argumate - Tumblr blog

[argumate]

Joe Biden is the puppet of the radical left movement that seeks to obliterate and destroy everything that you hold dear.

I’m fascinated by stuff like this because it requires believing that Joe Biden, a crusty white dude who became a senator almost fifty years ago, is more of a dangerous radical than the black man he served as vice president for eight years.

how is it possible not to notice that the Obama presidency didn’t destroy America? does this rest on the assumption that Obama was strong enough to resist the radical left and that senile old Biden isn’t? because that certainly wasn’t the narrative being pushed at the time.

[argumate]

so like... what... is this blog? i don’t know your target audience or content

target audience, bitch this isn’t a Disney movie

[argumate]

concept: Odyssean time travel forecasting.

The forecaster is ‘tied to the mast’, as it were, and can foresee a possible future where he would act, the future starting from the same point in time but he wouldn’t be tied to the mast and could just do normal actions. Only he is tied to the mast and hence can only see and not act.

this would work (hah), only for a while, before the part of the brain/magic that is doing the forecasting realizes that it is being fooled, and stops.

[argumate]

and the problem with any “decision” in which you see the future is that if your foresight is accurate then you only see the outcome that you’re guaranteed to take, and hence can’t “change your decision” because if this wasn’t what you were going to do then you wouldn’t have foreseen it.

yes that does imply weird circularity or metastable states but hey it’s time travel, what the heck do you expect.

[argumate]

I mean the many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics poses problems for religions founded on the concept of revealed truth, but that’s rather like saying that being hit by an artillery shell poses problems for your morning walk.

[argumate]

say you’re making a bet for your life on a coin toss and you have the ability to see the future; if you accept the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics then you see trillions of futures in which the coin lands heads and you win and trillions of futures in which the coin lands tails and you lose and trillions of futures in which the coin lands on its edge or you suffer a heart attack before it lands etc. etc. while if you accept the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics then you basically see the same sets of futures annotated with probabilities and the text YOU WILL END UP IN EXACTLY ONE OF THESE, either way the ability to see the future isn’t helping you decide whether or not to make the bet.

[argumate]

arrival: the heartwarming tale of how one's desire for motherhood is more important than one's obligation to inform one's partners if the offspring is guaranteed to die in 8 years, in pain. I am disgusted about how this aspect is totally neglected in the film - bc motherhood is sacred? I believe in the right for informed consent in reproduction. And intentionally making someone exist who is guaranteed to have an abnormally short lifespan is cruel and selfish, even if both parents want to do it.

I think this is actually a really thorny issue to deal with on a rigorous basis. Consider that historically, child mortality was really fucking high:

The average across a large number of historical studies suggests that in the past around one-quarter of infants died in their first year of life and around half of all children died before they reached the end of puberty.

So we’re starting with the Fun Fact that every person is mortal and is thus 100% guaranteed to suffer and die within a finite period of time, and noting that around half of them will die as children, historically.

That suggests that having any children at all is a fairly irresponsible thing to do if you think it’s immoral to create mortal entities, and yet obviously we are all descended from creatures that have been heedlessly replicating for four billion years, so responsibility is not in our nature.

Now you can say well it was fine to have kids with a 50% survival chance back when everyone faced those odds but it’s immoral now that childhood survival rates have improved, but pinning morality to current social conditions – while convenient and understandable! – is obviously a questionable move.

It’s true that it is important to be honest and ensure informed consent when reproduction is a joint exercise, but the consent of the entity being created cannot be obtained in advance, only retrospectively, and that’s problematic whichever way you slice it.

Of course the film presents a scenario that cannot actually happen, with certainty that we never face, but it’s also not clear why making the argument definite instead of probabilistic makes it that much worse. While it seems wrong to create a child with a 99% chance of a terrible outcome and it seems fine to create a child with a 1% chance, there is no defensible dividing line, and with no way to drive the risk to zero we all stand condemned.

[argumate]

perhaps one reasonable lesson that rings true from all the cliched stories about first contact being derailed by human antagonisms, military suspicion, and academic inability to (ironically) communicate, is that in an unfamiliar situation most people and institutions will fall back on their most comfortable and familiar methods and reflexes, for better or for worse.

[argumate]

okay I’ve finished Arrival and it’s definitely a good movie and I would recommend it but the two divergent themes of first contact and family drama leave me slightly underwhelmed at the end, it feels like concentrating more on one or the other would have led to a much stronger plot, even if the overall performance is fine.

[argumate]

rocking up in a spaceship the size of an aircraft carrier hanging vertically perfectly balanced and floating effortlessly a few feet off the ground displaying total control over gravity though, what a fucking power move that is, the chanel boots of first contact.

[argumate]

so many sci-fi stories about scientists making contact with aliens and then the military men fuck it up in the same way each time, with an obsessiveness that makes you start to wonder about the authors.

[argumate]

watching Arrival, it’s surprisingly good thus far.

[argumate]

back when making a computer do anything at all was enough of an achievement that you’d be churlish to ask for it to do something useful.

[argumate]

there is no effective defense against counterfactuals.

[argumate]

Public Anenome #1