• 3 Posts
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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 6th, 2023

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  • I’m someone who actually calls myself socially liberal but fiscally conservative, and that’s because my primary concern (in the terms of moral foundations theory) is the liberty/oppression axis. In other words, I think leaving people alone is a good thing, and while it’s not the only good thing and it needs to be balanced against other concerns, we should still be doing it more than we are now.

    Two caveats:

    1. I’m socially liberal because a free society requires tolerating even the people you hate. This is hard, and even many people who consider themselves tolerant because they simply don’t hate a particular group aren’t (and often don’t want to be) tolerant in this sense.

    2. I’m economically conservative because the freedom to act without government interference even in an economic context has great inherent worth (but I’ll repeat here that I don’t value it to the exclusion of all else) but also because the free market usually does a better job than central planning at making everyone prosperous. I don’t care much about wealth inequality - a world in which I have two dollars and you have two million dollars is a better place than a world in which we both have just one dollar.

    Edit: in practice I always end up voting for moderate Democrats at the national level, both because I think social issues are generally more important than economic issues and because neither party usually does what I would want regarding economic issues. However, I have more options at the state and local level.






  • Coconuts have evolved to spread from island to island by floating, but it’s still weird that one happened to float to the other side of the world in historic times. I would have guessed that either the currents could never take a coconut there or that the currents would have taken a coconut there long ago.

    (When I visit Florida, I see coconuts float by sometimes. Some have been in the water a long time - they’re covered in barnacles. However, if they’re still floating does that mean they might still be viable?)



  • You’re one of several people mentioning shared cultural references, but if you’re male and your partner is female then I’m surprised that she has any interest in things like Thundercats or He-Man regardless of her age. I’m more of a Transformers fan myself and I’ve never even met a woman who would respond to anything Transformers-related with more than just polite disinterest.

    I’m a nerdy heterosexual man, and in my experience practically no women share my interests or hobbies. Therefore my relationships have been built around doing the things that pretty much everyone enjoys - eating a nice meal, going for a walk, talking about current events, playing with pets, etc. A good partner is someone who enjoys doing these ordinary things with me. Maybe someone who does share my interests would be even better but I don’t think finding a person like that is likely enough to be worth passing up other opportunities.

    I wonder why your experience is apparently so different from mine. Am I unusual or are you?


  • I think that even in the scenario where AI is great at voice acting, there will be human voice actors left in the same way that there are people who perform live music left - a tiny number of superstars (new AIs will be trained on their performances), a few talented but obscure professionals who manage to make a relatively meager a living, and some hobbyists who do it for fun. There might even be more human voice actors than there are now simply because of population growth (or rather because of the growth of the population well-off enough to worry about that sort of thing). However, what Béart seems to be saying is that there won’t be excellent AI voice acting, not that at least some human voice actors will have jobs despite the AI, and I don’t think she’s particularly qualified to make that prediction.

    (I admit that I am baffled by the fact that people think AI won’t be able to do something at all simply because AI isn’t particularly good at doing it right now. Why are these people ignoring the extremely rapid rate of progress of AI?)