I enjoyed her comics on reddit so figure I'd shill them here since she isn't around. I also no longer have Facebook or Twitter so I have no idea what the titles are lol.
She has zero ethical hangups about mobilizing her fans to shout-down and destroy anyone she has an issue with. Her behavior on Reddit was abhorrent, and we don't need her here.
Can you provide an example, the few threads I saw her participate in she seemed nice.
If she mobilised her fans to shout down people who sent her dick pics, nazi's, trump/nigel farage/bojo, pro russian fans I would view that as a positive
Well, I couldn't speak to what she's gotten in DMs, but she shut me down and got all pissy when I was agreeing with her, so I can only imagine that at least half of what's said about her publicly is true. This is the same name I used on Reddit, so you're welcome to look at the history -- I even pinned a post with all the vitriol she sent me -- though you'll probably have to use the wayback machine, since Reddit permabanned me for the eighth time.
Edit: And, to be fair, she edits her posts and threads religiously. As you'll see if you find the post I'm talking about, I had to publish screenshots of her toxicity because she edited threads down to portray a completely different narrative.
As far as the post goes, I can't find it because of Reddit -- when they "permaban" you, you can't even search your own profile. I could probably dig up the screenshots and re-up them, but I'm honestly too lazy and not nearly invested enough in this situation.
The guy you're talking with went into a downvote rampage in kbin and downvoted my whole history and that of several other people (who deserve an upvote in return, like @KbinItTogether@IHeartBadCode@TheOlympian@blanketswithsmallpox@Satelllliiiiiiiteeee & probably more), just because they downvoted the comment where he said Pizzacake "is a b**ch".
So I would take with a fistful of salt whatever problems he might have had with anyone, specially if he was banned for it. He must be a very caustic person with self-confidence issues if he's so easily hurt as to need to go on childish vindictive crusades against people who happen to disagree with something he said.... I'd say if anything, this behavior is proof that what he's claiming about Pizzacake is likely distorted/magnified by the sad bitterness he must feel for having been banned for it.
You know in all fairness. Some people have difficulty with criticism. It is what it is. You know I tried pointing out to the person, "you are saying things and doing things that make it difficult to believe your story." One of the things the person said to me:
If this bothers you, you should try not starting shit to begin with
And the thing is, if being critical of your story is starting shit, well that's going to be a problem on social media and it starts to lend credence towards why someone would not be friendly with you. And you know, some people who have really bad issues with criticism go into a victim mentality, and that's what this person comes off as having an issue with. They perpetually put themselves into positions to confirm their bias towards being a victim.
You know, it takes all kinds in this world. Person just really needs to work on being able to take criticism a bit better. I mean we all could, but obviously that person a bit more-so than the rest. But I will say, the person has indicated that they are blocking us. Which, I mean, begs the question who does that person think is benefiting from that block? I know, I'll enjoy the silence and likely a bit more than they will. But doing that, all that really does is reinforce a particular echo in what eventually makes it back to you in comments.
I think that's the great part about people being critical, constructively obviously, you get to see things from different perspectives. I think person came here hoping to see only a single perspective rather than multiple ones and ones that may very well be critical of their narrative. But you know, maybe that is something people "want"? I've not really ever understood the surrounding yourself with a homogenize group's opinion. So maybe I don't understand that mentality. But I can see that the person is very hypersensitive to things outside their homogenized viewpoint and that kind of stuff can cloud one's ability to clearly see events as they are. And that makes it difficult to believe what the person was originally saying.
Yeah, people who are complete assholes, talk shit about others, and spew a bunch of incel buzz words should be scorned and treated with ridicule. That's you my dude. Look at your ludicrous spamming on a COMIC post of all things lol.
A comic!
It'd be pitiable if people like you weren't ruining people's lives through toxicity. Let alone the general good vibes. Particularly in 'new' places like the Fediverse where establishing that early culture is so key.
Dude you went though my profile and I just downvoted you, on the comments that I felt were completely out of line for this post. So I mean, you're free to do what you want, but it's going to be a massively uphill battle to convince people that you weren't the toxic one to Pizzacake when you're being vidictive in a very puclic way.
By all means downvote away, but it's something EVERYONE can see. As @TheOlympian indicated, "it's projection". And it's a bit sad that you sat there and went though a whole bunch of people's timelines to downvote their comments, not because you disagree with what that comment said, but because you got angry.
Calling them out by name got me "unbanned" every single time, but I'm done at this point...
So just to use something that you've indicated from your own timeline and I'm doing it as well. I'm calling you out. But on an old comment because I don't group ganging up on you to downvote. And I really wouldn't say anything until I saw that you indicated:
I had to publish screenshots of her toxicity because she edited threads down to portray a completely different narrative
You should downvote based on content, not just because you wanted to be vindicitive. I say should, doesn't mean you HAVE TO, but it really hurts your argument that you spent a ton of comments on this post trying to make, when your actions show otherwise. But your actions are pretty toxic and there's a very visible way for people to confirm those actions on this platform.
Ultimately you do you, but man did you become your own worse enemy on this post. So it's difficult to believe that you were the victim of Pizzacake, just running off of the evidence in front of me here.
Yes, I'm vindictive. I return the downvote favor when I see somebody else doing it. If this bothers you, you should try not starting shit to begin with.
As for the shit with Pizzacake, I again highly recommend you engage her yourself and see how things go. Nothing like experiencing it first-hand IMO.
Edit: And just so I don't have to experience your stream-of-consciousness bullshit anymore, consider yourself blocked. Bye.
If this bothers you, you should try not starting shit to begin with
It doesn't bug me what I'm indicating is that things you do leave evidence to the contrary of what your indicating in being a "harmless victim of Pizzacake's hate". This is your making, it can be completely your unmaking. So very few people are going to sympathize with your plight that you yourself made.
I again highly recommend you engage her yourself and see how things go
I have, have never had a problem. Thank you.
consider yourself blocked
I have thusly considered it. And while you might believe that you are the one being spared, I assure you, it is I who is being spared a reply to this message I leave you.
She recently posted on Reddit she's only posting there, not interacting with anyone because of the toxicity. I think it was the usual thing high profile women end up getting on social media that men don't, namely rape threats and death threats in their DMs all the time.
Not going back to the R site to find her post but that stuff always makes me sad
First thing I did when I signed up for Reddit back in the day was to turn off DMs. I refuse to believe she's too stupid to figure that out. She wants to be the victim, and frames every conversation she has in that light.
I don't really know enough about any of that. But I still don't think it's right people should be forced to turn off their DMs and comments because they're recieving messages like that.
Oh, I agree... you shouldn't have to, but we all know that DMs are used only for harassment, so.... yeah, if you don't, then you're asking for it. I wish people were better, well, people, but we aren't.
Thank you. For some reason I thought he was in a group chat with both of the people or something, not that they actually were the same person. It makes a bit more sense now.
False. Kick them in balls, and when they double over in pain, you kick them straight in the teeth, the throat, or right between their eyes. A side kick to the temples are pretty effective too. I support every woman and child wear steel toe boots
I encourage everyone to take at least a simple, basic self-defence course somewhere. While a kick to the crotch is painful to men and women, there are other simple techniques everyone should know in case this one attack vector isn't an option. One example is quickly slapping their ears with cupped hands, as if trying to clap with their head. It also helps to practice the right motions a few times, ideally on someone with a protective suit so you can actually use your full force.
This kind of "why do we seek out happiness/pleasure but stories of artificial happiness/pleasure utopias always read like dystopias" question baffled me a lot until it occurred to me recently - happiness and pleasure are evolved systems that evolved for a reason. It feels absurd to treat them like a goal because they're not a goal, they're a measure. It's a bit like you're heating something and looking at the thermometer to check it's heating right, and someone says "hey why don't we paint the thermometer to have the value you want, that's much simpler and you'll reach your goal fine" and the answer is yes, but no. Yes, the thermometer will have the value you were aiming for and it may have looked like that was your goal but actually no, your goal won't be achieved because the real goal was never the thermometer it was heating the thing.
In our case, happiness, pleasure and so on evolved to drive us towards certain states and behaviors that it was evolutionarily beneficial for our ancestors to be in. Being physically comfortable, safe and healthy, being well-regarded by peers, achieving personal and collective goals, having friends and family who love you/have your back and you them, acting in line with what one feels is best, etc etc etc.
I think that has two consequences: 1) it's entirely possible that perfect happiness/pleasure isn't something we can ever attain, or that it's even a coherent state, via real OR artificial means. Because happiness/pleasure evolved under constraints that didn't include the requirement that such a state be attainable or even coherent. It doesn't mean it's impossible, but it definitely means there is no guarantee that it is. Certainly our current experience with happy-making drugs suggests it's much harder than you'd think. And 2) it puts into question the assumption that this state is "good". These dystopias always seem so sterile, like what's the point of all those people being happy, why have this system go to all that trouble to make it happen? Well, why should we care about anything, right, it's all value judgements. And there are obvious reasons humans would value happiness. But there are also obvious reasons we'd value safety, comfort, loving friends and family, having children, achieving personal and collective goals, social status, discovering new things, leaving a legacy, etc etc. The "artificially happy people" dystopia assumes that we value happiness above all those other things but that's an illusion borne from the fact happiness is a unified system driving us to all those things. A bit like thinking money is the most important thing because everybody is trying to get some, when in reality the money is just the unified vehicle for various things we really want - products and services, security, status, etc.
So insofar as all of those different goals are things we care about because we evolved to, it seems both more parsimonious and more robust to focus on goals that happiness/pleasure evolved as instruments to achieve rather than trying to hack the thermometer.
Arguably that's the difference between actual utopias and "we're all happy, that's good right?" dystopias. Actual utopias explore the conditions for human flourishing, and either portray happiness as obviously following from that or straight-up don't focus on happiness at all. Happy dystopias are dystopias precisely because the conditions they show are so antithetical to human flourishing that no reader would buy the characters are happy without the in-Universe happiness drugs or brainwashing or whatever.
Wow, that’s some good insight. I have long thought there’s a difference between fulfillment and happiness similar to your contrast of utopia and happy dystopia. I do forget that though, thank you for the reminder.
The thing is that, technically, "human fluorishing" (understood as the evolutionary tendency of our specie to thrive & expand) is not something that can be maintained indefinitelly. The experiments regarding behavioral sink show that when the conditions are overly favorable, those survival / thriving instincts don't play in our favor and nature tends to bring out all kinds of deviant behavior / unhappiness.
Sure, we are genetically predisposed to try and thrive as much as possible, but I'd argue a "real utopia" where humanity is "fluorishing" and at the same time "happy" is either unsustainable long term, or requires a very nuanced definition of "fluorishing" / "happy".
The thing is that, technically, "human fluorishing" (understood as the evolutionary tendency of our specie to thrive & expand) is not something that can be maintained indefinitelly.
I meant "human flourishing" as a shorthand for the list of things I listed, as in "things that tend to make individual humans feel fulfilled" not the expansion and thriving of humans as a species. I don't think the latter is always seen as utopian; for example if I were to list utopias like The Culture, The Federation in Star Trek, Le Guin's short stories, the Abbey of Thélème... Some of those do feature human expansion although even there it's not uncomplicated (The Federation not only explores but also colonizes uninhabited worlds and I think it's fair to see "the expansion of the human species" as part of its utopian vision; I think the same is true of The Culture but the books also challenge the idea), others straight-up reject it like many of Le Guin's utopias, and I think ancient versions of the genre like the Abbey of Thélème don't think that much about it at all. However all of those utopias portray humans as having or being able to achieve a variety of "personal fulfillment" goals such as those I listed; those are what I meant. I do think our evolutionary tendency to thrive & expand may be worth valuing for its own sake, contra Le Guin, but that's a different conversation.
Having said that I don't think the "rat utopia" experiments say that much about human flourishing. For one thing those "utopias" didn't meet all of the rats' needs - they had unlimited food and safety from outside threats but they didn't have unlimited space or the kind of stimulation they evolved to thrive and maintain their social structures in. I guess it's good nuance to understand that "flourishing" doesn't reduce to "unlimited food and safety from predators" but that organisms have other needs too (notably space), but I think it's something most people realize already. Note that stories that do feature "the evolutionary tendency of our species to thrive & expand" as utopian tend to have the opposite of a "rat utopia", with space colonization/exploration making space unlimited but with challenging conditions.
I'm also not convinced such behavioral sinks apply to humans, or at least apply to them as completely as they did to those rats. Some unique features we have that seem relevant here include our level of sociality, playfulness and adaptability. Humans are much more social than our closest relatives (& maybe all mammals) so overpopulation doesn't have the same impacts on us as others. We also (literally) play a lot more than any other species, in the sense of engaging in behaviors for the sake of random goals instead of the more straightforward ones that usually motivate us - in that category I'd list not only what we understand as play and games, but also things like art, science, sports, random hobbies, etc. We don't only individually play, but as cultures we devote time and resources to goals "for their own sake" instead of concrete survival/expansion. I'd guess such random behavior serves as a natural outlet in cases where conditions are "too favorable", one that we probably literally evolved to engage in (evolutionarily speaking play has the purpose of learning new things, and you do it when conditions are favorable enough that you don't need to focus on survival), meaning it's likely to feel satisfying to some extent at least. Finally, Alison Gopnik says adaptability is a hallmark of humans as a species and I think that claim holds up - human societies have proven able to adapt to a huge variety of environments, both physical and social. Our own societies are extremely different from the kind we evolved with and have tons of issues, but they still basically function, with a huge proportion of humans in them leading lives that range from satisfactory to fulfilling, in a way that wouldn't be true of a comparable number of chimpanzees. So I have doubts that we'd completely collapse as a species because of something so generic as conditions being "too favorable". Humans and human societies can be broken, no doubt about that, but that usually involves extreme scenarios. Unfavorable ones, at that.
It might be worth noting at this point that a lot of us, particularly of the "posting randomly on the internet" variety, do functionally live in "rat utopias" with unlimited food, no predators but limited space and tons of people around. And I think most would attest that while it's not the key to perfect happiness, it also hasn't devolved into the horrifying hellscape the rats experienced.
This isn't to say I think human utopia is possible/coherent/compatible with our nature. I just don't think the rat experiment is a very good example for that argument.
I meant "human flourishing" as a shorthand for the list of things I listed, as in "things that tend to make individual humans feel fulfilled" not the expansion and thriving of humans as a species.
But wouldn't "human fluorishing" be a lot more in line with reaching the "states and behaviors that it was evolutionarily beneficial for our ancestors to be in" as you so elloquently explained before?
I feel that most (all?) of the things you listed are only good because they serve a purpose towards that goal. We like being safe/healthy because if we didn't we would risk dying (the opposite of thriving), we like working in groups & helping / getting approval from each other because a community is stronger together (higher chances of survival), etc.
I feel those causes of happiness you list are also consequence of natural selection pushing our species to thrive & flourish. There's no compelling reason to have them as goals by themselves either. In fact, seeking these things might also prove just as pathological as seeking happiness. It's not always good to desperatelly seek approval from peers regardless of the consequences, for example. And sometimes, obsessing over those goals can cause frustration/stress.
For one thing those "utopias" didn't meet all of the rats' needs - they had unlimited food and safety from outside threats but they didn't have unlimited space
True, though space is never really unlimited, not even the Universe is infinite (in Star Trek they simply haven't reached the limit of their expansion... but they are in a gigantic enclosed rat box that ultimatelly has to reach a tipping point, even if it takes millenia).
My point wasn't that an utopia can't work for a period of time, but that it's unsustainable in the long term to keep up with the constant growth that thirst for happiness pushes all living beings towards. At the beginning, the space the rats were given was more than enough, and the utopia worked just fine for several generations.
I'm also not convinced such behavioral sinks apply to humans, or at least apply to them as completely as they did to those rats. Some unique features we have that seem relevant here include our level of sociality, playfulness and adaptability.
I'd argue humans are already full of deviant behavior, just like those rats. Our sociality, playfulness and adaptability is ripe with unnatural deviations.
Videogames, art, entertainment, sports, spending the time in the internet, random hobbies, porn... I'd argue all those are behavioral anomalies. They might be connected deep inside to a natural need, but it's under so many levels of abstraction that the gratification we feel from those stimuli has been long dettached from the original natural purpose that made us enjoy those things. Those behaviors are just a more complex version of how Pavlov dogs salivate at the ringing of a bell. They come with more steps, but they are not so different from the distopic "happy pill".
We might not be starving for space, but we do have limits in resources, and the capitalistic thirst for constant "economic growth" that provides so much happiness to many is not sustainable, in the same way as the population growth wasn't sustainable for the rats.
During the experiments some rats started behaving more like humans. They lost interest in sex and didn't get into fights, some preferred to avoid socializing, some just slept, ate and groomed (Calhoun called them "the beautiful ones").
I feel that the problem in the end is not so much in "instant gratification" vs "naturally experiencing the things that lead to that gratification" but in "instincts" vs "logic".
Happiness, dopamines and such, are just how nature pushes us to have a goal to seek. If we were pure creatures of cold logic (like say.. Vulkans, to keep with the trekkie references) we would never have a need for happiness, we would be calm, at peace... not exactly happy, but not unhappy either. It would be a relatively healthy state, never feeling stressed.
The problem is that we do need animal instincts to have a purpose. There would be no reason for humanity to do anything without our reptilian brain giving us a motivation. There's no logical reason to not just let ourselves "die". No reason to have sex (I guess that's why Vulkans become irrational on mating season). It's not like the existence of humans makes the world "better" in any objective absolutist way. The only reason we see our life (and that of others) as a good thing is because we are programmed to see it as such. But the planet, the universe, they don't care... they'll continue "happily" existing after humanity is extinct. Humans are a lot less significant in the grand scheme of things than we think we are.
I think we just need to learn to control our emotions. Dopamine is overrated. And I bet we would just build tolerance against it if we were constantly receiving it.
Wireheading is a term associated with fictional or futuristic applications[1] of brain stimulation reward, the act of directly triggering the brain's reward center by electrical stimulation of an inserted wire, for the purpose of 'short-circuiting' the brain's normal reward process and artificially inducing pleasure. Scientists have successfully performed brain stimulation reward on rats (1950s)[2] and humans (1960s). This stimulation does not appear to lead to tolerance or satiation in the way that sex or drugs do.[3] The term is sometimes associated with science fiction writer Larry Niven, who used the term in his Known Space series.[4][5] In the philosophy of artificial intelligence, the term is used to refer to AI systems that hack their own reward channel.[3]
The VR involved in the comic is probably a bit of an unnecessary middleman, but same basic idea.
We don't really know if there's actually VR involved in the comic. The robot does not say that, and the headset might just be to apply electrical stimulation directly to the brain, like the article you linked suggests.
You know, I’ve considered that if the Holodeck from Star Trek was real - there would be no need for anything else. I mean anything except the factory that makes them, the power plant that runs them, and people to maintain all that stuff.
Your house would just be a holodeck simulation, and you could go anywhere. While we never see such things in the show, it stands to reason that holodecks could be networked together into a shared experience with other people somewhere else, but sharing the same virtual space. So an amusement park would just be a program you turn on and the people visiting are all real, just projections from their own holodeck. Heck even your workplace could be a shared holographic simulation. L
The only time anybody would need to leave their holodeck is when something real needs attendance. In star trek they have matter replicators, but without that you’d still need real agriculture and textiles and such. So, plenty of people would have jobs that require them to leave the simulation. Literally everything else though, all holodeck.
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