Just writing this down quick after seeing a number of articles on artificial intelligence. I think an AI would probably be sapient if it could actually understand language (or that sapience is right in that area), but I also think understanding language is computationally impossible :/
Category Archives: blog
important things 3
one of the most most most most important documentaries ive ever seen fr
and an event that just comforts me and convinces me of the power of language
hadnt listened to this song in 5 bajilllion years
and the self aint real and identity is a super limited framework :/
libertarian cycle
hate government services for being low quality → oppose taxes → gov programs lose funding → gov programs become worse → hate government services for being low quality
like, yeah, having money doesn’t fix problems, but not having money certainly creates problems
a little piece on being a person who can help
A comment to someone feeling awful (understandably) about the violence certain religions have perpetrated throughout history. In this comment, I also wanted to address some other comments that were trying to make a general attack on religion in the comment thread. Note that the conversation was nominally tied to discussion of Edelgard’s character in Fire Emblem Three Houses, which is why there are some tangential references to her. Knowledge of the character is not required. The main virtue of this writing, I think, is the last paragraph, which, if you don’t care to read the rest, I’d recommend you read at least that. Take care, stay safe y’all.
I would note Edelgard isn’t really anti-religion, so much as anti-Church of Seiros (and even then, not opposed to the Church per se but the Church as a purveyor of political and social corruption).
And to kindly point to some reasons to appreciate religion in the world, it’s important to understand how diverse religion is (both in terms of ideology and administration). A lot, not all, but a lot of moral learning and revolution and idealism has been religiously motivated, eg, Thoreau followed by MLK and Gandhi, a lot of antipoverty philosophy and advocacy (bringing up MLK again, imo the most important part of his legacy that has been forgotten was his antipoverty advocacy), how many philosophies at least started out as explicitly religious movements (humanism, human rights, for example) or important thinkers who were deeply religious (Locke, Newton, Mr Rogers, Confucius, Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz, and Maria Gaetana Agnesi for some examples; Newton actually wrote more about theology than any other subject). Religious believers and institutions are just as diverse and complicated as everyone else and especially when religion is exploited to justify some evil, the first to decry it are often people within the religion, possibly from a different school of thought, sometimes from the very same school that’s causing the problems.
And to push back at another comment, while it is true that some religions are antiscience, they are hardly the standard (many such religions emerge from impoverished areas where government, medicine, and education have failed the people to such a degree that the ppl are likely to be antiscience whether or not they are religious). My own religion operates 3 universities-at a loss because of how heavily or subsidizes tuition-founded several more that have been integrated into the state education system, and whose leadership includes former educators, judges, doctors, and deans, and is headed by a heart surgeon/medical researcher. Even some of the most famous stories of antiscientific religion are exaggerated. For instance, Galileo’s feud with the Catholic Church is well-known, but people tend to be unaware that the Catholic Church sponsored and approved of Copernicus’ research into heliocentrism a generation earlier (as a non Catholic, my read of the Galilean feud is more that Galileo’s personality as a provocateur was the real issue).
Turning to the overall issue, there are a lot of people fighting to make the world a better place. There are different understandings of what that is, but remember that the reason we have cohesive societies, the reason things function at all, why we haven’t descended into anarchy or general warfare are people fighting to do what’s right. Good people don’t attract or demand attention the way people who cause damage do. A good person will spend hours intimately discussing and healing a wound that was formed by a bad person in seconds. And as fast as bad things happen, i would say less people are actually willing to do bad things; most of it is accidental or driven by stress and duress).
There’s a lot of power in seeking out people who are doing good and aligning yourself with them. In learning in such a fashion that your capacity to help expands the longer you live. Edelgard’s a particular person who was in the right place with the right talents to do a lot of good in her society. But as long as you make yourself a person who can help people, you’ll find yourself in such positions naturally. Not to reform a nation (I assume you’re not secretly in line to some throne haha), but to help people around you to hold on and give them a chance to see the beauty in life. An example of incredibly kind advocacy that hopefully can help a little (it always touches me): https://youtu.be/fKy7ljRr0AA
important things #2
Fires of Faith: A documentary series about the history of the English Bible. Not the Bible, mind you, but specifically the massive controversy and sacrifice and loss of life that were tied up in the creation of an English translation of the Bible, an act of translation that often carried the penalty of death for heresy. I loved this series when I was younger and it was my first introduction to excellent documentarian Lucy Worsley. I bought the DVD set seeing that physical copies may be disappearing, but fortunately it’s available for free digitally.
The process of religious learning (surprise: it’s basically the same as all learning but heavily otherized)
Written in response to a discussion about religion, specifically criticism towards committing to religious belief, believing in grand claims, and believing in one religion despite the possibility of being wrong. Alongside typical stuff like evidentiary burdens, proof vs. disproof. I find these lines of thought tend to hold religious concepts to standards we don’t apply to other forms of learning, part of a broad trend to have religious and secular parts of communities otherize each other. So, this comment is principally opposed to the otherization of religion.
Religious learning isn’t really that different from other forms of belief and learning. Like in any science, it’s not so much about having a perfect answer, but getting the best answer available to you, given your capacity to learn, plus the learning communities and resources which you can access, and of course, your own intuition and biases.
An earnest godseeker will usually favor a religious ideology or institution based on how well it connects them to religious growth (and that growth can be in terms of conduct or ideology).
Religion is full of deeply complicated questions. Some questions give rise to serious divides between faith groups, others don’t. But people have their sense of reality, accurate or not, but that’s hardly exclusive to matters of faith. Consider how government leaders don’t have the option of verifying empirically how their every act is going to play out; leaders have to commit to an ideology and courses of action well before they can understand the implications of those decisions. In the sciences, interminable debates rage over interpretations of quantum theory, mathematicians debate over whether and to what extent math is real, Freud is still debated in literature despite his being abandoned by psychology, and so on. Scholars take their position realizing, but never believing, that they could be wrong. We hear all about the rugged scientists who stuck to their positions until they were finally proven right, but for each such story, there are 20 scientists who just turned out to be wrong.
Another illustration: geocentric models of the solar system are only marginally less accurate than heliocentric ones (and much of that difference would not exist if we had refined the geocentric model over the past centuries). Geocentrism wasn’t abandoned because it was inaccurate in a predictive or prescriptive sense. Rather, heliocentrism was simpler mathematically and human intuition grew to favor it.
So in a world where even accuracy, modeling, and empiricism can’t answer all our questions, even when we need answers and must act, and we must rely on intuition and preference, religion is not peculiar. It is not even peculiar in terms of how grand its claims are. When you consider how you and I will never count the stars, nor measure the distance from the Earth to the Sun, nor witness Julius Caesar’s assassination, nor view the functioning of our organs, but we believe what others tell us about these startling, almost incomprehensible things. We can personally verify parts of the great mysteries, but 99% of our abstract knowledge will always be something we’re told to believe and must take on faith.
For myself, I subscribe to my religion based on certain phenomena I have experienced which genuinely aren’t covered by secular psychology, plus an intuition that I am on a productive course of inquiry and learning. I very strongly feel that i am much closer to the truth thanks to my religion than i would be if i relied on my own powers. Also, while not a foundation of my faith, studying advanced mathematics very much impressed upon me how arcane knowledge and reality are: even understanding it, i am tempted to call it magic.
I would also note how there is no dearth of evidence for the existence of some form of divinity. Consider how many people, over history, have claimed to have communicated in some form with a god. Certainly, a good number of them were off in some way. But if even one of these people told the truth, that’s it. Thousands of witness testimony should not be discarded hastily. And I can personally add that I know some very well grounded people who have offered testimony of some kind.
important things roundup #1
this screencap from Keep Your Hands Off Eizouken
it’s part of a brilliant sequence about the nature of human conflict in the final episode and how conflict’s not remediable by good faith, because there are genuine issues that need resolving for which the solution is not at all clear. no se muere la controversia.
a song by astrophysics ~ thank you miku
proof of corruption in el gobierno bukelista
What Is Actually In Abortion Trigger Laws/Bans?
There is a lot of disinformation going around. In particular, a lot of people have made it out that these laws do not contain exceptions for medical emergencies, something that seemed incredibly unlikely to me. So, I read every relevant statute I could find and figured out what exceptions apply under each law.
Summary
20 states would have an abortion ban applying to any time or almost any time during the pregnancy. More states would ban after a a set period of time. 14 states have trigger laws, 5 have laws predating Roe still on the books, and 1 recently passed a law prohibiting abortion. 1 more included here merely has a proposed trigger law, but local media seems to suggest its passage is very likely.
Every one of these states would allow abortion for medical emergencies. Even statutes from the 1800s provide exceptions for medical emergencies (Wisconsin’s, for instance).
7 states (35%) have rape or incest exceptions. Only Mississippi exempts rape but not incest. No state exempts incest but not rape.
Of states enacting bans, Utah has the most comprehensive exceptions.
Since I’m just one person, there may be slight errors, but I believe this is mostly accurate. If you are concerned about your particular state, investigate it thoroughly and do not rely on this information, whose purpose is merely to survey and summarize.
Chart of Exemptions to Abortion Bans
| State | Code | Category | Medical Emergencies Affecting the Mother | Ectopic Pregnancies (explicit) | Lethal Anomaly Affecting the Child | Rape or Sexual Assault | Incest | Threshold |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Alabama | HB314 | Pre-Roe | X | X | X | |||
| Arizona | 13-3603 | Pre-Roe | X | Possibly (included in related statutes) | ||||
| Arkansas | SB149 | Trigger | X | X | ||||
| Georgia | HB41 | Recent | X | X | Up to 20 weeks | Up to 20 Weeks | heartbeat | |
| Idaho | S18-622 | Trigger | X | X | X | |||
| Kentucky | HB148 | Trigger | X | |||||
| Louisiana | 5.1061 | Trigger | X | |||||
| Michigan | 750.14 | Pre-Roe | X | |||||
| Mississippi | SB2391 | Trigger | X | X | ||||
| Missouri | HB126 | Trigger | X | |||||
| North Dakota | HB1466 | Trigger | X | X | X | |||
| Ohio | HB598 | Proposed Trigger | X | |||||
| Oklahoma | SB918 | Trigger | X | heartbeat | ||||
| South Carolina | TITLE44 CH1 ART 6 | Trigger | X | X | Fewer than 20 weeks | Fewer than 20 weeks | heartbeat | |
| South Dakota | SL 2005, ch 187, § 6 | Trigger | X | |||||
| Tennessee | SB1257 | Trigger | X | |||||
| Texas | HB1280 | Trigger | X | |||||
| Utah | SB174 | Trigger | X | X | X | X | X | |
| West Virginia | 61 6-2-8 | Pre-Roe | X | |||||
| Wisconsin | 940.04 | Pre-Roe | X | |||||
| Wyoming | HB92 | Trigger | X | X | X |
Code is the citation with a link to the text itself. Some are links to the text as codified, others to the enrolled bills pre-codification.
The categories differentiate between laws passed before Roe was decided and laws passed with a provision that they will only go into effect if Roe is overturned or states otherwise gain the ability to restrict abortion as if Roe were overturned (such as if a constitutional amendment were passed).
Medical emergency is usually defined with reference to a medical professional’s good faith or reasonable evaluation that there is a serious health risk to the mother. The exact definition of serious health risk will vary, but broadly speaking it includes serious bodily harm, impairment of body functions, etc. May include some mental health emergencies, depending on the state, the exact nature of the emergency, and how well verified the emergency is (e.g., Alabama allows only mental emergencies verified by certain psychiatrists if the mental illness will cause suicide or the murder of the unborn child). Most states, when they contemplate the issue explicitly, exclude suicidality and self-harm as excuses for abortion. Many states’ statutory definitions of medical emergency are general enough that lethal anomaly could be included under their definition of medical emergency. The differences in statutory language reveal uncertainty about how to handle mental health, due to the tension between genuine mental health issues and appropriation of mental health issues by bad faith actors (just like the insanity defense has been severely harmed by the numbers of people who claim insanity because they think, contrary to fact, that insanity’s an easy way to get off).
Ectopic pregnancies is marked if there is an explicit allowance for abortions of ectopic pregnancies. The lack of a mark does not mean they would be prohibited, especially given medical emergency and lethal anomaly exceptions.
Lethal anomaly exemptions allow abortions where the unborn child will die at birth, be stillborn, or die shortly thereafter. E.g., Alabama’s definition: “A condition from which an unborn child would die after birth or shortly thereafter or be stillborn.” Language varies; sometimes it’s framed in terms of medical futility, lack of viability, etc. Might also be included under medical emergency when the definition does not limit itself to risks to the mother or when no definition for medical emergency is provided.
Rape and Incest exceptions often explicitly require a police report to have been filed prior to seeking an abortion. South Carolina would require the physician performing the abortion to report the allegation instead after informing the patient.
An entry in the threshold section means the ban only applies if a heartbeat is detected in the unborn (alongside a requirement that doctors perform reasonable checks when there is no medical emergency). Generally, the physician need only take reasonable steps to identify a heartbeat; if none is found after a reasonable test, there is no liability. Several states have looser, time-based thresholds. Heartbeat thresholds are included because they apply so early in a pregnancy.
Based on my review of the statutory texts, miscarriages, abortions that increase the probability of a live birth, unintentional injury/death, or accidents to the unborn (including during medical interventions by medical professionals) are frequent, explicit exceptions. Where not explicit, I would highly doubt that they are not implicit-the statutes that don’t explicitly mention this are usually brief.
Many, but not all, statutes explicitly disallow the prosecution of the abortion patient.
Many of these bills also explicitly target or condemn abortions of unborn children for reasons of sex, gender, or nonlethal disability (especially Down Syndrome).
Notes on inclusions: I focused on states included in these two lists: 1 (specifically states listed as banning), 2. I excluded some states when I could not find any texts supporting what the article said, e.g., (1) lists North Carolina as banning abortion, but local news reports suggest no such thing. States listed as restricting I left out since, generally speaking, a ban is more extreme than a restriction and so the restrictions can be expected to be looser than the bans. Obviously, I can’t catch everything, but I’m not aware of having missed anything and anything I would’ve missed will probably be similar to one of the statutes included in the chart. It’s hard to imagine any statute, for instance, not including the medical exemption. Some states also had a pre-Roe statute and a trigger law. For simplicity, I limited my study to the trigger laws.
Brief Note on Roe
Roe set itself up for repeal. Even for the pro-abortion position, Roe was bad law, because of how it fueled the culture war and left so little room for discretion.
- The Supreme Court did not have the authority to issue the decision in Roe. I am not a textualist by any means, but the Court has to base its decisions on its Constitutional authority of interpretation. Roe did not interpret anything. The main text referenced is the 14th Amendment, but the connection to the 14th Amendment is tangential at best. The Court does not have authority to make such decisions, regardless of how good or bad they are, because these decisions are not interpretations. Interpretation is precisely the limit that prevents Justices from being kings.
- Roe violated the interpretive limit, but reversing Roe probably does not since the reversal is itself based on interpretation. Undoing an abuse of discretion is not itself an abuse of discretion.
- Roe set onerous obstacles on legislatures regulating abortion no matter how reasonable that regulation was, and it has left the US with radical abortion laws untempered by science or morality. Roe didn’t just block abortion bans; it made all sorts of regulation impossible. A Supreme Court decision like Roe is a sledgehammer: it does not allow for refinement, caution, compromise, or (ultimately) good governance.
- Because of these flaws in Roe, discourse around abortion has been extremist and conflictive. Roe deserves blame for fueling the culture war in ways which statutes, legitimately enacted by legislatures, do not.
- In a post-Roe v. Wade world, there will be more states restricting, not just banning, abortion. But abortion in many-maybe even most-states will be exactly the same as it was under Roe.
- State legislatures certainly have the power to legislate for and against abortion in a post-Roe world, so long as their state’s constitution grants them that power. I don’t particularly think that Congress has that power, though. Federal legislation has to be based on some vested power to Congress, of which only 2 might be relevant. I don’t think banning or preempting state legislation really falls under either the Commerce Power or the 14th Amendment Powers.
Personal note
This information has been prepared to be as neutral as possible, even if my personal feelings are very much nonneutral. I write this, not to invite debate (I have little doubt you or I would be convinced by anything either of us write), but because disclosure and openness about the biases I write under are important.
I approve of Utah’s approach, because I can only see abortion as justifiable where there exists a serious intervening cause. The life-status of the unborn invokes so many unsolvable questions of epistemology and semiotics that it’s impossible to show the unborn are not humans. I certainly consider the murder of a pregnant woman to be a double homicide, as well as a nonconsensual abortion to be murder. I don’t think miscarriage and abortions are distinguished by mere sentimentality. If we can’t be reasonably certain abortion isn’t homicide, if that question remains in a zone of ambiguity, I don’t think action is justified. And, even if abortion absolutely weren’t murder, I don’t know that it’d be different enough to be tolerable.
I also note how often the consent for abortion is nominal or uninformed. Legal access to abortion makes it much easier to pressure, manipulate, coerce, and abuse women into acting contrary to their will. On the question of choice, I find abortion just as, if not more disturbing, when men, partners, or family make the decision. Abortion also has nasty and enduring connections to eugenics, racism, sexism, classism, and ableism (enough so that Ginsburg may or may not have been caught up in that, enough that it may have at least influenced Roe).
Additionally, I note how urgent healthcare reform, orphanage/foster care reform, mental health reform, education reform, child rights reform, and parental rights reforms (like parental leave) are. As well as things like drug, alcohol, labor, and economic reform because of how much issues in those areas hurt people and their children. Abortion is one of the most serious forms of dehumanization of children, but it’s far from the only one.
Finally, I’m horrified when I reflect on how 1/3 of pregnancies were terminated the year I was born in my home state. A lot of us live lonely lives, and it is certainly lonelier, more painful, knowing that 1/3 of the kids who would’ve been my peers never drew breath.
sayaka miki is good and deserves the world and her story is very sad and ppl often kinda miss what’s going on so im gonna talk about how much was hurting her :(
[MADOKA SPOILERS]
ppl sometimes miss all of what sayaka miki was goin through that turned her into a witch and it’s not just boy stuff so here’s a list cuz she’s brilliant:
the train scene:
it’s a way bigger deal than it might seem; there’s a reason she becomes a witch right after
- predation on innocence; the scene is about predation on people like her (sincere, good-willed, loyal, etc)
- loss of innocence
- violent disruption of her justice-oriented worldview
- moral distress b/c she can’t fix the situation (neither force nor appeal to morality)
- even getting rid of the dudes doesn’t heal the victims or mean they weren’t taken advantage of
- sexual exploitation/womanizing is genuinely horrible and shocking
- the callousness
- ppl using peace+safety to hurt others when she’s fighting hard to create that peace+safety
- ideological dysphoria: the shock to your own identity when you suddenly arent motivated by or faithful to your core values, often due to feeling dead inside/intense pain.
[aside: i had a “train scene” of my own. it remains one of the most painful experiences ive ever had.see my essay on moral distress: http://octagonsun.com/moral-distress-a-systemic-issue-in-l2-teaching/… moral distress is serious: trauma symptoms arising when a person cant act according to their moral beliefs, esp when they witness profound hurt and cant help. really common in helper jobs like teaching&nursing. ruins lives]
other big events:
- ptsd from witnessing mami’s murder
- being intentionally misled to believe she could be strong enough to make the world better and then being particularly weak as a meguca – body dysphoria due to “zombification” (separation of soul from body)
- kyubey intentionally manipulating her emotions & exposing her to toxic experiences b/c that’s its intent from the beginning – traumatic physical pain&injury, including kyoko fights and witch fights (even if it physically heals, the memory of intense pain doesnt just disappear)
- and of course, the boy problems. she doesn’t feel worthy to stand up for herself b/c of zombification, doesn’t believe she’s capable of love (deeply disturbing), tension between wanting to let hitomi pursue happiness at her expense & stand up for herself (honestly hitomi isn’t a v good friend here, but it’d be normal middle school drama if not for the rest)
- kyubey tries to separate her from emotional support
all this happens over a short period. every one of these is hard to absorb emotionally+possibly shattering. but we don’t have an adult here; it’s a kid dealing with all this, with little guidance or nurture. sayaka miki is full of strength and good. she’s a wonderful child. but that breaks under intense, intentional duress and it’s totally unfair to hold that against her.
[Originally written for twitter]
Maximal limits of civilizations
Any civilization has an amount of goodness/kindness and evil/malice. They are not quite opposite quantities in that a single society can have an abundance of both-they don’t negate each other, but an absence of kindness can have much the same effect as an abundance of malice. Goodness is best thought of as a positive quantity
There is an upper limit on goodness in a society which, if exceeded, the people of the civilization will reorder their civilization into a new civil structure. I think a good name for this process would be regeneration. There is also a limit on malice, below which a civilization will degenerate. While passing the limit of goodness is a deliberate process of reorganizing and people deciding (even intuitively) to make the lives of others better, degeneration is much less likely to be deliberate overall and is better characterized as implosion or self-cannibalism as the society consumes itself.
A regenerated society will have higher limits in terms of malice and and kindness. The actual changes will be influenced by the cleverness of its people: they might focus on building a society that enables incredible levels of kindness but is vulnerable to malice, or they might focus on preventing malice and degeneration. Greater cleverness will see those goals better met. A degenerating society can be benefited by cleverness, but it is also more likely that cleverness will worsen its decay. Cleverness often loses value before and during degeneration and may be held in the hands of increasingly narrow factions (some factions may seek to control it while disinterest will prevent other factions from spreading understanding). Now, a regenerated or degenerated society might be more or less sophisticated, complex, ordered, intuitive, or otherwise than its predecessor. For instance, fascism is a degenerate mode of civilization, but is highly structured in many aspects. There is almost always a seductive force to degeneration that drives many people to simultaneously make choices that drive degeneration forward. Structure, superficial peace, and lack of restraint are some of the appeals of low-kindness/high-malice societies.
Signs of degeneration manifest when more and more people’s lives are consumed. Consumption is when a person is objectified, used as a tool, or otherwise eaten up and lose contact with kindness. People who want to do good cannot and suffer moral distress. Excessive social demands, overcomplexity, power structures insensitive to human emotion, trauma and suffering, exhaustion, addictions, illness, perversity, hypersexuality, and the like are both symptoms and causes of degeneration. Degeneration can only be combatted by choosing to use energy for kindness, so degeneration will push for decreasing the free energy and the willpower to do good. It needs to be a self-sustaining cycle for degeneration to complete, so stripping people of discretion to do what is right is essential (e.g., requiring judges to rule according to law rather than what is good [noting that precedent influences what is right, but cannot be morally conclusive]).
It becomes very important to distribute the burdens of governing society between many people. If rulers degenerate, they will degenerate those under their rule and, famously, monarchs have the greatest access to addiction and excesses, they are subject to burdens far beyond what any human can carry, and so on. In civilization design, it’s good to watch for any positions that have these traits-it’s not just monarchs. I would suggest doctors, lawyers, and presidents are examples of people with excessive burdens in our society-which often burns them out and turns these professions that should be about helping people into cold, unfeeling industries.
When we look to falls of past civilizations, we look to disease, climate change, warfare, and other environmental causes. What these phenomena represent is a pressure that consumes people’s lives and makes it harder for individuals to recognize what is kind and choose it for themselves and others. When kindness abounds, the effects of any of these are mitigated and do not destroy a civilization. To blame the environment is to miss the point. These things happen to people and make their lives harder, but they ultimately choose whether they are kind, cruel, or unfeeling.
Regeneration comes when people are not consumed and choose to be kind with the energy that is free. Where degeneration drains people of the capacity to resist, regeneration is most likely to happen as kindness becomes more and more intuitive. Being kind takes energy, so a rich understanding of kindness makes doing good easier and more effective. That requires education, benevolence, and good faith discussion of virtue and good. The goodness that results from isolated individuals reasoning for themselves what is good is too costly. Regeneration only happens when many people choose to be interested in moral discussion and are willing to correct and be corrected. Without cleverness within kindness and systems to help people understand kindness on a deeper, more functional level, the upper limit of good will not be reached. It is not enough to say, I am kind or I wish to be kind. It is necessary to ask: what is kindness, and what does kindness look like within my life, what is the kindness that my neighbor needs.
Some notes: empathy is related to kindness but is not it. Empathy is also quite capable of cruelty. Empathy must be tempered by goodwill and must be extended to all people. Selective empathy aids factionalism instead. I think our society is full of degenerative signs, in particular, an unwillingness to discuss morality and religion (religion being one of the only institutions seriously concerned with questions of kindness). Amorality is not real: it is callousness and disinterest in the welfare of others, which is a degenerative impulse. We need more doctors, lawyers, engineers and the like-any profession where the risks are big, we need more people so that caseloads are kept small. We don’t need people losing their sense of self under the pressure that people will die because they don’t have the resources to do everything they need to.