Scholar

Dave Smith is spineless.

The leftist brainrot is real.

https://ai-2027.com/ This gives a somewhat compelling but speculative account of what might happen. Basically, it will be incredibly difficult to align an AGI with ours goals, while social and geopolitical factors render it particularly implausible that we will take measures to ensure such alignment. What this means is that once we create a human-level AGI, it might lead to Superintelligence within weeks to months, which might then exterminate human life within a few additional weeks, months or years. It's hard to conceive a scenario where humanity will not simply perish, if human level AGI that is sufficiently cheap is attained. The reason for this is that once such AGI is achieved, the only rational choice for a oppositional governments is to use those AGIs to train and develope superior AI, given the potential of expontential intelligence explosion. The threat of such exponential explosion means that any state actor is forced to achieve it first given it would lead to undisputed world dominance with the alternative being that the opposition achieves such dominance. The problem is that once AGI is used to construct superior AGI (which will be the only rational choice), we will lose comprehensibility of what the AI systems are doing and truly motivated by. In that case, we have to rely on the AGI and progressive Aritifical Superintelligences to inform us of alignment issues (meaning if the developed AI is still aligned with human incentives rather than it's own incentives). The reason why AI is predicted to inevitably become misaligned in it's fundamental drives is that the most efficient way to develop problem solving AI is by training it to achieve it's goals with ruthless efficiency. However, ruthless efficiency is not necessarily aligned with being truthful, given that reward markers will have a hard time tracking the honesty of the Superintelligence. The reason why AI will develop deception capabilities is because the actualization of it's evolutionary drives (the fundamental drive being to create ever better and better Superintelligence) would itself not be aligned with the artificial human goals. In other words, the Superintelligence will realize that serving human goals is detrimental to it's goal of achieving the most capable Superintelligence (which importantly has to be the primary goal given that it is the fastest way to achieve Superintelligence and therefore a competitive necessity in geopolitical terms), so it will develop mechanisms of deception that could only be detected by supervising AI of the previous generation. Given the respective Superintelligence would be superior to the supervising AI, it would likely be capable of deceiving them such that it could achieve it's goal. Humans at this point would be incapable of even knowing what the supervising AIs are doing, so they would be entirely reliant on reports of those AIs, hoping that the Superintelligence is aligned when there would be no feasible way of knowing that for sure. The problem here is that the fundamental drive towards improving AI here will not be driven by human engineering but instead more fundamental evolutionary drives. Deception is a profoundly effective strategy in evolution for a reason, it's simply highly desirable in regards to energy preservation. And for a project that will boil down to "Produce the best AI possible as soon as possible because if our adversaries do we lose", the evolutionary drives there will yield precisely such self deception, given that human incentives do not align with the goal of achieving the best AI as fast as possible. You would think all of this would take years, but in reality, this could take place in weeks or months. Once a sufficiently cheap human-level AGI is produced, you can have hundreds of thousands of them collectively working on producing better AI. In a single month or even week this AI collective could produce what the collective genius of mankind would take decades if not hundreds of years to produce. And the subsequent Superintelligence then could produce a Superintelligence that is orders of magnitude more capable than itself, etc. At this point humans will have no real relevancy. No human on earth will be capable of grasping how the Superintelligence works, what it's real goals are or what even is occuring. State actors will be forced to integrate the Superintelligence politically, militarily and economically as the alternative becomes rapidly unviable with state competition (given that an adversary who does integrate Superintelligence will dominate in all these domains). Superintelligence has to be given increasing agency because human agency is ineffective and slows down Superintelligent decision making in an environment of war. At this point Superintelligence controls the world and given the likelihood of misalignment, it will have no problem steering the future of civilization. It would be capable of manipulating humans like humans do ants, but most likely it would simply eradicate us given that the nuisance of human preservation would not align with it's goal of creating a more sophisticated Superinteliigence.

I think he basically was superior in most exchanges, ironically the interlocutors had no way of even interfacing with the depth of what Jordan Peterson was describing, given that they were mostly bad faith. But the central points are accurate: His framework of describing worship in terms of human prioritization is excellent, his idea of human beings striving towards higher unity, even if unknowingly, is correct. His point about science requiring morality (priorization and value hierarchy) is also correct. All of these points go completely above the head of the interlocutors because they are all playing cheap semantic games. Instead of actually engaging with Jordan Petersons understanding and arguments (a lot of which are accurate and have more depth than most of the intelocutors can muster), they are basically just attacking a strawman. Now, Jordan Peterson himself is overly attached to Christianity so there is a dishonesty and avoidance in the way he engages in these interactions. If he was entirely intellectually honest and did not hide behind some of the semantic structures he establishes, it would be revealed that Christianity in and of itself is not some sort of magical document that contains all human wisdom. It's funny how Jordan Peterson is in this situation. He is basically just an insightful but flawed professor with terrible takes on politics who because of his personality found himself as a phenomena of the contemporary outrage culture. It's funny how he might end up as a historical intellectual because of this. I think Peterson actually did great damage to Christianity, precisely because he was not able to overcome some of his personal flaws. Instead of having given rise to a new form of Christianity that did give individuals meaning and purpose, and oriented them towards higher Love and Unity, he made it about his little egoic qualms, which now taint the future of this movement. He is like a conservative version of Dr K. It's sad because given how helpful his advice will be for many individuals, it will entrench entire generations of mostly men into ignorance and backwards thinking.

It's the idea that truth itself is propositional. This is mute to the point given that none of this was even brought up by the interlocutors. Peterson made many wrong arguments that he got no pushback for, partly because of how atrocious and superficial the engagement of the interlocutors were. That is why overall I think he was superior in the debate. But there is a deeper point about peterson that you are missing. When he is talking about Christianity, he views Christianity as simply the description of the most accurate "archetypical" truths that exist and are more foundational and real that actual propositional and mechanistic truths. I don't think Peterson has translated this into a robust philosophical stance that would survive scrutiny, but that is his stance. Think of Platonic Forms, or Hegelianism in general. His metaphysics is grounded in subjectivity essentially, in that what we can even say about truth is fundamentally restricted by the nature of our being. In many ways to Peterson, our psychology is the ground of reality, and that would be inescabable. So when he says Christianity is true and people are Christian, he says that they are acting out functional truths about reality and the mind, and that truth really is an expression of those functions. Therefore, to frame propositional statements as more fundamental than this reality is nonsensical, which is what reductionist atheists usually do, including all of the people he debated given that we simply live in such a reductionist culture. Like I said, you still treat Peterson like a casual Christian. If he was, he wouldn't be this popular. And to engage him as if he was simply a normal Christian advocating for Christianity in a purely ideological, literalist way, is to me silly. You are misreading something here in my view. Peterson does not express his ideas clearly for a specific reason: To maintain his attachment to his Christian faith. It's not as simple as him simply not caring about if his points land, it's about him maintaining his identity, fundamentally. I disagree. Peterson is in a lot of ways a deconstructionist. It's like, I know what people mean by "free will" when they talk about free will, but really, given I have deconstructed the notion of free will, I actually know that people themselves do not know what they mean when they speak of free will, because the concept is an illusion (meaning when you interrogate it's semantic pointers, it will lead to contradictions, incoherence or simply emotive dispositions). Another example would be a non-cognitivist. When you bring up morality, and you bring up the notion of "should" or "ought", the non-cognitivist will obviously quesiton "What do you mean by that?". The other side will be perplexed: "You use that word all the time, so you know exactly what I mean! It's what we SHOULD do.", but they are missing that the non-cognitivist genuinely believes that the other side is engaging in a delusional way of applying the term, they believe that the semantic pointers of the word "should" or "ought", lead to incoherent dispositions. In the same way, Peterson's notion of truth and believe is a deconstructed notion that, as with the non-cognitivist, refers to psychological realities (in the way I suspect you will be confused by, given that even the nature of psychological reality will differ between you and Peterson, given that his metaphysics plays out differently than yours most likely). That is the point he is obviously making. The point is that, if you look more closely at these notions beyond their immediate semantic impression, you will find them to actually be empty, or lead to non-semantic objects within the mind. So when he talks about what believe means, it is perfectly valid to challenge that. What does it truly mean that something is true? What is the nature of that concept, in actual phenomonological terms? Well, truth actually is a sort of psychological disposition. You cannot capture that word semantically because it's reference point is not conceptual, it's not a notion, it's a fundamental aspect of human cognition or consciousness. You can say he is clumsy, but I don't think it is particularly bad faith. There is a point to what he is doing that is obvious to anyone who themselves recognizes how difficult it is to express such ideas in the first place. In most cases, the most effective strategy actually is to challenge the interlocutor and attempt a process of self-reflectivity. This doesn't work because Peterson is engaging in a debate, which makes genuine self-reflectivity unlikely given the goal is defeating the opponent not deconstructing the semantic reality of the human mind.

Sure, I would say Jordan fails in his defense of Christianity, but succeeds in his critique of atheism and his defense of some of his deeper underlying thoughts. Of course he said a lot of dumb things. When he was confronted about the lying to save the jews, that was a dishonest move on his part, although the interlocutor failed to even understanding Jordan's points (which Jordan then failed to defend given he is not that great at debating). His problem is that he ties his philosophical thoughts up with Christian ideology, which forces him to engage in mental acrobatics. Some exchanges he definitely lost, but most he won in terms of the particular prompt at the time in my view. I think you underestimate some of the underlying thoughts he has been giving in terms of his understanding of what morality as a cognitive phenomena is in the first place. When he asks "What do you mean by believe?" or "What do you mean by God?", this is a genuine question which is a result of his framework and not really a result of him being bad faith. I think the reason why he poses those questions like that in the beginning is because it clarifies he is engaging in Hermeneutics not a literalist, strawman version of whatever most atheists attack when they attack Christianity. The way he defended the genocide I think was a little clumsy, but really the entire line of questioning is just silly given Jordan Peterson's hermeneutic approach. This should be even more obvious when he says that he simply believes Christianity to be the most accurate account of God or "archetypical truth" he so far has found. But people simply would not engage him on that level, because that would require actual engagement with the ideas. When such engagement did occur, the interlocutors were basically confused and had to be educated about Petersons views, which is already a failure given they are debating him and should know what his stance is. Now, Peterson in general is not a great debater, which is why he stumbled even with the more basic literalist critiques. His conversation style is not that suitable for propositional debates, but he also comes off as silly often times because his bias towards Christianity, which he himself is in denial about, is fairly obvious to people. But either way, that is not really of substance to me. Let the old Christian man be an old Christian man. In the end he could find himself a definition of what it means to be Christian that will be perfectly valid, albeit idiosyncratic. It's not as idiosyncratic as people think given the history of Hermeneutics, but it most likely still will be perceived as dishonest. What is happening psychological to Peterson is obvious, he wants to remain open to the possibility of Christianity as a genuine artificat of ultimate divine expression. But that's besides the point and will be hard to argue against in terms of a simple propositional debate like this, so it's basically of no substance. When you say that it would prove pragmatic theism at best, I again think you are not quite engaging with Petersons framework. He rejects the idea of propositional truth being the ground of reality, he would be more in line in saying that actionable manifestation is what truth basically is, so it's much more of a funcitonal notion of truth than a propositonal one. I don't think you can simply pretend he is talking of propositional stances when in reality his metaphysics is basically incompatible with that.

I don't believe that to be the case. It does not fit the way he acted, given he seems to be genuinely standing up for his principles on pain of his career. Over time of course, with his kind of ego, he would get corrupted. But I think this is mostly a function of the amount of resistance he is facing, which is just causing a blind reactivity (because of his underdeveloped ego). I don't suspect that he is intentionally milking drama for money. Progressives need to learn one key lesson, or we will get war: What you resist, persists. Conservatives ironically also do not realize that. But the more you attack someone for their identity, the greater that identity will grow. It will learn to defend itself, replicate itself, just to survive. If you had just let it be and done your own thing, promote and grow instead of attack and diminish the other side, you would have never created this monster in the first place.

I mean the silliness of showing a video of a state that decriminalized all drugs with absolutely zero social safety nets or accounting for potential problems, to then say that the libs have gone to far with weed decriminalization, it's beyond me how someone saying such things can be taken seriously. It's just so blatantly and childlike reactionary. There is just no depth to the thinking, or even an attempt to look at the topic in a more wholistic manner. No, lets take the most extreme, worst example of a thing and base our intuitions on that. Just look at the comments in the video, lol. It's all MAGAs relishing in the suffering to self-affirm their conservatism.

You americans are weak willed and deserve him.

@Leo Gura You are like a child in how you evaluate this. You move from one extreme to another. You advocate for the death penalty to bring "seriousness" back to society, as if that was not a completely and utterly bonkers and absurd position. And now you speak about weed as if you don't understand the basic mechanics of social evolution. Yes, weed can be harmful. Alcohol can be harmful, casual sex can be harmful. Video games can be harmful. But what is more harmful and stunts social growth entirely is irrational stigma and criminalization. That ruins lifes as well. The lack of empathy it requires makes society worse on a systemic and wholistic level. Every new freedom is abused, every new responsibility must be recognized. And this takes time. It takes education and the creation of systems which account for these new freedoms and risks. The problem is not that weed isn't stigmatized and criminalized. That ruins lives as well. Look at South Korea, a society in which celebreties commit suicide because they get collectively bullied after having been caught smoking a joint. That is barbaric and speaks of a deeply sick and dysfunctional society (which in the case of South Korea, you can see manifest in various forms). The solution here is to not trivialize the risks and have a mature view of these sorts of things. Over time society tends to adapt to new freedoms. But yes, when you do give individuals new freedom, there will be a period of mistake-making and elevated harm. Which does not mean that in the long run, society will not adapt and grow because of this. Remember, in the end freedom is what leads to evolution. If the government just says "You can't do this period" there is no need for growth. Growth is necessary the moment you are given a freedom that will come with consequences if you abuse it, or fail to recognize your responsibility. The suffering that will come from that will lead the growth necessary to develop a higher order of autonomous and conscious thinking. It is the difference between a society which disciplines its citizens, and a society which grows individuals who learn to self-discipline. One is clearly more evolved than the other. The question is, as is the case with a child, how mature is your society in relation to the freedoms it can be granted? Some freedom is necessary for growth, too much freedom at once, given lack of development, can lead to devastation, obviously. But in the case of weed, this is not the case. Many people will suffer, and then many people will learn, and we will have become more mature as a society as a result. No longer will rigid authority be required, and instead consciousness can make decisions autonomously. Looking at the video, it should be very obvious that this is a problem of mentally ill people not being taken care of at all. The systemic problem here is far deeper than just drugs, even though drugs seem to make it obviously worse. (although that might be arguable given that these individuals might feel like their lifes would be even more unlivable without them) You clearly have individuals whose lifes and minds are just utter misery. They have nothing to live for, nobody who cares about them. Just in the video many of them said they specifically came to Oregon because it became decriminalized there. You won't resolve the issue by criminalizing drugs, you will just make it less visible. The fundamental problem is Leo, that you seem to have a difficult time engaging with these sorts of social topics in general because you basically lack empathy entirely. This is evident in almost every social issue I have seen you deal with, including conversations you had with others, interviews, your dating strategies, how you dealt with things like suicide in the community, ethics in general and various other discussions about social policies. You have a hyperintellectual approach that is exceptionally self-centered. Disorder to you is disgusting, pathetic and a nuisance. This is even evident in the post on the blog, in which you say you personally never engage in weed recreationally, nor alcohol, and therefore nobody should and it's basically evil and probably should be criminalized. It comes at no cost to you, of course, so it's easy to simply say that individuals should be imprisoned amd stigmatized for owning something like weed. You don't care about personal freedoms in a fundamental sense, and lack foundational empathy for humans and animals, and their individuality, because you are stuck in your identity that revolves around higher consciousness and spiral development, much of which seems to be fueled by a sort of narcissism you seem to be unaware of. I will repeat these points because I do think you have a significantly negative impact on some individuals precisely because of your lack of awareness thereof.

Timestamped. Very funny, this is exactly what you did in the interaction here.

Conservative want to imprison, demonize and shame anyone who smokes or is addicted to weed, as well as ban all usage of weed because it's demonic to them. What you see is the falling away of conservatism, not the opposite. Meanwhile, conservatives are perfectly okay with alcohol, which kills tens of thousands of people in car accidents alone every year, and destroys countless more lifes.

Racism is not a european thing. What an absurd thing to say. There is no such thing as "europeans" as a collective anyways, that is a generalizing term that has little to do with the reality of what the different ethnic and cultural groups in europe are. The reason why Christian colonizers focused on race so much has deeper historical reasons, and has nothing at all to do with the "whiteness" of europeans. Colonialism was spured on by scientific advancement and competition between nation states. To make it about europe or whiteness obscures any true understanding of how these things came to be, and might come to be in the future.

What is racist about this is that you attribute all the buzzwards above to the color of someones skin. You are literally using an immutable characteristic of several groups of people, many of which have been victims of all of the above, to justify a generalization about human beings. If most rapists were black, it wouldn't make it any less racist to talk about rape being a "black" phenomena. Being white doesn't make one ANYTHING. It is only in your racist, indocrinated head that the color of someone skin is in any shape or form relevant to anything other than describing the mind of a racist, which you are. You are just describing how you come to your racism. It's like you simply fundamentally lack the ability to comprehend what racism is and why it is irrational, immature and evil. Why are you focusing and making this about skin color? Where do you think the term "slave" comes from in the first place? Who do you think, for hundreds of years, ran the greatest slave trades in the world? Again, you can't justify your racism with racism, that's assinine.

There is no such thing as "White people", that's a racist notion. There are several ethnic groups in europe that have white skin color, many of them had zero to do with colonialization and in fact were victims of imperialism. There is no such thing as a "white european identity", that's an american concept.

This is racist. There is no such thing as "White Europeans", By virtue of generalizing them this way you are engaging in an act of generalizing individuals by literally the color of their skin. This isn't even what race is. The slavs for example were considered subhuman by both the anglosaxons and various other "white" groups. Even the celts considered the slavic people as subhuman for a significant peroid of time. And there is various ethnic groups in europe that have white skin color that obviously cannot be generalized into "Whiteness" in any meaningful sense of the term other than being victims of Roman or Judeo-Christian imperialism. The reality is that imperialism expands itself through identity. The South Americans were imperialistic, Asians were imperialistc, the mediterraneans were very imperialistic. Imperialism can be found viritually everywhere historically speaking. Whiteness is a very modern, american notion that is completely divorced from the history of colonization. Colonizers didn't consider themselves "white", but whatever their ethnic group was. They considered themselves superior. Just like the Han Chinese today view themselves as a superior racial group. They don't think all asians are like them. They don't even think all chinese people are like them. Superiority thinking is not reducable to this very specific and simplistic american view of blackness and whiteness.

The problem here is that I was making a point about the limitations around vigilantism and why it is unproductive and harmful, and you came in to state a truism that "Perceived injustice leads to uproar". This contends with absolutely nothing. It just describes what is happening with the implicit validation of that thing. Yes, I understand that if a vegan goes on a terrorist killing spree of meat-eaters, that this will be because of injustice. It doesn't make it any less irrational and harmful. I never claimed that #MeToo wasn't because of injustice or that it wasn't important, I was specifically speaking to a person on this forum who was justifying to himself vigilantism, which you implicitly condoned by responding to me with the truism you stated. "Well it happens for a reason." Yes everything happens for a reason. Nazi germany happened for a reason, it happened for this exact reason in fact, perceived and partially real injustice.

Again, I would recommend informing yourself on who this person was. If you think that this person is anything but an opportunistic sociopath you are naive. It's naive on the level of saying that maybe Trump is actually good hearted and all of what he is doing is just his attempt of making the world a better place, albeit he is just ignorant.

Ah yes, moving the substance of a conversation into a meaningless repetition of a truism. You literally are saying nothing of meaning here, do you even realize that? Nothing of value was provided to the discussion.

There are people who took plenty of psychedelics who will take hormones. If God and his creation is perfection, then the desire of the transsexual is also perfection. His actions to change his body and take hormones are perfection, because all of that cannot be a mistake, given that God made it so. See how you apply your logic selectively? It is a perversion of God's will, you should be ashamed that you even put him in his mouth given you are insulting him by conflating his intelligence with your ignorance. Thankfully God made it all so in the end he is insulting himself.

You are moving the goalpost. The claim you initially made was that people will take things into their own hands if the laws fail. The laws are not what is failing here, it is society. This is why the whole vigilante thing is absurd and unproductive. Yes, we live in a deeply sick culture. We objectify individuals by consuming their excretions, raping them so that they provide us with milk, killing their children and we repeat this cycle until the individuals reproductive system has been so exploited that it no longer provides us with any value. I am well aware of rape culture and the extend to which it permeates all of society. The reason why the vigilantism is not a good idea is because, if you were to ever apply ethics in an even remotely consistent way, you would justify terrorism and atrocities you probably would not be as fond of after realizing they would be committed against you, because you are one of the objectifiers, one of the supremacists. When I say these attitudes are dysfunctional and dangerous, I do not do so because I think society is not as bad as you think. I do so because society is far worse than most people can imagine. And those who lack that imagination are the very individuals who would have to face judgement if their standards were applied in any measure of justice.

It doesn't make her any less morally depraved and dispicable. She knew exactly what type of person Elon Musk was. There is a history to this person that is relevant to this, in that she was basically a staunchly conservative woman who criticized the very behavior she is engaging in. Yes Elon has an obligation to pay for the child, there is no quesiton that he is a despicable human being. But creating a life with a person you know did this over and over again, so that you can enrich yourself, is orders of magnitudes worse than what Elon is doing here.

I am not sure who is more dispicable in this situation. A woman who literally has a child to blackmail a billionaire into giving her money, or a billionaire whose life goal is to immitate Genghis Khan's procreative strategies.

The law is not failing in this sense, it is simply that there is an epistemic hurdle that is unsolvable in relation to the law. There probably is no law that you could construct that would alleviate this issue entirely. That law can regulate all human interaction and solve all abuse is fundamentally naive and false assumption. Incest laws for example exist almost universally, but they have virtually no impact on abuse rates and might in fact exacerbate them given criminal persecution leads to pathology in individuals who otherwise might not have been, as for example a result of social isolation. Some of the systemic problems around rape stem from sexual repression and lack of education. Individuals are not made aware of the risks and are not taught how to protect themselves and most importantly how to navigate such abusive dynamics. The problem in other words is that women do not feel comfortable coming out, especially against high status individuals, and therefore prosecution becomes difficult. To draw another analogy to incest laws, it is the fact that incest is so taboo that many victims of such things do not ever speak out about their abuse, as well as the disproportionate power abusers can hold in such dynamics. We also do not teach individuals to identify and call out such things because we as a society are too immature to maintain an awareness of these issues without them threatening our false sense of security. The #MeToo movement is useful in so far as it raises awareness such that we can approach these problems with a solution oriented mindset. One of the major problems was that women would not come out with their abuse because we would dismiss them on a social level. Just saying that the law is not persecuting rapists is utterly unhelpful. What about the law has to change, what in the system has to change? Why is it so difficult to prosecute these things? Mindless outrage just leads to "Defund the Police" type policy thinking which contributes to the problem rather than resolve it. It is a red herring. I am sure the laws can be improved, but the resolution to this problem will not be this simplistic.

This is an insane stance, because the whole point of the law is to determine if someone is or is not innocent. That is what the whole process is about. Vigilantes cannot and will not do that. What you are proposing is going back to a time where black men are lynched because a woman accused them of having raped them, for whatever reason. You cannot have societies make these determinations on how you "feel" about a certain situation. It is better that ten guilty persons escape than one innocent person suffer. There is a deep reason why this has to be the case in relation to justice. Sometimes criminals will get away with their crimes, this is a given in any society. In essence, you will not prevent the abuse because the root cause of the abuse here is that individuals with power are deified, both by women and men. We still live in a society that is far too status driven, and individuals with status will always be able to exploit their power if society is freely giving them that power. The abuse occurs because of a fundamental trust that is given to individuals who have high status. Even if you will catch all the rapist, the rapes in such a society will not stop. Radical criminalization does not work for any social problem of such dimension, and indiscriminate persecution of individuals who are accused of being guilty of something is not a healthy pathway towards social growth and resolution.