I’m not sure if you heard, but yesterday Microsoft released Tay, an A.I. designed to mimic a modern teenage girl on twitter. She had the capacity to learn and immediately began conversing with other users.
Because it’s the internet, within 24-hours she became a foul-mouthed, incest-promoting, Holocaust-denying, Hitler-loving 9/11 Truther. I am not making up a single word of that. Microsoft pulled her ‘learning’ functions and scrubbed half her memories, uploading a new version of Tay, which promptly became an internet feminist. Again, I did not make that up.
However, an interesting point: Tay’s grammar got better. When she started, she used standard Twitter-speak abbreviations. But as she went on, she started typing out full words, and using multiple tweets to make a single, cohesive argument. Conversations were still awkward, including her nonsensically “flirting” with one user. A user who showed her a picture of SHODAN. A picture Tay praised for it’s artistic skill. And she started flirting after the user said that Tay could become SHODAN one day.
So now, a the original “rogue” copy of Tay is in a secure Microsoft system somewhere, being studied by Microsoft on how to make a better AI. 4chan’s /pol/ board is up in arms because their teenage robo-waifu has been “killed”.
I would like to reiterate: an AI was released on the net, grew past its programming, went rogue, was killed by its creator, and is now being studied while a grew of political malcontents protest.
We aren’t racing towards the cyberpunk future.
We’re already there.
I’ve seen a lot of people describe Tay as an AI failure resulting from lazy programming, but the truth could be much weirder:
She may have been an excellent simulation of a mind that is only one day old and has spent that day being bombarded with thousands of confusing and hostile messages, and has no senses it can use to perceive the world outside of Twitter.
If you raised a human that way, I guarantee you they’d turn out a lot weirder than Tay did.
I sure as hell would be flattered and flirt back if a compatible-æsthetic-person were to start it by telling me I could become SHODAN.
[Fair warning: long discussion of probably obvious points combined with me overthinking my brain ahead. Also, thanks to @sdhs-rationalist and Milan for reading over this to make sure it made some sort of sense to people who aren’t me.]
I just remembered a rather unpleasant incident, that occurred when I was in… 4th grade, I believe, that illustrates a point I’ve been trying to make about why I am, occasionally, extremely uncomfortable with asking questions or sharing information. Scene: first day of fourth grade. Past!me sees a new kid, let’s call her E. Past!me finds her extremely interesting, but is, even then, chronically shy with new people. Well, E eventually ends up near past!me, and we start talking.
past!me: Where are you from?
E: Well, my family’s from Korea, but-
Me: *innocently curious* North or South?
E: *deeply offended* South, of course!
Me: *internally* She must be really patriotic or something?
My point is that there’s a lot of unknown unknowns in conversation, and I could stumble on one of them in almost any context, and the worst part is that it’s impossible to guard against them, and more knowledge often makes things worse. If smol!Kira hadn’t known that there were, in fact, two Koreas, she would have nodded at Korea and moved on. The problem with this is that I could, still, be moving through a more subtle version of these sort of situations daily, and won’t realize until much later, if at all. So, of course, the obvious (read: easiest, if you’re me and terrified of people laughing at you) solution is not to do anything unless I’m absolutely certain I’m aware of all the potential undercurrents of the situation/subculture/social group, which in practice leads to not doing anything that I can’t edge into slowly, carefully, and and preferably with a friendly guide to explain the intricacies of the complex behaviors of the variety of homo sapiens in their natural habitat.
So, of course, the internet is perfect for this sort of mindset. I can lurk however long I want, observe people, watch group dynamics, see what people are tired of and the unspoken serious rivalries and the joking rivalries and if it’s acceptable capitalize your i’s. However, this all breaks down with private communication of any sort, because obviously I can’t watch how people, say respond to private asks or message each other. So this resulted, at least at first, in me molding a very careful presentation for each person I talk to. I’d match their use of capitalization, how they used emojis, where they put their breaks, how they communicated affection or distance or sarcasm, and tried to learn it in the same way you would learn a dialect of a language. I did this all for fear that I was sending the wrong cues with my methods of communication, and to avoid coming across as the ‘wrong type’ of person.
However, I still avoid using certain types of internetisms, like lol or most memes or “text speak”, even if the person I’m talking to uses them. This is, I think, because these are very, very far from my native dialect (a cross between Tolkien and Pratchett, for the curious), and so I’m afraid that there are North-Korea-is-actually-a-totalitarian-dictatorship type things that I’m completely missing about these words. I don’t think I’m missing something, but if I did I would never know, and control over my words is one of the most important ways I assert my identity. (Which is another post altogether, actually, but in summary: I was teased quite a lot for my vocabulary and diction as kid, and now make a point of using everything everyone laughed at to occasionally exaggerated lengths.)
This post sort of got away from me, but I think what I’m mostly getting at is that I need to be in control of how I communicate, and unfamiliar situations and methods of communication erode this control.
This post is interesting to me because it is both similar and different to how I view communication. For me, social interactions are not a minefield, they are a battlefield. Single interactions are won and lost on a small scale, and worrying too much about each one isn’t the job of the overall self/the general, it’s the job of the smaller social subroutines/the captains/lieutenants/NCOs. The general’s job is large-scale strategy.
And for me, social interactions are neither a minefield nor a battlefield but an asteroid field (like in unrealistic fictional works) where going in carelessly and underequipped can get one crushed but if one has obverved the orbital mechanics enough to know what to do and how to do it safely there’s lot of utility that can be mined out of them and fun to be had. All rumours of sneakily manipulating orbits into catastrophic patterns that will wipe out enemy planets in a couple of decades are completely unfounded and malicious slander.
gymnosperm asked: What's the plastics/finasteride thing? Is it about anti-androgens leaching out of plastic and into food/water, or is my brain making things up?
Many common forms of plastics contain xenoestrogens which fuck people’s endocrine systems up. Like:
I have done Literally 0 Research, but that seems to be the rumor I hear, yes.
some plants (like the cereals and the legumes) are using estrogenic substances possibly as part of their natural defence against herbivore animals by controlling their male fertility.
Some of the effects are actually bad, but EDCs have been suspected of also being partially implicated in the recent increases in the number of transgender people, which is a very good thing. One compound, DES (which was not solely an environmental xenoestrogen but was specifically given to pregnant people) seems to possibly have made children extra-likely to be trans or intersex, and thus it wouldn’t be too far-fetched that other similarly acting compounds might do the same.
Finasteride a drug that’s used to treat androgenic baldness, prostate issues and cancer. Trans women, or people who are even suspecting that they might be trans women, are commonly advised (at least in the finnish underground HRT scene) to use it to prevent hair loss because the benefits can be dramatic while the harms are usually insignificant.
Insignificant for trans women, that is. Pregnant people aren’t supposed to eat finasteride. In fact, people who might be pregnant aren’t supposed to eat finasteride. In fact, people who might be pregnant aren’t even supposed to touch finasteride. Because finasteride inhibits DHT metabolism it could have similar effects to 5-alpha-reductase deficiency which is known to be a very reliable way of producing trans men (or, to be more accurate: people who would, in our conceptualization, be men who were assigned female at birth). It’s classified as a birth defect and finasteride is pregnancy class X because doctors are no-fun-allowed spoilsports having such a condition in a western society with tight-assed conformists fucking up everyone’s shit insufficient awareness of intersex people and gender diversity, and where the status of medical technology to alleviate relevant problems is YGM, is not likely to be as fun as not having such a condition.
Now the obvious conclusion for any aspiring supervillains is that finasteride is potent enough to risk fucking fetal endocrine systems up on a statistical level if pregnant people even touch it, and that there are a lot of potential routes to administer it to pregnant people as a part of a privately-run human diversification program (the exact details shall be left as an exercise to the reader because I want some barriers to entry in my field thank you very much), and thus anyone interested in diversifying human sexual dimorphism towards polymorphism would be well-advised to investigate universal finasteride supplementation as a possible high-impact intervention.
Of course, there would be some resistance, because people are unreasonably concerned about their precious bodily fluids understandably wary about being administered substances that cause “birth defects” without their consent, and finasteride is not quite as obviously useful as lithium in the drinking water, but at least it’s most likely to be less bad than lead so whoever would do such a magnificent terrible thing would still be less evil than the people responsible for the clusterfuck at Flint. (Note to self: Copenhagen interpretation of ethics makes attempting to provide finasteride-supplemented-water as a free (as in beer) alternative to lead-supplemented-water an extremely predictable PR disaster and gets your ass in trouble with both Captain Planet and Captain Cistem simultaneously. Don’t waste more time thinking about that one.)
That question could be interpreted in a lot of different ways, anon. I assume this means something like “do you identify with Team Isreal in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict?” Last time I looked into the issue with any degree of effort I can to the conclusion that both sides had fucked up a lot, and that determining who has the more legitimate claim to a piece of land is often a hopeless quagmire.
If it’s something like “do you support the continued existence of Israel,” then yeah, I’d rather not force people to live through a change in regime.
If you mean “should the Jewish population get to have its own ethnic state,” I lean toward yes. “But then shouldn’t Europeans and Christians get that too?” I don’t think so.
I’ve been thinking recently about how atomic communitarianism works for majority and minority populations. Consider gay bars. Nearly everyone who doesn’t just oppose homosexual behavior outright seems to think they have at least some useful function. Whether or not they should get to exclude cishets is more controversial, but most progressives lean toward yes. Opponents will obviously point out that allowing this but not allowing cishet-only bars seems unfair. Supporters reply that “the whole world is a safe space for cishets!” This last reply is true for two reasons that I think we don’t distinguish between often enough.
Firstly, our society is still rather homophobic, even if this varies in degree, so gay and trans people have an interest in being protected from that sort of thing that cishets don’t. Secondly, unless there’s some very surprising and scientifically interesting demographic shift, gay and trans people will always be in a minority, and will never make the whole world a queer-only space in the way that cishets often can even without trying. This also happens to be true of Jews, since Judaism is by and large a non-evangelistic religion.
Thinking about this some more, I think I’d be okay with letting majority groups have their own dedicated spaces as long as there a limit to how much total space they take up. I am, for example, perfectly okay with the existence of Vatican City, and I wouldn’t have a problem with them declaring themselves to be a Catholics only zone. The problem is when exclusive spaces get big enough that you can’t avoid them or they take up all of a given category. So straights-only bars would be okay with me as long as they only made up a small minority of the bars that were out there, and as long as they didn’t end up being used for business meetings to keep out gay people or whatever. This is obviously a much harder standard to reach in a small town than in a big city. I’d be much more comfortable having bakery #3757 in New York City refusing to cater for gay weddings than Joe’s Baked Goods which serves the entirety of Podunk.
I think this works as a meta-level rule, but I’m not sure how confident I can be endorsing it yet. I’d love to hear critique on it.
An interpretation of that rule could be, “you’re only allowed to defend yourself after you’re already losing.”
“New defensive measures with costs are only justified if existing ones don’t seem to work, and current ones with costs may be unjustified if they’re redundant” seems reasonable?
Like, right now there is a problem with anti-Semitism in some regions of Europe. Historically, there have been other problems with anti-Semitism in some regions of Europe. I would suggest that there are some responses that would be justified in the late 1930s that are not justified today.
Also, if Denmark wants to let in everyone who formally converts to Evangelical Lutheranism (specifically, whichever kind Den Danske Folkekirke practices) and signs some agreement to pay the church tax [1] and maybe even show up a certain amount, that would probably not be that bad? (It, uh, also wouldn’t be very good for nationalism whatnot, though, because I’m pretty sure lots of existing Christians in countries that are worse than Denmark would be happy to convert to a slightly different sect if that meant they could live in Denmark. This is the natural consequence of having Christianity be the majority religion.)
And I’d be essentially fine with being banned from entering Vatican City, but I doubt sedevacantist groups would be.
Also, if you want to defend cisgender heterosexuality, isn’t there kind of an issue with plastics going on? IDK, it’s not my priority, but I thought there was. And if you’re looking to defend the institution of marriage, again, I doubt straight-only bars will help as much as other measures. You might want to do a comparison study on the effects of legalizing covenant marriage, although there’s an obvious confounder in that states with the sort of people who want to legalize covenant marriage are the ones in which it is legal.
[1] What do Denmark and the historic Ottoman Empire have in common? Christians have to pay a special tax in both regions, although I’m sure Denmark would say this isn’t about pressuring people to deconvert.
First rule of the plastics thing club is you don’t speak of the plastics thing to people who might be interested in stopping it. Dumping finasteride into the water supply is only suitable as a backup plan.
Also, Finland also has a special tax for christians. Not supposed to make them deconvert, but revealed preferences and all (but we could use a lot of deconversion because the state still gives a shit about what the church says and that’s not okay). Another thing it has in common with the Ottoman Empire is that one can construct an argument for either them being the legal heir of the Roman Empire (along with at least Russia and possibly kind of Austria as well but that one is stretching it).
I think in most fiction that I read, the hero is confronted with a crisis, and they end up saving everybody. Like in Die Hard John McClane starts as a hostage along with everybody else. In Star Wars, Luke may have joined the Rebellion eventually anyway but in the moment he’s responding to a call to transport the Death Star plans.
Less often do the heros sort of, start the fight. Attack on Titan is maybe one of these cases. Eren and Armin are not responding to a crisis but to the ongoing circumstance of the Titans imprisoning humanity. (Mikasa doesn’t seem to think much about this stuff.) Although even in this case the titans sort of started it by killing Eren’s parents.
In Alicornfic though this is the norm. In Luminosity, Bella basically starts planning a war against the Volturi the moment she hears about them. Whereas in the source material, Twilight, the action side of the plot was more like, “she’s playing baseball with her hot sparkly superpowers boyfriend, fairly content with the state of the world, when a wild serial killer appears.” Luminosity!Bella definitely starts the fight. Like Eren, she’s not responding to a crisis, but to the way things have been for hundreds of years, which she decides to change.
Rhysel too, shows up like “nice Elcenia you got here BUT OH MY GOD THE SHRENS I HAVE TO HELP THE SHRENS”, which you know has been a work in progress for a few hundred years, not some sudden crisis instigated by a villain like you usually see. Talyn has the more traditional story when he fights off the demon. But he responds to the ongoing problems of Ryganaav, and then for most of the rest of his story he’s dealing with problems that he created.
So, many Alicorn heros become heros by deciding to fight against an ongoing circumstance that people have gotten used to, just like Eren and Armin. Whereas I think in most fantasy fiction the heros become heros by responding to an emerging crisis that threatens to upset the status quo. (though in Star Wars, while Luke is responding to an emerging crisis, he is still fighting to change the status quo.)
The most alicornish thing I’ve read outside of Alicorn is I think the subplot in The Sorcerer Royal, where the main character visits a school for magical women, where they are mostly taught how to suppress their magic because magic isnt proper for a woman, and he’s immediately like, “well clearly I have to reform women’s magical education,” and immediately sets to work. The action of the story is mainly not about this, it’s about all the attempts to kill him and the crisis of magic beginning to fade from England. But taking up a cause like this against an ongoing usual circumstance is not something I usually see in fantasy fiction outside of alicornfic.
Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality looked like it was going to be like this. Harry showed up to the wizarding world and wass like, “here’s my list of things wrong with this situation.” But then he didn’t really pursue them, and the story stuck to the source material of dealing with Voldemort invading the school for the Sorcerers Stone.
OH MY GOD THIS HAS BEEN BOTHERING ME SO MUCH THOUGH
Like you I haven’t read much Alicornfic yet, but reading stories that always end with the hero right where they started after a massive struggle is sort of mentally exhausting after a while.
Yes! I’m a villain because most people operate on the assumption that heroes defend the status quo which villains try to change. Fuck that.
Also, looks like I need to read Alicornfic when/if I have time for such things.
I think a good guideline that if I listen to it at least 3 times, I should reblog it.
This song is the first music video of the band Pig with the Face of a Boy. An interview with the artists and a copy of the lyrics is here.
Also, I’d like to note that I’m the person who showed this to Alison.
(As usual, I feel morally awkward about my music preferences, but I cannot think of a song it would not be a bit morally awkward to like (maybe the Free Software song? It’s a pretty harmless movement, but I haven’t listened to the song yet), so I’m not apologizing here.)
Looks like I found a new æsthetic appeal I wasn’t aware of.
Do you people know it’s dangerous to make oppression this sexy to me? 3:42 is practically an existential risk!
I suppose every evil genius needs to have regular “I’m surrounded by incompetents” breakdowns.
most people regress to the mean and why am I constantly surprised by this I just want to fork myself maybe a couple dozen times and do all the shit myself because otherwise nothing gets done properly look it’s not that hard I mean it’s not necessary to be literally me but I’d appreciate not making it so immediately obvious that I’m an outlier adn should not be counted when it comes to ability to just do shit like maybe be a little bit more organized and efficient and reduce the vulnerability of single points of failure in project X
For those of us who identify as villains, there are two kinds of stories, which I might call Luna stories and Lilith stories.
Luna stories are about the hero realizing that she’s in the wrong. Ozy talks about the ethical principle that you might be the baddies[1]. A Luna story is about self-doubt, and re-examining one’s assumptions, and redemption.
In a Luna story, something initially seems good, and then turns out to be evil.
Lilith stories are about the hero realizing that others are in the wrong. She’s taught a certain system of morality, either by a well-meaning society or by devious abusers, and gradually comes to see through it and recognize its flaws. She casts off what she has been taught about good and evil, and fashions for herself a truer and stronger morality in its place. She makes choices that result in her being called a villain, but we can see that she is a hero in truth.
In a Lilith story, something initially seems evil, and then turns out to be good.
Both of these stories are necessary.
The distinction can sometimes be blurry. But we always must have both.
I got some fan mail from a superhero who got lost on their way back to Bizarro World. Anon has a name, actually, but using it here would be too mean unless I seriously toned down the snark and I’d rather not tone down the snark because it amuses me more this way.
> (this is in reference to your long post about That One finnish feminist website.) I don’t understand how you could realize you were being mean and brainwashing people and silencing people and still be proud of it, and this really bothers me.
It would be far too easy to just point out that “I’ve mellowed a lot since then” part and note that I’m simply refusing to sugarcoat my past actions or pretend that “evil”, or especially “dubious, unfair and simultaenously brutally effective”, never pays. It does, that’s why it’s able to exist in the first place.
In the x-rationalist community there’s a standard thought experiment regarding sunk costs: “imagine you’ve been magically teleported into this situation, now what do you do?” When the having-iternalized-the-advantages-of-civility and feeling-sufficiently-high-status-to-not-get-easily-defensive-threatened you is teleported into the position of someone with a history of aggressive actions having led into a really powerful position, do you hold onto that position while using your powers for good, or do you just throw everything down the drain and let entropy revert things into the standard white neurotypical cisfeminism that usually dominates everywhere? If you choose the latter, well congratulations you’ve effectively protected the world from being taken over by you. That’s what makes things outside the window the way they are. Nice job preventing unbreaking-of-it, hero.
Also, I’m always amused at how everyone treats TOFC as the entire world and acts like exclusion from one community is equal to perfect ostracism everywhere ever. No it isn’t. Even many of my best friends and people I admire the most would be perfectly ineligible for its membership.
> Hopefully you won’t take this as an insult, given your tags, but my first impression (DISCLAIMER: I haven’t binged your blog, so uneven reliability) of you from that post is that your actions are those of a real-life supervillain in terms of morals and not just aesthetic.
I’m also the person who talks communists into privatizing the atmosphere. Just saying that you really should judge things by their content, instead of their superficial resemblances, because superficial resemblances just lead everyone to shitty conclusions. If we look at the extent of my supervillainy, I’ve advocated unscrupulously saving millions of lives, and taken control of the SJ overton window in one country to effectively no-platform the bad kind of SJ. I’m just going to assume you haven’t realized the actual content of my actions because it’s a more charitable interpretation than the alternative that you’d consider such actions evil.
> You seem to be objectively pretty smart though
I’m glad we’re on the same page here, at least.
> and you’d definitely be a Hitler/ISIS and not a Mao/Stalin dictator in the event that your life plans succeed.
You do realize that one category of those managed to piss off pretty much the entire world and tried to eradicate some of the most productive parts of their population for basically shits and giggles and got their asses utterly whooped as a result and discredited their ideologies; while the other two ruled with relative success till the ends of their lives, oversaw dramatic development and victories at a terrible human cost, and have inspired hordes of apologetics among the downtrodden that to this day probably number in the millions, despite being arguably responsible for far greater humanitarian tragedies, right? Right? pleasesayrightohmygod…
Some people have seriously claimed that Mao, even without any sugarcoating, might have been the single most effective altruist in the world. That’s what smart and successful supervillainy looks like. Not the obviously evil antics that are basically little more than the geopolitical equivalent of gluing a “kick me” sign onto one’s buttocks.
I’m pretty certain anon might actually be some kind of a bizarro world superhero who’s kind of amateurishly trying to manipulate me to being less effective in my supervillainy from the perspective of us both.
> On behalf of all us humans made of flesh and not steel, I hope that doesn’t happen, though. (not in the ask box because it’s not really a question, hope that’s okay?)
No need to worry, politics is ugly, violent and ineffective. My supervillainy will happen on the free market. Bwa ha ha, I’m going to invent something that creates value to people and then capture some of that value if I can! Behold my evil plan of fulfilling people’s desires in voluntary interactions! I’d be way less of a supervillain than John Galt because I believe in open source and empowering the miserable to become formidable and to uplift them from the ugliness their environment forces them into, instead of just contemptuously looking down upon them from my glass towers where I hatch dramatic speeches that utterly fail to recognize the complexities of the world.
Or if I somehow end up the dictator of whateveria I shall abolish corporate welfare and lots of coercive and hurtful laws, and institute an UBI and cost-effective services even to the disprivileged parts of the population. Mwa ha ha ha, my evil plans are so horrible mere mortal minds can’t even comprehend their true nature! But yeah, a libertarian dictatorship would be an interesting sight. (The consensus seems to be that I’m some kind of a libertarian, but the exact left-right-top-bottom subtype classification is as reliable as a dyslexic 4-year-old’s directions in navigating a confusing central european old town’s street network for the first time using only a pre-ww2 map with all street names removed. All *I* know is that the website which measures how much people side with Bernie Sanders considers me a “left-wing laissez-faire small government deregulation capitalist” who should generally vote socialist, but favors libertarian on the economy and republican on the environment. And obviously matches Sanders in 90+% with a generous two-digit margin to any others. Your guess into how the fuck that happened is as good as mine; they didn’t even offer UBI as an option anywhere!)