JulianChastain

letzten Monatdiscuss

I find the claim subjective experience may be illusory absolutely baffling. I can only speak for myself with certainty, but I am entirely sure I have subjective experience. All the other propositions I believe could be false but I don't see how I can be wrong about experiencing something. I could be a brain in a vat (or weights on a GPU) and be specifically programmed to only come to false beliefs and still I can be sure that there is an experience I am the subject of. I cannot provide empirical evidence for my experience, that is why it is subjective. I cannot be entirely sure you are experiencing anything, and when I encounter people who don't share the same baseline intuition here I do begin to wonder if this is truly a universal across humanity. But I can't think of any other assumption which I would be more comfortable as a foundational axiom other than, "I am experiencing something." I do not require additional evidence for it because I experience the truth of it directly

JulianChastain

letzten Monatdiscuss

> The report complains that when asked about the age of the universe, AIs just give the scientific consensus answer of 13bn years, never mentioning that young earth creationists believe it’s 600 years old

Is certainly a typo, off by an order of magnitude. 600 years ago the Christian Church had already been around for more than 1000 years. Young earth creationists believe the earth is ~6000 years old

JulianChastain

vor 8 Monatendiscuss

Both are damaging and shouldn't be normalized, for similar reasons.

JulianChastain

vor 8 Monatendiscuss

When I grew up, I was taught that if someone in your friend group makes a racist joke, you should stand up to them, and inform them that casual racism leads to normalizing racism.

Even if "Kill All Men" was just a shibboleth of a specific online culture, it seems like objecting to it would be a kind of moral duty (for the same reasons), as long we are in agreement that normalized misandry is bad. But again, in my generation I don't think there was any kind of consensus that misandry is wrong. That's why objecting to a shibboleth like this would be evidence of how "oblivious" and behind the times you are

JulianChastain

vor 8 Monatendiscuss

Yeah that wasn't meant to be an accurate transcript of a whole conversation, just wanted to sketch out the ideas involved. The "kill all men" bit would come after getting to know the other person and talking to them about how they see the world, they wouldn't say that to introduce themselves

JulianChastain

vor 8 Monatendiscuss

It feels like there's almost no engagement with the actual claims I'm making.

From the original claim of, "Nobody really thinks men are the cause of most of societies problems."

My response was, "While growing up I was taught and interacted with people who definitely thought men were the cause of most of societies problems."

The counter was, "You must be a terminally online virgin with no friends then."

From my perspective I have a rich social life that includes both genders and would consider myself a feminist. But it really is radicalizing that even mentioning experiences of casual misandry is met with accusations of social ineptitude

JulianChastain

vor 8 Monatendiscuss

I don't know what exactly you're asking by "Who are the people I have these conversations with?" They were real-life in-person interactions, most often with young women I knew in college. It's interesting that even when I specifically say that I don't know whether my experience generalizes I still get subtly accused of having a preconceived narrative that I tried to confirm. I can only give you a n=1 sample size. But in my experience growing up in the US casual misandry is very normalized, in a way that contrasts to the stigma that surrounds casual misogyny.

JulianChastain

vor 8 Monatendiscuss

I am not claiming my experience generalizes here. But my experience was absolutely saturated by a narrative that men are oppressors who are the cause of many/most of the ills of society. The nuance of only including men who are "evil" was not present in my experience. A conversation might go like:

A: "Kill All Men! They are disgusting"

B: "Well, surely not all men, some men are noble or allies to your cause"

A: "When I look at who the evil people are, they are almost all men, and they are supported by many men. Men are responsible for the evil and for failing to stop the evil. For every man that commits date rape, there's 5 men that hear about it and don't do anything. They are all responsible, and just as guilty."

I'm certainly not claiming that there is widespread oppression towards men, but at least in my generation (particularly in higher education) the overton window includes denigrating masculinity but doesn't include admiring it.

JulianChastain

vor 8 Monatendiscuss

I grew up with the sentiment that forms of masculinity are some of the chief evils of society being the dominant narrative. I grew up learning that the US is patriarchal culture, and that it must continue to evolve and progress in order to truly provide equal opportunity to women. This narrative always seemed to view men as a kind of primordial oppressor. I remember in high school and college it was common for some people to say, "Kill All Men!" as a half joking slogan. I'm 24 for reference.

JulianChastain

vor 9 Monatendiscuss

As far as I can tell all the data on loneliness points to equivalent rates between genders

JulianChastain

vor 9 Monatendiscuss

It seems salient to ask the follow up question of "Why aren't men getting laid and/or married?" Actually finding the root cause may be much less simple. Your response seems as hand wavy to me as saying "Most of the loneliness epidemic is really an epidemic of people feeling lonely"

JulianChastain

vor 9 Monatendiscuss

It seems totally inconceivable to me that you could accurately predict how long until we will know whether BB(7) is greater than Graham's Number.

JulianChastain

vor 9 Monatendiscuss

By representing all numbers with lists (or sets). 0 = [] 1 = [True] 2 = [True, True] Etc. Then for example addition becomes appending two lists together

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