I guess. I was able to engage in real conversation on Reddit and still do here, sounds like you’ve not really trying.

And now with no future their suffering at school is extra pointless. No longer do they work towards securing their own future, they merely toil scholastically because of a societal machine that continues running despite long past surviving its own purpose.

I wish I had something meaningful to say about this.

I get the motivation to try and stay around and make things better but I’m well past that. I’ve been trying to change minds for a while, I can only assume I’m just bad at it.

I also don’t really owe this place my time and energy. If people in this state want to wallow in shit that’s their prerogative but I’m not getting pulled into that shit if I can avoid it. Though it looks like economically I wont be able to avoid it. Moving is expensive and if I move I’ll need a new job and the job market is terrible right now.

At least in the current state

I think that’s the key. The cost has been going down over time, it’ll get there eventually.

Its kind of like solar power. That seemed like a pipe dream for a long time as well but it just kept getting cheaper and cheaper.

This merely reinforces my decision to not buy it because it only is going to have manipulative EBMM for its main modes instead of a server browser. Even if Portal has a server browser, they know the average player is going to stick to their match making system.

I bought 2042 and I did play it a lot but my experience was sort of existentially dreadful. I kind of understood its match making was keeping me playing longer by sandbagging my progression on its overly bloated exp requirements. It was like watered down drip feed fun. Fun enough and low barrier enough that I kept jumping on. Every other BF game felt way more mechanically rich and because they lacked match making they were more fulfilling to learn and play. You start out sucking, and you slowly get better, feeling yourself win more often over time. There is satisfaction in starting out bad and being rewarded for your efforts to learn the game that EBMM steals from you.

Its painful for me though. BF6 looks like such a waste. It checks so many boxes for me in that it looks like a great pvp military shooter: fast TTK, robust map editor, point buy loadout system.

But all wrapped up in typical corporate bullshit.

As someone who is morally aware but also morally lazy and eats meat, this gives me hope that cultured meat is actually a threat to the meat industry at this point. Otherwise they’d not be making it illegal.

I 100% would replace all of my meat consumption with cultured meat as long as its reasonably umami/fatty/tastey/varied. Because I know how awful the meat industry is.

Plus it’d even be safer and healthier, especially given the destruction of food safety in this country. Little to zero communicable disease risk.

I unfortunately live in one of these prohibition states though. Just reinforces the idea that I need to get the fuck out of here, this place fucking sucks and the people here can suck shit.

The problem with local community organizing is that not every community is equal.

My local community are normal friendly people mixed with secret racists/homophobes who are also mixed with blatant racists/homophobes. Because I live in rural bumfuck.

Sure, I could try and connect some of them but I could get a shit spewing hate surprise, or run into someone who is bigoted but keeps their bigotry private with a friendly face, so by being friendly and cooperative I’m enabling them.

I intend to move ASAP to a moderately more progressive area soonish but its a more expensive place so it’s taking me a long while of personal austerity to save up to comfortably make the move. And a lot of good people don’t have the finances or opportunity to escape these wretched awful places. They’re a lost fucking cause.

I want to play more often than my close friends want to play because I’m a tryhard meaning that if squad play is crucial I’d have to coordinate with random people on the internet over voice chat and that sounds… potentially unpleasant.

Maybe 99% of the time my interactions will be nice, but that 1% of bad times with randoms over voice chat will unfortunately stick in my brain.

For me, the nice thing about BF is that I can team up with my friends in a squad or play asocial solo and have a great time either way.

Unfortunately, also as a tryhard, I despise Engagement Based Match Making. And it seems the main mode of BF6 is also going to have that and I just have zero desire to play a pvp game with Engagement Based Match Making after the experiences I’ve had with it. Skill Based Match Making can be ok if I get to at least see my rank. I just want to know how much I’m improving as a player and I can’t get that with Engagement Based Match Making. I only experience what is essentially hollow algorithmic match fixing.

I used to think I was an idiot, that everyone around me knew what they were doing and I didn’t.

Later I joined the work force and I now I kind of wish I was an idiot because no one seems to know what they’re doing and that is existentially dreadful.

That first one a real thing? Its hard to know what is real anymore.

Are they catholic converts? I bet they are.

Executive dysfunction is also an autism thing. Brain no likely changing topics, starting work on a responsibility that isn’t my current obsession is very difficult.

The Bird

Monster, Inc.

The Goonie

Car

Man in Black

District 1

1 Day Later

Inverse (not as fun but still I love these movies):

Fight Clubs

The Signals (2007)

The Matrices

There are ideological capitalists and capital holders.

There are people who are capital holders who are ideologically left economically, some instances as far as full socialist.

There are people who hold little to no capital at all but believe capitalism is the best possible system.

As a percentage of their respective classes though, the later class traitor is unfortunately more common than the former class traitor.

As a male bi who tends to sleep with women more than men and tend to favor fem guys (I’m picky), I wish I was gayer.

That said, bi and poly women are fantastic.

No one is making an art piece every meal.

Same.

Lol, I think you are massively conflating influence with literal programming. I don’t think you would find anyone credible to agree that robots have “will”

Also, “theoretical conscious” is doing a lot of lifting in this argument.

You mean a “theoretically conscious” robot would theoretically have free will, since this has not happened, and some would argue it cannot happen, we have no idea how we would treat them.

That’s just it though, there is no reason to assume that there is something intrinsically special about the human brain that allows it to exclusively be conscious. The brain is just a computer made of flesh, one that merely at the moment can’t be programmed directly. If we replicated it artificially and it was able to be fully programmed the obvious implications is that there also is nothing special about our own brains in terms of “will” because we’d have a replica that we’d be able to directly control and program. It’d just mean our programming came about from evolutionary forces.

What? I mean there are theological libertarian takes, but a libertarian take on free will is not innately religious. They just believe that predeterminism is logically incompatible with freewill.

“Predeterminism” is a red herring. I don’t believe in predeterminism either. I don’t think the future is already written.

You can decide you don’t want to engage with the body of work, but you can’t then critique it.

Again… I really don’t know how you are interpreting this [libertarianism]?

“You can decide not to read the bible and hundreds of years of theological theory, but you can’t then critique it.”

If 500 years ago, someone wrote a complicated theory that stated that everything was made of bananas and then over the course of the past 500 years people debated the specifics filling up tomes of books on the nonsense I wouldn’t be required to read it all to not be fully in the right to completely dismiss it as gibberish and to openly insist that others also not waste their mental energy on it.

I find libertarian ideas around free will to be nonsense at a fundamental level. Reading the specifics would go no where. I’d need to be convinced that the core idea had some merit to begin with. As far as I can see, they have zero.

Axioms are self evident, if your beliefs were actual axioms we’d all believe in them… I mean, definitely a step forward…but I’d still challenge you to practice some skepticism about these “axioms” of yours.

There are multiple definitions of axiom. I’m referring to personal ideological axioms. "A self-evident principle or one that is accepted as true without proof as the basis for argument; a postulate. "

So what are your core beliefs based on if not empiricism?

Empiricism itself is not a factual statement, its a system of thinking. Empiricism is indeed a core belief of mine.

So how do we handle subjectivity?

You’ll need to be more specific. What do you mean “handle”? Do you mean the issue that you can’t truly “know” anything?

Occam’s razor is only meant to adjudicate between two competing theories that are equally supported by evidence that have already passed theoretically scrutiny.

I guess? I not sure how this contradicts my usage of it? Also why arbitrarily two? If you are discussing something where every theory has zero evidence for it then you’d be able to select the most simple out of a list of theories of any size. They’d all have zero evidence. Its not like you’d be forced to only consider two of them.

I fail to see how you can make a claim against the existence of free will with that thought process. [That I can’t fabricate a fairy tale]

Because free will itself is a fairy tale. But it got stopped one step further. There being free will is more complicated than there simply being no free will.

So your rationality isn’t influenced by observation and your observation never influences your rationality?

The rational abstraction is systematized. Its not so much that it’s not a potential that observation could never influence my rational thinking, but that if an observation does then that has potential impacts on all of my rational thinking systems. This is pretty unlikely, we’re talking a major and profound table flip. It would need to be demonstrated that the very way my rational system of thinking is inferior at obtaining truth compared to another new way.

That said, as they are, the only abstract thinking that would follow is more like a procedural set of steps that I’ve already come to follow to process new evidence.

So rationality “applies” to evidence, but like a pre-written function.

Could that not be influenced by the sexist expectations set upon women by a patriarchal society?

Oh it definitely is. It however isn’t the only influence, patriarchy is only one component of cultural conservativism. There is also religion and capitalism.

Plus, lets be honest here women just are less horny because of the nature of hormones. Just ask someone on any kind of HRT. We probably evolved that way to create a competitive pressure on men. Natural is brutal and amoral, and men are thrown into a metaphorical gladiatorial arena by it. The one that comes out on top gets to have kids (and have a fulfilling sex life), and from my perspective this is pretty awful. I’m not a fan of nature. I want every individual, men and women (and otherwise), to have fulfilling sex lives.

Twisted Metal (1995) via Duckstation. Installed using Emudeck.

Playing normal difficulty, abused save states on the first character, Sweet Tooth. But after that stuck to only saving in between levels or level password.

Playing the characters in order from Sweet tooth moving right, on the final rooftops level atm with Crimson Fury.

Game obviously is janky as hell but its deep in terms of learning curve. I’m more familiar with TM2, but always want to play through TM1 at some point.

Also watching the cut FMV endings on youtube after beating each character. They’re delightful.

For the compatibilists

The problem is, maybe you are right that Sapolsky hasn’t looked into them but I’ve looked into them and their definition of free will is not meaningfully different from a theoretical conscious yet programmed robot’s “will”.

It also shouldn’t disagree arguably with the more important issues of justice and meritocracy. Its just shifting the definition of ‘free will’ to just be ‘autonomy’.

If those are the same thing, sure whatever that definition of “free will” is true but then robots also have free will, and we treat a programmed autonomous robot very differently compared to a human.

For the libertarians

They’re religious and I don’t engage in religion, spirituality, supernaturalism, or theology. Absolute waste of time.

The problem with Sapolsky is that he doesn’t engage with the mountains of literature that have already been written about this exact subject

Read what some of the most famous minds throughout history have to say about it before enacting upon your theory with practice that may be harmful to yourself or the people around you.

Maybe Sapolsky knew they were wastes of time and skipped them. You don’t have to read the bible to know christianity is a waste of time. I don’t need to read libertarian ideology to know the same about their ideas.

instead supplements his own definition of free will that no one is utilizing, so ultimately he is engaging with a strawman.

Free will hasn’t been meaningfully defined to differentiate itself from “Autonomy” by compatibilists. Their definition as a result is worthless. Libertarians basically believe in magic.

If anything, he’s offering a steelman.

Whatever your core beliefs are, having them be inflexible when challenged with new information or perspective is not rational.

My “core beliefs” are basically my axioms. And axioms are more like ideological goals or ways of thinking. Changing those certainly can happen, it used to be the case for me that my moral axioms placed “truth” above basically everything but now its below harm reduction for instance.

If someone’s core belief is more of a specific “factual statement”, then sure. One should be willing to change one’s beliefs with new evidence. And really it shouldn’t even be a core belief in the first place.

yes but [Empiricism’s] obviously limited by the subjectivity of the observer. Have you ever read any Hegel? If we utilized empirical thought alone then we wouldn’t be able to process any abstract thought. Empiricism is what I was talking about with the phenomenon that is observable and repeatable. If your claim is that “shared truth” is theory that can be put forward through the scientific method… Okay, but that invalidates a vast sum of what it means to be human, including most rational and abstract thought. Arguments against empiricism are famously as old as Socrates.

What I believe is true: 1) I engage with empiricism or scientific consensus. 2) If something is outside of empiricism or scientific consensus I fall to Occam’s Razor. 3) If something can’t be engaged with either of those things, I simply assume I cannot know right now and have to wait for empiricism or scientific consensus and that it isn’t worth fabricating a comforting fairy tale to explain it.

The “abstract thinking” all happens essentially at 0) My way of figuring out what is true stems from rationality and rational thinking structures. Abstract thinking never follows the other steps.

Healthy for you my dude… Learning how to manage scenarios like we discussed in a healthy way is all about self improvement. I don’t imagine you like feeling depressed or feeling like you are in pain when you see a particular person who didn’t wrong you.

Given that its earnest, I appreciate the concern. That said, if I hadn’t avoided them I’m pretty sure I would have unironically risked suicidal ideation. There wasn’t a safe way for me to engage at the time but to minimize. The only reason I’m able to talk about it now is that it was a long time ago and I’m kind of dead inside anyway at this point.

There have been people I’ve seen that I also felt similar to, but they’ve not been people I had to regularly see.

From the sounds of it then this isn’t a male problem, but a class problem… My point is that painting it as a male problem as most like to do, can lead to a misdirection this anger towards parties whom do not deserve it, namely women and leftist in general. We’ve seen a massive rise in mysoginy and young men being attracted to the alt right because of this misdirection of blame.

It can be both. Its in fact many things, religious and cultural norms play a major role as well.

Again, women also like sex and are restricted from it for the same reasons.

Absolutely, but they simply aren’t at the same rates and getting consent for sex from a heterosexual/bisexual man is rarely a problem for the average heterosexual/bisexual woman.

I would say actively avoiding someone is doing something.

Its doing something, but its not “Doing something to her.” Its more like doing something to myself.

Which we are doing. Adding in personal perspective is important to determine how a person feels and acts within a society, which is why you added your anecdotal experience in the first place. I think it’s a bit of a double standard to then expect not to address your anecdotes.

OK, let me break this down because there needs to be fewer people who do this.

I added my anecdote for context as supporting contribution to my argument to demonstrate an idea or probable reality. I wasn’t interested in actively changing the subject to me personally as the focus. Especially since that can often just result in discussing my character instead of engaging with the main argument, which is basically what you did.

If you wanted to attack the relevance/factuality/meaningfulness of the anecdote itself that is fair game. However, you then took your chance to decide largely to attack my character. This was ultimately me being good faith and willing to open up for the sake of a more meaningful discussion and you turned it into a dunk and a personal criticism.

This did not hurt my feelings but it annoyed me because its escaping from my actual points and meant suddenly I needed to defend my character, something I really don’t even care that much about on here as this is specifically the account I use to misanthropically complain about the state of the world during slow times at work. In order to maintain the legitimacy of my argument I ended up having to waste time defending myself. It just bogged down the conversation.