07mk
22hr ago
We're probably at least a year away from something that meets all those requirements, if not forever (the "free" part is the big one there). I don't think we even have free AI image generators yet that can generate 1920x1080 individual images that doesn't involve installing Stable Diffusion locally.
07mk
22d ago
On my Android phone, I can long-press any app notification, which changes that notification to a menu of options on how to treat that kind of notification, as well as a button to go into the settings to control all notifications for that particular app. Perhaps you have an older version of Android?
07mk
27d ago
I see this accusation thrown at rationalists a lot, and I'm honestly not sure what to think about it. As someone who's mostly ambivalent to the whole rationalist movement/identity but one who spend a lot of time interacting with them on Scott Alexander-related forums, I've rarely seen rationalists imply any sort of greater value on individuals for their IQ. They're often accused of being high IQ people bitter at not being worshiped like the gods they deserve to be merely for their high IQ, but, again, I've rarely ever seen them do or state anything that even remotely implies this sort of belief. I feel like this most likely reflects a sort of intelligence fetishism on the part of the critic, who sees rationalists talk about IQ and intelligence and how useful they are in certain (well, to be fair, many, MANY) contexts and can't separate that idea of usefulness from some sort of inherent superiority.
07mk
28d ago
If these "radicals," as you call them, stuck to Bene Gesserit-style multi-millennia plans involving eugenics in order to manipulate the genetic causes of the individual/cultural preferences, I think this aspect of the culture wars would be significantly less contentious.
07mk
28d ago
Once again it's only a conspiracy theory when outsiders notice what the insiders celebrate. Even that dev who was recently making excuses about how face modeling is hard snuck in an "and actually it's good to challenge cis hetero beauty standards and we're doing it deliberately" towards the end.
I find this apparent feigning ignorance endlessly frustrating. The writers and academics who call themselves "progressive" are very open about their desire and willingness to manipulate the populace into believing things they want them to believe by putting in certain tropes into the fiction they write. This is justified on the basis of their stated belief that all fiction manipulates the audience, and so it's better to do it with conscious intent for causes they consider socially just instead of doing so unconsciously while merely focusing on creating an entertaining/meaningful work of fiction which they contend inevitably reinforces the status quo which they find bigoted and intolerable. It's not always possible to nail down this as the cause of any given individual case of uglification, but given the prevalence of these types of people in fiction production and the ubiquity of this narrative, I don't think benefit of the doubt is at all justified, and it's perfectly reasonable to default to the presumption that any specific case was due to ideological intent until proven otherwise.
And if we were to follow the same standards by which such people deem fictional works as "white supremacist" or "patriarchal" or "heteronormative" or whatever, there would be no question that we could conclude that these were caused by ideological motives: as long as someone can write a convincing-sounding essay connecting some work of fiction with these concepts they consider bigoted, it doesn't matter what the creators were thinking or intending, these works are ideological and for a bad ideology. If the creators had nothing but pure entertainment-focused intent or even if they were actively trying to send a message of equality, then that just means that they fell prey to their implicit/unconscious biases which proves just how entrenched white supremacy/patriarchy/etc. really is. But double standards are also justified on the basis of relative power and such (which themselves are justified by someone writing a convincing-sounding essay).
You see this more broadly with people claiming not to know what "woke" or "critical race theory" mean. It's a kind of dishonest bit of self deception that fools no one other than themselves. I just wish they would loudly and proudly stand up for what they believe in, proclaim that they are trying to manipulate the populace for the purpose of a better, more socially just world, and let the chips fall where they may. I find Scott Adams to be... a very silly person not worth paying attention to, but when he said that he was hypnotizing people, including through the very same message of informing them of this hypnotism, because his hypnotism would work even if the audience was consciously aware of what he was doing, I could at least respect that more than this shell game of implausible deniability many writers and activists on the left like to play of openly claiming a desire to manipulate the audience and then acting shocked and appalled that others would accuse them of making creative choices meant to manipulate the audience.
07mk
28d ago
Surely these things aren't mutually exclusive, but rather in concordance with each other, right? Which is to say,
they understand enough to know the art is “prestigious” so they trick themselves into liking it whilst looking down on bourgeois taste
is the mechanism by which they arrive at their genuine, honestly held aesthetic preferences such that
They don't think it's ugly. They actually prefer it.
...
To them uglyness isn't ugly. It's genuinely mindnumbingly beautiful.
I mean, you see this talk about manipulating, say, straight men into genuinely, honestly believing that fat women and transwomen are beautiful and sexy by putting them on magazine covers or pushing them to watch porn featuring such people. If one believes that such manipulation of one's genuine, honestly held aesthetic preferences are possible, it's not unexpected that they themselves have undergone such intentional transformations of their own genuine, honestly held aesthetic preferences in order to better conform to what they believe is socially just or whatever.
07mk
28d ago
The number one de facto policy this would change is that proportionate representation by race in jobs that are heavily IQ dependent wouldn't be the goal which, if our society fails to reach, gets deemed White supremacist. Instead, greater emphasis would be placed on removing any extraneous barriers for all individuals from all races, including unfair discrimination, and may the chips fall where they may in terms of the racial proportions.
07mk
28d ago
And statistically speaking, CICO is not likely to result in success.
I don't know that this is a conclusion we can draw based on our observation that most overweight people in the west have failed at losing weight, though. First of all, because even though CICO is widely known, there's still also an incredible amount of other misinformation about stuff like "healthy foods" and various diets. There's also the fact that many people receive this very type of message along the lines of "CICO is trivially true from a physics standpoint, but the hard part is actually keeping to it due to self control and hunger" and as such, when they do diet, they pursue strategies for tricking themselves through other diets instead of literally just counting calories in and calories out.
All this means that the overall population of "overweight people who try to lose weight" does not necessarily look like the population of "overweight people who try to follow a CICO protocol for weight loss." I'd actually wager that overweight people who follow a CICO diet strategy while having a genuine belief in CICO and their ability to succeed by using it have higher success rates than overweight people who follow the strategy while being terrified by the prospect of failure due to their inability to control themselves in the face of hunger pangs. And as such, spreading the message that CICO is trivially true but ineffective actually harms people's ability to lose weight.
In any case, this particular comment was about manipulating the commenter's wife to following CICO via mechanisms other than just telling her CICO (i.e. the commenter getting ripped). This seems likely to fail for plenty of reasons, but those are different issues to whether or not [following as a diet strategy] CICO is likely to result in success.
07mk
29d ago
Secondly was this essay by Uri Berliner, their longtime senior business editor, creator of the popular "Planet Money" podcast, and one of the very few white males/not-super-liberals still in a position of authority at NPR. I really recommend this essay. He lays it out how, sure, NPR was always left-leaning, but it had intelligence and integrity. It's changed.
Not having read this essay, one thing that really stands out to me about the headline and the URL is how it frames NPR as the active party that "lost America's trust." This is in stark contrast to 99% of the recent mainstream narrative about people coming to view journalists and journalism outlets with mistrust and even disdain, which is more along the lines of, "Why do these dumb ignorant fucks not trust what we publish, when we're doing everything right? Clearly they must be getting manipulated by disinformation merchants who just know so well how to appeal to their tiny little minds." Back when journalists being less trusted by the public was becoming an issue during the Trump administration, I recall thinking that this should be a time for introspection for journalists, for them to question why they - literal professional writers and speakers - were just so bad at communicating that they were losing out not just to a politician but a politician of the dishonesty level of Trump. Such introspection has been rare indeed, and it's both nice to see it here and unsurprising that this guy was penalized for performing it.
For my own part, I grew up listening to NPR and I used to love it. The voices, the production value, the journalism, all of it was high-quality. It really stood out in the world of FM radio, where everything else is staticky, ad-filled garbage, and tends to play the same basic pop-classic rock-rap top 40 garbage over and over. In the world before podcasts and sattelite Radio, NPR was the only halfway intellectual content on the radio. Now it just feels like a podcast from some random student activists who have been triggered by Trump to the point that they're on the verge of a psychotic breakdown. I seriously can't stand listening to it anymore, it's just amazing how deranged and annoying it's become.
I used to listen to NPR a ton as a kid in my parents' car and also in my young adulthood which was 10+ years ago now. The rare times I drive these days, I still put on NPR, but I honestly can't stand it either, and I'm not sure if it's because I changed or because NPR changed. On Reddit's /r/stupidpol (subreddit for leftists who consider identity politics to be stupid), I read someone say they play a game whenever putting on NPR to see how many minutes it is before there's some mention of a racial or sex/gender-related angle to whatever story they're covering, and they almost never go past 5 minutes; ever since starting to play the game myself, I actually rarely go past 1 minute these days. Could just be coincidence given, again, I rarely listen to any radio anymore these days, but I suspect it's not.
At least, the few times I tune into Wait Wait, Don't Tell Me, it's still mostly enjoyable. The kind of self-satisfied smug "obviously the mainstream progressive Democrat narrative is the correct one" attitude can be kind of annoying, but it honestly doesn't seem any worse than when I was a kid - I've just become more aware of the biases I used to have - and I still find Paula Poundstone hilarious.
Entropy means disorder, randomness, chaos, and the like, so "low entropy" would refer to something that is well ordered or well structured. I think most people would interpret that in this context as something that has less "noise" compared to the "signal," since "noise" could be considered to add entropy, due to adding content without adding meaning.
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