Anomander

Yeah, I had to un-quit Whatsapp when my siblings-in-law moved to Argentina - because Whatsapp is the main communication platform for a lot of Argentina and that’s where all the various family chats moved to once the in-laws no longer had local phone numbers or reliable SMS service.

Yeah there’s two ‘main’ kinds of people who want a platform where users are able to post hate speech and reach “everyone” with it.

• People who want to be hateful and want access to the targets of their hate. They want to upset people, they want to ‘own the libs’ or be able to toss slurs at minorities, and those things are unrewarding for them if they don’t get to see how upset they’ve made their targets.

• People who want to recruit people to being hateful. They want to convince normal people to share their prejudices and their biases, they want “debates” or would like to share “statistics” and are seeking a soapbox that can reach people who might find their views convincing.

This is a huge part of why defederation works, why platforms like Voat or Gab rarely thrive for very long. Being hateful in an echo chamber towards people who are outside the room is rarely fun for those folks, and very often results in in-fighting and fragmenting of the movement. Moderates and ‘normies’ are driven off because now they’re a target rather than a participant or spectator.

If you are in fact a doppelganger you have no way of knowing and neither does the Anomander who died. And that is why I wouldn’t risk teleportation.

Which, conversely, is also why I don’t care about teleportation. If I have no idea before and I have no idea after and for all intents and purposes I am still me in the new location … all the parts that I can engage with, all the parts I care about - they’re all coming up fine. I might as well have fallen asleep on a plane, or blacked out after a few too many at the pub. When consciousness returns, I am in a new location.

In that explanation you quoted, I fall firmly into the former camp. I don’t think we have special-ness that transcends the meat, but that the consciousness is wholly rooted in it - and so I think that moving the meat from one place to another achieves the result of moving the consciousness from one place to another.

My main difference is that I don’t believe a “soul” transported or transplanted - or exists to be lost. The consciousness that is my sense of ‘self’ is the sum of my meat and my memories, and those are preserved.

But trying to make you understand.

Yeah, there’s your problem. You’re trying to make me understand it your way and criticizing me for not doing so, instead of trying to persuasively state your own viewpoints standing on their own.

It’s an approach that I can imagine would feel frustrating when I already understand your views and am talking about them.

To me it has nothing to do with souls, it’s about continuity of experience. […] If I don’t get to continue to experience life because I’m dead and some clone with my exact thoughts etc is now me, it’s only the rest of the world who experiences that as me continuing to live. But I don’t get to.

I think that distinction is artificial.

My continuity of experience is interrupted every night, among others - and I don’t worry that my experience as being me is somehow invalid now, or fear sleeping lest a doppelganger take my body overnight and wake up ‘as me’ the next morning. The idea that this would be different is resting on the notion that there is something other than mere meat and electricity that would be lost when the teleport interrupts consciousness, and I think that assumption is something that needs direct challenge.

I think you would experience life continuing from the moment consciousness resumes in the new location, the exact same as how you experience life ‘continuing’ when you wake up each day. All the ways that you experience your own consciousness would simply have relocated. Without assuming a soul, there is no subjective distinction between pre/post teleporter any more than there’s a distinction between pre/post nap.

This presumes that there is something special in this model that doesn’t resume when your mind resumes running in it’s new location. Or, in other terms, “a soul”.

That is ridiculous.

So you do see my point.

People aren’t computers, so getting all worked up about how software models instances still isn’t a valid modelling for human consciousness.

When you kill a process and you re-run a program, even if you saved the full state of the memory elsewhere, you don’t say that it’s the same process. Is another process with identical content. There’s no need of a metaphysical entity. It’s another instance.

But this is so hair-splittingly pedantic it’s almost doubled back to be incorrect. If you ask 99.999% of the world, they’ll be like “yeah I closed outlook and then I opened outlook” - to them, it’s still the same program. They’re launching the same software again. No one is like “oh well once you quit Skyrim it’s all over because even if you reopen it later, it’s a new instance and the old one is dead” … no. That’s ridiculous. It’s the same program, the same save file, resumed from save at a later date.

Your focus on “Process” instead of “Program” is making the soul argument. The “process” you’re arguing for is a soul. Something intangible and irrelevant to the end user, that does get terminated on shutdown, that cannot be restored from save. Consciousness is the software, not the process itself. Memories are the save file. There is nothing in OP’s model of teleporting that suggests “process” itself is the sacred portion - when the hardware & software of “Dave” gets paused and resumed flawlessly.

You’re deeply, sorely mistaken. Even in a deep, unconscious state, the mind keeps working, even if the degree of consciousness is different. That we’re not 100% certain of what the brain does in those moments doesn’t mean that it stops working.

Not at all. Consciousness is interrupted. Unless we’re assuming that the “process” itself is sacred - what happens to consciousness is all that matters in either case. If your ability to perceive yourself as a conscious being stops - it doesn’t matter to your experience of your own consciousness if the ‘process’ stopped or went to sleep during the gap.

That’s absolutely the issue.

Your body is copied as a file.

Your mind is a process running in a body created from that file.

When the process stops, you are effectively dead. Another copy of your body runs another process with an identical content. He has your body, but he’s not you.

This presumes that there is something special in this model that doesn’t resume when your mind resumes running in it’s new location. Or, in other terms, “a soul”. The idea that an identical consciousness in an identical body is “not you” is based wholly on the assumption that “you” is something other than the consciousness.

And your mind, or my mind, are both “processes” that stop regularly already - are you claiming that old you dies each night and a completely new but otherwise identical person lives each morning?

or in a real teleport where you are disassembled, you’re gone the moment

I love how this was said completely unironically.

We’re talking about something that only exists in sci-fi stories and you’re trying to argue about souls as if one outcome of teleports is clearly more real than another.

you’re gone the moment you teleport and the “you” that remains is another different person with exactly your thoughts, feelings, motivations, memories, etc

Ship of Thesius, though. If it’s exactly my thoughts, exactly my feelings, exactly my motivations, my memories, my body … That’s me. There’s no other parts that got left out.

But consciousness was interrupted briefly when the transport happened? That happens to me every night - except in the morning I wake up in the same place instead of a different one. For all worthwhile intents and purposes, everything tangible and real that makes a person a person is relocated and the person remains. Getting lost in whether or not “you” “survive” is wasting angst on the existence of a soul.

You’re repeating what OP said.

Thing is, the idea that an “old you” has “died” is a modern soul conceit. If “me” is just the combination of meat, electricity, and memories - then for all intents and purposes I was simply taken apart in one place and reassembled in another. Continuity of all three is maintained when I am reassembled on Mars with my body and memories intact. There is no “old” and “new” me - because what you or OP think defines “me” isn’t something that dies when the meat stops working briefly.

Absolutely this.

Someone else can be the guinea pig, but if it’s been tested and everyone came out fine? Yeah. I’ll absolutely take advantage.

Very much so.

If this coin’s math and mechanics actually work in transferring wealth from rich to poor … it’ll be swamped in poor people wanting their cut, and rich people will want nothing to do with a shitcoin that’s explicitly going to take their money and give it to other people.

The issue there is that it’s kind of like saying “the only way to fix society is if everyone followed the law” - it places all assessments of success behind a nearly impossible standard. It also places all responsibility for that success solely onto mods putting their own interests ahead of their communities and/or the interest that brought them to volunteer as mods.

I participated in the protest, I’m here because of them, I facilitated protest actions within ‘my’ communities that wanted to protest - but I don’t think there was a world where mods alone could bring the site to its knees and force Reddit to backpedal. If anything - I think that any hope of dramatic action causing change died on the spot the moment the protest became “about mods” and users experienced the protest as something mods were doing to communities in order to reach Reddit.

So many mods acted unilaterally to shutter communities and the impact of that approach cultivated reddit’s existing anti-mod sentiments to fuel opposition to the protests and the cause. The vast bulk of people I saw trolling in protest subs, or arguing against protest in my own subs, were users who already had a history of disliking “reddit mods” as a significant theme in their account history.

But to average users, their shit and their communities and the things they like about reddit were being “taken away” by mods in a dispute between mods and Reddit. The hijack of messaging around the API to be about modding and about how much harder it’d be and how the API changes would affect mods - meant that users were also indirectly being told this was an issue that didn’t affect them if they didn’t use the apps affected.

The only dramatic impact that would have swayed Reddit Inc and won the matter was a fairly unanimous buy-in from the average user, a clear unified front, and a dramatic drop in user engagement. As long as they have the data showing that people are showing up and are using the site and are interested in using the site, they can deal with the interruptions to major communities and pull more compliant volunteers from the users that remain.

Back as a young fella, striking out in the dating market a bunch …

“Just be yourself!”

No, honestly, that was the problem last time - I was looking for something a little more granular and actionable.

This is one of those helpful and encouraging things that people say without necessarily really thinking it through. Deep down in intent, they’re right - you can’t fake your way to healthy relationships, being insincere or putting on a performance of being someone you’re not isn’t going anywhere genuine down the road. Absolutely correct, absolutely great advice - but it’s never given in sufficient complexity and depth to be useful.

None of those grown-ups were like “Ah yes, definitely be sincere about who you are - but also don’t spend a whole date monologuing about the book you just read or your favourite video game.”

That you can be genuine and sincere about who you are, while still using your social skills and putting your best foot forward socially just … didn’t occur. At the time, my understanding was that it was a hard binary - either I was 100% me at 100% volume and whatever came out of my mouth was definitely the best thing I could say, or I was stifling myself and being ‘fake’ in order to build an equally-fake relationship.

It took a friend’s brother taking me aside to make it ‘click’ - he was holding a can or a bottle and was like “So the whole object is all ‘real you’ yeah? But any time you’re talking to someone is like right now - you can only see the side that’s facing you. It’s all you, it’s all honest, but you still want to show them the best side, the best angle, of the whole thing. Don’t sprint straight to showing them all of your worst angle just because that’s what’s on your mind that day.”

“We’re getting paid to put paint on the wall.”

I was like 17 or so and had a temp job as a housepainter for a couple weeks, and I was sinking time and energy into doing an excellent job and being really efficient with paint and … kind of missing the forest for the trees. I was putting unnecessary care & excellence into a back wall and the wall was taking longer to prep than the whole-house job could afford. One of the old guys on site pulled me aside me and, in the eloquent terms above, pointed out that … the real goal here is paint on the wall. We’re doing a good job because we take pride in our work, but the outcome is significantly more important than the journey to everyone else. Doing a “good job” can’t wind up as an obstacle to the job itself.

I was always a details person and perfectionist, and that one clear lesson about taking a step back from the details of a task to double-check what the actual goal is … has always stuck with me.

I have a hard time believing that all of even just most of the men that initially joined her group had “concerning views” if that’s meant to refer to the misogyny we see in those most associated with the term today, but I do know that plenty of the posters I saw on the subreddit years ago when I visited were not of that ilk.

That’s fine, but remember you’re doubting the one person unique qualified to talk about the developmental history of the movement that they launched from the site that they ran.

I don’t think that it necessarily was “all” or “most” but simply that the male presence within the movement was sufficiently represented by individuals with those views that it’s one of the first thing she mentions in the context of discussing the growth of the movement itself.

Part of her point seems to be pointing out that they invited those views in, very early in the movement, out of a desire to be inclusive - only to be driven out by those views later on down the road.

I bring that up in this context because I don’t think that the movement or the term can be divorced fully from the male misogyny that it’s associated with today. Those people are not latecomers to the label, they’ve been there effectively from the start - from the point where it went from the comments section of Alana’s Involuntary Celibacy Project blog, to becoming “a community” centered around a shared label.

but I think if the term was originally coined to represent people who were genuinely suffering from external circumstances that put them in the position they’re in, it should remain for them and not those who sabotage themselves via their own toxic behavior.

I’ve used bold to highlight it in the quote above - that is a big “if” that the person who coined the term says is not true. If it were true, we’d be having a different conversation. But it’s not true.

The simple fact is that it’s a self-identifier. It’s a label that people put on themselves based on their perception of their own life circumstances. The original vision for the term says that neither you nor I get to tell anyone else they’re “not a true incel” or to go over their life and tell them the barriers are self-inflicted if they don’t see it that way. I guarantee you that the people you want to exclude from the term do very genuinely believe that they are “suffering from external circumstances that put them in the position they’re in.” No matter how much your or I might see them and think they’re clearly suffering from self-inflicted wounds, they are entirely sincere in their belief that their dating life is out of their control and has been a victim of cruel society.

One group deserves empathy and compassion; the other deserves scorn and derision. I don’t think it’s productive or fair to the former group to use the same term for both.

To me? They’re the same group. Some members of the group are hateful and shitty. Some members of the group aren’t. I’d say that the overwhelming majority of members, from both sides of that divider, are experiencing obstacles to dating or sex that are self-inflicted, even if they also have other barriers that are not. The vast majority of both groups would tell you that their personal circumstances are wholly out of their own control.

The “logic” that group uses around attractiveness and dating marketability and how this or that facet of looks or wealth or social status or whatever is ultimately spurious. If Ricky Berwick get rich, famous, and married - the absolute hard impassible barriers that incels talk about affecting themselves simply do not exist.

Internet history pedantry, but by the time the subreddit rolled around, the term and the movement had already been coopted.

Incel started as a term for men who felt depressed about being unable to find a female partner, and the subreddit they created was originally a supportive space for them.

The term was coined somewhere between 1994 and 1997 by “Alana’s Involuntary Celibacy Project” as a term for people of all genders who were unable to find partnership despite trying. Alana is a woman, and is effectively universally credited with coining the term and founding the movement. The movement wasn’t ‘for men’, the term wasn’t about men specifically, and it didn’t start on Reddit. It started off as more of a personal blog, where Alana documented her own experiences and struggles - the site gained followers from other people with similar experiences, eventually growing into a combined forum / support group / community.

Then it got taken over by angry misogynists and the term became associated with them, while the original group just kind of got forgotten about. That original group deserves attention and empathy as well as the term they coined; the latter group isn’t even “involuntarily celibate,” as they play a very big role in their own celibacy.

Those folks have kind of always been there, and have always been a heavily represented demographic - Alana has said in interviews that the men who joined in the early days did have some concerning views and some concerning themes were on frequent repeitition in the discussions the community had. I don’t think retconning the movement to exclude those people from the “true definition” is doing either camp any favours. The “involuntary” part of the label isn’t trying to engage with whether or not the barrier may stem from factors within their control, but solely confined to the fact that they want something and are not getting it. They are simply “celibate, but not voluntarily celibate”.

One quip that Alana made in several interviews while defining her modelling of the community she founded was that she didn’t care why someone was an incel, ie “it’s OK if you’re celibate because you’re into horses, but that’s illegal” that that person should still be welcomed and included in the community.

I just think more people should give some thought to who that term originally belonged to.

I think that in light of this, it’s even more important to be accurate and honest who those people are: Not male-exclusive, not limited to this or that cause of celibacy, not specifically gatekeeping out the misogynists or the beastialists any more than any other group. Just any people who want to get laid but are not getting laid.

Exactly this. Like, I have favourites - but I’d wind up hating them if that was the only thing I could ever engage with from then forward.

I’ve found especially with games, there comes a point where if you get deep enough with a game for long enough - there are issues apparent at those levels of detail that are inevitable, and are going to drive you nuts.

No game is going to survive full-time play for a year, or ten years, and you come out the far side still loving it completely.

Just the same way the funding bar works. As long as no one is lying, confused, lazy, mistaken or busy it’s bulletproof.

Ah. Of course. People will declare the undeclared money they receive.

Maybe a light/dark bar showing declared and undeclared funding.

How is that supposed to work, though?

Like, say I’m wildly corrupt and taking money to push stories about Smurfs. Big Gargamel sends me $1K a month to use my influence to seed stories that talk negatively about the Smurfs. I don’t say shit. Big Gargamel doesn’t say shit. How would the “undeclared funding” bar know?

But also a vastly different array of hobbies, and that for some included gaming. This meant care homes having to upgrade internet/wifi, and many other adaptions.

I remember my grandpa being furious that the seniors-only complex they moved into had shit internet, maybe a decade ago. The whole complex was running off a single residential line - like they bought a good package, but still - and that was fine for residents checking email and stuff, but it meant he was stuck taking a day or two to download each Flight Sim update.