afroggyfrog

[afroggyfrog]

Social justice capitalism

I have moved to substack because it looks cooler, so go read there. https://froggie.substack.com/p/social-justice-capitalism

[afroggyfrog]

cat

While I was making an easter egg for an NFT on opensea.io I encoded “meow” to decimal, the result is this. 109 101 111 119

I was in awe at the symmetry that meow has in decimal,its like a mirror image where the mirror has +10 added to it, I saw it as a sign from above that I should look deeper into cats.

I started with gematria, which is always bullshit when everyone else does it because they can always go through every synonym and rephrasing they can until they get an answer that’s vaguely what they want, like if “cat” has no results i can do “cats” “kitty” “kitten” “feline” and then i can multiply all of that by adding an s at the end, an “a “ at the beginning, and so on, i can end up with maybe a hundred options if I take my time so the chance that at least one of them will have a result are way bigger than coincidence.

But i didn’t do that, i simply went with the first google result which was “a cat” and i only looked at the first thing on the first list (the jewish gematria list) so you know this is a real sign from god and not p-hacking.

There’s also countless images of cats posing in ways that fit the golden spiral which has to mean something!

In ancient times cats were seen as godly but that ancient wisdom seems to have been lost to the times.

I wanted to see if the cats were referenced anywhere in the bible but they were not! I think they were trying to hide the existence of cats.

And last but not least, remember how dog spelled backwards is god? what else is the opposite of dog? cat

If you were to look at any of these on their own it would surely feel like its a mere coincidence but you can only take so many coincidences before you realise something is fishy.

Wake up sheeple!!!

[afroggyfrog]

cancel cancel culture

cruel bombs

Nukes will burn at temperatures higher than the surface of the sun, the first nuke used in war, “little boy”, dropped on Hiroshima killed about 80 000 people.

Since then we made some upgrades!

Tzar bomba was just the biggest one since 2002, and it was only tried at half capacity, and little boy is already microscopic compared to it, so the 13400 nukes we have today can definetely do hundreds of times more than 13400 hiroshima explosions.

But 13400 nukes aren’t that bad. we used to have way more in the 80s!

Take a moment to guess how many of those nukes were used for killing, before reading whats below this graph.

just 2

Hiroshima and Nagasaki were the only cities that got nuked, ever.

Partly this is because WW2 ended very quickly after everyone saw Americans have an absolutely huge advantage and nobody could compete until they made their own nukes.

But it was only a matter of time before the rest of the world could produce nukes, and when they did, boy oh boy, did they do absolutely nothing with it.

So what kind of miracle is this? who would make dozens of thousands of nukes and not use any of them?

M.A.D.

Just in case you don’t already know, it M.A.D. stands for Mutually Assured Destruction, and its a military doctrine stating that by merely having nukes in your inventory, you can prevent your enemies from using nukes, because if they do, it will escalate until both sides are completely destroyed by nukes.

I think we can pretty much attribute this whole miracle of not using nukes to M.A.D..

If the Japanese invented nukes at the same time America did we might have even gotten by with 0 nukes instead of 2.

This flies in the face of common sayings like

“An eye for an eye will leave the whole world blind.”

Can you imagine if the war went on, but commies and nazis said

“we will not build nukes because then we’d be just as bad as the americans”.

How many more nukes would have been dropped on them? either enough to make them surrender for good or enough to exterminate them.

But enough about real-life nukes.

Back to the culture war

We’re interested in political nukes.

Do you think cancel culture is bad? do you want it to stop? then take the action that will stop it.

Saying “nukes are evil and I’ll refuse to use them so I don’t become evil” isn’t gonna stop everyone else from using nukes, the only way to prevent force is to use force.

If you want to put an end to cancel culture you have to cancel those who contribute to cancel culture.

It doesn’t matter how paradoxical or weird it sounds, saying that building more nukes is the only way to prevent people from using nukes sounds equally weird and paradoxical but it is an empirical truth! when your ideas are opposite to how reality works, you have to admit it’s your ideas that are wrong.

Once enough people organise by creating online groups, like subreddits, dedicated to sending complaints/emails to peoples employers and sponsors, while only targeting those who are part of cancel culture, they can finally put a stop to cancel culture.

How many people are going to support cancel-culture when doing so will put them at risk of being cancelled?

I was gonna make a subreddit but the name is already taken

https://www.reddit.com/r/CancelCancelCulture/

And it’s not being used for cancelling people! its just a couple posts talking about cancel culture, no one is trying to take any action.

Meanwhile, /r/CancelCulture is exactly the kind of thing that people should copy! hell, if the copy is close enough to the original you might even get /r/cancelculture banned when /r/cancelculture2 inevitably gets banned, simply because it would make the bias too obvious, and getting /r/cancelculture banned would be an amazing achievement! it would make getting /r/cancelculture2 banned 100% worth it!

Taking action

I made /r/cancelculture2!

It probably wont achieve anything since I’m lazy and not that invested into this.

https://www.reddit.com/r/CancelCulture2/

This is the first set of rules I made.

After writing this, I realised rule 1 might not be enough, for the original cancellers, it would be enough to not talk about cancelling and to keep cancelling secretly. But if instead of “being pro cancel-culture” i say “benefit from cancel culture”, like if a left-winger has a really disgusting opinion but they would never be cancelled for it, and they benefit from having their rivals cancelled, then I guess the loophole would be closed, at the cost of collateral damage, but we’re doing necessary evils here so it’s okay.

Debunking myself

“An eye for an eye will leave the whole world blind.”

Earlier I refuted that idiom, and yet, the author isn’t some random guy who never achieved anything, it was Gandhi.

And Gandhi is the only example I can think of of someone actually winning a war by being against violence.

I’m not a historian, I don’t know how it happened, I don’t know if it can be repeated, or if it has ever been repeated, or if it needed a very specific context, or if the context is applicable to the culture war.

But if I were to be proven wrong about the M.A.D. strategy being the most practical, I would expect the proof to start by using Gandhi as an example.

[afroggyfrog]

SuperStraight

A brand new sexuality that is trending on twitter and being super popular.

Definition:

A superstraight person is someone attracted to members of the opposite gender who are not transexual.

This was created as a response to people who sometimes say things like this:

(source:BBC)

Let’s give a name to the people who insist that not being attracted to trans people makes you transphobic, since I’m not about to describe them every time i wanna bring them up, I’ll call them trans-incels because just like incels they resent people for not wanting to have sex with them.

It’s worth it to remember that trans-incels aren’t representative of all trans people. or even of a majority of them, if i were to bet, they are about as popular as actual incels.

In all the comment sections I checked the anti trans-incel side was a clear majority, and having searched for “superstraight” on youtube to see what people have to say, the first video on the list, from a trans man, is definetely anti trans-incel .

> If you don’t want to date a trans person that’s fine, and if somebody is trying to force you they’re just an asshole

-probably most trans people

From the perspective of a trans-incel (and how we’re all assuming too much)

Imagine a person.

Imagine the probability that they are racist.

Imagine that same person saying “i wouldn’t date a black person”

Has the probability increased at all? be honest, it hasn’t gone up to 100% (which would be the race-incel response) but it must have gone up by at least a little.

But why did it go up by a little? Because now the chance they’ll say something like “because blacks disgust me” has also gone up.

Now imagine being into internet drama (ew) and as a trans person, you’re especially interested in people being transphobic and you probably see transphobia every day because people like talking about it as much as anti-sjw(tm) people like to talk about the trans-incels.

If discussions about trans people only gets to you when it causes drama you’ll probably never see “i wouldn’t date trans men/women...” without having it be followed by “...because they’re not real men/women”.

And even though the whole point of being superstraight is to explain why people wouldn’t date trans men/women without calling them ‘not real men/women’ lets see what the original guy who started the whole superstraight meme has to say at second 15.

https://youtu.be/z8vQhkPnEE4

It’s like instead of throwing bait, they’re just throwing food.

The more you see “...because they’re not real men/women” the more likely you are to expect it, and as someone who subscribes to people posting drama 24/7 you’ll see that hundreds of times until you end up answering ...

the probability that the person who says ‘i wouldn’t date trans men/women’ to be transphobic is 100%

...and even if they don’t follow up with something transphobic it’s always easier to imagine they’re just hiding it rather than to change your whole worldview on the spot.

And if you think “why do they even predict transphobia before its spoken”, well, this might sound crazy to you, but everyone is assuming things all the time, our whole perception of reality is nothing but a hallucination that our brain comes up with using not only stimulus from the world but also assumptions.

There’s a blind spot on each 1 of your eyes, your brain simply fills it in without you knowing, it also adds color to the edge of your vision and makes the whole thing less blurry.

When someone says “i won’t date trans people” some people will simply fill in the blanks, they’ll assume every bit of info about who you are what you believe in what your personality is from just a sentence, because the brain is literally designed for it.

IQ tests are just patterns where a spot is blanked out and you’re supposed to fill it in, your intelligence is measured by your ability to fill in the blanks, and low intelligence people will just make mistakes more often, but everyone smart or dumb will constantly make assumptions about everything, and dumb people will be proven wrong about their assumptions more often.

And this happens all the time even when you’re not talking about politics or having a fight.

Someone talking about the earth being curved? well, every time I saw someone do that they called it a sphere so let me just fill in the blanks.

Someone saying they wouldn’t date trans women? well, every time I see screenshots of people saying that in my drama facebook group i see them being transphobic, so let me just fill in the blanks

That’s just how incels operate.

Building legitimacy

Have you ever noticed that every sexual preference eventually gets assigned a flag, on that note, why does every country have a flag?

If you ask a regular person to guess why their country has a flag you’ll get something related to aesthetics, our flags represent our country.

For example Romania and Hungary:

In school we are taught that each colour on our flag has a different meaning, I searched on google and everyone disagrees on what they mean but as an example.

Liberty (sky-blue), Justice (field yellow), Fraternity (blood red) 

Outside of school I was taught by my grandma that the Hungarian flag, much like the Romanian flag, also has a meaning.

The green represents a wide field of green grass, the white represents a white dog playing on the field of grass, rolling around on his back, and the red represents his red dog cock.

Both of these meanings are pretty much just something that a Romanian randomly came up with so i don’t think most people know why countries have flags.

Flags originate from war, that way the armies know not to attack their own allies when they see they carry the same flag, having an army grants you true legitimacy because you can just beat people up into believing you’re legitimate, so countries with no armies probably still had flags because it would be really hard to pretend you have an army otherwise.

Nowadays every country has a flag even if war is illegal, simply because every country has been using one for so long that it became convention. If you don’t follow convention you will be seen as illegitimate. It’s an unwritten rule, but a rule nonetheless, that you need a flag, and much like not following written rules makes you illegitimate (and illegal) so does not following unwritten rules.

And sexualities having their own flags and names probably feels like an even stronger convention than countries having flags for some people.

It’s very often brought up that you have to feel “valid” (which more or less means “legitimate”) 

I still don’t know why, but it’s apparent that people need to be reassured that their sexuality is “valid” and then there’s also this:

Why does a sexual preference have to be distinct from a sexuality? I don’t know, but I’m pretty sure the only difference between the two is legitimacy, to confirm to the conventions of flags and labels.

Q: So why do superstraights get a label and a flag and copy everything that LGBT people do, like tweets talking about how valid their followers are or using the word bigot etc

A: Because to get true legitimacy you need to copy the conventions.

The cargo cult

(wikipedia) Some primitive tribes of people would look at colonists from the civilised world and notice that after they’d built some plane lanes, the planes would come bringing cargo full of valuable stuff.

The tribesmen have made the observation that planes land if you build lanes for them to land on, they made the hypothesis that building the lanes causes the planes to come, and like scientists, they set out to test it.

They made lanes, they made fake planes, they tried to copy everything that the colonists did hoping it would be enough.

Superstraight is a lot like a cargo cult of sexualities, they have a flag, they have a label, they call everyone bigots all the time.

This is the first pic I sent before cropping it.

Because, like a cargo cultist who does not see the plane factories from the colonists homelands, the superstraight person does not see the LGBT community from outside his filter bubble, the filter bubble where only the most obnoxious people like the trans-incels can get through.

So when the superstraight person who thinks every LGBT person is just an obnoxious incel tries to “fit in” with the LGBT, they will act like an obnoxious incel, and when everyone is angry at him, he thinks to himself “they've all proven themselves hypocrites! i baited them so hard! i won!!!”

Even tho there’s a bunch of LGBT people from the comment sections I read who don’t even know the trans-incels even exist, because their filters simply don’t show them the same things you superstraight people are shown.

It gets worse

There’s some people who are so cocky and think they’re so much smarter than the LGBT community that they can just sneak in the nazi SS symbol into their flag and not just fuck up the bait completely.

hehe Schutzstaffel fla- wait! you cant call me a nazi! this is just another sexuality you hypocriteeeee

But this is also just a minority of the people who get superstraight trending, its so popular that I’m pretty sure most of the people getting it to trend are actual normies who wouldn’t even recognise the SS symbol and who have never been to 4chan.

Speaking of 4chan

Of course people don’t think superstraight is legitimate when you have 4chan taking credit for it.

They pick up on all the superficial customs like the flag the label the speech patterns and think “this is their, logic, im using it against them, and they’re all mad because of this alone and not just because a we’re comparing ourselves to the Schutzstaffel”

In a turing test a computer attempts to pass as a human.

In the ideological turing test a human tries to pass as someone of a different ideology.

Are people afraid of passing the ideological turing test? do they think if they can think like the enemy, then they’ll become the enemy? there was no need for people on 4chan to talk so openly about superstraight being a ruse, there was no need to make nazi memes with it, there is no need to post “we used their logic against them”, to constantly tell “yes this is all a lie”.

And yet people have to constantly break character and expose superstraight for being a fake sexuality, why? what’s even the point of it then?

What it could have been

Imagine a world in which instead of making a cargo cult sexuality and just delegitimizing it yourself with all the actual nazi symbolism, you were able to cancel trans-incels.

Imagine if they were able to say things like “the trans-incels are trying to create a new rape culture in which superstraight people are coerced into having sex with transexual people” with a straight face

Imagine if they even tried to coin the term “trans-incels”, since incels are hated by progressives for misogyny and are often associated with 4chan.

Imagine if they could get people banned for hate-speech against the superstraight

Imagine if they had the balls to denounce the people amongst them trying to delegitimise superstraight with their nazi SS and obvious parodying of the  points that aren’t taken seriously by anyone who doesn’t call themselves anti-sjw.

Maybe then there’d be some divide between “pro-superstraight” and “anti-superstraight” instead of everyone who’s not anti-trans agreeing that superstraights aren’t legit.

Maybe they’d be able to get some people canceled, there’s been at least one actual celebrity (India Willoughby) who is a trans-incel, they  could have canceled her! but nobody is even trying.

And oh how much “applying their own logic against them” would have been true if as a response to “but not all trans people are calling you transphobic for having a sexual preference!” you dusted off the “not all men are like that” memes that was popular with feminists.

If they would go on the offensive, cancelling people, spreading trans-incel screenshots to everyone who says they’ve never seen one, mocking people who stand up against them the way feminists used to and say “nOt aLl TrANs pEopLe aRE liKE THat” to anyone who says “not all trans people are like that”, to tell them that “silence is violence” and to make them cancel eachother.

Imagine how much more effective that would have been.

In the end this isn’t gonna make a difference, it will be forgotten, maybe in a couple months, or a year, or a week, some people are  angry today because a counterculture hashtag is trending, but they’ll forget about it too, maybe a couple dozen people will permanently have superstraight on their twitter bios, but really, nothing interesting is gonna come out of it, and if someone tries to make something like whitesexual/blacksexual/asiansexual etc a thing the well will have already been poisoned by superstraight.

[afroggyfrog]

Trying to build an AI to replace myself

I was suggested (jokingly) to build an AI that will replace me and I decided to give it an actual try. I decided to use GPT-2, it was a model that a couple years ago was regarded as super cool (now we have GPT-3 but its code isn’t released yet and frankly my pc would burst into flames if i tried to use it).

At the time, GPT-2 was considered so good that OpenAI delayed releasing the source code out of fear that if it falls into the wrong hands it would take over the world (jk they just didn’t want spam bots to evade detection with it).

The first lesson I learned while trying to build it was that windows is trash, get linux. The 2nd lesson i learned while trying to build it was that my GPU is trash, and after looking for one of the newest models online...

...I decided I’d just use Google’s GPUs for the training.

There’s 5 models of GPT-2 in total, I tried 4 of them on my pc and it crashed every single time, from the smallest to the biggest it goes

distilGPT2

GPT-2 124M

GPT-2 355M 

GPT-2 774M

GPT-2 1.5B

From a little reading around, it turns out that even though 1.5B is better than 774M, its not significantly better, and distilGPT2 isn’t significantly worse than 124M.Every other improvement is significant, so my plan was to use distilGPT2 as a prototype, then to use 774M for an actually decent chatbot.

The prototype

I created a python script that would read the entire message history of a channel and write it down, here’s a sample.

<-USERNAME: froggie -> hug <-USERNAME: froggie -> huh* <-USERNAME: froggie -> why is it all gone <-USERNAME: Nate baka! -> :anmkannahuh: <-USERNAME: froggie -> i miss my old color <-USERNAME: froggie -> cant you make the maid role colorlesss @peds <-USERNAME: Levy -> oh no <-USERNAME: peds -> wasnt my idea <-USERNAME: Levy -> was the chat reset <-USERNAME: SlotBot -> Someone just dropped their wallet in this channel! Hurry and pick it up with `~grab` before someone else gets it!

I decided to use aitextgen as it just seemed like the easiest way and begun training, it was... kinda broken

It had the tendency to use the same username over and over again and to repeat the same emote over and over again.

While it is true that most people write multiple messages at a time, one sentence each, and they sometimes write the same emoji multiple times for emphasis, it’s almost never as extreme as the output of GPT2.

But you know what? this IS just a prototype after all, and besides, maybe it only repeats the same name because it needs a prompt with multiple names in it for it to use them in chat, which would be fixed when id implement my bot (just kidding that screenshot is from after i started using prompts with the last 20 messages in the chat history and it still regressed to spam).

So i made a bot using python again, every time a message is sent

it reads the last 20 messages

stores them into a string

appends <-USERNAME: froggie -> to the string

uses it as a prompt

gets the output and cuts everything after a username besides froggie appears

sends up to 5 of the messages it reads in the output

waitwaitwait let me fix that real quick

hey, it’s saying words, its sending multiple messages if it has to, it never even reached the limit of 5 i set it to so somehow it doesn’t degrade into spam when i only get the messages with my name on it....

ok that was just one time

but besides the fact that pinging and emoting is broken, (which has nothing to do with the AI) it was a really succesful prototype!

The 774M

The first thing i noticed was that the 774M model was training MUCH slower than the distilGPT, i decided that while it is training i should try to use the default model to see if my computer can even handle it.

It... kinda did..... not really

It took the bot minutes to generate a message and countless distressing errors in the console

>this is bad

This is bad indeed.

With such a huge delay in messages it can’t really have a real-time chat but at least it works, and i was still gonna try it, the model without training seemed to just wanna spam the username line over and over again, but it is untrained after all, surely after hours of training i could open the google colab to find the 774M model generate beautiful realistic conversations, or at least be as good as distilGPT.

(I completely forgot to take a screenshot of it but here is my faithful reenactment)

<-USERNAME froggie -> <-USERNAME froggie -> <-USERNAME froggie -> <-USERNAME miyu -> <-USERNAME miyu -> <-USERNAME levy -> <-USERNAME peds -> <-USERNAME miyu -> <-USERNAME peds -> 

It had messages sometimes but 80% of the lines were just username lines.

On the upside it actually seemed to have a better variety of names,

But it still seemed unusable, and that is after 7000 steps, whereas distilGPT seemed usable after its first 1000!

So after seeing how both the ai and my computer are failures i decided I’d just give up, maybe I’ll try this again when I get better hardware and when I’m willing to train AIs for entire days.

So why in the hell is the 774M model worse than distilGPT?

I asked around and most answers i got were links to research papers that I couldn’t understand.

I made a newer version of the script that downloads the chatlogs so that messages by the same person will only have the username line written once, but I didn’t really train an AI with it yet, perhaps it would have helped a bit, but I wanna put this project on hold until I can upgrade my hardware, so hopefully this post will have a part 2 someday.

[afroggyfrog]

Why politics devolve into hate

It’s not like I like Biden, I just really hate Trump

-everyone who voted for Biden

I really wanted to start by citing the study responsible for this quote

He cites studies among Republicans showing that increasing some measure of liking Republicans one unit only makes them 3% more likely to donate to a campaign; increasing the same measure of hating Democrats the same amount makes them 11% more likely (there are similar numbers for the other side).

I couldn’t find the original study after 10 entire minutes of searching so I’m gonna cite the thing citing the thing citing the thing, lowering my writing standards to that of a mere professional journalist.

So perhaps we didn’t need the numbers to know that, at least from personal experience, people only ever bring up politics when they wanna talk shit.

The most mundane explanation that everyone heard before:

Angry people are more likely to share things because everyone likes to express anger more than anything (why?), therefore journalists only write about stuff that makes you angry so they get more clicks.

Now that would be a good explanation, if you bother going any deeper into why anger is the most likely thing to make someone share stuff, which you can, just not here, not now, because I wanna focus on something unrelated.

The asymmetry of lies

If you put all lies on a balance like this:

to the left are the lies meant to make the liar look better

to the right are the lies meant to make the liar look worse

The left side must be orders of magnitude heavier.

So far it’s just reiterating common sense, how does trying to make ourselves look better end up with us hating each other? Let’s see a fake example I just made up.

Today we’re about to cover a news story about a random person! If you were to even try to read his content (you won’t) you’d be bored and quit before you even learned anything about him, so let me be your only source of knowledge about him.

He’s a nazi, no, I’m not gonna quote him saying “I’m a nazi” and no, don’t bother trying to find a quote from him anywhere saying that, because he never said anything like that. You see, people lie, and he’s trying to make you think he’s just a normal human, but I am fluent in dog whistles, and I can read between the lines, trust me.

Anyone could fall for that, an evil person lying to make himself look normal, so your only source of truth are the political enemies of the person, proving that wrong is nearly impossible.

-But he literally says “I hate nazis” ! -Umm, no sweaty, you can’t prove he’s not lying.

On the other hand, the asymmetry of lies implies that nobody will ever say:

Look man, I know he’s saying “I’m a nazi” but what he really means...

All of this just means that making someone look worse is always easier than making someone look better, and it’s got nothing to do with our ‘inherent love of hate’.

But what about the bible?

In my attempt at proving myself wrong, I realised the bible (possibly every ancient religion?) is one of those things that say

“kill the gays kill everyone sacrifice babies space isn’t real the earth is surrounded by a firmament that cant be penetrated slavery is epic”

And its followers are saying “nonono what the bible REALLY says...”

There’s also feminists out there saying “KILL ALL MEN” and if you ask a feminist, you might be met with the kind of mental gymnastics you’d expect from a zealot.

Of course people won’t say “the bible is LYING about being pro-slavery”, they have to come up with more elaborate excuses. It still takes considerably more effort to convince yourself that what looks bad is actually good, than that what looks good is actually bad.

[afroggyfrog]

Political compass

To some people a political compass is just a “fun” quiz like “what type of bread are you?” and if you’re that kind of person then don’t waste your breath telling me I’m overthinking. There’s people that take it seriously, maybe they live in a 2d world with simple, 2d beliefs that always be plotted on a 2d grid, or maybe they just want that to be true, because it’s more comfortable than to think “I really don’t understand politics”.

A political compass of political compasses.

One axis can’t be used for more than one question

Let’s say we have a political compass of 1 axis, lets say, it has 2  questions.(i would have added “do you prefer donkeys or elephants” but that would just make it unnecessarily complex)

https://forms.gle/gCifTpqu2hTNo7s86

Do you prefer blue or red?

If you’re in a maze and your path is split, do you go to the left or to the right?

These questions perfectly correspond to what a politics fan might call “democrat” or “republican”, and to be serious, the answers to this probably predict who you’re gonna vote for at least a little. So what’s the problem with this model? You might not think that people who prefer different colours or maze paths wouldn’t hate each other but the whole point of politics is to hate each other So imagine this was a real political test, and if someone answers differently from you, yo hate them. Now imagine that my political axis is GOP and DEM, if you select blue left youre a DEM extremist and if you select red right youre a GOP extremist, anything else and you’re a centrist.

From the point of view of an extremist (according to the american political compass), you’ve got your side, your polar opposite, and some people who are in the middle and it all seems to make some sense.

From the point of view of someone who happens to like red but also sticks to the left side of a maze your political compass results puts you in the exact same spot as your polar opposite whom you hate very much, in the same spot as someone who answered neutral to both questions, and to one side and to the other, sit people who you think as pretty much the same as eachother, since they both just agree and disagree with you in equal measures, and none of it makes any sense.

Now imagine if there was a country where the leftists wore the color red and the rightists wore blue (i think it might just be literally every country except america?) and all of a sudden the same political compass puts all the previous extremists into the middle and it splits the 3 centrists into the left, right, and center (that 1 guy who answers neutral on everything is literally the only person worth the title of centrist)

To put this into the simplest words I can, you can have extremists that are perfectly opposed to each other end up in the middle, unless the questions aren’t all just the same thing rephrased. And this is a huge flaw that you cant get rid of unless you add a new dimension to the compass, a new dimension for every single question you add, at 1 question a line, at 2 questions a 2d grid, at 3 questions a cube... So the political compass can only tell you as much info about someone as you can get frrom asking them only 2 questions, trying to cram more than 2 questions into it will only lead to misrepresentation.

Almost every political extremist sits in the center

Because the larger the number of possible policies you could use to guess someones political compass position, the more combinations of extreme stances on each policy could end up canceling each-other on the compass, but that doesn’t make them any less extreme, it just means that in order to be in one of the corners or the sides only 8 combinations of extremist opinions can be had. If you have 3 policies each with 2 extremist stances that can be had, thats already 8 combinations, for 4 policies thats 16, for 10 policies that let you be an extremist thats 1024 combinations. That means that if humans were only capable of having 10 policies then only 0.8% of the ideologies with the most extremist positions on each policy would be seen as an extremist by the political compass.

But even if it’s broken in theory, you would at least expect right wingers to be on the right side and left wingers to be on the left side of the compass, since even if your opinion isn’t represented by the political compass, neither is your opinion represented by the 2 parties, so they should at least misrepresent your opinion in the same way (it always boils down to 2 parties because our voting systems are just broken but voting systems deserve their own separate post)

Why americans are immune to noticing its defects

I’m not a historian, but I read somewhere that the popular version of the political compass cant be applied to 20th century european politics because the political compass of the time was this triangle.

It seems pretty intuitive that different cultures at different time periods would need unique and incompatible political compasses. A political compass may ask stuff about race to someone who’s never talked to someone of a different race irl, or a question about congress to someone who’s country doesn’t have a congress, it can ask “are people more divided by class than by nationality” and the answer feels like it should vary solely by the country they are in rather than by their opinion, these are all questions I randomly got by searching for political compass.

Perhaps it’s just a coincidence but every political compass I ever saw seemed like it was designed to only work on americans, this may or may not be due to the fact that american politics are the only politics that are ever talked about internationally. I also went and searched for “compas politic romanesc”, i found a study written in english that contained a political compass quiz written for romanians  but the site where the quiz was hosted is just a blank page for me, you can still find the questions written in english in the link to the study at page 10) Every other result was also in english, so I wouldn’t even know political compasses existed if i didn’t know english.

So why does the compass designed for your personal culture  end up feeling useful?

There’s this bias called the halo effect. To put it simply, if you are a fan of someone, or something, you’re going to convince yourself that every part of it is good, if you’re a democrat, you’ll convince yourself that everything they do is right, even if there’s no reason why ideas like open borders, climate change alarmism, additional taxes, gay marriage etc are related, you’ll convince yourself that if you like more ideas from democrats than you like from republicans, you’ll have to like ALL the ideas that come from democrats.

If you live in a world where everyone’s convinced themselves that there’s 2 sides then all of a sudden the political compass doesn’t feel like its grossly oversimplified to the point of making no sense, in fact, it even looks like it has more nuance than it needs, why do we need the authoritarian axis again? oh, theres a couple loud minorities in addition to the main parties, like communists and fascists and libertarians and hippies and because they’re all american off-brands the political compass puts each of them into their unique spots on the compass.

Sure every american who calls themselves a fascist will end up on the far right, but not Mussolini himself with his “race is a social construct” ideas, the father of fascism himself could be deemed a centrist by a modern-day political compass because hes not american.

Extremists that happen to be seen as centrists by the compass can simply be forgotten, after all, they’re probably the way they are because they’re not americans which means you’ll never have to discuss politics with them.

The silver lining

In a world where due to a broken voting system there are only 2 parties that matter, and where the halo effect makes people unnaturally aligned with the either one of the 2 dominant parties, a political compass could be helpful to someone who lived in a cave and was never corrupted by constant stream of political propaganda that is spewed online. Sure that his randomly-generated political opinion is 90% likely to be somewhere in the center, where every extremist sits, except 4 of them, but just on the off-chance that he aligns with one of the sides that america has deemed worthy of being trademarked he will know it, and can buy their branded stickers and hats.

The alternative

Just don’t talk about politics It’s a waste of time.

[afroggyfrog]

Mind control

If you ever heard of the conspiracy theories involving mind control, then learning about the part of the brain which controls confabulation has interesting implications. To recap, there\s people with disabilities like blindness or paralysis which are unable accept that, they will be convinced they can see or that they can move their arms.

After a right-hemisphere stroke, she lost movement in her left arm but continuously denied it. When the doctor asked her to move her arm, and she observed it not moving, she claimed that it wasn’t actually her arm, it was her daughter’s. Why was her daughter’s arm attached to her shoulder? The patient claimed her daughter had been there in the bed with her all week. Why was her wedding ring on her daughter’s hand? The patient said her daughter had borrowed it. Where was the patient’s arm? The patient “turned her head and searched in a bemused way over her left shoulder”.

So, there’s this part of our brain which just comes up with explanations for things, to make everything seem normal. If someone were to control your brain, they wouldn’t have to implant false memories to fill in the blanks and make you feel like you’re in control, your brain is equipped to do that on its own. Have you ever walked into a room and realised you don’t know why? Perhaps you think you just forgot, but maybe you were being mind controlled, and usually, you make up explanations for your actions, but just not that time, sometimes your brain doesn’t come up with an explanation so it just feels like you did something for no reason. Not that mind control is real or anything.

[afroggyfrog]

Thoughts on immortality

I feel like I can prove immortality of conscious experience. I want to kill myself just to see if this is all true.

The teleporting thought experiment.

Imagine teleporting, you sit in one chamber, the machine works its magic, youre in a new location. But teleporting is identical to recreating your body atom by atom and then destroying the old atoms. So all in all when you step into the teleporter should you really expect to experience teleportation? or would you experience death?

What if we take it a step further, when time passes, when you move around, you are already doing something similar to teleporting, infinitesimal distances through space and time, every planck second, you could say the old you is dead, and yet you don't just 'experience' dying, do you?

The anthropic principle.

When someone questions why the universe is the way it is, why are we on earth when the things required for life to form are so rare, we say that its necessary for the world to be like this, cause of all the universes, all the planets, we will only find ourselves in the one in which we can exist. We CAN'T find ourselves in a universe in which we can't exist. Taken to a smaller scale, we will never experience being dead, because being dead, not existing, isn't an experience. We can only find ourselves in the universes in which we aren't dead.

I think therefore, that if there are multiple universes, if I were to die, I would die in some universes, but I would experience only the universe that splits at the last moment of me being conscious, in which I somehow don't die. If I were to put a bullet through my brain, something will happen, Everything is technically possible, as far as I know particles can just do whatever they want, as it's all probabilistic, so who's to say the bullet won't spontaneously disintegrate? as small a chance as it may be, with an infinite amount of universes, one of them will be like that, and since I can't experience death, I'll have to experience that instead. But far more likely it is that the bullet will still go through, I'll be paralysed, maybe in a coma, maybe the rest of my existence will be a nightmare for an eternity, which is scary. I won't kill myself because I would still expect that to just give me torture for the rest of eternity, even if i still experience immortality, scarier than that is thinking no matter what I would do I'll still experience hell for eternity, once I'm close enough to death.

[afroggyfrog]

This is a great, if you like lovecraftian horror, and machine learning, you’ll love this as much as i do. I especially loved how immersive it was, using screenshots, the post being actually written by the main character, and a somewhat believable storyline .

[afroggyfrog]

Links related to ‘maybe’ increasing your chance to survive COVID-19

1. This blog post has a ton of info.

Most studies suggest that zinc probably shortens the duration of cold symptoms by 25 – 50%. The studies didn’t really look at severity, but plausibly it affects that too. It’s unclear exactly how it works, but some people think it inhibits viral replication. It also might be involved in immune system function, and there’s some growing evidence that adequate zinc levels prevent pneumonia.

However i also read that Zinc lozenges will leave permanent damage to your taste buds, and if it doesn’t, it’s because it has stuff added to it that makes it no longer work as a side effect.

2. Corona Variolation might be worth doing. The basic idea is that since the virus is most deadly from its pneumonia symptoms, if you could get infected with it, not by breathing it in, but my letting it through some cut in another part of your body, you could build an immunity to it before it reaches your lungs, and thus you will increase your chance of survival.

It will be a pain in the ass - but I propose we first test infections through the rectum. It is a receptive mucous membrane which is, at the same time, well equipped for dealing with pathogens. Diarrhea itself is a manageable condition, with proper rehydration protocol.

3. Anti-inflammatory drugs could increase the symptoms of the virus.

4. Curcumin might help against the virus. TL:DR of why curcumin helps. It lowers the amount of iron in your body, iron is a common bottleneck that stops viruses from replicating, Turns out our bodies already lower the iron as a defense mechanism when it detects infection, but there is a delay before your body notices the infection, and you can take curcumin if you came in contact with an infected person, and lower the virus replication before your body can,

5. Chloroquine might help (1, 2)

6. Coronalinks

I might update this post if i find more things

[afroggyfrog]

What does God look like?

A christian was talking to me about the trinity, the 3 parts of God, and also, each one of them, the entirety of god as well.

But how does that make sense? 3 things, different from each other, yet they are all equal to one whole?

Turns out it may make sense, we have fractals, mathematical objects that can be of infinite complexity, or they can just repeat themselves.

You can zoom in on a fractal and just see the same shape, a part of it, is equal to the whole, and yet the parts are different from each other, sounds familiar?

So if God is just a fractal, what fractal is it?

In truth, he could be any sort of fractal that has a 3 fold symmetry, but the most popular of such fractals is the Sierpinski triangle.

[afroggyfrog]

Are we fake online?

Someone I know once argued that peoples online personalities are fake, while 'in real life' they're real. Theres some arguments for it, for example, that person admitted to lying online all the time, but not offline. In that case, I can see why he would think what he thinks, but things aren't that simple.

"Your personality offline is different due to certain factors"

But what might those factors be? anonymity? lack of consequences?

Online you might be able to lie more easily, as my friend put it 'I can say anything here', there's no consequences to anything you say. But that's also the case for telling the truth, I've seen plenty of people confess to things, and become more open, merely because they can be anonymous while doing so. Can we measure if anonymity balances the scale towards more lying, or towards more truth? Maybe, but I think it actually doesn't matter.

Whether you choose to lie more, or to open up, I think in a way you can still consider yourself less fake online, even if your words can’t be taken at face value, you're still expressing part of your inner self, your drive to lie, which is just hidden offline, but still present inside you.

What's really the difference between being fake and being real?

I'd say I know the real you if I can guess what you would do, if my predictions about you are systematically false then I was given a fake image of you, if they are correct, I have a real image of you. So maybe your offline friends can predict stuff about your offline activities, but do they know you go on discord just to shitpost all day? I don't really know, maybe you keep no secrets from offline people, in which case this whole post doesn't apply anymore, but I'm sure it applies to most people.

"One personality is fake and one is real"

Seems like a false dichotomy to me. I can get a glimpse of who you are when we're online, I can get a different glimpse when we're offline, neither are the full story, but they are both part of it.