#thinking in probabilities

[mentalisttraceur]

One of the valuable but annoying things with thinking in probabilities is like ....

Sometimes you say something to a person, and you're actually consciously, deliberately saying words that have different meanings in the different possibilities... words that would mean different possible things or invoke different associations or feelings, depending on which of the different possibilities is true of who they are, where they're at, what mood they're in.

Because sometimes that's better than just flinging the same intended meaning at all possibilities of who they are in that moment. In fact sometimes meaning one thing is impossible. Sometimes within the possibilities you see, you can't see any statement you could make that would get taken the same way in all possibilities and which also fits all your relevant values.

But like, some people don't get that - they don't think like that, so they can't really put themselves in those shoes, or maybe they have never even consciously conceived of the experience, or of it being practically doable by humans in the real world.

So then if one of those people asks you "what did you mean by that?", it's like... (very tired sigh).

[girlypopz123]

The pills meme but it's things i wish i had

[hamletthedane]

Thinking about him (the soldier in Poynter’s Faithful Until Death painting watching an apocalypse unfold around him with horror in his eyes as he tries to keep himself standing beneath a doorway, based on an actual 19th century archeological find of a man in full soldier’s garb under a doorway at Pompeii)

[inkskinned]

please i love you i'm begging you bring back suspension of disbelief bring back trusting the audience like. i cannot handle any more dialogue that sounds like a legal document. "hello, i am here to talk to you about the incident from a few minutes ago, because i feel you might be unwell, and i am invested in your personal wellbeing." "thank you, i am unwell because the incident was hurtful to me due to my childhood, which was bad." I CANT!!!!

do you know how many people are mad that authors use "growled" as a word for "said"? it's just poetics! they do not literally mean "growled," it's just a common replacement for "said with force but in a low tone." it's normal! do you hear me!! help me i love you please let me out of here!!!

[crow-caller]

as a child there's nothing cooler than a kid who gets subjected to evil experiments and gains special abilities. it's even cooler if these abilities also cause unfathomable suffering to use/against others. children love stories like this.

[sushiisiu]

puppy instincts kicked in

[98chao]

these are from very late 2023.. i never posted them because i didn't finish the second pic (i was sick and just never got around to it afterwards) but looking at them again i think they're gold i might as well post it

[fishyfishyfishtimes]

It's always so weird to come down from the biology heavens to see what the average person believes about animals, plants, ecosystems, just the world around them. I don't even mean things that one simply doesn't know because they've never been told or things that are confusing, I'm talking about people who genuinely do not see insects as animals. What are you saying. Every time I see a crawling or fluttering little guy I know that little guy has motivations and drive to fulfill those motivations. There are gears turning in their head! They are perceiving this world and they are drawing conclusions, they are conscious. And yet it's still a whole thing if various bugs of the world feel pain or if they are simply Instinct Machines that are Not Truly Aware of Anything At All????? Help!!!!!! How can you look at a little guy and think he is just the macroscopic animal version of a virus

[triona-tribblescore]

Snow white lookin' mf

[introvert-slushie]

Currently thinking about how much Ford tries to hide his hands a lot when he can…behind his back with this stance. Due to how often he’s been bullied for it.

And also, how Mabel is one of the ones who Ford feels happy about showing his hands to because she thought they were cool looking upon first shaking his hand, instead of him being judged for his six fingers.

[ID: Gravity Falls screenshots. The first three are of Ford with his hands crossed behind his back. The last two are of him shaking hands with Mabel, and letting her paint a turkey on his hand. He's smiling in both. End ID.]

[mentalisttraceur]

Something ethically messed up and logically incomplete about treating every potential creation of an experiencing mind (even if you guarantee that it will have an ideally positive life experience) as a "we ought to pursue this" increase in good/value/utility.

The extreme of what I'm criticizing here is the longtermist view that we must pursue a future where we fill as much of the universe as we can with human minds experiencing the best possible experiences. (In simulations! because that way we can have more of them, with reliably positive experiences.)

As if hypothetical minds that don't exist, and would only exist if we actively caused them to exist, have ethically-obligating worth now.

As if it is ethically better to pursue a future in which we create an extra richly experiencing mind having the best possible experiences (even if that mind is in a simulation and doesn't interact with or in any way affect any other minds) than a future where we just don't create that extra mind.

There's something off about this view... a subtle slip/skip (misstep, assumption, error, etc) which feels paperclip-maximizer-y in nature. It's just that the paperclips are very convincingly shaped like actually good values. Like copy-pasting a snapshot of a good-to-achieve result, while missing at least one reason why it was good to achieve (a reason which is contingent on a mind already existing, or contingent on good odds of a new mind having certain effects beyond itself).

I don't have the time to properly drag this out into words, and it's not a priority for me to make it rigorous or convincing. But there's something more-than-one-dimensional about good/value/utility revealed by this. I would assert that even though

the transition from a mind experiencing a worse existence to a better existence is ethically positive, and

the transition from a mind experiencing a good existence to that mind not existing is ethically negative,

the transition from no mind to a mind experiencing its best possible existence is ethically neutral.

To me it's obvious that there's no contradiction to those three things. I think the only way it would seem contradictory is if you implicitly assume that ethical value is a simple integral of qualia over time. There's something at play that is best described by one or more of

assigning ethical values to the derivatives, to some or all of the transitions between states rather than to just snapshots of states, or

recognizing a different kind of ethical value, where its only worth maximizing within the "domain" for it which already exists, but not worth creating more "domain" within which it can be maximized (and perhaps this is the only kind of value);

and so minds which don't exist and have no external reason to exist are in some crucial sense ethically worthless until they start to.

This is of course without even touching the point (which I previously wrote down in my reply to torture vs specks) that when integrating the future, possible states further in the future are increasingly less certain. Arbitrarily far in the future, there are too many possibilities still impossible to rule out, so there is enough possible good and possible bad from any act to cancel each other out, the probabilities are so small that the ethical weight of each possibility is tiny anyway, and the uncertainties have multiplied to the point that all the possible outcomes have vast error bars on tiny likelihoods. This alone is enough to kill the idea that we today can assign significant probability or ethical value to outcomes like "we eventually populate the virgo supercluster and the majority of our descendents have good lives".

[trainwreck-pumpkin-pie]

Neon Genesis Evangelion (1995-1996) / Mouthwashing (2024)

inspired by this post

[bubblesthecow]

Watching Star Wars in chronological order is so funny.

Obi-Wan Kenobi really took one look at R2D2 in the middle of the desert and said “No, Luke, I’ve never seen this fucking droid in my life. Looks like a real bitch though. Not that I’d know. This is my first time meeting the asshole.”

No one in that whole franchise was Gatekeep-Gasslight-Girlbossing quite like “Ben” Kenobi, regular human-man.

[lazylittledragon]

someone get this poor man a chair for the love of god

[shalmonsdraws]

honkin yappin