07mk
12hr ago
I'm sure there's stupidity to be found there, but when the real world REQUIRES you get things right in order to actually succeed, the accountability is to some extent baked into the cake, even if various institutions will try to put a few layers of obsfuscation between themselves and the outcomes.
That's exactly why if all that turned out to be a facade, it would be absolutely wild and crazy and turn my world upside down. I'd guess that the odds are low, but also, I'm quite sure that the true believers in those already-discredited fields would also judge the odds as being low for whatever field they're a true believer to.
No matter how stupid people are today, I'm sure they were dumber pre-1900, especially before we normalized hand-washing. Although if you want to call the entire history of humanity "the Stupid ages" I'd agree to that.
I think it could make sense to call the ages the Stupid Ages if the cause of us being stupid was the very thing that was for the purpose of addressing/avoiding/escaping stupidity, which is sort of what's happening with academia, which are ostensibly for the purpose of something like addressing stupidity, even if, overall, we're less stupid than any other age. There's something to hubris that is extra stupid than just being plain old stupid. Especially since hubris is, itself, a concept that is taught in academia as something bad and to avoid.
07mk
13hr ago
If it's a facade, it's one that is at least very functional and works reliably day in and day out. Sociology isn't demonstrating it's functional correctness billions of times per second on each of billions of devices.
Right, and imagine just how you'd react if it were proven to you that this was indeed all a facade? My model of the world doesn't have much room for something like that, where something that works literally quadrillions of times a day in basically exactly the way that all the scientists and engineers and experts and my own limited expertise say they do, and yet all of those are complete lies. This would be a revelation that comes close to - not quite, but close - to waking up in a pod and discovering that you had been in The Matrix.
Significantly, I'd wager that the belief by the typical non-stupid layman believer in those already-proven-to-be-stupid fields like sociology, [x] studies, psychology, etc. is about as strong and about as confident as mine is to electrical engineering. It's both reinforced by and causal to the constant defense such people run against scrutinizing such things with basic scientific/academic concepts like "evidence" and "logic." And if those people can be fooled into such stupid beliefs about sociology, then I could be fooled into an equally stupid belief about electrical engineering.
07mk
13hr ago
I think LLMs making people stupider doesn't have much relation to LLMs' ability detect past stupidity that had been sufficiently hidden via exploiting human biases. As long as it doesn't uniformly make all the smartest people stupid (possible, but I think LLMs likely have an effect that's bifurcated on smart/stupid people in terms of their intelligence, if at all), some smart people will exist who can direct the LLMs towards detecting and revealing that stupidity.
I suppose the depressing possibility (likelihood?) is that the populace will be so stupid due to LLMs that all the revealing-of-stupidity just makes the smart people feel like they have no mouth and they must scream. Probably a better apocalypse than the AM takeover? In any case, to avert the apocalypse, perhaps the thing to do is to accelerate the revealing of stupidity and discrediting of these institutions even more, faster than LLMs can make everyone stupid (though we may already be too late on that, even in the pre-LLM times).
07mk
13hr ago
I'm starting to think that Futurama was rather prescient in calling the turn of the century from 20th to 21st as the Stupid Ages. More and more of the facade of credibility of organizations, institutions, people, ideas, etc. that people used to believe were not stupid - justifying using them to guide their decisions to be less stupid - have revealed themselves to be deeply stupid. I hope that LLMs will become so cheap and reliable that all the previously hidden stupidity will be aired out for all to see soon enough. I just dread what unexpected stupidity will be found - sociology, [x] studies, psychology are the obvious no-brainer candidates which have already largely gone through the process, but what if it turns out even very "hard" or concrete fields like electrical engineering or chemistry are built on a bunch of stupidity that has just enough facade to be convincing to the in-field expert and certainly more than enough to the layman?
07mk
15hr ago
On the other hand, it seems equally intuitive to think that middle-management is not so concerned with appearances, instead prioritizing the bottom line.
This doesn't seem intuitive at all. From what I've observed, middle managers aren't especially known for prioritizing the bottom line - even upper managers and CEOs aren't known for that, though they're generally moreso. They're known for prioritizing their own career progression, which is sometimes helped by the bottom line, but, for middle managers, often are overwhelmed by other, often zero-sum/negative-sum concerns like office politics, which often intersects with actual politics.
07mk
15hr ago
I just want to say, from what I can tell, HereAndGone2's description:
The guys at the top, if they're smart, certainly can't believe in supernatural nonsense. So they know the truth, but they cynically power grab by manipulating the gullible masses in their ignorance. To get a top job in the hierarchy, you can't really believe the supernatural crap, so selection for smart cynics ensures the leadership is always majority, if not completely, 'we know it's bullshit but it enables us to rule over the dumb peasantry so we pretend, too'.
is basically the standard model of how the typical atheist progressive liberal believes all major religions work. Hence the talk about US imperialism and oppression and such to explain the motive behind Islamic terrorism against various Western targets, always foregoing any sort of religious/faith-based explanation except for the useful idiots who are manipulated by their ostensibly-Muslim-but-actually-atheist leaders into actually blowing themselves up. This is also related to the common notion among them that "We've already had an atheist president, but we just don't know which one," or even the during-2008 "common knowledge" belief by Democrats that Barack Obama was a lying liar who lied about his opposition to gay marriage so that he could cynically manipulate the country into legalizing gay marriage once he gained power.
07mk
15hr ago
Plenty of noob directors have been fumbling existing franchises with no problem recently, despite the risk of backlash. It beggars belief that nobody wanted to take a chance.
I think the idea that "these nerdy loser franchises for nerdy losers that somehow still broke out to mainstream success ought to be taken over and transformed to appeal to cool people like me" just wasn't as common or popular in the 90s or even 00s compared to the 2010s-20s.
07mk
15hr ago
I’m skeptical of the proposition that Anthropic employees are our moral and intellectual superiors, but clearly it cannot be discarded outright.
Intellectual, there's probably a strong case to be made. Moral, it cannot be discarded outright, but also any moral/ethical question that acts as a filter for becoming an Anthropic employee seems unlikely to provide any information for determining this, since the morals that people say they will follow is almost always entirely reflective of what they believe a morally good person would follow, which only coincidentally sometimes intersects with what they themselves would follow. That's before accounting for bad faith liars.
If she actually is mentally ill, then consenting to treatment is taking responsibility.
Given that there's currently a trial where other people are choosing whether or not to direct this towards her without her consent, it seems evident that she isn't taking responsibility, and lots of people are supporting her avoiding responsibility on the basis that she is suffering from things that are consequences of her being a mother.
In any case, "taking responsibility" for one's actions and being held accountable are different, though related, concepts.
EDIT:
Actually, I realized that this was just a non sequitur. Her being mentally ill isn't the issue here, it's whether or not she's an example of how many women are claiming that hormones make them "mentally ill" to the extent that they ought not be held accountable for their actions, in the sense that when they "take responsibility," it's through "consenting to treatment" rather than "prison, like any non-mentally-ill person would do."
So the above paragraphs that I wrote aren't all that relevant, actually. The whole point here is that we understand that "consenting to treatment" isn't actually meaningfully held accountable to anyone except the mentally ill; to claim that her hormones just made her that mentally ill as to be placed in that lower tier of being "held accountable" is also to claim that vast swathes of women in general ought to be suspected of being so "mentally ill," which puts into question their equal rights.
07mk
1d ago
I was not the most aware kid in the 90s, nor was I a Star Wars fan, but I recall that Star Wars held a near-sacred status among both scifi nerds and film enthusiasts in that time. IIRC, they were the highest grossing movies of all time until Titanic, and with about a decade having passed between the 3rd and then-latest installment, in the days of limited VHS or TV runs, its myth and legend grew. I imagine that the responsibility of handling such a holy franchise and the pressure that comes with it was probably too daunting for most directors, perhaps even Spielberg. Since Lucas was still alive, if the results were anything less than mindblowing and revolutionary like Star Wars was in 1977, whichever director was at the helm would surely get dragged through the mud (Lucas himself was dragged, of course, mostly deservedly so IMHO).
07mk
1d ago
Clancy is still getting punished. Spending years in a hospital for the criminally insane is not a good thing.
Sure, but this is only "punishment" in the same sense as that she's getting punished by being a mother whose kids are dead, which is also not a good thing. Going to the hospital for the criminally insane is there to help her get over her insanity so that she can be cured and re-enter society as a safe member, not for punishment; the unpleasantness is just a necessary consequence of the treatment, like how some medicine doesn't taste good. We can label any negative consequence of someone's actions as "punishment," but I don't think that's what people are referring to when talking about not being held accountable. If a bank robber with poor impulse control spends all his money on heroin and overdoses to death, one can claim that he was "punished" in some divine sense for his sins, but I don't think it makes sense to claim that he was held accountable in some meaningful, concrete sense.
07mk
1d ago
I'm not sure how it's possible to reference the former without referencing the latter, since the former exists as a reference to the latter.
07mk
1d ago
Whether your motivation for this discrimination is neutral or harmful does not change that.
Sure, but then this just makes it so that "racism" describes lots of entirely innocuous and even virtuous and desirable behavior. That's the far more important aspect of that definition of "racism" due to how it takes away what many people would consider perhaps the most salient characteristic of that word, which is that it's automatically bad.
07mk
1d ago
If fully automated luxury communism requires sufficiently advanced technology, then so be it, the technology must advance but until it does we can already get to work on implementing the desirable ideology it will surely enable.
This perhaps gets too much into Culture Wars, but I will say, I'm in a camp similar to this, except that I follow "the technology must advance" with "to truly overwhelming and crazy scifi/magic levels, which can only be done in an immensely wealthy and productive society, and only capitalism is known to be even capable of generating such wealth and productivity, which is why capitalism must be maintained as strongly as possible right now." I honestly don't see any other route into a Communist future that is actually desirable (i.e. doesn't equalize everyone at 0).
07mk
2d ago
This seems like an easily mostly-solved problem: if the suits are confidently unanimous you don't bug the chief; if not, you send a quick email, archive the response, and summarize it in the Show Bible.
I don't think we're there yet, but this seems like the kind of thing LLMs could be used to handle. However, LLMs could also obviate the need for an actual coherent extended universe, as the sheer volume of fanfiction being generated could take away the meaning and value of official canon in the eyes of fans.
07mk
2d ago
How much of this is just a function of people who saw the prequels as kids imprinting on the films at an early age, and enjoying them despite their uneven quality? Similar to all the people who love Disney direct-to-video sequels because they grew up with them.
This is an open question, and certainly it's nonzero, but my anecdotal experience is that, even among the younger viewers, respect for the prequels (mostly undeserved, IMHO) seems more driven by how much better they are than the sequels than by nostalgia. I've seen a number of completely new young fans who never watched the prequels or the sequels (or the originals) until recently express the opinion that the prequels are much better than the sequels.
If that's the true explanation, then just as the prequels started to be rehabilitated in the public eye as people who saw them as kids grew up and started making video essays about why the prequels were great, I wonder if we won't see the same thing happen as the kids who grew up with the sequels grow up?
We should be able to detect this pretty soon, if not now. The Force Awakens came out 11 years ago, which is less than the 16 years between The Phantom Menace and that film, but still plenty of time for then-10-year-olds to become influential in the social medias to shape the overall public view of it.
07mk
3d ago
Wouldn't it be a contradiction for any woman to become a thought leader as an anti-feminist? By definition she should be trying to not lead
I don't think that is the case. Even using the motte definition of "believes that equal rights between men and women is just," there's no reason why someone who is anti- that would believe that women ought not be leaders. If we take the more well-understood definition of something like "supports the movement that is labeled 'feminism,'" then it becomes even more stark, because the idea that women could be thought leaders is neither unique nor even unusual to the feminist movement.
I can't think of a reasonable definition of "anti-feminist" that would map onto the real world that would imply that they must be against women being thought leaders.
07mk
3d ago
By women I meant corporate bitches.
Ah. I'd guess
sex differences in how people react to things they hate in the modern environment
is a big factor in that case, since corporate bitches tend to be some of the least encumbered when it comes to expressing righteous indignation over some sort of ideological/political issue and/or have immense amounts of practice and encouragement of it in the last few decades, which should be the formative years of most of anyone in corporate.
In terms of the threat to their actual work, if we presume that corporate bitches disproportionately fill what might be hyperbolically called sinecures, doing makework, versus men who disproportionately fill jobs where their actual productivity actually drives the company's performance, I'm not sure that women are worse situated either. AI is able to do productive work, allowing the productive workers to be replaced, but sinecures and makework can be justified and invented as much as needed, to fill demand, and I don't see any signs that the demand for more corporate bitches is going down any time soon.
However, there's also the argument that AI is capable of making the productive people so much more productive and capable of performing a lot of the makework tasks such that companies do decide to cut down on the demand for corporate bitches, in favor of profits. So who knows.
But most importantly, the perception of the corporate bitches versus men could indeed be that the former is more threatened than the latter, since, presuming that there's truth to the hyperbole, the former's work is, in fact, easier for AI to replace than the latter's. So you're probably right.
07mk
3d ago
I too feel like I've see fake-out deaths happen more and more often, and I don't know if it's me growing up or if it's a real thing. But it just seems to keep happening in basically all major mainstream media works, like in the last couple seasons of Game of Thrones where, e.g. Jon Snow was saved from falling into an icy lake by his uncle coming out of nowhere, and then during the Battle of Winterfell, we kept seeing character after character get overwhelmed by zombies, only to cut away, and then later see that they somehow got out perfectly fine. Or the latest Star Wars films where we saw Kylo Ren walk out of a crashing spaceship unscathed without explanation, and then later come back from falling into a pit to save Rey, and then have Rey "die" only to get saved by him. Or recent Marvel films like Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness where Wong fell down the side of a mountain, only to be revealed to have landed on a ledge to survive. I haven't watched the latest Jurassic World film, but I heard that there was a scene near the end where a major character says "go on without me" to do a last stand, only to show up 15 minutes later unscathed, to be rescued.
If there is indeed a trend, I feel like it has to do with the extension of childhood that's been happening all throughout the West at least since my millennial generation and possibly longer. The writers want the benefits without the costs, the power without the responsibility, to have their cake and eat it too, to have that emotional death moment without the death. Children get to enjoy some of that, because they (usually) have guardians to take care of the responsibility stuff while giving them the benefits. I also expect that this effect might be stronger among mainstream media writers, as, I'm guessing, they're more likely, due to nepotism, to come from more wealthy and well-connected families which can allow them to live as children for decades at adult age.
07mk
3d ago
Have you watched Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, an earlier film by the director of The Nice Guys? It's essentially a prototype to the latter film, starring a pre-Iron Man Robert Downey Junior with a fantastic Val Kilmer (also Michelle Moghnahan). I liked it better, but I liked both.
07mk
3d ago
Also women seem to be in position to be more threatened by AI.
Do they? I don't know the stats exactly, but I was under the impression that women tended to do more people-oriented work like e.g. nurses, therapists, caretakers, while men tended to do more thing-oriented work like e.g. programmers, analysts, engineers. And the latter set of jobs seem to be more threatened than the former by AI right now. On top of that, threatening someone's job is far more negatively impactful for men than for women; a woman losing her job doesn't also have extremely negative impact on her sexual market value the same way that a man losing his job does, and that's a great determinant to someone's general life satisfaction.
Speaking of sexual market value, there's an argument that generative AI also tends to be more beneficial to women for simulating sexual relationships, as women tend to prioritize emotional connection more than physical ones, and currently AI can generate text that simulates emotions much better than it can generate atoms that simulate physical flesh and blood. So we could see a future with billions of femcels happily chatting with their AI boyfriends on their phones while billions of incels cry to sleep after jerking it to their ideal GF on a 2D screen on their phone.
HOWEVER, a counter-argument could be that women are more status-conscious and so they may be less likely to accept an AI partner as a good substitute; an AI can simulate status, but it can't actually be a high status man. So I think the jury's still out on that.
Of course, innovations in robotics and material sciences could make these even out or even flip, but those haven't happened yet.
Which explains why the foaming at the mouth AI haters are mostly women.
This doesn't match my experience, but I feel like this could be more down to sex differences in how people react to things they hate in the modern environment than to do with sex differences in how much they actually are threatened by it.
I also think there may be a portion of image/video generation that women tend to get more upset about. That is, image/video generation allows for the creation of infinitely diverse, bespoke porn, which cuts out actual women from the production cycle, arguably lowering the price they can charge for actual photos and actually filmed videos. It also greatly lowers the barrier to entry for someone to take a real photo of a real clothed person and to draw over it in a way that makes it appear as if she's nude, or even to create a completely new image with a new pose and setting for the same face, which I believe women tend to find problematic more often than men do. Likewise with the ability for someone to take a photo and then generate more images and audio to put together to a video where only the first frame is a real photo, and the rest of the video is a depiction of the actual person doing something that never happened.
I'm arguing it's better than the implicit proposed alternative of "I want a movie where the tall good-looking kid kicks in the short whiny kid's teeth".
That's a fine argument to make, but that's a very different argument or statement than the one from that comment I originally responded to, which claimed that basically all movies universally were "tall goood-looking kid kicks in the short whiny kid's teeth" in the before-times, which the Jews saved us from (according to SS's narrative, anyway). If you're now claiming that the statement you made was false for the purpose of hyperbole, I think that's inaccurate, but justified.
I don't think I'd really enjoy seeing even one token overdog movie. I can just look at real life if I want a big-kid's-values-reinforced story.
I don't have much of an opinion on any given film without knowing the specifics, but I personally want a high diversity of types of movies to cater to a diverse group of people, including those who want to celebrate seeing the big dog crush the underdog because of the implicit message of the film that being big and strong is morally superior to being small and weak. I see a dearth of that right now, and I personally think it's because of just plain old profit-motive plus luck of history, rather than anything nefarious. But intent need not be malicious for bad things to happen, and I certainly think that a relative dearth of such diverse fiction to cater to such diverse people is a bad thing.
07mk
3d ago
Currently I find that the story of the big kid beating up small kids finds plenty of traction as long as the big kid has the moral* high ground. I am not interested in watching stories where the big kid beats small kids up simply because he can and that is the entire message. If that means that the small kid in movies will always be coded non-Aryan, I'll take that trade. My hair is not particularly blonde, anyway.
Okay, but your personal opinions and preferences aren't what's being discussed here. It's the lack of diversity in fictional media where, e.g. big kid beats small kids up simply because he can and that is the entire message. I don't know if I'd personally like that sort of media specifically*, but neither my preference for/against it nor yours is really relevant to the reality of the lack of such diversity in the recent media landscape. Which is what I was addressing by pointing out that describing things before as "endless cultural veneration of the big kid's boot on the small kid's face, forever" is wrong.
It seems like you're just saying, "Okay, you're right, but it's a good thing." Which is fine, I don't think anyone has any issues with you thinking it's a good thing. But that doesn't change the reality.
* As always, it would have to come down to the execution, which is orthogonal to the message. Possibly my favorite film of all time is Schindler's List, and I'd personally love to see a film with similar competence in filmmaking that just depicts Nazis crushing the Jews as glorious, which I could rank as better. It's just unlikely, since outdoing 80s/90s Spielberg is very unlikely.
I think you're right. But:
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