The game in which the premise is "the odds are real but gamers struggle to conceptualize or even believe them" has negative reviews from gamers who don't believe the odds are real (game: Unfair Flips)

BREAKING: A federal judge has granted a restraining order blocking President Trump's call-up of the National Guard in Portland. storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.us...

The judge who granted this restraining order was appointed to the bench by Trump.

Judge Immergut is a Republican and a 2019 Trump appointee.

The AI era is bringing back virtue ethics

Imo if they people believe an AI is soulless or not a mind or whatever then yelling at it is pointless as it can’t hurt it, instead it is purely performative for fellow anti AI folks. And it’s not a good look.

this isn't because I care about if you're a dick to C3P0, who I would gladly mindwipe if it was necessary to decode a random dagger, which isn't morally problematic, but rather that the behavior of being a dick to a machine indicates one broadly may enjoy being a dic

people hate droids in Star Wars because they were deployed by corporate interests in the pursuit of a fascist takeover during the democratic degradation of their country nevertheless, if I was gay and in Tattooine, that guy saying that would make me a bit nervous to admit I was queer

ok, so, this is a thing where I think Star Wars literally depicts something that is now metaphysically true you know the guy who yells "your droids don't belong in here?" him doing that makes sense because it likely implies he or his family were in the Clone Wars on the Republic side

3D Maze 🤌

(if you are feeling shittier by the day in the usa realize just residing or being a citizen here may come with more witness trauma & moral injury than before in your lifetime)

“a moral injury can occur in response to acting or witnessing behaviors that go against an individual's values and moral beliefs.” www.ptsd.va.gov/professional...

moral injury & witness trauma also hurt - not like a face full of pepper spray or teargas. but still.

yes math can do more things now we can now use math to talk to people

The unintentional comedy of these posts coming from this person is really something

People who intensely hate on Taylor Swift and her fans are weirder than all but like the top 0.1% most obsessive Swifties.

THERE WAS A SPIDER IN MY MEASURING CUP, ELLIE. KINDLY EXPLAIN THAT

I also think that people would be better able to think about AI in terms of morality if you remember that we anthropomorphize objects *all the time*, whether those are teddy bears or the Library of Alexandria or a website we spend time on with people

The whole corpus of Western Cultural Literacy is for better or for worse refracted through the prism of Christianity in ways you’re not likely to be aware of if you don’t put in the work. So it’s somewhat understandable at times. But you should put in the work anyway.

Some of it is also just not being aware of the water you’re swimming in. In the last month or so I’ve heard or read unimpeachably progressive people I respect allude to the idea of A Cruel And Vengeful Old Testament God or Pharisees being scheming sophists oblivious to how insulting that is to Jews.

Gut feelings are isomorphic to statistical models. This is why muscle memory can be trained and must be retrained as conditions change, internal and external. Shock of shocks, the brain isn't doing calculus to figure out where the ball is going, it's doing something cheaper.

idk man, if you’re getting to the point where you’re accusing prosecutors, judges, and metro police of being the enemy, i am skeptical you have achieved the kind of consolidation you need for this kind of a project

Just look at the dogmatic rejection, without consideration, of (and often mocking distain for) any belief system different from the one they chose, and the superiority complex based in their understanding of The Truth™ which allows them to patronizingly condescend when expressing their tolerance.

It’s way beyond that. It’s “ex”-Christians who aren’t educated enough to understand the degree to which Christian thought influences the fundamental nature of western culture. The way they think & behave is completely in line with how any fundamentalist Christian behaves, and they hate knowing it.

This is so true. Talking with friends and realizing that the god they don't believe in is entirely white Christian American. I've tried to explain growing up as a Southern CA reform Jew in the 60s. Hell, lots of Jews don't get that context. 😂 But the not-christians are steeped in it without knowing.

Once again, the problem of defining oneself by "against" rather than "for"

I was raised atheist myself, and I've noticed that many of my atheist peers raised in evangelical families were very prone to falling back on puritanical Christian morality, especially the ex-Catholics for some reason

See also Roko’s Basilisk and all the other Singularity stuff.

I think the thing people are failing to recognize about LLMs is that regardless of how you feel about "LLMs: good for society or horrible for society", what they actually prove is less "we can make a machine god" and more "postmodernists and especially Derrida and Foucualt were right"

Just an entire department of Colonel Lockjaws

I think everyone’s so on edge and feels so helpless about the big stuff that purging the Milwaukee Stamp Collectors Association of traitors both real and imagined becomes a way to reclaim some small sense of agency.

Yeah, sign me up for this.

They also don’t see the overlap between religion/culture/ethnicity. I’ll always be Jewish even as an atheist.

what did the bee nutritionist say? remember to take your bee-12

That and I can't take the ineffectual smuggery of PSA any more. Tim Miller's NeoCon past views are firmly at odds with my centre right (by European standards - far left by American metrics), but it acts as a reminder of just how insane the world has become.

Oh god, I need to add this one too. Christian atheists get reallllllllly mad when they discover that they aren’t just enlightened luminaries who have transcended the petty foibles and prejudices of regular human beings.

Exvangelicals trying to atone by being anti-Zionist and taking it too far... many such cases

I was like this myself until I got to graduate school and some Jews basically took me aside and were like, hey, so your idea of "religion" is just Christianity, and you're repeating misconceptions about our beliefs based on the religion you were raised in badly misreading shit

like, the American atheism movement is expressly heavily influenced by people raised by evangelical fundamentalists, and sincerely has a lot of people who believe that all religion is the extremely narrow definition shared by fundamentalist evangelical churches

Reminds me of the old Irish joke whose punchline goes "Aye, lad, but are ye a Protestant atheist or a Papist atheist?"

yes, this is not really a joke but a real thing you don't change your cultural background by choosing to disbelieve in the literal truth of scripture. a lot of people are Christian apostates who believe they have completely left Christianity but haven't

It‘s not the biggest thing on a macro level, but one of the things I mourn about this shitshow are the strained or broken friendships that would otherwise be healthy because none of us are our best selves anymore due to the stress of all this.

but also, audience capture, being pulled left by the audience - there's more money, I strongly suspect, in an audience that spans center left to center, than in one that spans center to center right

this too. which is to say, our side is losing hard enough that someone substantially to the right of the center left knows there's no point in fighting over the lifeboats and just gets on board with the general center left talking points

I think they have shifted this time

I watch Bulwark instead of Pod Save to get my"deal with Trump's bullshit by watching their clips 'with' a parasocial fave" fix,&don't delude myself that the main reason for that isn't"its more satisfying to hear someone I slightly disagree with complain about the president than someone I agree with"

they as individuals are center right, but let's be real, their audience is center left because it flatters us to have the former bad guys validate us

Oh my god is the bulwark center *left* now? Has the Overton window truly shifted that far?

just as an example: Rogan is one of the most credulous human beings alive today, and highly credulous people just simply do not end up on the center-left very often, for obvious reasons

I clearly need a disclaimer on my account like "just block and do not even try to argue with me if you're going to take issue with being called a christian atheist as an american white atheist"