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Reposted by Nvidie

Microplastics Sommelier @eephus.biz · 5h

this is the most threatening delivery email i've ever gotten

Blurry slanted photo of a door
Your UPS Package was delivered UPS <mcinfo@ups.com>
Delivered Thursday 10/15/2026 5:52 PM
Track Your Package ›

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Nvidie @dervine7.bsky.social · 5h

saying I'm uncertain/don't know something implies that I take there to be some fact of the matter

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Nvidie @dervine7.bsky.social · 5h

(part of the complaint)

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Nvidie @dervine7.bsky.social · 5h

that sounds like epistemic uncertainty about *future* states of the system? I took it that @seanmcarroll.bsky.social 's complaint is that the Quanta headline makes it sound like there's some *current* state of the system we're uncertain about

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Reposted by Nvidie

June Martin @theworldsgreatestwriter.com · 14h

I haven’t been following the discourse too closely but I basically agree that GLP-1s are conscious

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Nvidie @dervine7.bsky.social · 6h

wait, isn't it also misleading to say epistemic uncertainty follows? if it's ontic then there's nothing we *could* know that we don't

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Nvidie @dervine7.bsky.social · 6h

is this also true in Bohmian mechanics?

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Reposted by Nvidie

noam @noamchompers.bsky.social · 9h

I reflectively reject this thought, but I find it sorta irresistible to experience writers of bad academic prose as failing to respect my time

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Nvidie @dervine7.bsky.social · 8h

wait is the graph real?

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Nvidie @dervine7.bsky.social · 8h

my point is just that if you rank the tokens by P and increase the temp starting at 0 the model is going to start choosing the higher P tokens before it starts choosing the lower P ones. so given the distribution is the graph it's gonna start outputting 5 before anything in the shaded regions

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Nvidie @dervine7.bsky.social · 8h

I was supposing no rlhf, as I think is implicit in the graph, so the probability distribution P the model learned over tokens is just the probability in the dataset of those tokens

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Nvidie @dervine7.bsky.social · 9h

obv the graph is made up but also it doesn't make sense right? as you turned up the temp wouldn't you start seeing another peak at 5 before you saw anything in the shaded areas?

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Nvidie @dervine7.bsky.social · 10h

hmmm I'm not sure what I'd say about Buridan's Ass cases, 'cause I don't really want to say that by going for the hay on the left the ass has compared the bales. I'm strongly tempted to say that that's not really *choosing*, but that feels like a no true scotsman

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Nvidie @dervine7.bsky.social · 10h

yeah I don’t know what my views are on that. I’m not entirely sure whether it challenges the point I’m making, bc that still implies a pairwise comparison between (any) two things, even if it isn’t transitive. but you’re right that it wouldn’t be a ranking

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Nvidie @dervine7.bsky.social · 11h

(based on what little knowledge I have of existentialism my understanding is that’s one of their major points)

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Nvidie @dervine7.bsky.social · 11h

(referencing “Hindu/Buddhist” not bc they’re interchangeable but bc they were participants in the same debates and were often directly debating each other in the literature)

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Nvidie @dervine7.bsky.social · 11h

tbf I would actually be pretty surprised if this doesn’t show up in some school of Hindu/Buddhist thought

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Nvidie @dervine7.bsky.social · 11h

I understand psychologically why people have that reaction, and I have the same gut responses, but reflectively I think they’re going wrong

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Nvidie @dervine7.bsky.social · 11h

but I do still think that *making a choice* is, by its very nature, to make a comparison — whether or not you think that’s all there is to value — and I often feel like a lot of discussion in (western, analytic!) ethics is driven by discomfort with what that might mean about the choices we make

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Nvidie @dervine7.bsky.social · 11h

I also am realizing that I was stuck on the sense of valuing where it has to do with choices, I think I agree that there are other forms of valuing which aren’t comparative (when I’m enjoying music I’m not comparing it to other music)

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Nvidie @dervine7.bsky.social · 11h

also to clarify, my point here wasn’t to argue for my position, I just wanted to note that I don’t think it’s correct to describe my position as intellectualist — one of my motivations is *anti*intellectualism

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Nvidie @dervine7.bsky.social · 11h

oh certainly, and tbc I’m expressing a controversial opinion on western/analytic philosophy! if anything *I* often feel like my attitudes here are very alien to people

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Reposted by Nvidie

noam @noamchompers.bsky.social · 13h

for every person who denigrates philosophy on here, i'm gonna make it take one year longer to solve the hard problem. go ahead and keep talking shit, see what happens

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Nvidie @dervine7.bsky.social · 12h

it's true that I think what you're disposed to do generates an "intellectualist", mathematical description (e.g. a preference ranking) – and that we can't escape that fact and should be honest with ourselves about it – but that description isn't what's doing the moral/motivational work

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Nvidie @dervine7.bsky.social · 12h

not to mess up conversation threading, but I just wanted to note that, like @thrillhouse1701.bsky.social said, part of where I'm coming from is *opposition* to overintellectualizing. values aren't about what you think, they're about what you *do*

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Nvidie @dervine7.bsky.social · 13h

choose the adult, and that I believe the reasons support this disposition, but that this doesn't have anything to do with the phenomenological/attentional aspects of my valuing? (in fact I think this might be the case: on an interpersonal level I care about and respect infants and children a lot)

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Nvidie @dervine7.bsky.social · 13h

genuine question (i.e. this isn't meant as a gotcha, I'm trying to figure out where the disagreement is): would it bother you less if I said that if faced with a choice between saving the life of an infant and the life of an adult, where I have no other reasons to favor one over the other, I would

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Nvidie @dervine7.bsky.social · 13h

I think that's pretty implausible tbh. the whole point of the the "protecting the children" slogan is to bypass reasoning altogether to make an immediate emotional appeal

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Nvidie @dervine7.bsky.social · 13h

I don't know why you think I don't understand that

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Nvidie @dervine7.bsky.social · 17h

I was just noting that the relative difference in impact isn't so clear-cut. it's also the case that an adult who has built their self-understanding & values around some thing/capacity/etc. might struggle to recover from its loss in a way that a child who hasn't would not

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Nvidie @dervine7.bsky.social · 17h

I'm not claiming they don't, and from a brief search it does seem to be true that traumatic events in childhood are associated with more psychological problems than the same events in adulthood

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Nvidie @dervine7.bsky.social · 17h

I think, *in general* (none of these are "as such" claims), the adult has a richer web of interests, personal valuings, and relationships

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Nvidie @dervine7.bsky.social · 17h

I meant the thought that the infant's death is more tragic bc they miss more of life, which seems to be weighing potential interests against actually existing present interests and taking the quantity of loss of the former to outweigh the loss of the latter

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Nvidie @dervine7.bsky.social · 17h

yeah that's the tendency I find highly morally suspect (it triggers moral disgust for me, tbh)

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Nvidie @dervine7.bsky.social · 17h

(tbc my point there isn't "so it's fine for a child to lose a leg actually bc they'll learn to deal with it", I'm just noting that it isn't so clear what to say about relative resilience & ability to recover)

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Nvidie @dervine7.bsky.social · 17h

(also on 2, I do think we sometimes underestimate the resilience of children and overestimate the resilience of adults. also, a child may build and come to value a self-conception that incorporates the results of a harm in a way an adult would struggle with)

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Nvidie @dervine7.bsky.social · 17h

on (2), I agree that that consideration comes into play and is important, but these intuitions also comes up when talking about *deaths*

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Nvidie @dervine7.bsky.social · 17h

yeah so on (1), mentioned this in another reply but I worry that's the same reasoning that leads to longtermism and/or opposition to abortion

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Nvidie @dervine7.bsky.social · 17h

yeah I was getting very confused reading your replies 😆

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Nvidie @dervine7.bsky.social · 17h

when I said "usually" in the OP I really did mean it: all I'm claiming is that there are morally relevant features that tend to be distributed differently between infants and adults, and those features bear on how we should value their lives

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Nvidie @dervine7.bsky.social · 17h

just quickly on the point of valuing based on group membership, tbc I don't think there's a difference here *in virtue of* group membership, or that infants' lives are universally less valuable

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Nvidie @dervine7.bsky.social · 18h

ah shit I left out a negation lol

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Nvidie @dervine7.bsky.social · 18h

oh oops I meant it provides a good case for *denying* (2), but not for *denying* (1)

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Nvidie @dervine7.bsky.social · 18h

that's totally reasonable, that's what I was getting at here:

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Nvidie @dervine7.bsky.social · 18h

I think that illustrates exactly my point! people (feel the need to) justify harm against children by denying that they have the features associated with childhood (and/or claiming that they have features associated with adulthood), and that justification is often effective

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Nvidie @dervine7.bsky.social · 18h

it seems to me that that's the same sort of reasoning that leads to longtermism or, more concretely, opposition to abortion

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