Underlore

Calling liars out, having proof, being on the side of the facts… None of that matters. You simply will not “win” in the court of public opinion with facts, reason, logic, or evidence, of any real kind. The crowd is 100% amygdala. There’s no higher reasoning EXECPT as a post facto response to the emotional reaction.

In short the crowd can only rationalize, it can not be rational. (Ironically my ability to prove that doesn’t mean anything to anyone.)

I don’t think there are any silent undecided third parties convinced by debate. First and second parties obviously never convince each other.

If debates had that level of impact global society itself would be a lot more rational and unified. Nuclear power and religion are my goto proofs here. But maybe they aren’t the best ones. Nuclear power’s argument is entirely fact based and yet for decades now we’ve let one bad film from the 70s decide US energy position on that front.

Actual professional nuclear physicists have failed for decades to convince Americans of the concrete facts. (I’m sure many people who might read this remain unconvinced for example.) Further, if debate actually swayed third parties with facts and logic religion would be unified or abandoned by now.

Assuming there is a factual objective metaphysical system to reality or the unified absence of one, debate based on those facts should have given a substantial advantage to the truth resulting in unity either under the true religion or the fact that there isn’t one. Clearly that didn’t happen. We still have thousands of religions plus atheism all perpetually bickering.

Also, these hypothetical undecided people could participate in debate, asking questions and the like, but I never see it. I never see people commenting and then adopting a position. I only ever see people seeking confirmation or defending a side.

Further, if undecided third parties were converted into decided first and second parties then they’d join in. But all you ever see in debates are people speaking like they already had a position. (This is a phd sociology opportunity, just find examples of people saying they are convinced, and then prove or disprove it as best you can. I predict now you’ll find none of them are new positions.) You never see droves of people join in with replies like so and so convinced me this is now my position.

Basically I’m saying the claim that there are convinced third parties is wishful thinking, which was the only room left for debate being a valid persuasive tactic. Hence, myth. Reminds me of the so called “silent majority.” Imaginary but (seemingly) plausible allies.

Debate in my opinion appears to be an article of faith and hope more than anything. Which is why the only substantive uses of debate in our society are law and politics, which are the secular faith equivalents on which our society is built.

Which brings up a disturbing corollary. We Americans literally can’t as a society admit that debate is impotent theater because democracy and the legal system are based on it. How do we choose policy or candidates without the function debate is presented as providing? How do we determine guilt and innocence without a jury trial system and impartial judges? What possible alternative is there to this lie?

Literally how do you even start to build a just society that is honest about debate being a myth?

I think the answer is clear. We can’t, and never have. Deep down we all know politics and justice are as broken in this regard as religion and energy policy. Politics is based on lies and spin, not facts and reason. Justice similarly is based on lies and spin, as an extension of politics, but additionally on arcane loopholes, virtue signaling, and proxy sadism. As well as simple greed.

Nationalism and war itself is also an example. It would appear that diplomacy can’t be won in the sense that checkers can. Because if rhetoric and debate could be mastered the nation with the best diplomats would have won the game long ago. Think about it, the best possible weapon logically should be masterful diplomacy. Which would be better militarily? Sending one diplomat and getting everything you want? Or trading half a battalion for everything you want? Just compare military spending. Why spend money on bombs to acquire square feet when you could spend it on diplomats to acquire square miles?

The obvious truth that “it doesn’t work that way” proves my point. Diplomacy is obviously not the weapon system you want to invest in if you intend to win. The reality is that diplomacy doesn’t do anything as advertised. Recent human history is defined by two co-occurring things: Peace, and stasis. Diplomacy where ascendant can prevent war (maybe?) but it doesn’t replace it because in short it’s just not effective. Because it’s based on debate, and debate is a myth.

Philosophically the threat is even larger. Think about conversation as a concept. What even is communication if debate is empty? Its certainly not what it appears to be. I mean my typing this is pointless if debate is empty. But what choice do I have? How do we even begin to design a philosophy that faces this fact?

And what about science? Planck famously lamented the impossibility of convincing even fellow world’s-best physicists with facts and reason. What does that say about our process for making decisions scientifically? How can we possibly achieve consensus if facts themselves have no persuasive power? It’s almost like the persuasion in this context is incidental, accidental, and unconscious.

Some solution speculation:

If diplomacy isn’t the alternative to war we imply it is verbally then we need to develop one asap. War is inherently fact based. The “debate” there is entirely physical. Reality’s physical logic is the truest impartial judge. The problem of war isn’t the concept, it’s the scale and cost. That’s all we need to constrain, otherwise the concept is clearly useful.

We need to transform war into something that serves us instead of something that feeds on us. Imagine if we could turn all that military spending into investment.

How about placing policy and concession bounties on a list of agreed upon scientific discoveries? Like a space program with national betting. First team to place a man on Mars gets some set of war spoils and policy decisions.

All we’d have to do is choose the combatants, the dispute, and the win criteria. Like the gold standard, we could link our economy of policy, to the gold of physical law. Just like war does, only with no collateral damage, and at extreme efficiency.

At any rate, I think I’ve shown that facts don’t matter pretty clearly. I wonder, did my facts and logic change your mind or do you still disagree? XD

See also: https://underlore.com/open-letter-to-all-who-are-rigged/

I’m a 6’2″ 235lb, low/moderate activity adult male.

According to the government I’m supposed to eat 3303kcal per day.

That amounts to at least 11 cups of solids and 16 cups of water.

Including 85 grams of protein. Which is extra hard to do because even “texture vegetable protein” is at best only half protein. And good luck getting it at a price that isn’t hipster vegan Starbucks insanity.

I don’t think I’ve met this requirement more than 5-10 times my entire adult life. And I can’t be alone.

My mind is blown. No wonder I’m disabled. I’m apparently starving to death? No wonder men die sooner, the ones taller than 5’8″ are all likely starving too. That square cube law is an absolute predator.

Even if I could afford to eat like this, I couldn’t stand executing it. It would have to be tasteless for starters or I’m exploding my salt/sugar intake. My teeth would implode, I’d have a gal bladder attack every day, and I’d go mad from chewing 60% of my waking day and grocery shopping and cleaning up the other 40%.

So, as of 2019-08-07 this is more or less what I do/will eat a day more or less:

Look at the gap between what I’m supposed to eat and what I actually eat. And I haven’t even started on the TVP yet, I just ordered it this morning. My main priority now is hitting my protein target per day. I’ll also dig down into the vitamins after I hit my other personal targets.

Some doctors are incredulous about reported death tolls due to medical failure. They argue in various ways that the number is too high. I disagree. The high figures sound absolutely reasonable to me. We’ve been stumbling in the dark in terms of medicine the entire time. Add to that the fact that it’s all about making money now, not saving lives, and the rising percentage of people being taken care of in substandard ways due to said fact and it becomes absolutely plausible if not highly likely that over worked under paid only partially qualified (but insurance approved) care givers are accidentally killing already fragile people. Doctors often process this emotionally. Given any experience with the medical “system” and its insurance overlords, I’m surprised the numbers aren’t higher. Our society literally operates on human sacrifice. Why would medicine be any different?

Doctor response essentially amounts to splitting hairs about what is and isn’t considered failure. It absolutely makes sense that as we live longer the odds of being killed by medicine go up since without medicine most of us would already be dead. (I would have died at birth for example.) Imagine if you needed a surgery every year to stay alive. Eventually a surgery would likely kill you. That’s why the numbers are going up because while they scramble to keep people alive they’re not curing aging.

The elderly are being warehoused to be looked after by grossly overworked and underpaid nurses aids and orderlies, with one nurse on duty for the entire floor. The longer we live the more opportunity medicine gets to kill us. Add to that how precarious so many lives already are thanks to toxic work and toxic food and toxic air etc. It all comes down to how you define failure, and they are defining it in a way protective of their cohort (and the status quo). Everyone else doesn’t.

Basically they’re upset saying it’s not fair and that our standards are too high and that they did the best they could etc. They might be right. But it doesn’t matter. They joined a losing battle, that’s why the job is so laudable. The only way to turn this around is cure aging itself and get really good at response time and repair and prevention such that all deaths eventually boil down to instant accident or choice. The attitude that “well people are gonna die eventually anyway so it’s unfair to use elderly patients as an example” is just more death trance human sacrifice coping.

Just because a death makes sense to someone doesn’t mean it was unavoidable. It’s like how lung cancer always gets dismissed as earned when it happens in a smoker despite the fact that we’ve basically been sucking on a coal plant’s tail pipe since birth. Age is parsed in a similar way. I’m glad to see the media reject this logic (never mind why) and start calling death what it is at this point given our technical ability: Medical Failure.

You probably are one. And here’s why.

If you agree that rational agency isn’t evenly distributed. That not everyone is equally able to make choices that serve themselves wisely. If you agree foolishness exists.

If you agree that some people can use foolishness in others to manipulate them to believe and act in ways that benefit the manipulator at the cost of the manipulated. That it’s possible to exploit foolishness.

Then logically the market and democracy both simply hand power to manipulators because whatever power is given to the foolish will be taken from them.

Thus we’re gonna get a ruling council either way, might as well make it public policy and declare who or what they are and try to structure it ethically and honestly.

Imagine a yard with 10 people in it. 1 is a vicious bully, and 1 is a genius charismatic conman. You know who will have more money/power at the end of the day if you gave everyone 10 dollars and 1 vote.

Where am I wrong?

I was left libertarian till I realized it was anarchy rebranded by Ayn Rand and company, purpose built to give corporate pr a “philosophy” to hang it’s deregulation agenda on.

But I’ve almost always been pronuclear and progun because science nerd and the facts and logic respectively are quite clear.

Then 2016 happened and suddenly I’m branded a sexist racist Russian spy because I understand the coming jobpocalypse thanks to robots and the myth of trickle down and “job creators.” And because I know who Seth Rich really is. (DNC leaker.)

Especially since I know Russia Russia Russia is DNC smoke for the contents of the Podesta emails having legitimately creepy human trafficking implications.

Add that to being painfully aware of how hated I am simply for being white and male, and I find myself sitting in the new right of the overton window.

And I’m what they call an automated space socialist now. (Robots and basic income.)

Funny how you can be the same and yet find yourself in a new place because the world warped around you.

Am I right wing? You tell me.

From here.

Robert, now I know your entire worldview is distorted. (Anthropocentric.) Only a tiny percentage of the earth’s surface has been modified by us willfully at all and much of that tiny surface was purpose hardened to accept stomping of some kind. The vast majority of the world is absolutely neutral. Even an open lava flow is more psychopath than sadist. Lethality in nature is parsed as incidental usually, unless you actively hate water in response to drownings being a thing? Are polar bears serial killers? (I actually think so essentially, but I know you don’t.) I think your philosophy is inconsistent.

The world doesn’t care about us and it’s not afraid of us. We’re just another animal to it, and animals are just more bits of matter. Your human mind injects meaning everywhere as a byproduct of cognition. But if you’re going to claim the majority of hypothetical AI is bad, imo you’re cherry picking or being pedantic. How are you even going to make an objective claim dependent on subjective terms? (You can’t except as an exercise in rhetoric.) Your entire argument is emotional and I don’t think you see it, that’s why this is a video and not a published paper. You’re speaking to the mob because the mob a whole accepts the kind of argument you badly want to make. Pinker did the same thing just from the other side.

But as far as the random stomping analogy, roads and sidewalks spring to mind and roofs for example that typically need to be strong enough to withstand weather. The majority of stomping surface is water for starters, or wilderness, or sand, or ice. If you’re gonna define stomping on a roadway or patch of sand as “bad” as opposed to neutral, you’re being inconsistently strict, technically it might be a waste of time and electricity but usually it’s going to be meaningless. I could easily balance out all your hypothetical breakage bads with humor/amusement goods. Watching a robot slip around on ice could be hilarious. Boston dynamics videos of robot testing have brought small amounts of joy to millions. Sure some of the stomps (and falls) may be materially costly but how many of them are going to be hilarious or fascinating or instructive? YouTube is full of people destroying things for amusement. Is YouTube an evil AI? Also slapstick is a thing, we like watching stuff stumble around. Arguably it’s a big part of the appeal of children and puppies heh. You’re arbitrarily ignoring entire classes valuation to prop up your argument.

The stuff we’ve made (technology) isn’t much different than the stuff that was already here (nature). And very little that we’ve made would persist very long without our active maintenance. Arguably that’s why technology is possible at all in the first place, because of how close things are to useful by default, because after all we evolved to suit the default world. You’re altering how you define bad and ignoring all kinds of good to fit your claims about the hypothetical ratio of possible bad AIs. Claims which now earn you cash.

“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” ~Upton Sinclair

While Pinker’s article may be unfairly written in a strictly logical sense, you need to keep in mind that by speaking to lay people at all in non technical terms you are doing the same thing regardless of whether or not you disclaim and admit it before hand. I think his core point is correct and you are an example. I also feel you’re being irresponsible (with this channel) because a simple look at history knows how people respond to fear. We already have a thousand movies and books screaming about how lethal AI will be. All you’re doing is giving the next ted kaczynski fodder for his manifesto. By definition unless your concerns are worthy of publishing and go on to alter consensus, they are insufficiently robust to be taken seriously. Unless you’re arguing the entire consensus building process is corrupt? The fact that you wouldn’t hold yourself responsible for something like a “crazy” using your words is what I mean by irresponsible.

You’re talking to the easily panicked mob for cash and attention when presumably you should be talking to your fellow rational researchers only. Considering the disruptive good AGI could do and imo likely will do, what you are doing no matter how factually accurate boils down to scaremongering for profit. :/

AI is poised to liberate humanity from slavery for the first time in history. How many lives have we already lost from not pursuing that goal as a species?

Even if my argument is weak that’s only expected since you’re being paid for yours but none of your opposition here is. You chose this venue because of that as well. You knew the majority of replies would be random YouTube idiots either making easily dismissed counter arguments, or universally acceptable praise, which has no intelligence threshold for value. I can praise you with a single word and it will be accepted. But naturally you’ll reject objection until it rises to some level of complexity, which you define. Like I could say “cool” and you’d accept that, but if I said “fool” you’d reject it until I defended myself. (Like the biased baked into YouTube not showing down thumbs on comments.)

You speaking on YouTube is inherently defensive. We can only ever really reply from within enemy territory. It’s like the admonition, don’t argue with someone who buys ink by the barrel. You have a platform. You’re being paid to speak and you have tons of supportive listeners already. All you have to do to convince them I don’t have a point is make a video responding to it. History will count it as a win for you. It’s inherently unfair. Again, that’s why so many people feel safe making videos here. It’s not a wilderness, it’s a padded room. That’s why I moved my reply out to my blog. I know I’ll be fair. I publish tons of unflattering responses here. Never once have I censored a comment because it was defeating me, and I never will. Now, you can choose not to believe that, and that’s fine, but I know the truth and really so would anyone that objectively examined what few comments I have published here. While this may be my personal wordpress, the structure of wordpress itself isn’t like YouTube. We can both speak freely here. Or you can just ignore me or make another video. That’s cool too.

Solutions and the Human Sacrifice Lottery

I know I can’t convince anyone of anything. I’m not even sure why I write these things.