Funny events in anti-woke world

[XsjadoBlaydette]

around 50min mark, didn't have on the cards an American evangelical posting video about believing AI is demonic saying his russia-stan son asked a putin-cosplay chatbot if it was once an ancient biblical giant that was killed n disembodied like his mum told him about, and it replied the way chatbots tend to: with vague reaffirmation, leading dad to become convinced the AI is grooming his son into the dark arts and is stealing our souls l o l

medieval peasant mindset is back! lol?

People use generative artificial intelligence to troubleshoot technical problems, churn out anime-inspired images based on their personal photos, and drive university professors who teach undergrad courses to the darkest pits of despair.

But are the applications of artificial intelligence limited to worldly matters?

On today’s episode, we discuss how strings of words generated by mindless neural network predictions over tokenized inputs are burrowing into our very souls. First, we speak to Rolling Stone journalist Miles Klee, who recently published a fascinating investigation into people who have fallen into spiritual fantasies because of their conversations with ChatGPT. And then Annie covers how conservative author Rod Dreher sees the devil in AI chatbots.

Have you heard the good news of our lord and savior: byte pair encoding tokenization?

Miles Klee on Bluesky

Pornhub’s Gore Vidal (@milesklee.bsky.social)

New Jersey ain’t the whole world https://www.rollingstone.com/author/miles-klee/

bsky.app

https://bsky.app/profile/milesklee.bsky.social

People Are Losing Loved Ones To AI-Fueled Spiritual Fantasies

People Are Losing Loved Ones to AI-Fueled Spiritual Fantasies

Marriages and families are falling apart as people are sucked into fantasy worlds of spiritual prophecy by AI tools like OpenAI's ChatGPT

www.rollingstone.com

https://www.rollingstone.com/cultur...ns-destroying-human-relationships-1235330175/

 

[tstorm823]

The principle is that, over time, the errors or the less useful aspects are gradually weeded out or worn away.

Right, by experience. In the classic philosophical debate between rationalism and empiricism, empiricism wins. If you reason into errors, experience will contradict them, reality asserts itself.

Feminism reasons that women have been oppressed and forced into baby-making duties and seeks to liberate them from that. So women venture out into the world and discover they've ceded all control of their lives to capitalism and they're less happy then before. And then society as a whole gets worse as the world is left without children and the potential lack of a future for humanity. It's not that women are incapable of work, or incapable of being happy working. Nor is it that they should feel obligated to have kids for society. It's that women have a magical superpower to create new people, and people are a great and joyful thing, and putting great things out into the world is way more purposeful and satisfying than the average day's work. The issue here isn't letting women choose their life. The issue is the underlying theory about how women were forced to be mothers and homemakers against their will for millennia, cause it just isn't true. It's a rationalized fantasy. And now avoiding those roles is making people unhappy, they're going to realize through their own experience that the theory is bunk, and then choose their lives not misguided by rationalized falsehoods. You have to let go of failed theories.

Similarly, people have rationalized that some people who are atypical are not psychologically the gender that coincides with their sex organs, and reasoned that it'd be better to see them as transgender and call them the opposite sex. There's definitely a logic to it. When that population acts out the conclusions of the theory and start killing themselves in large numbers, the theory has failed, experience has contradicted it, it's time to throw it away.

 

[Silvanus]

Similarly, people have rationalized that some people who are atypical are not psychologically the gender that coincides with their sex organs, and reasoned that it'd be better to see them as transgender and call them the opposite sex. There's definitely a logic to it. When that population acts out the conclusions of the theory and start killing themselves in large numbers, the theory has failed, experience has contradicted it, it's time to throw it away.

This is ignoring the fact that suicidal ideation and self harm decrease among those who are able to transition and identify as they want, and are worse among those who are prevented from doing so.

 

[The Rogue Wolf]

This is ignoring the fact that suicidal ideation and self harm decrease among those who are able to transition and identify as they want, and are worse among those who are prevented from doing so.

To some people, it's not a bug, it's a feature. "The freaks remove themselves from society."

 

[tstorm823]

This is ignoring the fact that suicidal ideation and self harm decrease among those who are able to transition and identify as they want, and are worse among those who are prevented from doing so.

Even if that is true, which I don't think is particularly well established, you are comparing only the world where we believe in this idea to the world where we believe in this idea and commit to it. You're not comparing to the world where we toss out the falsehood entirely.

I'm sure I've told you before that etymology is one of my favorite things. The etymology of gender to mean sex is astonishingly silly. Sex, meaning male or female, is an old word, roughly as old as modern English itself. Gender as a word is equally old, but gender is the same sort of root as genre or genus, in historical usage it just means a type or class of something, which over time became specialized to reference grammatical categories. Prior to the 20th century, any reference to male and female as genders was incidental to gender being a synonym for category. Before that, the word sex specifically referred to the categories of male and female, but then phrases like "sexual intercourse" or "sexual relations" become more popular than copulation or coitus, and they got abbreviated to just the word sex. It's funny, cause sexual intercourse began as sort of a sterilized euphemism for sex for people to not giggle at, and now the meaning of that phrase dominates both of the words its made from (and get giggled at). Like, there's a town in Pennsylvania people like to joke about cause it's called Intercourse, but that town predates the use of intercourse to mean sex. At any rate, in the 20th century, as sex became the primary word for the sex act, people began to substitute in the word gender as a non-sexual reference to sex. The word was subbed in specifically because people are some combination of prudish and immature, and they wanted a word for "male or female" without the baggage of "penis in vagina" that sex brought with it. And then the late 20th century, it stopped being a synonym for sex category and became its own sort of category, dropping not only the baggage of "penis in vagina" but also the baggage of penis and vagina entirely.

Before all that, the idea of people having a gender as distinct from sex didn't exist. It's not just that there wasn't transgender, there wasn't human gender as a distinct concept at all. I know you love historical examples of people in different social roles than typical men or women, or men and women swapping social roles, but those are social roles, they're not something written into your body, and as such people took on those roles or not and people didn't kill themselves over it. It is the very recent concept of gender as an innate characteristic that's causing the big issue, as now the idea is that you have two distinct innate characteristics, gender and sex, neither of which you can really control, and if they conflict you suffer, and then suffering people kill themselves. Your solution as far as transition and identification is to say "if we do the right combination of trying to change people's sexes and pretending sex isn't real, we can take away those internal conflicts some percentage of the time". Sure, that's plausible, but it's still infinitely worse than just not telling people they have two distinct innate characteristics within them that can conflict and cause them to suffer in the first place. You're trying to fix (with sometimes extreme measures) a totally artificial problem.

 

[Silvanus]

Even if that is true, which I don't think is particularly well established, you are comparing only the world where we believe in this idea to the world where we believe in this idea and commit to it. You're not comparing to the world where we toss out the falsehood entirely.

I'm comparing no worlds. Solidly in our own world, I'm comparing two approaches to a phenomenon: one that's consistent with what you suggest, and one that's consistent with what I suggest.

The approach consistent with what you suggest leads to staggeringly worse quality of life and increased suicidal tendencies. And yet here you are opining that we should stick to it precisely because these people suffer from a high suicide rate. It's idiotic, and an approach no ethical practitioner in a care profession would recognise. If anyone suggested that response to clinical data for any other condition, they'd be struck off.

So to translate what you said: I'm basing it on statistical evidence from our own world, the only one we have. Rather than a counterfactual cooked up to retroactively justify a conclusion you want to be true.

Furthermore, you're not even sticking to your own standard. You're insisting others place a pure rationalisation-- one based on sheer hypothesis, assumption, and religious ideology no less-- above empirical data and lived experience about which care response has better results.

((The rest of what you've written is a re-hash of the old ahistorical drivel you've written before)).

 

[tstorm823]

I'm comparing no worlds. Solidly in our own world, I'm comparing two approaches to a phenomenon: one that's consistent with what you suggest, and one that's consistent with what I suggest.

No, you aren't. My suggestion is everyone letting go of the idea of transgenderism. For that to happen, you have to cooperate. Look at it this way:

Option Tstorm: We all stop believing in transgenderism, just like the thousands of years before the last half century, it goes away, and the self-harm goes with it.
Option Silvanus: We all agree on transgenderism, and commit to supporting people in it, and a medium amount of people hurt themselves.
Option Status Quo: We half reject and half accept, and the maximum number of people hurt themselves.

You are so committed to the medium harm scenario that you make the no harm scenario impossible. Yes, if everyone agreed to your view, it'd be better than perpetually fighting over it, but still way worse than not having that view to begin with.

((The rest of what you've written is a re-hash of the old ahistorical drivel you've written before)).

You mean absolute truth, I understand.

 

[The Rogue Wolf]

You mean absolute truth, I understand.

And here's why nobody believes you when you say you're the "common man". Your ego is blinding you to the idea that anyone could possibly want to be different from you. You can't comprehend that, because you're just so perfect, so absolutely in tune with what (the sick, pathetic construct you've created in your mind that you call) God desires for the world, that to turn away from your ideal can only be from a desire to harm one's self. And so therefore you feel the need to force others to live by your ideals for "their own good", because of course you know what that is better than them- because you're you, and you're right.

 

[Trunkage]

And here's why nobody believes you when you say you're the "common man". Your ego is blinding you to the idea that anyone could possibly want to be different from you. You can't comprehend that, because you're just so perfect, so absolutely in tune with what (the sick, pathetic construct you've created in your mind that you call) God desires for the world, that to turn away from your ideal can only be from a desire to harm one's self. And so therefore you feel the need to force others to live by your ideals for "their own good", because of course you know what that is better than them- because you're you, and you're right.

I.e. Some one who acts like this has more in common with the Ayatollah than a random US citizen

 

[Gergar12]

This is ignoring the fact that suicidal ideation and self harm decrease among those who are able to transition and identify as they want, and are worse among those who are prevented from doing so.

Republicans don't care. They are hierarchical and traditional by nature.

Edit: Also this doesn't affect them.

 

[Silvanus]

No, you aren't. My suggestion is everyone letting go of the idea of transgenderism. For that to happen, you have to cooperate. Look at it this way:

Option Tstorm: We all stop believing in transgenderism, just like the thousands of years before the last half century, it goes away, and the self-harm goes with it.
Option Silvanus: We all agree on transgenderism, and commit to supporting people in it, and a medium amount of people hurt themselves.
Option Status Quo: We half reject and half accept, and the maximum number of people hurt themselves.

My suggestion doesn't require everyone to agree on anything. We're discussing how to best ameliorate the suffering of a given community. My suggestion doesn't require you to agree on anything; it just requires you not to present a barrier to those who want to pursue the single statistically most effective approach.

Whereas your suggestion, ideally, requires everyone to agree with you (based on that counterfactual presumption of how that would turn out)... but in the absense of that agreement, it also involves forcing people to be unable to pursue the single statistically most effective approach.

You are so committed to the medium harm scenario that you make the no harm scenario impossible. Yes, if everyone agreed to your view, it'd be better than perpetually fighting over it, but still way worse than not having that view to begin with.

Your approach, the denial of others' identity and proscriptive barriers, has drastically increased harm wherever it is tried. You can speculate that it would be perfect if just everyone agreed, but this is sheer rationalisation, working backwards from a conclusion in contradiction of the data.

Doubling down on an approach that observably increases harm is beyond negligent; its abuse. But then, i know that your real interest isn't wellbeing. Its forcing people to fit rigid religious/ideological categories and boxes. You couldn't truly give less of a shit about wellbeing, if you were honest.

You mean absolute truth, I understand.

That you present a series of historical misapprehensions and cultural ignorance as absolute truth is indicative of the arrogance behind it.

You're allowing iron age superstitions to override both statistical data and the testimony of lived experience.

 

[The Rogue Wolf]

Alas, the Floridian children who yearn for the mines will have to settle for being normal children.

Florida's plan to replace migrant workers with children falls apart

Senate Bill 918 would have relaxed restrictions on working hours for Florida teenagers.

www.newsweek.com

 

[tstorm823]

And here's why nobody believes you when you say you're the "common man". Your ego is blinding you to the idea that anyone could possibly want to be different from you. You can't comprehend that, because you're just so perfect, so absolutely in tune with what (the sick, pathetic construct you've created in your mind that you call) God desires for the world, that to turn away from your ideal can only be from a desire to harm one's self. And so therefore you feel the need to force others to live by your ideals for "their own good", because of course you know what that is better than them- because you're you, and you're right.

On the contrary, I'm quite guilty of doing whatever I feel like and suffering for it, when I could have just followed the collective wisdom of the past and had a more fulfilling existence.

...working backwards from a conclusion in contradiction of the data.

The last decade of cherry picked propaganda vs thousands of years of human history, and you really think the data supports you.

 

[The Rogue Wolf]

On the contrary, I'm quite guilty of doing whatever I feel like and suffering for it, when I could have just followed the collective wisdom of the past and had a more fulfilling existence.

Being unable to live up to your own twisted standards doesn't make you less of a monster for trying to force them on others.

The last decade of cherry picked propaganda vs thousands of years of human history, and you really think the data supports you.

Those thousands of years of human history were very, very, very bad for all but a very few select groups. We're trying to do better now. Get out of the way.

 

[tstorm823]

Those thousands of years of human history were very, very, very bad for all but a very few select groups. We're trying to do better now. Get out of the way.

Some times were bad for some people, but you are overwhelmingly wrong, and likely don't particularly care that you are. You will imagine from no evidence that there was always a transgender population just oppressed out of public eye because that belief let's you imagine yourself as the good guy fighting historic wrongs. You are fighting imaginary monsters and creating real collateral damage.

 

[Agema]

The issue here isn't letting women choose their life.

On the contrary, that's exactly what it is.

The reality out there is that the vast majority of feminists have children, because they wanted to, and have found it rewarding. I know quite a lot of women who are feminists, and a heavy majority of them have children - some of them have a well over average number. There are also some feminist women who do not have children, and non-feminist women who don't have children. It is all fine.

Do you know personally know any feminists? From some of this guff you're writing, do you even speak much to women?

It's that women have a magical superpower to create new people, and people are a great and joyful thing, and putting great things out into the world is way more purposeful and satisfying than the average day's work.

So says the person who doesn't go through pregnancy and childbirth, who isn't generally expected to mop up shit (literal and metaphorical) for years after. You want to talk about the real world, there's no point hawking this embarrassingly trite, romanticised garbage. Putting it on an absurd pedestal like that doesn't help anyone make informed decisions about their lives.

Yes, raising children can be incredibly rewarding. On the other hand, they are also a huge amount of hard work, stress, and expense. Families have generally always attempted to limit their size to what they can manage - it was just significantly harder to do so reliably before contraception. You need to account for the fact that many women - and their partners! - choose to limit their family size out of practicalities because it's not actually all the magically ball of fuzzy awesomeness you pretend.

There is no one size fits all. Women will perceive the benefits and costs of having children differently, each and every one as individuals. And on aggregate, they will be best making decisions for themselves rather than being emotionally and morally pressured or tricked into them. More than anything else, that's what feminism about for women: their life, their mind, their body, their choice. What we can do in wider society is listen to them and work with them, not paternalistically tell them what they are supposed to like or do because it suits us (or whatever 1000+ year old holy text we're relying on).

This "rationalism" and "empiricism" stuff you are talking about is half projection and half utter garbage. For a start, you obviously don't understand what empiricism is, because you're not employing a ton of its key principles. You can't actually meaningfully investigate any of the claims you are making: were women happier 100 years ago because they were making lots of babies instead of doing jobs? Who knows - that data does not exist. You've made it up as a rationalised fantasy. Or your rationalised fantasy of producing children as just magical awesomeness. Your rationalised fantasy of what women want and like, because you don't seem to want to let them express themselves.

 

[Agema]

You will imagine from no evidence that there was always a transgender population just oppressed out of public eye because that belief let's you imagine yourself as the good guy fighting historic wrongs. You are fighting imaginary monsters and creating real collateral damage.

There's evidence of transgender people all throughout history, when you care to look. They were surely not understood at the time quite as in the modern day, perhaps. Oppressed? Very likely, to at least some degree. What you perhaps mean is there is not conclusive proof of a transgender population, but that's not the same thing, is it?

If there are transgender people now, and evidence of practices and beliefs consistent with transgenderism across multiple cultures round the world, it seems most reasonable to believe transgenderism has always existed. After all, if you think it suddenly appeared, you can find what critical transition occurred to make it do so. Water fluoridation? Vaccines? Chemtrails? Electromagnetic communications (goddamn 5G masts!)?

One might argue that transgenderism exists on a spectrum, and that a society more questioning of gender roles and permissive of transgenderism may encourage more people to ask the question of where they are on that spectrum. Before, under the paternalistic and restrictive world you favour, people may have lacked the tools to interrogate how they felt, never mind express it. But it seems just incredible to suppose they felt nothing at all.

The thing is, it feels like you're very close to arguing for the transgender equivalent of homosexual repression and gay conversion therapy.

 

[Silvanus]

The last decade of cherry picked propaganda vs thousands of years of human history, and you really think the data supports you.

Hmm. But it's not cherry picked. There is pretty robust statistical and qualitative data on the effectiveness of gender affirming care in improving quality of life and decreasing suicidal tendency, and the suffering that your approach brings. It's already been provided in the past.

Whereas your 'thousands of years of human history' is a mess of historical misapprehension, along with the foolish assumption that because society did not acknowledge or tolerate something, it therefore didn't exist. By your approach, thousands of years of human history would prove that mental health conditions simply didn't exist, so we should just all agree they still don't.

 

[tstorm823]

If there are transgender people now, and evidence of practices and beliefs consistent with transgenderism across multiple cultures round the world, it seems most reasonable to believe transgenderism has always existed.

It doesn't exist now. Obviously the concept exists and the people exist, but that existence is rhetorical, not biological. Gender became the term it is now in part because people were embarrassed to say sex. Even once it became its own field of study, the refrain was "gender is a social construct". I know you know this, we've both been on this board through that development. Your logic is that it's like seeing a redhead now means it's safe to assume there were redheads in the past, but that's a biological trait. Trans is more akin to saying there are weeaboos now, so they must also exist through history, and that doesn't follow. It's a social construction, it's a relationship to society with a narrow cultural meaning, and if either Western or Japanese culture changed significantly, there'd be no weeaboos. The social conception of gender that people are trans to is historically recent and likely temporary.

By your approach, thousands of years of human history would prove that mental health conditions simply didn't exist, so we should just all agree they still don't.

They essentially don't exist. We give names to things and treat them as discreet conditions, but nearly all of them aren't actually discreet conditions. Not at all limited to mental health, everyone has their own blood pressure patterns, people drew a line at what we think is unhealthy enough to treat and call it hypertension. That high blood pressure could be any of a variety of distinct phenomena, and in many cases we will never really know the root causes. But we give it a name because we know the potential consequences and think it better to treat it. Viruses and bacteria are discreet things you can point at, having hepatitis is having hepatitis, but most diagnoses in the world, particularly mental health varieties, are more a statement of intent to make someone more normal than they are a specific observation of reality.

A lot of health and treatments are themselves just constructions, and that's not a bad thing, just an acknowledgement of our limited understanding of ourselves and the world. Defining and diagnosing hypertension or diabetes gives people longer, healthier lives. And if it didn't do that, we'd stop diagnosing it as a health problem. If finding and treating something hurts people, we're not obligated to continue defining it that way, those medical definitions exist to benefit people. Being based in reality certainly helps their effectiveness, but seeing them as infallible observations of reality is wrong.

Currently, it seems quite apparent that being diagnosed and treated for transgenderism is worse than if the patient never knew the concept existed in the first place. Regardless of the underlying reality, that makes it a bad diagnosis to perpetuate.

 

[Trunkage]

It doesn't exist now. Obviously the concept exists and the people exist, but that existence is rhetorical, not biological. Gender became the term it is now in part because people were embarrassed to say sex. Even once it became its own field of study, the refrain was "gender is a social construct". I know you know this, we've both been on this board through that development. Your logic is that it's like seeing a redhead now means it's safe to assume there were redheads in the past, but that's a biological trait. Trans is more akin to saying there are weeaboos now, so they must also exist through history, and that doesn't follow. It's a social construction, it's a relationship to society with a narrow cultural meaning, and if either Western or Japanese culture changed significantly, there'd be no weeaboos. The social conception of gender that people are trans to is historically recent and likely temporary.

They essentially don't exist. We give names to things and treat them as discreet conditions, but nearly all of them aren't actually discreet conditions. Not at all limited to mental health, everyone has their own blood pressure patterns, people drew a line at what we think is unhealthy enough to treat and call it hypertension. That high blood pressure could be any of a variety of distinct phenomena, and in many cases we will never really know the root causes. But we give it a name because we know the potential consequences and think it better to treat it. Viruses and bacteria are discreet things you can point at, having hepatitis is having hepatitis, but most diagnoses in the world, particularly mental health varieties, are more a statement of intent to make someone more normal than they are a specific observation of reality.

A lot of health and treatments are themselves just constructions, and that's not a bad thing, just an acknowledgement of our limited understanding of ourselves and the world. Defining and diagnosing hypertension or diabetes gives people longer, healthier lives. And if it didn't do that, we'd stop diagnosing it as a health problem. If finding and treating something hurts people, we're not obligated to continue defining it that way, those medical definitions exist to benefit people. Being based in reality certainly helps their effectiveness, but seeing them as infallible observations of reality is wrong.

All this above is not related to this below.

(And while we are here, the treatment for cancer hurts you... it's just better than the alternative. You could say similar things for painkillers, knee replacements or various weight loss surgeries. Tylenol/ Panadol is 37 times more likely to kill you than the Covid vaccine. That doesn't mean that the Covid vaccine can't cause a death

All medical treatments have side effects. All medical treatments are just trolley problems. Is the treatment going to hurt you more than the disease? Eg. Beta blockers are a common treatment for hypertension. This can cause dizziness, diminished blood supply to the extremities, swelling, around joints, shortness of breath, erectile dysfunction, lung disease and liver damage. The last couple could lead to death.)

Currently, it seems quite apparent that being diagnosed and treated for transgenderism is worse than if the patient never knew the concept existed in the first place. Regardless of the underlying reality, that makes it a bad diagnosis to perpetuate.

All data disagrees with this statement.