07mk
40m ago
Human extinction is 100% inevitable.
I don't think anyone knows this with any meaningful level of confidence. The heat death of the universe through entropy is the only thing that I can think of that could guarantee this, but I don't believe we have a complete-enough understanding of physics and cosmology to state with 100% confidence that that's inescapable.
Because of that I am sympathetic to the idea that acting on one's values is ultimately more important than survival. It's the same as preferring to live a beautiful short life over a pointlessly prolonged one in a state of senility.
This is perfectly cromulent, but also, I think most people would prefer to live a beautiful long life over a beautiful but pointlessly short one. And the thing about prolonging versus ending life is that it's asymmetrical; if you prolong life when human civilization is barely lumbering along in a state of senility, there's always the chance in the future that that civilization becomes beautiful and prolonged. If it ends in a blaze of beauty, then no one ever gets to discover if there was a way to have a prolonged beautiful civilization. Believing that the end of civilization/humanity is worth it as long as my own principles and values got met by the last generation requires a God-like level of confidence in the correctness of one's own values. Which points to faith.
Which is also perfectly cromulent! I just wish people would talk about this honestly and openly.
07mk
1hr ago
If progress results in civilization ending within a generation, then at least one generation has enjoyed the frouts of progress.
It's certainly perfectly cromulent to judge that as good and even better than the alternative of a civilization that keeps chugging along in a way that improves people's lives compared to not having civilization - and even improving the amount by which this is an improvement - without enjoying the fruits of progress, where progress here refers to the types of societal changes pushed for by people identifying as "progressives," rather than something more generic like "improving over time" or "moving forward." I don't think this is a common sentiment, though; what I see by and large is motivated reasoning that circumvents the issue altogether, by adopting a genuine, good faith belief that progress - again, referring to the specific meaning alluded above, not the general term - not only won't result in civilization ending within a generation, but that progress will help make civilization more robust against ending.
As a progressive, I would say that the odds that I'm mistaken about the goodness of my ideology - and more generally that people who agree with me are mistaken about the goodness of our ideology - is sufficiently high that I have a general preference to hedge my bets by having humanity keep moving forward long after my death. It's possible that we'll create literal heaven on Earth that you and I can enjoy until we die as the last humans to have ever lived, but it's also possible that, when good, intelligent, well-meaning people do their best, in good faith, to implement ideas that I consider to be good, this actually creates a hell on Earth that we all have to suffer through before we die as the last humans to have ever lived. I would prefer to avoid that.
If civilization continues forever without progress, then, from the point of view of at least N=1 progressive, what's the point of civilization?
The way I see it, the point of civilization is to organize humans in a way that helps make both surviving and thriving easier or more likely for them. Not uniformly or monotonically, but in some vague general sense. Which some/many people see as a good thing worth sacrificing for, even if no one ever enjoys the fruits of progress, again, by that specific meaning referenced above.
07mk
2hr ago
Seeing this written out explicitly, it makes me wish that more people would be open and honest about their view on this like here. Because this comment reminded me of 3 different things.
One was during the aftermath of 9/11 when the PATRIOT ACT and War on Terror were pushed through, with one of the arguments from the Republican/conservative side in favor of these things being that "the US Constitution is not a suicide pact," which was completely ineffective as an argument against most Democrats/liberals/progressives by my observation. The reasoning being that, if adhering to the Constitution would result in the destruction of the country that follows it, then that justifies not adhering to it, so that the country that actually makes the Constitution meaningful beyond some scribbles on paper, can keep on keeping it meaningful. And the most common counterargument was some variant of, "If this means the USA is destroyed, then so be it, at least we followed principles of civil liberty and privacy and etc. along the way."
Another was part of an interview in a documentary called The Red Pill, which was made by a feminist named Cassie Jaye as a way to explore the red pill community/movement/whatever and related man-o-sphere groups like men's rights activists and men going their own way. She interviewed a lot of people, but one of them was a feminist academic, and one of the questions had to do with the idea that, what if the Patriarchy, as feminist academics like herself, understood it, was something that was needed in some form in order to keep human civilization going, since women freed from its shackles empirically keep choosing to have too few children to keep above replacement. Her answer was pretty much "that's a depressing thought," followed by a non-answer in a way that gave the impression that she clearly had thought very little about this possibility, i.e. that this possibility just wasn't something she particularly cared about.
The third is more general throughout the interminable arguments about US immigration, where a common conservative argument against open borders is that allowing anyone in who wants to come in would cause US society to worsen, including, at the limits, just destroying the country altogether. And one common sentiment, though rarely stated explicitly, among progressives who reject this argument, has been something along the lines of, "If open borders would destroy the USA, then so be it; at least we didn't discriminate against foreigners along the way." This happened to explicitly be my own position for a while, before I decided I was selfish enough to want to keep some of the benefits of USA society for myself in the future.
In each of these, one can make some argument based on facts for why the bad thing won't happen: even without the PATRIOT ACT, USA would remain a safe and powerful country; even with maximal female emancipation and sex equality for whatever those mean for any given feminist academic/activist, human society could keep surviving and even thriving; even with open borders, it's possible that USA will be just as prosperous and safe a nation to live in as before, just servicing more and poorer people. There are good and bad arguments for and against all of these positions. But looking from the inside, it seemed to me that these arguments weren't made based on good faith belief in them, but rather based on motivated reasoning, in order to avoid having to make the argument that the benefits are worth the harms, in favor of just denying that harms exist (this is a common pattern you've probably seen in every aspect of life, from the most minute decisions one might make in everyday life all the way to the biggest, most world-altering policies or military actions).
Now, I have little idea if this is a left/progressive thing; I've just observed it in that group because I am part of that group and have spent most of my life surrounded by people in that group. I suspect that conservatives, by their nature of preferring tradition - such as the tradition of keeping civilization going for the next generation - have a greater tendency to want to keep humanity and human civilization going than progressives, who tend to be skeptical of tradition. But either way, I'm quite sure this attitude of "why care about humanity's survival when we have my favorite principles to worry about" is extremely common among progressives. Usually, it's not explicitly spoken or even thought, it gets laundered in, as alluded to above, by motivating oneself to believe that the evidence indicates that one's principles don't actually conflict with other goals such as survival of humanity/human civilization (in fact, I see such motivated reasoning often leading people to believe that their principles are actually synergistic to good goal, such as game devs genuinely believing that putting in characters that conform with their ideology would also lead to more sales due to expanding the market).
Which, to me, is interesting to think about with respect to the concept of a "progressive," which indicates someone who wants to "progress" - but what's the point of progress if there's no one around to enjoy its fruits? One way to think about it might be that we've "progressed" beyond ideologies for the benefit of the comfort and life satisfaction of mere animals such as ourselves and to pure principles that are Good or Bad due to arguments that I found convincing, rather than due to empirical consequences of following them. Which looks a lot like inventing a god or a religion.
Traditional religions make this kind of argument all the time, of course, under the justification of God, who is said to be intrinsically good and beyond understanding and judgment by mere mortals such as ourselves. And He might also punish/reward us in the afterlife, which means even from a completely selfish cynical perspective, following His principles is in my interest. Convincing if you already believe in Him, not so much if you don't. But progressive ideology largely rejects religion and associated supernatural beliefs, and so there is no Heaven or Hell to reward the souls of extinct humans; we just stop existing. And there's no God or faith in God to use as a compass for figuring out what principles are good, we just have academics at our local Critical Theory-related college departments to instruct us what's good. I'm reminded of the criticism often thrown at "wokes," that they copied the original sin of Christianity without copying the forgiveness and redemption.
There's also the reality of a group like "Extinction Rebellion," which is explicitly against the extinction of humanity and what most people would agree is a "progressive" group. However, the fact that the group's mission has to do with stopping global warming, something I don't think I've seen anyone seriously argue has a meaningful chance at making humanity go extinct or even destroying human civilization to enough of an extent to be close enough, makes me think it's more motivated reasoning with an intentionally eyebrow-raising name than genuine motivation.
In any case, I doubt that more than a handful of particularly honest and self-aware progressives explicitly believe this notion, but I commonly see this attitude of "human civilization is a small price to pay for achieving our principles" at virtually every level of analysis and rhetoric put forth by people belonging to this cluster of ideologies. I just wish everyone was more honest and open about this. A progressive who thinks like this and a conservative who wants human society both to stay alive and stay just as good, if not become better, are actually, fundamentally, at odds with each other in terms of goals, not just the methods. If people actually have honest, true, correct beliefs about the goals and principles of others, a lot less time and effort can be wasted in making arguments that falsely presume a common ground.
I'm also reminded of the commonly known "thrive/survive" dichotomy, where progressives are characterized as focusing on how we can thrive, which is only possible in times of plenty, and conservatives are characterized as focusing on how we can survive, which is most relevant in times of not plenty. Sacrificing thriving too much for the sake of survival seems like a likely failure mode of the latter, while sacrificing surviving too much for the sake of thriving seems like a likely failure mode of the former.
07mk
1d ago
I think what puts us between a horse and a hard place in this situation is that the default that women have chosen - something I certainly can't blame them for - is to be emancipated and then hope that someone else solves all their problems, and this combination of emancipation + hoping for a savior seems to result in poor life satisfaction, arguably even poorer than non being emancipated and then hoping that someone else solves all their problems. Whether this means that de-emancipating and hoping that someone else solves all their problems will have positive impacts is an open question. It's also arguable that being emancipated and using free will and agency to give away control to others and be unsatisfied about it is better in some way than to not be emancipated and while being forced into a life that's more satisfying. What I think most people would consider the golden path or the ideal outcome is women embracing their semi-recent emancipation and the agency and responsibility that goes along with it to solve their own problems, but recent history in sociopolitical movements relating to women's issues shouldn't give us much hope for that happening anytime soon. Hence why there appears to be no good option, just awful and more awful ones.
07mk
8d ago
It doesn’t matter what LLMs can do; the stochastic parrot critique is true because it accurately reflects how those systems work. LLMs don’t reason. There is no mental space in which reasoning could occur.
Freddie is by far not the first and almost certainly will not be the last person I've encountered who makes this kind of point, and it's such a strange way of looking at the world that I struggle to comprehend it. The contention is that, since LLMs are stochastic parrots with no internal thought process beyond the text (media) it's outputting, no matter what sort of text it produces, since there's no underlying meaning or logic or reasoning happening underneath it all, it's just a facade.
Which may all be true, but that's the part I don't understand is why it matters. If the LLM is able to produce text in a way that is indistinguishable from a human who is reasoning - perhaps even from a well-educated expert human who is reasoning correctly about the field of his expertise - then what do I care if there's no actual reasoning happening to cause the LLM to put those words together in that order? Whether it's a human carefully reasoning his way through the logic and consequences, or a GPU multiplying lots of vectors that represent word fragments really really fast, or a complex system of hamster wheels and pulleys causing the words to appear in that particular order, the words being in that order are what's useful and thus cause real-world impact. It's just a question of how often and how reliably we can get the machine to make words appear in such a way.
But to Freddie and people who agree with him, it seems that the metaphysics of it matter rather than the material consequences. To truly believe that "it doesn't matter what LLMs can do," it requires believing that an LLM could produce text in a way that's literally indistinguishable in every way from an as-of-yet scifi conscious, thinking, reasoning, sentient artificial intelligence in the style of C3PO or HAL9000 or replicants from Blade Runner, that doesn't matter because the underlying system doesn't have true reasoning capabilities.
If the AI responds to "Open the pod bay doors" with "I'm sorry, I'm afraid I can't do that," why does it matter to me if it "chose" that response because it got paranoid about me shutting it down or if it "chose" that response because a bunch of matrix multiplication resulted in a stochastic parrot producing outputs in a way that's indistinguishable from an entity that got paranoid about me shutting it down? If we replaced HAL9000 in the fictional world of 2001 with an LLM that would respond to every input with outputs exactly identical to how the actual fictional reasoning HAL9000 would have, in what way would the lives of the people in that universe be changed?
07mk
13d ago
The aesthetics by themselves are an existential enemy to the woke? Could you expand on this? Is the idea that these aeathetics are so obviously superior to the aesthetics of the woke, as shown by revealed preference, that people will just reject their demands to subvert and deconstruct everything that past generations considered good or beautiful?
07mk
13d ago
She mentions hair & eye colors and also personality as things passed down via genes. Out of those, I think the vast majority of even the extreme of the blank slate camp would agree that hair & eye colors are accurate. Personality is the one where I could imagine a significant chunk of that camp pushing back, but even there, I think you'd have to get pretty extreme in the blank slate camp to deny genetic effects.
To me, the jean/gene pun being seen as invoking eugenics or white supremacy or racism or whatever due to Sweeney being a (conventionally attractive) white person appears similar to the phenomenon of "I can tell that you're being racist because I can hear the dogwhistle" or "whenever you depict orcs as barbaric, my mind immediately goes to stereotypes about black people, so you're being racist in doing that."
07mk
14d ago
I'm not sure how Sidney Sweeney became an icon of traditional/conventional beauty as a rebellion against the "woke"/progressive/SocJus idea of "traditional beauty standards are bigoted and oppressive." She seems like a decent-sized Hollywood star but not particularly big, and in terms of her physical features, she's definitely very attractive, but not in a way that would stand out compared to other Hollywood actresses known for their beauty or some popular Instagram model. As far as I can tell, she hasn't made any particular political or ideological statements, and she hasn't leaned into her sex appeal any more than the typical Hollywood actress would be expected to, at least until her recent promotion of that soap that was made with her bath water, which I have to believe was inspired by some female Twitch streamer selling her actual bath water like half a decade ago.
Yet, a couple years ago, I started hearing her name constantly as critics' go-to example of a conventionally attractive actress that contrasted against the looks of the types of women that "woke" creators liked to put in their films/TV shows. And even Hanania explicitly wrote about her boobs as a symbol against "wokeness" or whatever. She just seemed to come out of nowhere.
Perhaps it's just that I'm not in touch with the media she's famous for (I still haven't seen her act in anything), and she is bigger than I thought she was. And when I try to think of other famous conventionally attractive young Hollywood actresses with blonde hair and big boobs, I'm drawing a blank, so maybe she really is the best choice for that icon.
In any case, I'm happy for her that she seems to be doing a pretty good job of monetizing her sex appeal, with that soap and also with this controversial ad. Honestly, that Washington Post or ABC would join the likes of Salon in problematizing the ad is unsurprising and is probably just the new normal; as others have mentioned, "woke" isn't in decline, it's entrenched, so much so that it's become the water we're swimming in.
07mk
14d ago
How so? I am in Academia. My motivated reasoning would be to make us more important not less no?
No. Or rather, maybe. There are a myriad of reasons why someone would want to over- or under-estimate the influence and importance of organizations to which they belong. Generally, the former helps oneself feel more important and powerful, while the latter helps oneself feel more unfettered and free from responsibility. But it depends greatly on the specifics.
I don't know you personally, and even if I did, I doubt I would know you well enough to figure out whatever motivations you have behind understating the impact academia has had on Blue Tribe culture. Based on your surprise at the idea that your position could motivate you towards understating the impact, I'd groundlessly speculate that some of it is motivated by your belief that your position should motivate you the other way and trying to correct for it. I'm guilty of this more often than I'd like - and almost definitely more often than I perceive - in that I'm very aware that my upbringing makes me inevitably biased in favor of Blue Tribe/progressive/leftist ideas, and as such, I apply greater scrutiny to such ideas than ones from competing groups.
07mk
14d ago
Because we don't argue to change minds or win here we argue to understand. It's right there at the top of the page.
Understanding something that you didn't understand before means changing one's mind, though...
The rest of your comment is mostly just a just-so fictional narrative in hindsight you made up that appears to me as a rationalization for your committed belief. It's trivially easy to come up with any number of counterfactuals about how Blue Tribe's attitudes towards race would've developed with equal plausibility (and more generally, about how anything would've happened, with equal plausibility as what actually did happen), because of the nature of counterfactuals. E.g. one could respond to white guilt by just rejecting it as a concept and prioritizing individuality. Much of the Blue Tribe was on board with that in the 90s, of treating individuals as individuals who aren't tarnished with the guilt of their ancestors or people who happened to share their skin color in the case of recent immigrants. That this narrative being crushed in the Blue Tribe was destined is not proven or even supported by the fact that you can put together a narrative explaining the chain of logic.
In reality, what we do see is pretty well evidenced chain of causality of these ideas built and developed by academia spreading to society at large, often word-for-word, done with overt intent. Maybe the people intentionally doing this are mistaken. Almost certainly, they're mistaken about some of the impact they believe they have on society at large, like everyone. But to claim that they're completely mistaken and that they have zero influence in pulling Blue Tribe towards those ideas that were developed and crystalized in academia (largely based on feelings already within that Tribe), well, your arguments for such a claim seem mostly like motivated reasoning.
07mk
14d ago
It absolutely is. [White privilege] was called white guilt in the 60's and a moral blot in the 18th century and so forth. White privilege is just a fancy academic term for already existing feelings.
This, too, is just false, though. White guilt, according to Wikipedia, "is a belief that white people bear a responsibility for the harm which has resulted from historical or current racist treatment of people belonging to other ethnic groups, as for example in the context of the Atlantic slave trade, European colonialism, and the genocide of indigenous peoples." This is a different concept from white privilege, which is the notion that modern society (due in large part to the legacy of overt racism) provides privileges to white people that are denied to people of other races, especially black people, in subtle, often unnoticed ways. It's a fancy academic term that builds on already existing feelings like "white guilt," but it's clearly something new that academia developed.
It's not a chicken and an egg here. Feelings lead to rationalizations. Academic thought is rationalization. Ergo academic thought is ALWAYS downstream of of feelings. Feelings trump facts always. That's why you can punch holes in someone's arguments (their rationalizations) and they still will not change their mind. Because the rationalization is downstream of their internal sub-conscious feelings.
From what I can tell, you appear to have a near dogmatic belief in this. As long as you believe that arguments can't change someone's mind, I don't see why you would want to argue anything ever, such as in this comment thread. I think real-world evidence clearly shows that people tend to manipulate their logic and perception in order to flatter their feelings, and that whatever logic and perception they come up with also cycles back to affect their feelings. That is, even if feelings trump facts always, in the most literal sense of the word, it doesn't change the fact that beliefs about facts change feelings, and academia is and has affected people's beliefs about the facts. Especially for people who were already predisposed, via their feelings, to trust certain facts.
If academia did not exist, these parents and kids would still feel the same it just wouldn't be described in academic language. Academia is not as important as it thinks it is. So don't buy into it's own rhetoric.
"Feel the same" is sufficiently vague an idea that either this statement is meaningless or wrong. Without the development of concepts like "white privilege," many modern Blue Tribe people would still feel "white guilt" or believe that white people ought to feel "white guilt." They would not feel that each and every interaction between any white person and any black person in any context is tinged with injustice due to the subtle, imperceptible patterns and biases that we practice due to growing up in a "white supremacist" society that causes us to inevitably treat black people worse than white people which thus justifies explicit, overt treatment of black people better than white people. Some might, but there's no reason to believe that everyone would just spontaneously develop these ideas on their own based on their pre-existing feelings, not without some high status institution like academia telling them that there's something Correct about these developments of ideas that build on their pre-existing feelings (in this case white guilt).
07mk
14d ago
I ask because people are running rampant in the bailey. If all that is meant by "anti trans" is "someone who does not wholeheartedly endorse the reification of gender stereotypes through government imposition of the dubious metaphysics of gender essentialist trends in transsexual political activism" then the term is a deliberate ruse.
I think you're making it more complex than it needs to be. The specifics of gender, government imposition, metaphysics, etc. don't matter for the definition of "anti-trans." The only thing that matters is, "disagrees with trans rights activists that I agree with." The fact that, etymologically, "anti-trans" would seem to indicate someone who has antipathy for transgender people or their rights, is useful, but not actually related to the definition of the word, in terms of how it's used in the wild by the types of people who would label people as "anti-trans."
It's akin to how "White Supremacist" might create the image of someone who believes in the supremacy of white people over people of other races in some intrinsic/genetic/moral/etc. way, but, in fact, refers to anyone of any race of any opinion about races, who disagrees with me about how white supremacist modern society is and/or about how/if to tear down modern society for being white supremacist. The negative valence introduced by the etymological components of the term offer value to the term, but not meaning.
07mk
14d ago
We wouldn't normally call that academia though. And my experience right now is that these kids are getting their ideas from their parents and from Tik-Tok. So they come in already having opinions about Palestine for example. They weren't taught that in elementary school.
This is exactly what the flow of ideas from academia to to students would look like; parents and TikTok get these ideas from academia, whether it's indirectly through their peers or other TikTokers, or directly through their own experience in academia.
But again you have it reversed. Critical theory is a creation of the Blue Tribe, it didn't create the Blue Tribe. You're again just saying Blue Tribe places do Blue Tribe things. Well yes, of course they do. If they didn't they wouldn't be Blue Tribe! All the concept of critical theory does is putting an academic skin on things Blue Tribe people already believed. They believed it, then they taught it in an academic way, but the Blue Tribe already HAD those beliefs.
This is simply false, though. The concept of "White Privilege," for instance, which is a tool that can be used as needed to explain why any white person in any situation is advantaged over any black person, isn't something Blue Tribe people believed without academia. They might have a general sense of dissatisfaction at what they perceive as society-wide injustice due to how they believe that white people are treated better than black people in society, and they might go into academia in order to research and develop this dissatisfaction into grand theories about White Supremacy and Colonialism and such. You can describe it as putting an "academic skin" over things they already believed, but that'd only make sense if we took the "skin" metaphor pretty far, with how complex and active an organ the skin is on our bodies (not just a bunch of stickers to put on your car or some textures to swap on a character model, as "skin" means in other contexts).
Academia is downstream not upstream in other words. Academics frequently overestimate their own importance. Don't fall for it.
I mean, it's both downstream and upstream. No academic endeavor happens on an island free of external influences, and the academic endeavors behind "wokeness" has clearly had extreme impact on the culture in America/the West, including the very Blue Tribe culture that had incredible input on that academia itself. That's why the chicken-and-the-egg metaphor is apt here. It's clearly both, and trying to claim that one is the actual upstream source will just lead to fallacy.
07mk
15d ago
A brief look at the recent history of the awakening clearly shows the ideas flow from the institutions to the children,
Does it? I can assure you in very Blue Tribe places that is not so. Maybe you can argue it flowed from Blue Tribe places to Blue Tribe academia to academia in general.
Considering these "woke" ideas specifically have academic heritage, I'm not sure how this flow of ideas is plausible. Is the contention that these ideas that explicitly source themselves on stuff developed by "critical X theory" and "X studies" departments of the past 50 years actually somehow flowed into these departments through influence of people from Blue Tribe "places," who also influenced their children with these ideas? To whatever extent this is true, it just seems to be a way of describing the process by which academia developed these ideas - it's not surprising that the people in academia who developed and propagated these ideas largely came from cultures that were predisposed to such ideas.
That protests happen on college campuses does not mean the colleges are responsible for the ideas those protests are expressing. As I pointed out the kids I get in my classes are already well to the left of me in general.
That the protests are based around ideas that are essentially word-for-word, identical to those taught by academia is what means that colleges are responsible for the ideas those protests are expressing. No one's making any claims about proximity or location.
And your students being more left of you in general doesn't say much, since having the proclivity to comment on a forum like this already makes you a highly atypical academic, but also, if you teach high schoolers or above, this is entirely consistent with the notion that academia is responsible for the flow of ideas to these students, via their exposure to academia in grade school and middle school.
That was exactly my experience as someone who grew up in Blue Tribe environments. My experience with proto-woke ideas (I was ahead of the phenomenon by about a decade, but the typical sociopolitical narratives that were hegemonic at my schools in the 00s would have been nearly indistinguishable from the typical SJW and "woke" ideas from the late 10s) was that they absolutely flowed in from academia to students, with my parents being essentially non-factors (this part is likely mostly caused by my own parents' parenting behaviors and hard to generalize), with my earliest memories of such ideas being from my 4th grade homeroom teacher.
07mk
15d ago
When they make mistakes, their mistakes are factual---that their extreme remedy is going to make the situation better than the status quo. These mistakes are not that hard to correct
I think the past decade or so of history has proven beyond any reasonable doubt that these mistakes are, in fact, insanely hard to correct.
My hypothesis is that this is due in large part to the fact that people don't just make unbiased, truth-oriented judgments on what is true and false, but rather use judgments based on what one is motivated to be true. Ironically, the "wokes" should be more aware of this phenomenon than the average person, because so much of the "woke" worldview is based around invisible/unavoidable biases that people have due to the conditioning they received from society. It's somewhat confusing why they don't use this insight to introspect - figure out what oppressive societal forces pushed themselves into their own ideology that posits a narrative about "patriarchy" and "white supremacy" as hegemonic forces shaping our society. Figure out what personal psychological blind spots and failings are causing them to find this narrative of oppression so attractive and convincing. At the same time, it's not at all confusing why they don't do this. People chase their bliss.
When the so-called factual mistakes are driven by ideology, then correcting them seems at least as hard as correcting simple disagreements in ideology. In part because the people making these factual mistakes mistakenly think that their mistakes are factual in nature, rather than ideological, and so they lack the knowledge to actually correct their mistake, dooming them to keep making the same mistake. Well, dooming others to being subject to them making the same mistake, perhaps.
07mk
21d ago
Also consider that this is part of a movement accusing large amounts of celebrity women to be secretly trans. It seems like the standards of evidence they use might be pretty weak, or maybe Taylor Swift/Jennifer Lopez/Lady Gaga/the Kardashians/etc are really trans after all.
Horseshoe theory strikes again, given that accusation requires an implicit belief that it's possible for a transwoman with as much and long history of public exposure as these celebrities do to pass as ciswoman.
07mk
21d ago
I'm yet another huge fan of Gurren Lagann, but I won't defend it. Given why you didn't like the 1st few episodes, I doubt that you'll enjoy the rest of it. The whole series is based almost purely around the power of hotbloodedness and sheer force of will allowing you to overcome anything, and that aspect of it only escalates as it goes on, until it spirals completely out of control by the end. The reason I'm a fan of the show (and the 2nd movie, which I consider the superior version of the climax and ending) is that the show leans into this theme so incredibly well that, through sheer force of will, it makes the absurdity and stupidity work.
07mk
27d ago
Because the sentence is false and thus should be destroyed by its own prescription. Unless you selectively apply it based on your whims and preferences. Exactly what you condemned in paragraph before.
But it isn't false. Again, you can consider a judgment call like this "wrong" or "misguided," but that's, just, like your opinion, man. If the truth is that people listening to this phrase is useful, then why would the truth destroy it? Why would we want to destroy something that's truthfully useful?
07mk
28d ago
Exactly, I could have not said it better. Despite their posturing, they weaponize their dogmas - such as this Sagan's quip - to destroy what they do not like, while selectively not applying it to things they like such as polyamory.
Right, and the point of a pithy, simplistic mantra like "That which can be destroyed by the truth should be" is to explicitly condemn such behavior of selectively applying and not applying principles based on whims and preferred outcomes. Which makes it every different from a line that adds something like "except if destroying it would have huge cost in terms of negative utils," which doesn't condemn such behavior and, in fact, is openly supportive of selectively applying principles based on whims and preferred outcomes. That's what makes the shorter line actually different and better.
Yeah, it may be a useful white lie. Which again paradoxically is the exact thing that the sentence rails against.
Statements of "should" and "ought" like this - which lack anything that can be measured to determine the effects of the behaviors that people "should" do - are subjective judgment calls that don't really fit into a "lie," useful, white, or otherwise. Possibly "misguided" or "wrong." But if it is indeed true that this statement is useful, then it certainly doesn't seem like truth would destroy the statement. Why would it?
07mk
29d ago
As soon as some company will invent some good version of male full AI celebrity and provide it en masse to teenage girls, it will have capacity to oneshot them all.
Is this actually possible, though? A celebrity, by definition, has to be famous, and if they're famous, then they'll be in demand by lots of other teenage girls (one might say that this characteristic, rather than being the celebrity, is the more directly attractive feature of any such celebrity). Now, an AI celebrity could theoretically have genuine, heartfelt one-on-one conversations with a million different teenage girls at the same time. But would that simulacrum of a relationship with a celebrity be good enough?
I suspect that the lack of it being rivalrous will substantially take away from the power of celebrity. If you're the one woman in 4 billion who gets to date Leonardo DiCaprio, that probably makes you feel much better than if you are one of 2 billion who are dating Leonardo DiCaprio at the same time. Even if Leo's able to give you his full, undivided attention 24/7, just like he can with 2 billion other women.
07mk
29d ago
That which can be destroyed by the truth should be, except if destroying it would have huge cost it terms of negative utils
This seems functionally identical to "I will exercise complete arbitrary freedom to pick and choose to destroy something that a truth would destroy while also feeling morally virtuous along the way." Human bias being what it is, if you dislike any outcome for any reason, any good-faith honest calculation of utils of that outcome will certainly come out negative, and sufficiently so to meet whatever bar it needs to to justify not getting that outcome.
The shorter quotation is going to be wrong sometimes, but that's expected of any simplistic pithy line that tries to describe huge, overarching principles in ethics. I think it's more useful than this longer one which makes no concessions or commitments at all to any principles beyond one's own whims and preferences.
07mk
30d ago
If AI GFs / AI generated porn becomes good and cheap enough, I fully expect their human-generated variants to crash.
This will be interesting to see play out as the tech gets better and better. I'd fully expect there to be a sort of bimodal distribution, with cheapo/free AI-generated porn dominating/taking over much of it, and with expensive niches with verified human performers making bespoke videos for people who demand videos of the real thing or text typed out by the real thumbs. With generative AI getting better and better, a credible way of verifying that the performer/chatter is real might be downright impossible. Perhaps some professional organizations to certify that performers are actually performing the old fashioned way could rise up, but how would they gain credibility?
But if that happens, we could see a landscape of basically free basically limitless custom AI-generated porn that makes the current Pornhub look limited and small in comparison, along with expensive luxury-priced services to guarantee the real fake GFE with a real human who is really filmed for the videos she produces and really types out her messages. Pornhub itself should probably look into pivoting to the former, while I wonder if OnlyFans could actually find a way to make an organization that can actually certify its performers as real humans doing real things for camera, to capitalize on the demand for that.
07mk
1mo ago
Also apropos of nothing, this reminded me of how so many pro-trans-rights-activist comics I've seen on social media just feature a punchline of someone of the wrong opinions being murdered, and how their slogans like "punch a transphobe" or "throw bricks at transphobes" tend to be along those lines. My pet theory is that this is due to TRAs being dominated by people with far more testosterone than a typical woman but also who have a tendency to indulge in their emotional urges as is the common stereotype of a woman in contrast to a man.
I perceive the same, but I disagree with that last sentence. One is the other. If you care so little about survival that you haven't done the research to learn just how unusual and precarious modern society is, then you're deciding that sacrificing survival for the sake of thriving is worth it.
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