Gentlemen, I present: the world’s first transhuman!

Mobile phones, as well. Thing is, though, I wouldn’t describe a mobile phone as “the next step in evolution”—it would seem downright silly to, even.

“Alignment” in the machine learning sphere is about what the agent is trained to do.

You might have one trained to solve a maze, but not realize that it didn’t “learn” to find the exit, it “learned” to move to the bottom right corner.

It’s the paperclip machine problem, basically. A human knows not to turn literally everything into paperclips, but a machine might “value” turning even themselves into paperclips above all else. And it’s actually really hard to teach it the human values without any misunderstanding.

This is about behavior, though, and does not require that we interpret the agent as “alive”.

Also, full disclosure, I fucking hate AI and would make it illegal for Google, Anthropic and Jim down the street to develop one today if I could. No quarter.

Oh, I’m aware. It’s just, uh… that evolution statement taken as a given is something I would expect to hear from someone who’s maybe a bit too in love with the cyberpunk genre.

Transhumanism is the next step in evolution

Wat

Yeah, that’s all true. Sorry, your first post confused me a bit. :p I couldn’t tell who you were saying was using the weak argument.

Why is it an obvious simplification?

The man who beats his wife isn’t gonna see a billboard

Okay, I have one more thing to say to anyone who happens to wander down here, I guess: This is very funny because the campaign he’s referring to did reduce domestic violence cases. So without having to explain why, we already know that he’s wrong.

I am so sick of pretending that we ought to take activism advice from people who are doing nothing with their lives. Do you think this guy has ever purchased a billboard? What the fuck would he know?

All it’s doing is causing boys who did nothing to fall down the alt-right pipeline

No, it’s not. Please stop talking out of your ass.

A mother telling her son that all men are evil is completely different.

Buddy, please, listen to me. This is a conversation happening in your head only. Listen to the words actually being said and not the ones you feel like you’re hearing.

the type of man that wouldn’t do these things is gonna feel attacked because they know they’d never do those things.

Can you explain how this knowledge is hurting anyone? To me, I mean: as a man, I need to know how I’m being attacked here.

all these posts and messages and shit aren’t helping,

The way that we prevent a majority of these rapes and accidental rapes from happening is overwhelming social pressure. It is very difficult to do something like this while people are watching.

You are actually working against the solution by being such a twit about the subject.

I say “accidental rapes,” by the way, because there are a lot of men out there who literally do not know they’re doing it because they have not been taught consent.

But I’m still lumped in because it’s “all men”.

As I say to all men I talk to about this, you are putting yourself in that category. I don’t know why. It seems kind of fucking stupid. Like as if you were arming a bear trap while standing in the center of it.

And don’t get on me for being mean to you, by the way, because as much sympathy as I have for you, and as much as I want you to finally get it and succeed, I find your attitude about this to be really fucking annoying. It’s tiresome talking to people like you about this.

Yeah, but I don’t see anyone engaging with it on the basis of it being plausible. It’s a joke super power.

I can be more direct, if you like. I don’t think that you’re really cautioning anyone, I think that you just dislike the concept and want to see that sentiment reflected in other people. The same way that some people argue about whether a popular song is bad or not.

It doesn’t really matter, I suppose, I was just hoping you would see the social faux pas.

You feel adding an optional extra mode

If it doesn’t have a separate progression system, it’s not really optional—not in the way that you imply. It changes the incentive structures of the game as a whole, which means the whole game must be played differently.

As a basic excercise, let’s think about a game with a dark hallway that has scary monsters. Most players don’t want to walk down a dark hallway with scary monsters, so how do you get them to?

That would be because you said this:

I’m just cautioning people to not think quantum physics actually does support the idea,

You think that I think quantum immortality is doable?

That means it picks a branch at random, which contradictions Many Worlds’ premise that the universe is fully deterministic.

Or it picks the most convenient one. I don’t know what this word ‘random’ means. If what you mean is ‘arbitrary’, there are lots of reasons you might arbitrarily pick this or that.

To claim you continue living in another branch is equivalent to claiming your experience somehow jumps

For one, I don’t actually care. But for two, most depictions I’ve seen portray this as a passive effect. It is not you that moves, it is the universe that moves around you. The details of how this actually works, or doesn’t, is for nerds in comic book stores to discuss.

I’m just cautioning people to not think quantum physics actually does support the idea,

At the risk of sounding a bit argumentative—and I really don’t mean to—Who?

Well, it does depend on which particular Batman comic run and author we’re talking about, but I have heard that this is sometimes the reason.

I probably consume even less Punisher, but my understanding is that he’s sort of like if Batman did kill people. They’re operating under the same moral framework. One that views The Law as civilizing and a world of Punishers as barbaric. Animalistic. A world of selfish kings fighting over the same throne.

This is different from what’s being expressed in the OP. The OP rejects the idea that this act is barbaric at all and instead focuses on the outcomes. They and the villain can’t be the same because they and the villain never do anything for the same reasons.

The villain in the OP has made billions suffer, and probably for money. But the hero is stopping the suffering, and because they like joy. The fact that they both kill, maybe, is immaterial. It doesn’t actually matter.

If I understand correctly, yes. The idea is that the “just hand of the law” is a better executor of justice, even if it’s the same justice, than “some guy” with “some guy’s opinions” on things.

And to be clear, I don’t think that view is without it’s merrits, of course, I just think a lot of goodguy / badguy media really under explores it. Certainly they often ignore the view that good outcomes may sometimes be worth more than the process.

Also, I don’t actually watch / read much Batman. I think there are times when his refusal to use guns is more about his personal adjacency to the crime of his city, and how he feels that if he indulges too much in the call to violence, that he would just become another mafia kingpin. In a literal sense, like as if he were an addict refusing a drug.

The logic is about a battle of ideologies. When the villain, or the hero sometimes, says they’d be just as bad as what they’re fighting, what they mean is that they’re succumbing to their baser instincts, allowing “might makes right” to win out against the spirit of democracy. “Democracy” in their view, the author’s I mean, is mostly about letting people coexist, and using only official channels to punish the most obscene offenders. The hero is rejecting “an eye for an eye,” essentially, in favor of the perceived fairness of The Law.

This framing kind of doesn’t work because we all know who the villains are. We all know the world would be better off without The Joker in it. And worse, letting him go through the prison system to get the outcome we all want for him anyway isn’t really different from just shooting him yourself. It’s marginally different, maybe; probably better than enabling a bunch of vigilantes. But even so, it is an action that merely defers the pulling of the trigger to the state. Someone will be pulling it regardless, because as we all know, the world would be better off without The Joker.

This framing about due process works a lot better with villains who are not The Joker because it leaves open the possibility that the law might not actually punish them, and that the vigilante hero is a bad person for trying to kill someone who does not actually deserve death.

It doesn’t have to pick any specific one; any branch in which you’re alive will do.

Nobody’s really “jumping”, you just don’t die. The universe constructs itself such that you don’t die—there’s nothing more to it.

It is a funny superpower idea. Like turning invisible. Which also doesn’t make any sense if you think about it.

Your enemy is not ‘conversation simulators’, its capitalism.

It’s both, actually.