07mk
2yr ago
At the end of the day, we can't really tell who's got a more perception, I guess. My thinking is that much of the philosophical basis I hear from the left around trans issues seems to implicitly posit a sort of dualism, that there's some immaterial soul that has a gender that is decoupled from the sex of the body. As such, I would predict that for most of the left, a pill that makes someone identify their gender with their birth sex would be akin to a pill that tears off a part of the person's soul. It's the same reason why I would guess that even if gay conversion therapy were proven to be effective and with low risk/benefit ratio for a medical/psychological intervention (neither of which seem plausible to me), I doubt there would be much support at all for it from the left.
My perception could easily be colored too much by the leftists I interact with, though. And it's entirely possible that the implicit dualism I see being invoked is just a tool being used to push forward policies intended to reduce the suffering of people with gender dysphoria, and in the scifi scenario that a pill is invented to painlessly do just that, the dualism basis would get dropped entirely. Most leftists aren't activists, and most people aren't principled left or right, so it could take just a few activists supporting it and the regular everyday people going along with it to make it popular among the left.
07mk
2yr ago
My favorite fake fact is that people with <100 IQ can't understand hypotheticals. I've worked minimum wage jobs and I've met some real fucking dummies - yes, they can understand hypotheticals.
Every time I've run into this, it has not been presented as a fact, and the number was far lower than 100 - I think 85 or 80 maybe? Where here have you seen someone claim that it's a known fact that people of 49th percentile intelligence or lower can't understand hypotheticals?
07mk
2yr ago
But this suggests another strategy: don’t train it on the world as it appears to be. Train it on the world that could be.
Is creating such training data trivial? No. Does it require discriminating against anyone? Also no. Seems like a decent idea to me.
Presuming that this theoretical "world that could be" is at all different from the "world as it appears to be", it absolutely requires discriminating against someone. There's just no way to bridge that difference without applying some discrimination against someone at some point in the process; otherwise we'd just end up back where we started.
07mk
5mo ago
That's not what happened. We've been on a years, if not decades, long loop of Please Just Fucking Tell Me What Term I Am Allowed to Use for the Sweeping Social and Political Changes You Demand, until progressives started using "woke" in a self a descriptive manner, when they were feeling particularly strong.
I don't think this is what happened either. I don't see "woke" as being particularly different in kind compared to its predecessors like "SJW," "identity politics," "political correctness," or "CRT." These were all used unironically to describe oneself and one's in-group, often in a way meant to invoke pride - I both partook in and observed this happening all the time within progressive leftist circles about 10-20 years ago. Even "political correctness," which was a derogatory term in most of the 90s, was being reclaimed during the late 2000s/early 2010s as simply what any decent human just considers as "correct."
Thing is, as Shakespeare might put it, shit by any other name will stink just as foul, and so people figured out that the ideological projects described by these mostly innocuous-sounding terms were actually quite foul, and so these terms became foul, necessitating the shift to a different label. What sets "woke" apart, I think, is that it was the term in use when shit really hit the fan in the mainstream, when the naked power and demands of the "woke" were too large and too extreme for a large part of the mainstream to accept everything just on vibes, but rather compelled people to look under the hood and properly connect all the dots. So it's become difficult, if not impossible, for the SJWs, idpol-types, PC-types of yesteryear to slide into some other, as-of-yet untarnished label. It's sort of happening with "DEI" becoming "BRIDGE," but, I mean, those same 3 letters are still in the latter, and I think the overall awareness of these types of politics is just too high for the sleight of hand to work nearly as well this time.
The term "woke right" seems to be trying to get at a subset of rightwingers who follow a similar sort of resentment- and identity-based thinking when it comes to society as the "woke." And I can why people like James Lindsay - who's the person responsible for like 95% of the usage of the phrase "woke right" that I've seen in the wild - would want to do this; there are few things rightists hate more than "woke," and it's not unreasonable to believe that the dangers of right-wing identity politics could be a blind spot for many anti-woke rightists. But in terms of the meaning of the term, it just seems unnecessary, since it's just describing plain old racism.
The "woke" way of thinking involves justifying discrimination against individuals of race X and in favor of individuals of race Y because, in the past, society was structured to favor race X over race Y, and modern society still suffers from downstream effects of such structures such that individuals of race X today are advantaged over individuals of race Y. This is equivalent to the stereotypical classical racist rationale that, due to a difference in the grace of God/genes/essence/intelligence/etc. race X is intrinsically inferior to race Y, it's just a version that's been adapted not just to be palatable but to be delicious to people who want to consider themselves non-racist.
So whatever cluster of people the "woke right" is describing, it just seems to me to be describing classical racists among the right-wing, just using a label that's meant to provoke a greater disgust response (interesting that, again, since a rose by any other name smells just a sweet, it seems that "racist" has become a less nasty thing to be associated with than "woke").
07mk
5mo ago
This is, again, illustrating the problem with the Motte. It is not that you’re a right winger insulting me a left-winger; you’re being a bad debater. Part of the rules of this site are “speak clearly”, so yes, you DO have to clarify that when you say “leftists don’t care about child rape”, you SHOULD say “policies that leftists champion lead to child rape and so on” or that “leftists believe in stopping child rape but don’t take action”.
No. One of the rules of this place is to be charitable, and I believe that an obvious charitable reading of “leftists don’t care about child rape” is something akin to “policies that leftists champion lead to child rape and so on.” I would agree that wording it this way is not nice, and certainly something that I would prefer to see less of in this space, but it's a world away from the type of crap that the likes of antifa posted.
Okay, but we’re trying to debate and your response was “I think that leftists don’t care about child rape because of my anecdotal experience of being a leftist” and I responded with “anecdotal evidence isn’t enough, do you have evidence outside of that”, and not only have you not responded to my claim about anecdotal evidence you have not responded about providing said evidence. I’m not saying you need to agree to those points or some type of action or whatever, but you have to acknowledge those points so we can move on to the next point of debate or we are literally talking over eachother.
If we're having a debate here, it's certainly not about whether or not leftists care about child rape. Commentary on the truth-value of that was something I put in a parenthetical to point out that the answer of "No" is one that I agree with. You don't have to agree with it, and I don't care if you do.
My actual point, the point surrounding whatever debate we're having, is that this is a perfectly reasonable question to ask and to answer with a "No" given the topic at hand. It's not a particularly productive question, nor is it a nice question (though personally, I'd say it's a productive question for a leftist - or really anyone - to ask himself, based on my own personal experience as a leftist who did, but not productive for someone to ask about others). But given the topic and underlying reality at hand, it's a question that makes sense both to wonder about and to answer with "No."
07mk
10mo ago
The fact that Japanese devs are able to create a Western culture inspired game more successfully than Western devs themselves seems to support the original comment's point. I suppose there's Skyrim and other games with similar inspirations made by Western devs, but there's plenty of examples of Japanese devs outdoing Western devs with Western culture inspired games. Obvious examples that come to mind include From Soft's Dark Souls games & Bloodborne, Capcom's Dragon's Dogma and even Devil May Cry games, and Square Enix with Final Fantasy games (notably, when they took a modern Western storytelling approach with a Western-culture inspired fantasy game in Forspoken, in bombed both in the West and East).
07mk
11mo ago
I think it’s the inevitable result of not being able to handle the idea of disagreement. If you don’t have political views, you’re just right, then it’s not disagreement, it’s a bizarre rant.
I think this is correct and just another variation of the prevalence of the word "gross" to describe political/ideological beliefs/behaviors that began about 10-15 years ago among the progressive left. Besides just not having enough exposure to these ideas to describe their negative qualities outside of generic disgust-based ones like "gross" or "bizarre" or "weird," there's also the heightened emphasis on immediate, visceral, emotional reaction as the genuine reaction that one ought to be true to, with a denigration of trying to reason through the issues while taking those emotional reaction into account along with logic and evidence (e.g. Ben Shapiro's "facts don't care about your feelings" line has only been a punchline to showing how stupid and short-sighted he and his ilk are for longer than I knew who Ben Shapiro was). The phrase "not a good look" is also used similarly in a lot of similar contexts, and I'd say it's all an extra-political variation of "creepy" to describe any man that someone wants to denigrate but who lacks any characteristics that it is considered okay to publicly call out as a moral failing.
I also wonder if there's been a sort of secular trend of the term "weird" being used for things that are morally reprehensible by the kids these days. But that's just from me noticing a couple of young-ish YouTubers using the term that way to describe things like an adult hitting on a minor or people purposefully polluting wildlife to film themselves cleaning them for YouTube views (I'd describe those as "predatory" and "fraudulent" respectively, but the folks I watched just kept using the term "weird" to describe those things). The way I understand "weird," it's meant to convey that something is abnormal in a negative way, but as more and more kids are raised in environments that emphasize the celebration of things that are seen as abnormal, perhaps they see the term as just negative, possibly in a visceral way.
07mk
11mo ago
What surprises me is that Biden doesn't step down "for the good of the country". Sure, he wouldn't be President anymore, but it secures his legacy. With the academy fully captured by the left, Biden would go down as a Top 10 President who defeated the evil Donald Trump and stepped aside in favor of a woman of color.
This was somewhat surprising to me as well. Obviously, I can't know how I'd feel in the same situation since no one can, but I imagine that if I were 81 years old with as storied career as Biden's, I'd figure it'd be a good time to sail off into the sunset, hoping I have at least a decade or two left to spend with my grandkids and great-grandkids, instead of spending all my time and energy working what is reasonably considered one of the toughest, most scrutinized jobs in the world. Heck, even if it were a disgraced retirement instead of one where the history books will lionize me as the Fascist-Defeater who seamlessly transitioned the USA to a new, golden age of a black female POTUS, I'd think that'd be worth it.
But clearly, Biden thinks differently. I find myself thinking that there really are people who are just fundamentally different from most of us in terms of their ambition, that they would see working, again, one of the hardest jobs in the world, until their dying breath to be worth it for the... what, prestige? Status? Power? even if it means sacrificing a relaxing, luxurious, and potentially love-filled retirement. I see that in Trump, too, in his own political ambitions in the past decade, though he doesn't look quite close to his end as Biden is to his. Or maybe I'm just the unambitious weird one, and actually most of us would do the exact same thing and consider holding onto that power until my last, exhausted breath to be well worth the sacrifice. There certainly seem to be no shortage of rich and well-respected celebrities who have ruined themselves or at least severely harmed themselves by risking things to reach for even more.
07mk
1yr ago
A place where I've noticed the whole "self-improvement is right-wing" meme being true has been in fictional media. In recent years, a number of films (e.g. Star Wars, Captain Marvel) and TV shows (e.g. She-Hulk: Attorney at Law, Rings of Power) - all of them made by openly progressive people openly pushing a progressive agenda - have been criticized for what some have disparagingly called the "HER-o's Journey," wherein the heroine, often fairly boring or unlikeable from the start, goes through a character arc where she discovers that she was actually always as awesome as she always believed she was, realizing that all her problems were the fault of everyone else who couldn't see her innate awesomeness that was always within her. This is obviously meant to contrast with the classic "Hero's Journey," which tends to involve a hero going through a character arc where he struggles with and overcomes some flaw he has, allowing him to overcome some obstacle at the climax. It'd be easy to say that this is a projection of how women and men relate to each other IRL, where women judge if men are good enough for her while men improve themselves to become good enough for women, but I don't think it's that simple, since, AFAICT, fictional media that follow this type of narrative tend not to be particularly liked by women any more than they are by men. But to add on to this whole "refusal to self-improve" phenomenon, when these works underperform commercially, usually the creators of these works tend to blame the fans for failing to understand their value, rather than blaming themselves for failing to deliver something that fans would want to give money for.
More broadly, these phenomena both tie into something Jonathan Haidt has talked about with respect to modern leftist politics, which is that he sees it as "reverse-cognitive behavioral therapy." One well known trope in CBT is that one reframes "this person caused me to feel this way" to "this person did this, and I responded by feeling this way," which obviously shifts the locus of control from external to internal. Much of the modern left is informed by the idea of discovering one's true self and being in touch with one's emotions, which often rounds down to just trusting every feeling that goes through one's mind as true and valuable and projecting it onto the world - this is something we obviously see coming from all sides all the time, but the modern left particularly encourages this as virtuous for people who have been deemed oppressed.
Another disparate thought I have is that the left has long been associated with support for religious and sexual minorities, who have traditionally been oppressed by a society that would treat them as second class citizens for believing the things they believe. In such a setting, trusting one's own feelings over what society tells you is considered a righteous act of rebellion, and it's not at all a leap to go from that to the belief that any sort of belief in improving oneself is actually an internalized form of the oppressive standards that society imposes on you. I also wrote in another comment that the connection to postmodernism makes it so that it's easier to disconnect one's beliefs from base reality, which in this case is the belief that any negative health effects of being fat or obese are purely imposed by society and disconnected from biology or physics. This also connects with beauty standards, where the notion that skinny, fit women being considered attractive is deemed to be a purely arbitrary societal invention.
I don't know that there's any theory that neatly ties all this together. I'll just say, as someone who's been a leftist Democrat all my life, seeing Democrats whine about Republicans for so many decades without taking responsibility to improve themselves has largely made me check out of politics over the past half-decade to a decade. The idea that it's our responsibility and only our responsibility to shape our message to win over Republicans and independents to our cause, and that these people who disagree with us have no responsibility to be convinced by a message they don't find convincing just doesn't seem to occur to them. That said, I'm seeing this from the inside of just one side, and so maybe this exact same type of passing-the-buck phenomenon happens just as much in the other side.
07mk
2yr ago
This whole situation seems like a perfect storm of... a lot of things, starting with the fact that it's fundamentally about children, which tends to bring out the least rational, most passionate sides in people, both for better and for worse. I've only heard of this Mermaids group in passing so I'm not intimately familiar with them, but the way you describe them and your further notes about trans activists speaking on behalf of trans kids brings to mind this old blog post that resonated with me, particularly "It felt like I was talking to an AI designed to maximize the number of trans people." The idea of such activists having any influence on actual care providers seems completely FUBAR to me, and likely to cause truly monstrous travesties.
I admit part of my reaction here is colored by a couple of personal factors: 1. I knew a temporarily FTM transman who decided to detransition back to woman partway in and who had felt betrayed by the community that had pushed her to transition and the permanent physical changes she had gone through during her initial transition as a girl in her late teens, and 2. I could easily see myself as having been pushed to transition MTF if I had been born 30 years later and grown up in the same places I have; I am quite fine with being cis male now as an adult. These make me feel that the dangers of false positives are very important to acknowledge and work around. It's only through cold empirical study that we can nail down the proper ways to detect and serve the true positives and false positives, and activists whose motivations seem to be to maximize the true positives with little-to-no concern for everything else should have precisely zero influence in that study.
I think back in 2016-2018, on the actual Slatestarcodex comment section (likely one of the open threads), I had a conversation with someone who believed that calling out the media lying/misleading about Donald Trump in a negative way was worthy of derision, because doing such would help Trump to get (re-? I don't remember the exact date)elected. I disagreed strongly, because my view was that the media spreading such deceptions was discrediting itself, and it was only by calling out such deceptions that the media could be pushed to correct itself and stop its self-discrediting, and it's only by having a credible media that the populace could be expected to take seriously true negative things that the media claimed about Trump. And as someone who felt very strongly about not wanting Trump as POTUS (or as 2-term POTUS), I wanted the media called out on each and every such deception, as harshly as possible.
I feel similarly about this situation. Medical care for potentially trans kids is very important to nail down, and whatever medical institutions come up with the standards for care need to have credibility that they did their homework in a scientific, rigorous way. If there's any indication of undue pressure by certain activist groups to these institutions to put their thumb on the scale, that destroys their credibility, leaving us at square 1 on figuring out this very important issue. So I would expect that anyone who actually cares about helping potentially trans kids would make it a high priority to make sure that such credibility-destroying influence gets called out and corrected. And contrapositively, anyone who's hesitant to call out such influence for whatever reason is someone who can't be trusted to actually want what's good for such kids. And this goes just as strongly for any sort of anti-TRAs that might exist who behave in a way as to maximize the number of true negatives, even if that means maximizing false negatives, who might have undue influence on medical institutions.
That's all pretty meta, and I wish I could form some meaningful opinion at the object level, but at this point, I'll admit that for most CW topics, and certainly this one, I'm just mostly suspicious of anyone who has strong opinions either way at the object level due to how, at the meta level, the ability to find actual true knowledge of the object level concepts seem to have been so corrupted, often intentionally.
07mk
2yr ago
The sense that I get is that this can't possibly work that way, because women are the ones who define what "defective" means. By definition, 0% of women are defective, and X% of men are defective as determined by the judgments of the women which play out in whether or not one of the women chose to marry the man. I think this underlies most of the discussion on this topic, and trying to reason why those X% of men might have negative character traits is just a long-winded way of trying to avoid recognizing this. Those men are defective, by definition, but for whatever reason, people in our society don't like to think of ourselves as judging people as "defective" based purely on their romantic success, and so we come up with other reasons to justify this judgment that avoids the obvious answer.
07mk
4mo ago
As a feminist myself, I'd agree that that's not the type of stuff that I support as a feminist (in fact, I've spoken out against other feminists who espouse them). Unfortunately, feminists like you or me tend to be either rare or quiet (for me, personally, I chose to be the latter due to noticing that speaking out in the way you did in this comment tended to be met with extremely harsh abuse from other feminists), so I have to admit that comments like Quantumfreakonomics's or FCfromSSC's in this thread are entirely accurate when describing the general group of people who both call themselves feminists and who other people recognize as feminists. I've just had to learn to leave my ego at the door and not feel attacked when people talk about "feminists" supporting [thing I, as a feminist, oppose]. I think having relatively unpopular or at least less-loud (we could be a silent majority among feminists, and I actually suspect that that's the case!) perspective within a particular ideological group unfortunately tends to require this kind of thinking, and this forum in particular tends to have a high proportion of people with fairly idiosyncratic opinions that make them relatively unpopular or, again, less loud compared to the common, mainstream ones within any given ideology.
07mk
10mo ago
All the talk about the shift in "vibes" and re-energizing of the Democratic party under Kamala, as well as the talk about how good this "weird" insult is at owning the Republicans just makes me think of someone noticing an ignorant child tilting his head with a quizzical expression and quickly shutting that all down by ostentatiously shouting out that everyone in fashion agrees that the emperor's new clothes will absolutely revolutionize the industry with its creative use of sleeves or whatever. It's just narrative built on top of narrative said by like-minded people, which doesn't imply it's false, but when the people pushing forward the narrative also happen to be people who like the narrative, largely based on what other people who also like the narrative say, it certainly implies that great skepticism is in order.
The bigger issue I think this raises is, if the narrative turns out to be false and people notice that, then that will result in the many journalists and media outlets that pushed forward the narrative having discredited themselves, which will mean fewer trustworthy resources for the American electorate to learn about their politicians. This phenomenon of journalists discrediting themselves through politically-motivated messaging has been going on at least since the 2015 Trump campaign, and it seems to just keep getting worse, and I wonder if, eventually, something will have to give.
07mk
1yr ago
I don't really play AAA games very much, so the actual effect of Sweet Baby on those games is not very salient to me, but when reading and hearing about it, I can't help but notice that they usually aren't giving many examples of of aspects of these games that people really think are bad because of Sweet Baby. In fact, before this controversy, the main thing gamers were complaining about was in-game transactions.
I think there's no actual way to know what Sweet Baby Inc influenced in these games unless you work for SBI, the company, or there are leaks. Before SBI was put on as a face to the concept, though, the "woke" direction of the industry had been criticized for a long time, so the issue was never SBI specifically or even companies like SBI, but rather that devs actually seemed to want their narratives to receive influence from the type of ideology espoused by people working at or defending SBI.
One recent fairly prominent example of a game that SBI had worked on according to that curator (but whose exact influence is a mystery AFAIK) was Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League which, as the title implies, involved killing the Justice League heroes, where the one heroine Wonder Woman apparently got a noble and dignified death with the male heroes getting fairly muted or pathetic ones (apparently there was some extra controversy cuz the Batman VA died before the game was released, and he got a rather unceremonial death). The game was apparently shit for many non-narrative-related reasons, and this kind of thing could easily be chalked up to coincidence, but it does fit very neatly into a pattern we've seen in a lot of visual media of legacy franchises the last 5-10 years.
There have been a number of mini-controversies over patterns like this, such as (mainly western) devs making heroines more masculine/ugly than players tend to prefer seeing, with the Horizon games, The Last of Part 2, and even the aforementioned Suicide Squad with Harley Quinn compared to her depiction in the old Arkham games by the same dev, being examples. Last year's Resident Evil 4 remake was criticized for cutting out 2 of the best lines in the game: "Well, if it isn't the bitch in the red dress" and "I see the president has equipped his daughter with ballistics," but the game was well received for being good. On the other hand, the previous year's Saints Row reboot was criticized for making the protagonists soft 20-something roommates getting into crime to pay back their student debt while rebelling against the current societal order or whatever, along with censoring in-game stores like Freckle Bitches to FB's.
I don't think any of these rose to the level of being a major, or anything more than a tiny, controversy, and it was the rare person who was actually worked up over any of it, but certainly lots of people noticed the pattern of the direction things seemed to be going and were making some noise about how devs were just making games worse for no good reason. The SBI Detected curator probably created a focal point where players who were noticing this could direct their ire, but, again, the issue was never SBI specifically or even the specific devs that they worked with.
What people are mostly talking about is how their employees conduct themselves on social media. And even though the way they often conduct themselves is unprofessional and dumb, It's also understandable when there's a hundred thousand people telling you how bad your work is and trying to stop people from doing business with you.
I actually don't think it's understandable. Like you said, they're conducting themselves in an unprofessional way. They are industry professionals, and there's a standard of conduct they ought to hold themselves to as professionals. I'd say it's understandable only from a cynical perspective, as an attempt to build a "we're getting harassed" narrative out of whole cloth to build sympathy.
07mk
1yr ago
You're so myopically mired in self-pity that you actually think there's even the remotest chance that a woman would rather be in a relationship with a man who beats her up than you. You shouldn't be "open to the possibility": it's preposterous and a grave insult to every victim of domestic abuse in history.
I have no disagreements about how pathologically self-pitying SkookumTree is in his comments, but I don't think the rest follows. The revealed preference of many a woman is to be in a relationship with a man who beats her up rather than with someone who's awkward to the level of what SkookumTree believes he is. It's possible to discuss if those are her "true" preferences and what she would "truly" rather do, and there's room for such factors, but I think the pudding they actually choose to eat is where the proof is.
Personally, I think this sort of thinking stems from a sort of "Just World Hypothesis" when it comes to romance, particularly that moral qualities that society in general sees as good in a man also translate to romantic success, and as such, if a man has romantic success despite having negative moral qualities such as beating his gf/wife, then there must be something that corrupted and manipulated the women who keep volunteering to be his gf/wife. When I think the more straightforward and also more correct explanation is just that there's only coincidental overlap between these two categories, and women, like all people in many contexts, often tend to be prefer things that are unhealthy for them over things that are healthy for them, if those unhealthy things provide other benefits that the healthy things don't.
07mk
1yr ago
But I also couldn't imagine a Hamas rocket leveling a building even with a direct hit.
Perhaps a result of my own ignorance with respect to explosives and my observation of 9/11, I find this surprising. I would have thought that it wouldn't take much to take down a building, even one as big as a hospital, as long as it hit the load-bearing parts, and I figured that hitting those load-bearing parts wasn't particularly unlikely in the crapshoot of battle. I suppose buildings, possibly especially in Gaza, must be hardier structures than I'd initially thought.
07mk
2yr ago
they confuse methodological constraints for a metaphysical theory. That is, science has methodological constraints; it makes certain assumptions and speaks only to things within the constraints of those assumptions. But instead, folks want to claim that those are not constraints on the method; they're constraints on reality.
Sorry, this just seems to be restating the part I quoted before, just in more words. Could you please be specific about what specific methodological constraints and specific metaphysical theories and specific assumptions and specific constraints on method versus reality are being involved here?
Sorry, the post in that link was more muddled and confusing than enlightening. It seems to write about "shoe atheism" as if the reader already understands what that refers to, which is specifically the thing I don't understand. Who's saying or implying that shoes are atheists, and what does this have to do with the above statements about metaphysics versus methodology?
07mk
2yr ago
Xakota Espinoza, a Fair Fight Action spokeswoman, also sent a statement to The New York Times: “It was deeply disturbing to see an attempt to diminish the qualifications of a nationally esteemed Black, woman attorney.”
No one in the Politico article criticized the legal qualifications of Ms. Lawrence-Hardy.
This sort of editorializing is so slimy, and transparently so. It's obvious that the last paragraph is meant as a follow-up to the sentence before that, in a way appears to counter it to a typical inattentive reader. But it doesn't counter it at all, since there was nothing in the quotation from Espinoza that implied that her accusation was that the attempt was to criticize the legal qualifications; she specifically used the term "diminish" and didn't imply any sort of "legal" conditional on the qualifications of the attorney. There are a million and one ways the Politico article could diminish her qualifications without criticizing her legal qualifications in any way. And the NY Times presenting the latter statement as if it's in any conflict or even any discord between the 2 reduces their credibility in my eyes. Either they're purposefully misleading, or the writer and editors lack the capacity to understand that it's misleading.
07mk
2yr ago
I have to ask myself; was I, in turn, being pandered to in the previous eras of scifi in the same way that different demographics are being pandered to now? Am I just primed to like things featuring men or manly women set in space, or that feature nanotech and computers at the expense of character development or good writing? And honestly, the answer is probably yes. There probably is some cosmic Ginsbergian justice to Woke sci-fi taking over traditional awards ceremonies.
No. I think you can only reach this conclusion by essentially obliterating the notion of "quality" when it comes to fiction. This is something implicitly supported by woke fiction producers/critics who explicitly use "(imagined) downstream effects on how humans behave in society" as the measure of quality, but I don't think this is a reasonable position. There's no objective measure of "quality" in fiction, but it doesn't then follow that it's completely subjective and merely a question of who's being pandered to.
07mk
1mo ago
I almost feel a bit sorry for the assassin. Sans any evidence, my speculation is that he saw the love and adoration Mangione was receiving and decided he wanted some of that by pulling off another senseless ideological murder. But he's just not good looking enough, and the victims not suitably high up on the food chain for him to garner anywhere near the same level of following, IMHO. There's something almost funny about this, him copying Mangione with a cargo cult understanding of the phenomenon, when Mangione himself seemed to have a cargo cult understanding of how assassinations are supposed to work for affecting change.
Then again, I could be completely off about this, and he was a truly devout and deranged ideologue. Or he could gather adoration even more than Mangione. Time will tell, I suppose.
07mk
3mo ago
I've come to terms with the fact that "could" actually means "could not" when it precedes "care less," but I think I've yet to come to terms with the fact that "reign" actually means "to restrain or stop, like pulling on the strap for controlling a horse" when it precedes "in."
07mk
4mo ago
I don't see how it could possibly generate subtitles instantly on the fly for a music video with a runtime of three minutes?
I think your explanation about the AI lying and confidently misrepresenting evidence in this case is almost certainly true. But I don't see how the runtime of the music video would matter for this. If the AI were analyzing the music video - which I don't think it did - it would be analyzing the bits that make up a video file after downloading it from wherever it is, in which case it just needs to process the bits that make up the file, and the speed of that would be dependent on many factors, but certainly not limited by how long the video is. A human might be limited to maybe half the time at the shortest if they watched the video at 2x speed, but I don't see any reason why an AI couldn't transcribe, say, all recorded audio in human history within a second, just by going through the bits fast enough.
It's almost Christmas again, which means every retail worker and most shoppers in general are dreading having to listen to Mariah Carey's All I Want for Christmas Is You about a sextillion times over the next month. This dread has become such a cliche to the extent that Carey herself has pointed it out after Halloween at least the past couple of years on social media, warning people that it's time to be assaulted by that song again.
My question is, does anyone else still unironically like that song*? I'm not particularly one for Christmas, but listening to that song everywhere is one of the parts I look forward to in December, and when I used to run for exercise, that song used to be one of the mainstays on my exercise playlist year-round. I'm not well versed enough in music to meaningfully explain why I like it so much, but I find the extremely sugary-sweet wholesome lyrics along with the melody to be exceedingly pleasant in a way that few other songs are.
* Edit: I meant anyone else today, after having been forced to listen to it so many times each and every December over the past few decades.
07mk
8mo ago
A question that intruiges me as well. My guess is that that it will be entirely forgotten the same way that the pedo rights movement of the 70's was. Sure every once in a whole someone will dig out some receipts, and it will be seen as that weird thing that apparently happened in the past, but it will not be something pinnable on the progressive movement
I wonder about this. Unlike the 70s or any time before the 21st century, the dialogue and commentary around this is largely done on the internet, which is very easily accessible. Memory holing something that can be looked up with a single click of a hyperlink on your phone is harder than doing so for something you'd have to look up old newspapers or journals in a library.
Yet it certainly seems doable. Stuff like the Internet Archive can be attacked and taken down or perhaps captured, thus removing credible sources of past online publications. People could also fake past publications in a way to hid the real ones through obscurity. Those would require actual intentional effort, but the level of effort required will likely keep going down due to technological advancements. More than anything, human nature to be lazy and ambivalent about things that don't directly affect them in the moment seems likely to make it easy to make people forget.
I wonder how much people in the 20th century and before were saying "We're on the right side of history" as much as people have been in the past 15 years. Again, people saying that has never been as well recorded as it has now. It'd be interesting to see in the 22nd century and later some sort of study on all instances of people saying "this ideology is on the right side of history" and seeing how those ideologies ended up a century later.
This is the part I find a lot of problem with whenever this topic comes up, often in the context of sexual assault/rape accusations. I don't think any denial necessarily implies that the accuser is lying. It necessarily implies that the accuser is wrong. Given what we know about the fallibility and malleability of memory, particularly when stressful situations are involved, it's entirely possible for the accuser to be honest to the best of their ability and still be completely, entirely wrong about the facts of what occurred. I don't know if this affects the legal calculus of the potential defamation suit; is the claim that an accuser is making an incorrect accusation for whatever reason - without implying that the accuser is lying - defamation? I don't know, but that's the actual pertinent issue than the claim that they're actually lying.
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