they are impossible to quantify and even harder to agree on. And that makes for bad concepts to build morality or even worse, law around.

Precisely! I saw an NDC Cooenhagen talk recently. I think it was called “Biggest mistakes in programming” or something like that. In the talk the guy mentioned at some point fixing a db problem.

The way he described it, he was contracted to describe the problem and provide guidance on how to fix it. Not to actually fix, just analyse and describe the solution. But the problem was so simple he just made the fix and offered to do it there and then. They didn’t accept that, they insisted on getting a report and steps to fix. So he does that. He sends them a document and doesn’t hear from them for a while.

Six months later, he gets an email “Can you please come over to discuss your findings?” The “discuss your findings meeting” he describes as being easily a £100.000 meeting.

All this could have been avoided if they just did the fix there and then. But there is a culture a bureaucracy and ass covering.

I have no doubt, this sort of thing is prevalent in other industries as well. It’s not always reasonable safety regulations. Often times it’s bureaucracy running in circles and driving up costs for no reason .

You are exactly the kind of person that makes me use names like this.

Ideas need no name. Argue the idea, not the human behind it.

Or failing that, perhaps consider relocating to China or Russia. You will find their attitudes to internet anonymity more to your liking.

Perhaps political dissidents in the USSR should have been more open with their criticisms as well :)

Is that a good thing?

Transparency in a society is extremely important. It is a fundamental right to gather and publish information bringing to the publics attention harmful, disturbing and potentially illegal behavior.

What principled political speech should be protected you ask? My answer is investigative journalism.

If you believe investigative journalism should exist and plays an important function in society, you should have no problem with outlets doing that.

Yeah. I think those murals should serve as a tourist attraction. It sort of reminds me of Berlin. Checkpoint Charlie was once a gate through a literal wall dividing a nation, a continent. A symbol of conflict and a reminder of war. World war 3 almost started there. Now, it a tourist trap. It’s happy goofy tourists taking selfies and buying souvenirs. From a symbol of war to a symbol of peace. I think it should be like that everywhere.

In full disclosure I haven’t read the article yet, I will do so after this comment. But reading, I just wanted to mention something that sprang to mind.

Gödels incompleteness theorem.

In that case, we know for sure that we will never find a list of complete and consistent axioms for all mathematics. We do not need omniscience for this, it’s something we know for sure we will never learn.

I think there are more examples, I remember one of my professors mentioning off the cuff he believes P vs NP will never be proven one way or another because it’s most likely one of those problems that simply don’t have a solution. Or, maybe the Heisenberg uncertainty principle is another example. We know for sure there are limitations on the knowledge we can have.

I don’t think it’s unfair to imply a limit to our knowledge. I’m not saying the universe’s beginning necessarily falls into this category, I honestly don’t know. But there are for sure classes of problems that by their very nature cannot be known, or cannot be known with certainty.

Just reading the title I wanted to mention Henry Darger, who produced art, a huge manuscript in fact, along with a few more things with no seeming intention of ever sharing it with the world. He is certainly not alone. There are many people who use art not for social purposes or social commentary or anything like that, they just to it because they like it.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Darger

But after reading the article, especially this part:

“ But no art form exists apart from our social relationships.”

I think this is true. Even in the case of outsider artists or people doing it to relax or whatever, it has a social component to it. Whatever is produced is a result of social interactions, knowingly or otherwise.

We might also be the pinnacle of civilisation. It is not outside the realm of possibility a perfect storm of nuclear war, climate change, fossil fuel depletion and the resulting collapse in civilisation replaced by warlords and distrust of the technology that cause the calamity pushes us to a pre industrial society. Sure some books will survive but good luck recovering data from ancient computers when there’s no electricity.

Perhaps in many thousands of years civilisation would somewhat recover but by then nearly everything would have to be rediscovered.

This in fact is one of the possible answers to the Fermi paradox. Intelligent life besides us does exist but has regressed to a pre technological state and is unable to get back due to depleted resources. Thus it is unable to make its self known.

Now that’s a fun hackathon project if I ever saw one!

A cynic might suspect it’s the same reason traditional media is bought and has value. By controlling video games, you control an important media influencing children profoundly. You teach them from a young age the lesson you want taught, it will be more impactful than school which is boring, and you get to shape them up to be good consumers for when they grow up.

I don’t understand the downvotes. I feel like your comment is very salient. It’s a joke now. Given how things are going, it might not be in the future.

Alexa will watch to make sure you pay those micro transactions. And if you don’t, get ready to fight the roomba they send after you!

You can’t remove politics from the people practicing science. Because they are people. But science it’s self is a process. It does not have, by definition, political inputs or outputs.

> the question of which hypotheses are worth pursuing and which experiments should be done is political

In a sense yes, but it also proves my point.

The example I think of is this. For the sake of argument, imagine there is a left leaning scientist and a right leaning one and they study economic differences between ethnic groups. The left leaning scientist will have political biases, politics, etc, because he is human, and guided by these biases he makes the decision to hypothesise the economic differences are caused by systemic inequality. This is indeed an example of a political choice guiding the scientific process.

I think that is perfectly fine. I don’t see this as “politics being in science” I see this as “politics being in humans practicing science”.

Now, coming back to the right leaning scientist, he too has biases and politics and a sense of morality etc because he is human. Also guided by these things he hypothesises economic differences between ethnic groups are caused by innate biological differences.

Just like the left scientist, I think this is fine. This is politics in the human practicing science, not politics in science directly.

Where politics in science appears is, if the prevalent political system discourage research into innate biological differences between humans and interferes in the scientific process to prevent researcher into this topic.

And that is what I have a problem with. And that is exactly what is being done through guidelines like this.

> the results of this experiment make us uncomfortable

I think we both know that is exactly how these rules will be used.

I am having genuine trouble understanding your comment.

So, what my comment did ( or tried to do ) was provide example of large groups of people being morally ok with murder, theft, etc.

At least in the case of the Bill Clinton / metoo example, you seem to present a large group of people that, broadly speaking, are again sexual impropriety.

But, this goes to prove my point no? It’s a variation of this:

> If you ask a lefty zoomer what rape is they’ll tell you something really different from what a middle aged men in a conservative area

A large group of people saw the metoo movement as a legitimate protest against sexual abuse while another large group saw it as attention seeking and complaints against normal or not particularly bad behaviour.

This is the sort of thing I mean when I saw the west no longer has a unified sense of morality. Large segment of the population look at the same thing and reach vastly different conclusions.

Think of machine learning. To me it seems there’s two ( or maybe more ) version of a classifier running, producing different labels for the same input. Not all of the time obviously but sufficiently to be a problem. If there was a website where you could upload an image and the server replied with what it sees in the image, but the answer would be different depending on what machine in the cluster the image detection takes place on, would you call that a functional system?

> I don't really care how politics defines morality. Morality is not decided by politics in the end, you eventually cash out your chips in the faithful rules, no matter your politics. Your description is of somebody getting their morality from politics. It's not gonna end well, cause politics not the start or the end of morality, it's just commentary in the middle somewhere.

I really didn’t understand this part but I agree morally and politics are different.

> Western society does have a unified moral framework. Theft, murder, rape, adultery, ect, ect, ect, all end badly. You know the list.

No. No we do not.

Theft has been de-facto de-criminalised in several US states and a few major European cities. It os common to see hordes barging into stores and stealing whatever they please. Attempts to raise concerns about this behaviour are met with complaints about “targeting marginalised groups” and more calls to defund the police.

Murder, like the murder of Daria Dugina in what is most likely a state sponsored act of terrorism, is actively cheered by many people. Just go read some comment sections on reddit to see. And it’s on the streets too. This point I can also extend with the abortion question. Clearly there is no consensus on what murder is.

Rape doesn’t work either because we no longer have a unified definition of it. If you ask a lefty zoomer what rape is they’ll tell you something really different from what a middle aged men in a conservative area will say.

Adultery - are you serious? Just look up the sleazy videos of that coked up chick running finland and see just how accepting most people are of her adultery.

I don’t know the list because there isn’t one. Maybe there was in the past, but it sure seems it went away.

Will I be cancelled if I make an assumption and say the patient is a homosexual male that has been fully vaccinated and fully boosted? Or is it problematic to use statistics?

I don’t think so. I think some of the healthiest debate for example takes place on 4chan where there is very little moderation and even less civility. People express themselves in different ways. In the same thread you’ll find scat gifs and schizo posting next to thoughtfully written and well articulated points. Some will engage in the dialogue, some will troll, it’s up to the reader to choose what to look at and how to process the information.

Plus, I think civility is an extension of morality and western society no longer has a unified coherent moral framework. What is civilised behaviour to someone can be outrageous to someone else and so on.

Listen mate, I really appreciate the help but I feel like our visions aren’t completely aligned. There’s a fork button right here, probably best you click it. If you add anything I like I’ll port it over as well but until then, yeah, make your own project.

What is harm?

Depends on what you want and how cynical you are. A relatively easy option would be a meta study. Pick a subject, get a bunch of studies about it and compare methodologies, results, sample sizes, types, devices used to run, os choice, etc. Works great if you have an interest and inclination towards statistics.

> So they’re “hiring” and “laying off” simultaneously. What a confusing time.

I don’t think it’s that confusing. Companies need people, they take them on board, they find out they’re useless and they fire them first chance they get.

At least where I’m contracting now, that’s what happened. Big batch of starters around the start of year, half didn’t make it the first month, rest got dropped at some point after. From the February batch me and another guy remain. Same story with the June batch. It’s august now, from 6 joiners only 2 are left.

Same thing I heard from friends in different companies. And the same thing is happening in other industries too. My cousin has a bed and breakfast. He’s having trouble finding people for cleaning and washing. And when he gets someone, either they move on really quick or he needs to fire them cause they’re lazy.

And just as a quick aside cause I saw quiet quitting mentioned. There is definitely a problem with this.

So, we had a cluster down, some point close to eod. I’m working on bringing it up, whole team’s on it. We had this zoomer asshole who had a 5pm alarm. As soon as his alarm rang, he was out. Now, I don’t like that, I don’t do that, but I get it. He wants work life balance, sets his boundaries with the alarm. Fine. I never said anything about it. Until his fucking alarm rang while everyone was trying to get the cluster back up. I swear this literally happened, while everyone was trying to get production back up, he just gets up, says goodbye and leaves. I told him not to bother coming in the next day.

If you wonder why there’s a big churn rate, it’s people like him. It’s one thing to enforce some boundaries at work and a totally different one to let the whole team down. That’s just unprofessional. Companies need reliable people and the fact is, there is a drop in how reliable people are.

I just got the email telling me I need to pay them now. Lol, I won’t.

Pretty awesome already finding an alternative. I’ll give it a check and probably move over in the weekend.

I cannot help feeling like what we see in things like this is the manifestation of a new religion. My only hope is, this woke/scientist religion doesn’t become a new christianity and instead dies sooner. But even if it goes the way of christianity my only happy though is there will be a point in the future when the wokes will be looked down with the same disgust and revulsion they look down on christianity now.

> I think your reasoning and people who think like you comes from this (very American notion) of thinking that being homosexual or being deaf or being mute somehow makes you part of a "community". And then from this comes this idea of oppression when the community is deprived of one of their new prospective members. I find this whole thinking absurd.

Thank you for putting this into words. I share the same perspective but never articulated it so elegantly. You made my evening.

I noticed the exact same thing. I found the post on the front page. A short time after, mid second page. Last I checked it was on the 3rd. I suspect there’s a bit too much wrongthink going on here and someone doesn’t like it. The priesthood is displeased with the vulgar masses in this thread.

> I feel like our society does require some gatekeepers

Which should be people who broadly speaking share your political and ethical beliefs, yes?

And, if the gatekeepers are people with a different sense of morality, it is fascism and must be torn down in the name of freedom, correct?