Proof. We seek to prove that regardless of the existence of an objective morality people will only adhere/accept their own personal morality, thus making objective morality irrelevant.

We have three cases:

1. Objective Morality doesn’t exist: If there is no objective morality, people can only default to their own morality.
2. Objective morality exists and doesn’t align with an individual’s own moral compass: Imagine objective morality was defined by some Aztec or eldritch god and tells you it is morally imperative to torture people. If you have a sense of empathy your moral compass will not align with this and you will choose to disobey this morality. Hence, if an objective moral compass exists and does not align with one’s own morality, the individual will reject it and default to their own morality.
3. Objective morality exists and does align with an individual’s own morality: Trivially this means an individual is still just following their own default morality.

In all cases the individual will only act on their own morality regardless of the existence or nonexistence of an objective morality. Hence, objective morality is irrelevant. QED.

Because the existence of objective morality has no relevance one can assume objective morality doesn’t exist which, by Occam’s razor, is already the most likely case. Your ideas of right and wrong or good and bad will never be objective in a way that would matter. It is, in my opinion, a much better idea to explain what you think the positive effect of your “moral” actions are because those cause effect relationships can be objective. “I think we should provide free basic needs to everyone because a significant portion of crimes are committed as crimes of necessity, and I would like my country to feel safer” is much more objective than “I think we should provide free basic needs to everyone because it’s the right thing to do.”

Anyone can claim their ideas are “right” or “good” without any explanation of why. I mean that’s basically the strategy of the Republican Party. “Being trans is wrong” “Anti-capitalism is evil” etc. And you saying “Anticapitalism is good” is just as empty and meaningless.

Also, fun fact the proof above works for the existence of god as well. Basically just swap out morality with god and ta-da it is morally irrelevant if god exists, you’re only going to do what you personally think is right regardless.

Serial Experiments Lain, layer:10 LOVE

As with every episode I’ve seen so far, it’s a confusing avant-garde mess, but with cassette-cyberpunk aesthetics (the best kind of cyberpunk aesthetics) so I guess that’s okay.

But that episode in particular is weird people confessing psycho love for a protocol.

To be fair I’m less weirded out by falling for a concept and much more weirded out by the fact this protocol looks like and thinks she is an 11yo girl, and these adult creepy idiots are confessing their love to her. Seriously, what the fuck Japan?

Funny how stuff like this only applies when it’s against the western narrative

This stuff applies always. It’s called critical thinking skills and it absolutely applies when someone is speaking “for the western narrative” too

The western brain pan cannot comprehend a genuinely popular government

Clearly you can’t comprehend elementary statistics like the central limit theorem lol

And honestly god damn you tankies give communists and socialists such a bad name with all your braindead bullshit. Nothing talks me out of trusting china more than talking with you idiots

Look I know it’s easy to think that there’s a singular big bad out there. That there’s just this one entity called “the west” and you’ll be able to fight and conquer it. It’s easier to believe things are black and white, that certain countries are innately good and others innately bad at all times. But that’s not reality.

If you give into those kinds of delusions you’re not really better than the people who blindly believe in Trump or God etc. It’s easy believe that kind of blind faith because it’s less scary than admitting you might be wrong. We are driven to cling to the idea that there are hero’s out there, a righteous nation behind us fighting for good, someone we can always depend on, but if you don’t see reality as it is, you’re setting yourself up for more pain. Those feelings are opium not a cure, and often they hurt you and your causes too

If you’re delusional people won’t believe what you say even if it’s true. So if you constantly go around attacking people with ad hominem, or claiming literally everything is western propaganda without actually providing evidence, you’re really just hurting the causes you’re trying to support

Anyway dude, even if you didn’t actually engage my argument you did point me to a fascinating rabbit hole to go down, so thanks for that, but I think I’m going to disengage now

I hope your days go well, and I wish you peace and happiness mate

Nice straw man. First, ethos is bullshit man, don’t idolize people or institutions to the point you think they’re infallible.

Second, you aren’t making the same claim as the source. And I’m not contradicting it (Harvard’s research). The source rightfully states that their survey found high satisfaction in government, higher than in most other countries. The original paper is on how those reports seem to be increasingly positive overtime and show that development of rural areas correlates with increased reports of happiness in that survey.

The researchers question the validity of their results because they are abnormally high and list possible other factors influencing the data. One of the researchers states that they believe the abnormally high levels are likely due other factors like the “highly positive news proliferated throughout the country” so I’m not doubting Harvard I’m actually agreeing with it

Lastly, my concern over data collection doesn’t actually apply to Harvard. I’m reasonably certain that Harvard did the best with the data they were given. And the Ash Center used that data to create their little positive promotional brief well too.

The research done by Harvard seems sound, as are my concerns about the validity of the collected data and my statement that this kind of data cannot be used to draw conclusions on the actual state of democracy or the actual workings of the government.

Fuck it maybe I’ll just send the researchers an email about it tomorrow and see if they respond. I’ve gotten responses from physicists and mathematicians before, might be fun

To be fair I doubt that would change your mind since you seem dead set on ignoring my actual argument. If they agree with me you’ll just say they’re producing propaganda for the western elites haha. But hey chances are the researcher will actually engage me in real discussion which would be nice

The study in that link is the same one from the last in the report they have the “implemented by a reputable domestic Chinese polling firm” line.

The brief neither mentions the name of the polling organization nor does it list or link to the actual questions asked. Honestly seems odd given that it’s Harvard, then again isn’t meant to be a rigorous academic paper and I doubt the Chinese government would be up for letting more research be done if they had found negative associations.

Still odd that they won’t name the firm anywhere. Like “The work began in 2003, and together with a leading private research and polling company in China, the team developed a series of questionnaires for in-person interviews.” what leading polling company? Wouldn’t they want their name attached to this? Also an in person questionnaire seems both much more qualitative and much less private than I would have expected. If you want to get people’s true anonymous opinions without any coercive bias, having them physically go somewhere and have to answer questions to an actual person is definitely not the best approach.

The only thing the questionnaire does, assuming it is built well, is show that when asked those questions people in different countries answered differently.

Did the Chinese populations sampled by the study respond more positively to those four questions more than the samples of other nations? Yes.

Can you assert that this is proof that china is more democratic and less authoritarian than those countries? NO.

At best, this study shows that public opinion of the government in china is higher than that of the other countries. Which definitely doesn’t mean all that much at all, for example I could ask half my family members and they’d say that things are better now under trump than they’ve ever been before. Is that the case? Absolutely not. Does that change their minds? No.

Now, the original article you linked seems much more soft science but the article it first mentions actually has more concrete data but still that data is on public opinion.

Unfortunately the democracy index site appears to be missing and “for sale”

If you could find me the actual questionnaire in mandarin so we could read it as it was presented and compare with the English version we could rule out some of the bias I presented earlier, but not all.

Lastly, kairos buddy, your argument was that a country (which many of the people you’re trying to persuade think is George Orwell big brother level controlling) isn’t authoritarian. Using polled data, especially that which was “implemented by a reputable domestic Chinese polling firm” is not going to hold much evidentiary worth to your target audience.

I’m not Anti-China, in fact I was and possibly still am thinking about taking a semester or internship out there; I only wanted to point out that you aren’t actually backing your argument up with any solid evidence especially with regards to your target audience.

I really am curious about the test though, especially since the democracy index paper is on a dead site, so if you could find it in Mandarin I’d be interested. If you could find a source on what “reputable polling firm” Harvard used I’d be interested in that too since the report didn’t actually mention the name…?

Oh and one last thing is that the article mentions “Furthermore, China outperforms the US and most European countries on these indicators – in fact, it has some of the strongest results in the world.” Fun statistical fact: outliers are a sign your sampling methodology is flawed, especially when the outliers are a set of samples and not just a singular data point.

From just the “my government serves the people” bars alone, it would appear the Chinese dataset is well beyond 1.5 standard deviations if the other three are so much lower and show such low variation. If this was a single data point, one would throw it out, but considering it is supposedly a longitudinal collection of samples it implies that there is a very strong influencing factor that is only largely affecting the Chinese survey takers.

If the pattern holds for many other metrics, then it implies this singular factor (or other factors) have significantly biased the Chinese samples. This doesn’t necessarily mean that factor is government intervention or bias from being raised in rhetoric from an authoritarian state, but it is statistically unlikely that this factor is simply due to china just somehow having a better democracy than every single country on earth (including all of its allies and enemies alike) by a statistically gigantic margin.

Why would that have any effect on the point of my argument?

My point is about the ineffectiveness and unscientific nature of this kind of questionnaire.

Doesn’t matter what topics or debates these are used in or who is right in those debates; the point is that these kind of charts are useless regardless of their content.

Sidenote: if you had “various metrics” why’d you post the least scientific one? Like bro, brain-dead “libertarians” could probably pull out some statistic or study that is more sound than this chart to support their idiotic bullshit. If a fellow anarchist tried to use a metric like this I’d call them out too even if I agreed with their point

Meta argument: charts like this are basically useless.

I was raised in a very religious town. If you asked, the people in that town would say “my religion is a religion of love” “people should be as free as possible because it’s an extension of personal agency” and all the while they beat their kids and would rather die than let gay or trans people be themselves.

They can quote the scriptures and could likely write some pretty strong rhetoric implying they are loving and kind and caring, but it wouldn’t be anywhere near the truth.

Point is that just because you get phrases pounded into your head doesn’t mean you truly believe them or even know what they imply.

If your country’s rhetoric specifically states that the government serves the people and says it over and over, regardless of the truth of that statement, people will have a tendency to select it. (Like if your government called itself the people’s republic…)

If you asked Americans and Chinese if they think personal freedom is important, you’d likely get the reverse pattern in your graph. Is this because America has more freedom? No, more likely it’s because the historical rhetoric we get exposed to emphasizes “freedom” whereas China’s revolutionary rhetoric was centered around “democracy”

If you asked Americans if they support socialism, you’d get lower bars than if you asked it indirectly. Just using the word socialism skews your metric.

People will say they support or don’t support concepts they don’t understand, or that they view in a different light than others. Does democracy mean more than two political parties? Does democracy mean no capitalism? Does democracy require freedom to spread information freely? Etc.

So once again these metrics are useless because I’d imagine most of these countries’ voters would disagree on what the statements even mean.

“Paul Atreides who catches hunter seekers with his bare hands, like a hero of old!”

Thanks, I almost didn’t post because it was an essay of a comment lol, glad you found it insightful

As for Wolfram Alpha, I’m definitely not an expert but I’d guess the reason it was good at math was that it would simply translate your problem from natural language into commands that could be sent to a math engine that would do the actual calculation.

So basically act like a language translator but for typed out math to a programming language for some advanced calculation program (like wolfram Mathematica)

Again, this is just speculation because I’m a bit too tired to look into it rn, but it seems plausible since we had basic language translators online back then (I think…) and I’d imagine parsing written math is probably easier than natural language translation

Engineer here with a CS minor in case you care about ethos: We are not remotely close to AGI.

I loathe python irrationally (and I guess I’m masochist who likes to reinvent the wheel programming wise lol) so I’ve written my own neural nets from scratch a few times.

Most common models are trained by gradient descent, but this only works when you have a specific response in mind for certain inputs. You use the difference between the desired outcome and actual outcome to calculate a change in weights that would minimize that error.

This has two major preventative issues for AGI: input size limits, and determinism.

The weight matrices are set for a certain number of inputs. Unfortunately you can’t just add a new unit of input and assume the weights will be nearly the same. Instead you have to retrain the entire network. (This problem is called transfer learning if you want to learn more)

This input constraint is preventative of AGI because it means a network trained like this cannot have an input larger than a certain size. Problematic since the illusion of memory that LLMs like ChatGPT have comes from the fact they run the entire conversation through the net. Also just problematic from a size and training time perspective as increasing the input size exponentially increases basically everything else.

Point is, current models are only able to simulate memory by literally holding onto all the information and processing all of it for each new word which means there is a limit to its memory unless you retrain the entire net to know the answers you want. (And it’s slow af) Doesn’t sound like a mind to me…

Now determinism is the real problem for AGI from a cognitive standpoint. The neural nets you’ve probably used are not thinking… at all. They literally are just a complicated predictive algorithm like linear regression. I’m dead serious. It’s basically regression just in a very high dimensional vector space.

ChatGPT does not think about its answer. It doesn’t have any sort of object identification or thought delineation because it doesn’t have thoughts. You train it on a bunch of text and have it attempt to predict the next word. If it’s off, you do some math to figure out what weight modifications would have lead it to a better answer.

All these models do is what they were trained to do. Now they were trained to be able to predict human responses so yeah it sounds pretty human. They were trained to reproduce answers on stack overflow and Reddit etc. so they can answer those questions relatively well. And hey it is kind of cool that they can even answer some questions they weren’t trained on because it’s similar enough to the questions they weren’t trained on… but it’s not thinking. It isn’t doing anything. The program is just multiplying numbers that were previously set by an input to find the most likely next word.

This is why LLMs can’t do math. Because they don’t actually see the numbers, they don’t know what numbers are. They don’t know anything at all because they’re incapable of thought. Instead there are simply patterns in which certain numbers show up and the model gets trained on some of them but you can get it to make incredibly simple math mistakes by phrasing the math slightly differently or just by surrounding it with different words because the model was never trained for that scenario.

Models can only “know” as much as what was fed into them and hey sometimes those patterns extend, but a lot of the time they don’t. And you can’t just say “you were wrong” because the model isn’t transient (capable of changing from inputs alone). You have to train it with the correct response in mind to get it to “learn” which again takes time and really isn’t learning or intelligence at all.

Now there are some more exotic neural networks architectures that could surpass these limitations.

Currently I’m experimenting with Spiking Neural Nets which are much more capable of transfer learning and more closely model biological neurons along with other cool features like being good with temporal changes in input.

However, there are significant obstacles with these networks and not as much research because they only run well on specialized hardware (because they are meant to mimic biological neurons who run simultaneously) and you kind of have to train them slowly.

You can do some tricks to use gradient descent but doing so brings back the problems of typical ANNs (though this is still possibly useful for speeding up ANNs by converting them to SNNs and then building the neuromorphic hardware for them).

SNNs with time based learning rules (typically some form of STDP which mimics Hebbian learning as per biological neurons) are basically the only kinds of neural nets that are even remotely capable of having thoughts and learning (changing weights) in real time. Capable as in “this could have discrete time dependent waves of continuous self modifying spike patterns which could theoretically be thoughts” not as in “we can make something that thinks.”

Like these neural nets are good with sensory input and that’s about as far as we’ve gotten (hyperbole but not by that much). But these networks are still fascinating, and they do help us test theories about how the human brain works so eventually maybe we’ll make a real intelligent being with them, but that day isn’t even on the horizon currently

In conclusion, we are not remotely close to AGI. Current models that seem to think are verifiably not thinking and are incapable of it from a structural standpoint. You cannot make an actual thinking machine using the current mainstream model architectures.

The closest alternative that might be able to do this (as far as I’m aware) is relatively untested and difficult to prototype (trust me I’m trying). Furthermore the requirements of learning and thinking largely prohibit the use of gradient descent or similar algorithms meaning training must be done on a much more rigorous and time consuming basis that is not economically favorable. Ergo, we’re not even all that motivated to move towards AGI territory.

Lying to say we are close to AGI when we aren’t at all close, however, is economically favorable which is why you get headlines like this.