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The Old Hack

Story Monday May 15, 2017

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"I did see a dress at the mall I sorta liked?"

Serious question: will Elliot's conscience allow him to magically copy that dress, or will that feel like pirating to him? Would considering the morality of that possibly lead him to decide not to transform up any clothing he doesn't own, leading to having a wardrobe of girl outfits as transformation reference?

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5 minutes ago, onfurtherreview said:

"I did see a dress at the mall I sorta liked?"

Serious question: will Elliot's conscience allow him to magically copy that dress, or will that feel like pirating to him? Would considering the morality of that possibly lead him to decide not to transform up any clothing he doesn't own, leading to having a wardrobe of girl outfits as transformation reference?

Hrm. Interesting. What would that be, a victimless noncrime? *scratches head*

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Elliot doesn't need to copy clothes; she's already produced originals. Heck, as long as she's thinking with might and main about clothes and such, wouldn't this be the perfect time for her to discover her true calling? Fashion, of course!

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4 minutes ago, Tom Sewell said:

Elliot doesn't need to copy clothes; she's already produced originals. Heck, as long as she's thinking with might and main about clothes and such, wouldn't this be the perfect time for her to discover her true calling? Fashion, of course!

We don't really know that the clothes she has produced so far were originals, as opposed to some outfit seen on a classmate or wherever. 

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Regarding Elliot's conjured clothing, I'd draw a distinction between two categories... one of which, I suspect, will not interest him any time soon.

Haute couture stuff, runway showpieces, fursuits, and the like - those are pieces of art, and part of their draw is their uniqueness. If he conjures a duplicate, that's taking something important away from the designers and purchasers.

Stuff that is in mass production... well, it's in mass production. There's no uniqueness to take away. And his conjuring one does not deprive the sellers of one, so he isn't taking anything physical from them. At most, he's taking away a potential sale... and were it not for his powers, he wouldn't be buying a dress anyway.

The ethics get slightly more complicated when he creates clothes for his sister or female friends, but it's not much different than a group of girls trading clothes among themselves.

Although I do think he'd bug the holy cr** out of the other contestants on Project Runway.

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6 hours ago, Don Edwards said:

Fruit is intended to be eaten - in hopes that you (or some animal) will swallow the seeds and deposit them somewhere else in a nice lump of fertilizer.

This even extends to hard-to-eat fruits like ghost peppers. (Yes, botanically they are fruit. So are tomatoes, and several other things that are culinary vegetables.) The catch there is that the seeds will rarely survive the typical mammalian herbivore's teeth and digestive system, so US eating them is not good for the plant's genome. They can pass through a bird's beak and digestive system with a rather high survival rate, though... and birds don't have the receptors to notice capsicum.

Both true: fruit is intended to be eaten BUT fruit is not intended to be eaten by human, who sometimes cut the seeds out (apple) or crunch them with teeth and even in the lucky case when he eat it with the fruit he then flush it to toilet which is rarely good condition for growth. Especially if the fruit was transfered hundreds of kilometres out of zone it's able to grow in.

18 hours ago, Nayl said:

She does not fear judgement - her blood family is accepting to the point of indifference, her friends are literally every color of the rainbow, and her girlfriend actually really digs her difference.

And her clone knows exactly how she feels ... and decided to be female.

3 hours ago, chridd said:

Also, humans can lie (to others, to themselves), and humans can change their behavior based on their understanding of human behavior.  Physics doesn't care what we know about it.

Bell's theorem and few related quantum physics properties suggest it does care. Still, even with superposition theoretically holding infinite amount of data in single particle, humans are more complicated ... because we ARE from particles, and lot of them. Personally I believe that brain includes system for amplifying quantum effects which produces free will ...

3 hours ago, The Old Hack said:

Bah. Surely we can just have Jack Bauer torture the truth out of everyone. *grumble grumble*

You can never get the truth out of someone, no matter if by torture or bribe. Most you can get is what he knows or thinks he know, but truth? Most people will not even tell you the factorization of 1100771835408811 !

2 hours ago, onfurtherreview said:

Serious question: will Elliot's conscience allow him to magically copy that dress, or will that feel like pirating to him? Would considering the morality of that possibly lead him to decide not to transform up any clothing he doesn't own, leading to having a wardrobe of girl outfits as transformation reference?

It will, until someone point out the problem to him.

I think he never though about pirating so much to realize that copying dress may be copyright violation (although ... quick google search suggest that it isn't, unless it's jewellery or pattern ; and trademark is separate issue).

1 hour ago, Don Edwards said:

Stuff that is in mass production... well, it's in mass production. There's no uniqueness to take away. And his conjuring one does not deprive the sellers of one, so he isn't taking anything physical from them. At most, he's taking away a potential sale... and were it not for his powers, he wouldn't be buying a dress anyway.

Funny that the same doesn't work for mass produced music or software. Well, someone got good lawyers and lobbyists soon enough, someone didn't ...

But we are not talking about what's legal or moral ; we are talking about Elliot and he will be likely to overthink it and get guilt trip no matter of what makes sense ...

1 hour ago, Don Edwards said:

The ethics get slightly more complicated when he creates clothes for his sister or female friends, but it's not much different than a group of girls trading clothes among themselves.

Note that those clothes don't last long. I would say that they would work as nice demos.

 

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37 minutes ago, hkmaly said:

Both true: fruit is intended to be eaten BUT fruit is not intended to be eaten by human, who sometimes cut the seeds out (apple) or crunch them with teeth and even in the lucky case when he eat it with the fruit he then flush it to toilet which is rarely good condition for growth. Especially if the fruit was transfered hundreds of kilometres out of zone it's able to grow in.

If the fruit is bred and grown by humans, then from a genetic/biological fitness perspective, humans eating the fruit is good for the plant, because it gives money to the farmers who will then plant the plant's offspring and water, fertilize, etc. them.

37 minutes ago, hkmaly said:

Personally I believe that brain includes system for amplifying quantum effects which produces free will ...

I've seen plenty of people who seem to believe things like this, and have never seen any actual evidence.  Unless I hear from some actual neuroscientist or quantum physicist that the brain uses quantum effects (beyond the fact that technically everything is a quantum effect), or see actual evidence or an actual explanation of how specifically brains use quantum mechanics, I'm going to assume that brains just use classical mechanics, and that people are just bad at understanding determinism and its implications (or, rather, lack thereof) on free will (or are trying to hold onto vitalism/dualism in spite of evidence to the contrary).  (I don't mean that I think people are stupid or uneducated or anything; I suspect our brains just aren't set up to deal with these philosophical issues well.)


Regarding the complexity of sexual orientation and gender identity: if you cover all possibilities, then it's super complicated.  I don't actually know how many of those possibilities occur in practice; I don't know what the actual dimensions are in terms of how it actually works (e.g., are there dimensions "sexual attraction to males", "sexual attraction to females", "romantic attraction to males", "romantic attraction to females"; or are there dimensions "attraction to males", "attraction to females", "attraction manifests as sexual", "attraction manifests as romantic"? are cis-genderless people high on the dimensions "okay being female" and "okay being male", or are they low on the dimensions "tendency to experience physical dysphoria" and "tendency to experience social dysphoria" with a gender identity that ends up not really doing anything?), and of course people can have preferences that don't come from sexual orientation or gender identity, and might not know which preferences come from where.

...and it's not like other things are simpler; if you consider things people are interested in, there are lots of potential interests (and each person can be interested in any combination of things to any amount), lots of potential sub-interests, lots of reasons to be interested in things, and effectively new dimensions are added over time (the dimensions "interest in computer programming" and "interest in video games" didn't exist a couple hundred years ago).

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37 minutes ago, chridd said:
1 hour ago, hkmaly said:

Both true: fruit is intended to be eaten BUT fruit is not intended to be eaten by human, who sometimes cut the seeds out (apple) or crunch them with teeth and even in the lucky case when he eat it with the fruit he then flush it to toilet which is rarely good condition for growth. Especially if the fruit was transfered hundreds of kilometres out of zone it's able to grow in.

If the fruit is bred and grown by humans, then from a genetic/biological fitness perspective, humans eating the fruit is good for the plant, because it gives money to the farmers who will then plant the plant's offspring and water, fertilize, etc. them.

Well, probably not offspring of that specific plant but it's close relative, so, yes. On the other hand, the same will be true for human-bred animals.

37 minutes ago, chridd said:

I've seen plenty of people who seem to believe things like this, and have never seen any actual evidence.  Unless I hear from some actual neuroscientist or quantum physicist that the brain uses quantum effects (beyond the fact that technically everything is a quantum effect), or see actual evidence or an actual explanation of how specifically brains use quantum mechanics, I'm going to assume that brains just use classical mechanics, and that people are just bad at understanding determinism and its implications (or, rather, lack thereof) on free will (or are trying to hold onto vitalism/dualism in spite of evidence to the contrary).  (I don't mean that I think people are stupid or uneducated or anything; I suspect our brains just aren't set up to deal with these philosophical issues well.)

Well, I also agree with

Lyall Watson said:

If the human brain were so simple that we could understand it, we would be so simple that we couldn't.

and there was also nice clever quote about using brains for philosophy mentioning what it evolved for ...

37 minutes ago, chridd said:

Regarding the complexity of sexual orientation and gender identity: if you cover all possibilities, then it's super complicated.  I don't actually know how many of those possibilities occur in practice

I think that 7,505,280,000 will be good estimate. If you ask for how many exist in give moment, I mean ; if you mean in general, then we may reach infinity.

37 minutes ago, chridd said:

are cis-genderless people high on the dimensions "okay being female" and "okay being male", or are they low on the dimensions "tendency to experience physical dysphoria" and "tendency to experience social dysphoria"

Why not both?

Seriously: how ok you feel being the gender you is may not be directly related to how would you feel if you would be the other gender.

37 minutes ago, chridd said:

the dimensions "interest in computer programming" and "interest in video games" didn't exist a couple hundred years ago

I believe they did. Sure, you couldn't actually program computer before they went invented, but Ada Lovelace did much more computer programming than she was able to actually try on any computer she had access to (this observation is trivial, as she died in 1852 and the Analytical Engine was not actually build yet). You can have interest in something without ever seeing that thing - and in fact, many inventions started like this.

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Some of you seem to have missed the greatest group of species to benefit from human evolution: Grasses! Sure, trees got monkeys to eat fruit and shit seeds-with-their-own-fertilizer. But grasses turned primates against trees by bringing monkeys to the ground, giving them enough brains to make tools that could cut down trees--and also thin out grazers. All the cereal crops are grasses: Wheat, barley, oats, rice, corn, and more obscure cereals like syllium and emmer. Then they gave humans fire, so humans would cut firewood, and golf as a first step toward lawns. And, of course, booze so we'd be too drunk to see through their insidious control over our entire civilization. And MacDonalds! The Amazon rainforest is being felled to make room for pastures for cows for Big Macs! And the bacon conspiracy! How else do you explain Iowa? An entire state that's one big cornfield.

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1 hour ago, Tom Sewell said:

Some of you seem to have missed the greatest group of species to benefit from human evolution: Grasses! Sure, trees got monkeys to eat fruit and shit seeds-with-their-own-fertilizer. But grasses turned primates against trees by bringing monkeys to the ground, giving them enough brains to make tools that could cut down trees--and also thin out grazers. All the cereal crops are grasses: Wheat, barley, oats, rice, corn, and more obscure cereals like syllium and emmer. Then they gave humans fire, so humans would cut firewood, and golf as a first step toward lawns. And, of course, booze so we'd be too drunk to see through their insidious control over our entire civilization. And MacDonalds! The Amazon rainforest is being felled to make room for pastures for cows for Big Macs! And the bacon conspiracy! How else do you explain Iowa? An entire state that's one big cornfield.

You really think grass on golf course ENJOYS being so short? Maybe it did started as an attack of grass on trees, but their victory seem very Pyrrhic. Seems it got out of their hands long time ago. I mean ... hmmm ... what does grass use instead of hands?

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1 minute ago, Tom Sewell said:
2 minutes ago, hkmaly said:

what does grass use instead of hands?

Us.

Oh. Right. That works. It definitely got out of us.

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3 hours ago, hkmaly said:

Most people will not even tell you the factorization of 1100771835408811 !

 
102199 * 103573 * 103993
By the way, thanks for having that space in there - factoring 1100771835408811! would be absurd.
2 hours ago, chridd said:

are cis-genderless people high on the dimensions "okay being female" and "okay being male", or are they low on the dimensions "tendency to experience physical dysphoria" and "tendency to experience social dysphoria" with a gender identity that ends up not really doing anything?

In my model, "how much is being male part of your identity" and "how much is being female part of your identity" are two dimensions. People who are agender are somewhere near zero on both scales; people who are bi-gender are fairly high on both scales; what you're referring to as "cis-genderless" are (assuming I'm interpreting that correctly) more often called "gender-neutral", and are somewhere between those two - and more or less even on both scales. Cisgender people are, of course, significantly higher on one scale than on the other - as are transgender people, but the scale they're higher on doesn't match their physical sex.

My suspicion is that most agender and gender-neutral people simply assume they are cisgender, because they don't experience anything that would cause them to question it - and if something magically changed their sex but not their gender, their questioning of the results would be over developed habits/knowledge and other people's expectations, not over their identity. (Prime example: Elliot.) The difference is that the gender-neutral embrace being the sex they are, while the agender don't care; so after a change the gender-neutral would seek out experience related to their new sex, while the agender would try to eliminate disruption as much as possible. Or to put it another way, after changing sex to female an agender would buy a few bras to wear under their existing T-shirts while a gender-neutral would buy bras, blouses, skirts, and dresses. (Meanwhile, a cisgender would have become transgender, so would be wanting to do some combination of hiding and passing-as-male. And a transwoman would have become cisgender, and quite happy about the change. Although it would undoubtedly still take at least a little getting used to.)

The bi-gender, unfortunately, get stuck wanting to be both at the same time. And at the other end are folks who are in significantly-negative numbers on both scales, actively wanting to be neither; the most common term for that is "neutrois". Both of these are difficult to achieve or to get anyone else to recognize and respect - particularly in languages with exactly two sex-linked genders.

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43 minutes ago, Don Edwards said:
5 hours ago, hkmaly said:

Most people will not even tell you the factorization of 1100771835408811 !

 
102199 * 103573 * 103993

EGS readers proved they are not "most people" on multiple issues already. (Also, good luck to find out without computer.)

 

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