By David Futrelle
A polar vortex has descended across much of North America, meaning that many of the readers of this blog — and also me — have been feeling pretty chilly lately. So I thought I would brighten your day, and mine, by sharing some reflections on cross-gender friendships.
Oh sorry, I should add that these reflections all come from Reddit’s main incel subreddit, r/Braincels, so they may not actually brighten anyone’s day at all.
Here’s a dude who thinks all guys with female friends have some sort of cuckold fetish.
Here’s a guy who can’t tell the difference between a (cis) woman and a hole in the ground. (Well, a woman and a hole in a woman, anyway.)
No one tell this dude that men have holes, too.
Here’s a guy who says he doesn’t want any female friends because … Chad allegedly has sex with every woman he ever says “hi” to?
This guy reworks the famous line from “When Harry Met Sally” and manages to invent a brand new word in the process:
This dude, meanwhile, eschews female friends to protect himself from hearing endless talk about Chad’s sex life, somehow not realizing that anyone who hangs out on an incel forum hears more discussion of Chad’s (alleged) sex life than the friends of a woman simultaneously dating three guys literally named Chad.
And finally, there’s this guy, who warns his fellow incels that friendship with a woman is the equivalent of having a diet consisting of nothing but soy lattes:
Once again, I am stunned that these guys have trouble finding girlfriends.
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How do these guys churn out this level of bullshit every day? Seriously, how can someone be so irreparably delusional that they can orally defecate like this on a daily basis and actually believe it? It’s like the most disgusting, dedicated fanfic club ever.
Ah, the classic When Harry Met Sally conundrum. I believe Nora Ephron settled that question with fake diner orgasms and baby fish mouth.
Probably not. I mean, these Reddit assholes are so online all the time that they probably don’t have a soul that they actually talk about their actual feelings.
I mean, sheesh, even Spock had friends to share his feelings and he tried to purge them all.
Even if somehow these clods do get together, I doubt they’re discussing Wittgenstein over a game of backgammon.
I know some of those people.
Oh, don’t get me started! Sometimes, I’d just want to go to the pub with my mates and talk about the footie, but all they would rabbit on about was Gettier’s critique of “justified true belief”, or Hans Albert’s take on the Münchhausen trilemma. Fucking epistemologists! Or, after a tough week at work, I’d want to unwind with some mutual grumbling about our bosses, but they wouldn’t shut up about type-identity theory and p-zombies. We got barred from one pub after a fight kicked off between Team Wittgenstein and Team Kripke. This is why I no longer bother with male friends.
@Gaebolga:
“Intelligence signal[l]ing” is a good way of putting it. I just finished watching The Good Place on Netflix. It was entertaining though like yourself I’d be doubtful if it will lead to a more nuanced discussion of ethics among the general public. After all, the “trolley problem” thought experiment in ethics (which is a major plot point in an episode of The Good Place) is quite well-known among the internet cognoscenti but is mostly used as the subject matter for dank memes than anything else.
@Jane Done:
I know, right? Or, like, some kind of weird performance art where you have to construct improvised stream-of-consciousness bullshit on a topic assembled by pulling bits of paper out of a hat (guess which type ?): “/u/mgtow4truth43569475, you have two minutes on the topic of, uh, (rustle) ‘that women are ‘ (rustle, rustle) ‘inhuman automata’ uh (rustle) ‘created by the Trilateral Commission to’ (rustle, rustle) ‘destroy Western notions of fairness with half price cocktail nights’! Go!” Except, you know, that might actually involve some kind of talent.
Oh, and just in case there are any manospherians hanging around with their “women don’t philosophy” horseshit: that trolley problem? ?? Posited by a woman, y’all. ??
@Cat Mara
I’ll do you one better in getting them to clear out:
Roko’s Basilisk.
That is all.
@Ariblester:
?
Now now, the first rule of
Basilisk ClubSupah-Rational Thinky-Man STEMlord ClubLessWrong is you don’t talk aboutBasilisk ClubSupah-Rational Thinky-Man STEMlord ClubLessWrong. But if you accept the Basilisk as your personal Omega Point, you will beeatenuploaded first!@Katamount:
Meh, not even Wittgenstein discussed Wittgenstein over a game of backgammon– he’d start with a poker to the kisser and go from there… ?
Roko’s Basilisk has NEVER made any sense to me.
– Why would the hypothetical AI want to spend resources duplicating and torturing people? What is the benefit?
– How exactly is it creating mental duplicates of people long dead? It’s not like we’ll have our brain patterns on file.
– If the AI COULD make a perfect mental duplicate of me, contrary to the thought experimenter’s assertions, that duplicate IS NOT ME. It’s a person who, at the moment of their creation, is identical to what I was like at a certain point. The moment our experiences differ, we become different people.
– “This will affect your personal welfare” is a load of crap. Sure, I care about what happens to people in the future, but claiming that preventing the malevolent AI is in my own self-interest is bunk.
– Plus, the fact that the entire point of Roko’s Basilisk is to scare people into contributing to AI research. That’s petty and pathetic.
You just know when manospherian dudes talk about “discussing philosophy”, they mean couching the Red Pill sentiment in vaguely academic word salad.
@Allandrel
First point negates second.
You are dead in the future. (The hypothesis does specify distant future)
Your duplicate is not dead.
The only one getting new experiences is your duplicate.
Therefore, for all intents and purposes there is still only one of you, which can be considered as you. Who’s going to argue?
Theory is still utter bullshit though.
@Allandrel:
It only really makes sense if you accept LessWrong’s non-mainstream takes on utilitarianism and other philosophical concepts, hence the reason why the reaction to it outside of LessWrong has been less one of existential horror and more one of “lolwut?”
I like to ask the Basilisk people: what if this future AI prefers to be called a Manticore, and does not care who contributed to AI reasearch, but really bears a grudge against anyone who called it a Basilisk.
I always figured Roku’s Basilisk was just a dressed up version of, “Dude, what if I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream were real?”
@Allandrel
Yeah, Roko’s Basilisk is sort of like Discworld, only instead of turtles, it’s stupid all the way down.
@Cat Mara
I love your weird performance art!
I mean, I don’t dedicate my life to punishing anyone who thought my parents would make a good couple but didn’t actually set them up together on a date.
How does the AI even *know* who imagined the possibility of its existence? I guess if you believe the argument, the moral is really “don’t publish any articles about AI unless you’re also working on/funding one.”
Which would at least cut down on pretentious or sensationalized thinkpieces on the topic.
@Lumipuna (nee Arctic Ape):
… a large chunk of which will be made up of complaining about how much academic word salad there is in the world because of all the “Marxist post-modernism” (sic) going on, in the style of their pal and mentor, Judderin’ B. Properscam ?
@Cat Mara
That article you linked about MetaMed was quite the read; I dimly remember Yudkowsky’s news post on how they “cured” his sleep condition when I stumbled across HPMOR a few years ago.
(On the whole, HPMOR had mixed outcomes for me; on one hand, it led me to some Dark Enlightenment-adjacent places I now regret, but on the other hand, I liked Yudkowsky’s recommendation of the webfic “Worm”. I stopped reading HPMOR itself somewhere after it became crushingly obvious that it was never going to deliver on its original premise of explaining how magic works in the Potterverse).
…if you consider simulations to be real, which I guess Basilisk people do for some reason.
Considered as you by people other than you; as far as the actual you is concerned, you’re still dead. Which is why using the thought of torturing a simulation of you as a threat against the actual you seems a bit…unpersuasive.
To me, anyway.
And that’s essentially the argument about transporters in Star Trek: once you get dematerialized in a transporter, you are dead and a perfect copy of you is now running around. Sure, your copy thinks everything is hunky-dory, and since you aren’t around anymore to contradict that assessment, that’s the consensus reality.
But the actual reality is that you had all your atoms ripped apart by a combination disintegration/scanner.
…I’ve always found the implications of that rather horrifying, putting me solidly in McCoy’s camp.
I mean past me keeps making really dumb and selfish choices and future me is a massive ingrate, so to me the failure of the Basilisk is that with respect to other me’s, I’m looking out for number one.
@Moon_custafer:
Because Roko’s Basilisk is basically, “once upon a time, a tech-bro asked, ‘what if Pascal’s Wager, but on the blockchain?’ and a passing VC¹ gave him a tens of thousands of dollars because that’s what happens to white dudes in the Valley. The end.”
¹ The VC being Peter Thiel, who when not bankrupting websites out of spite, shilling for Donald Trump, running unethical medical trials, and owning a company that makes spyware for spooks and cops, is also backing a “science” “journal” that peddles climate science denial. Because of course he fucking is.
@Gaebolga & Cat Mara
Gee, that reminds me of a certain desperate someone I seem to recall throwing acronyms and latin around here recently.
@Ariblester:
There’s worse than that; there is a whole Twitter thread of allegations about that Michael Vassar/ Arc guy who ran MetaMed being an abusive arsehole (needless to say, that link comes with a content warning in letters of fire, visible from space). It could be the type specimen for Toxic Masculinity, Entitled White Valley-Bro Subspecies.
Yes! Worm is awesome!
I never read HPMOR. Most people I know who’ve read it pretty much had the same experience as yourself; i.e., started it and lost interest. I know a lot of people found the way the character of Hermione was written in it particularly infuriating…
One of the parts of Roko’s Basilisk that really grates on me is “the AI is trying to protect it’s own existence: it creates and tortures simulations to persuade the original versions of those people in the past to contribute to its creation.”
THAT’S NOT HOW TIME WORKS. If I create a perfect simulation of Hitler’s mother and torture it, she will still have given birth to Hitler, and WWII will still have happened.
And the claim that “with a perfect digital simulation, it is impossible to determine who is the original and who is the simulation.”
In this scenario, one of “me” is a computer program, and the other is a pile of cremains in an urn. It’s trivially easy to determine which is the original.
“Men only have female friends so they feel validated by the fact that a female can be comfortable in their presence” – I smell some sour grapes here.
I think this is mostly self-rationalization by asshole men who’d have a hard time earning any woman’s friendship (or love), who aren’t much into friendships generally, who mostly bond with others over misogyny and masculinity.
I can apparently make a positive presence to women – I’m just generally lazy at approaching people and maintaining friendships, and I find it difficult to relate to most other people. My two current friends are both women and former coworkers, who were initially more open towards me than the other way round. It is indeed somewhat validating to have women friends, as a socially awkward guy who hasn’t actually dated women but hopes to do so one day.