07mk
8d 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
9d 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.
07mk
10d ago
Overall I'd say, "game writing was never good." Most classic games barely even had writing, either because it was pointless for an arcade-action game, or because there just wasn't enough memory or disk space then to handle a lot of text. Japanese games had an especially tough time with text.
And, aside from technical issues, a lot of games just don't need a lot of writing, and made a design decision not to include it. They tell the story in other ways. Famously John Carmack decided to put only the bare minimum of story into Doom because “Story in a game is like story in a porn movie, he said. “It's expected to be there, but it's not important.". It's only in more recent years that it's just expected that every game must have some sort of story, with full-time writers cranking out the content.
I think this actually explains why game writing in the past was good compared to now; having barely any writing because they didn't need a lot of writing can be very good writing, if it serves it purpose exactly as needed. To build on Carmack's analogy, a film whose entire script is: "Did you order the pizza with extra sausage?" "Yes, but I'm afraid I don't have any money. How ever will I pay you?" or the like has much better writing than something like Rise of Skywalker. The writing in the former doesn't need to be any longer or deeper than that in order to accomplish its goals, and trying to accomplish more with the writing would likely be counterproductive. With the greater production values and focus on narrative in many modern AAA games, writers have a lot more degrees of freedom, which means more room for error and also more rope to hang themselves with. That's even without considering the overt attempts at injecting ideological messaging that has plagued much of modern writing, in games and other media, which was much less common in older games, in a large part just due to older games not having as much writing.
07mk
8d 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
8d 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
30d 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
8d 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
8d 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
9d 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
11d ago
Ban on all tipping, punishable by death-by-torture on any chief executive of any company that implements any sort of tipping system. Customers gain the right to perform summary executions on any service provider who suggests any tips. Naturally, this would also mean no alternative minimum wage for people in previously tipping jobs.
Nationalize TurboTax and other similar services, to auto-file all taxes for everyone, with taxpayers having the option to check and change if they wish.
Ban on all viewpoint-based moderation, by 1st Amendment standards, of any forum beyond a certain size.
07mk
15d ago
I think the main problem with the whole "punching up/down" or "egg vs wall" framework is that there's just no agreed-upon way to meaningfully determine which side is actually the stronger and the weaker side. In WW2, the Axis powers lost, so one could argue that, by definition, they are the weaker side, but then others could argue that merely losing to someone else isn't proof of being the weaker side, and we need to analyze the precise details of the situation. It's the same arguments that get brought up in playoffs or MMA fights of, "Did the better team/fighter actually win?" where there's seemingly no way for people to come to an agreement on what standard to choose for determining what "better" means; the very notion of "the proof of the pudding is in the eating" is the point of contention. And so people just twist the logic and evidence in whatever way needed to to make the "side I like" be the "weaker" side and vice versa (or "better team" in the case of sports). It's just naked bias with extra steps. Whenever I see talk about "punching up/down," I mentally replace "up" with "direction I want to punch" and "down" with "direction I don't want punches going in," and it's a more useful way of analyzing the situation every single time.
07mk
22d ago
I view it as nothing short of tragic that a people who suffered so much due to being viewed as inferior, who struggled for so long to be viewed as equals and treated with dignity, who endured all kinds of injustices in the hope that we would overcome...only for science to prove that it was fruitless all along. It's so dispiriting the possibility that all the problems in our community: crime, poverty, ignorance, are intransient.
(Emphasis added) This is the part that sticks out to me as false. Presuming that HBD is true and black people have an average IQ of 85 or whatever, this doesn't imply that these issues you name, i.e. crime, poverty, ignorance, in black communities are necessarily intransient. Even if we want to think of the black community as a "community" in some meaningful sense rather than just a bunch of people who happen to have certain genes in common (something I personally don't want to, for any race, but it seems most people insist that we must), it doesn't imply that that this community must have these problems permanently or in the long run. What it does mean is that attempting to solve these problems the exact same way that we have and do solve these problems for other "communities" such as the "white community" or "East Asian community," but more is pointless.
I'm reminded of something people sometimes say about the gender culture wars, that boys get treated like defective girls (e.g. when they're physically violent, aggressive, or restless in classrooms). Some people insist that we ought to just keep pushing boys to be more like girls even harder and punish them even more when they fail, but there are plenty of people who believe that "HBD" (or perhaps more accurately behavioral sexual dimorphism) in this realm implies that we ought to solve boys' problems and girls' problems in different ways. I don't see why this couldn't be the approach to solving these issues in the various communities if it turns out that HBD is indeed true.
Again, my personal preference would be that we ignore the entire notion of "[race] communities" altogether and summarily execute tar and feather shame ignore anyone who insists on analyzing populations on this basis and allow individuals to navigate a world of individuals forming communities with each other based on other characteristics, but that seems like a non-starter these days.
07mk
1mo ago
I think there's something to this. Particularly in how so many character dynamics seem to reflect stuff that might be the most stressful part of a modern writer's lives, just transplanted to some fictional setting, such as, e.g. a fantasy princess rebelling against her arranged marriage in favor of her lesbian love interest, as was the case in Willow, I believe. Or in Star Wars, Admiral Holdo talking down to her hotshot male underling Poe for being a hotshot male who is upset that, as the leader, she hasn't communicated to her troops any information that would give them confidence that she has a plan for keeping the Resistance alive. There's just no sense that the writers had any understanding of the way people in these roles and with these responsibilities think and operate.
This extends to action scenes, of course, which break laws of physics in egregious suspension-of-disbelief-breaking ways that, say, Jackie Chan or even wire-fu Jet Li films didn't, which shows how little the choreographers or directors knew about actual combat and making it look believable (not necessarily realistic) within the setting. To say nothing of the even greater crime against good taste with the terrible camera work and uninteresting choreography you see in so many works (e.g. even the terrible The Matrix Revolutions from 2 decades ago had better choreography in its worst action scene than the even worse Resurrection had in its best one).
But I think there has to be more than this, because one very common refrain you see from writers in general and certainly the types of writers who support the promotion of (certain) agendas in writing is the power of fiction and narrative to change and influence people. There is no shortage of fiction from the past that they could learn things like how military structure works and why it works that way and how that would look when transplanted to a similar situation in a galaxy far, far away. It takes non-trivial research to get all this right, but personal experience, direct or indirect, isn't a requirement for writing these things well, or at least much better than what we're seeing these days.
And the fact that we see incredible incompetence in following basic narrative rules like characters going through arcs or setup and payoff also points at a deeper issue. These are things that someone who got a C in an undergrad creative writing course would understand and avoid. Some of it is surely that the garbage of the past got forgotten, so we're comparing the best of the past to the average of today. But there are like-for-like comparisons that can be made. E.g. the recent live-action Pinocchio remake presenting Pinocchio as an innocent bystander who only ever got dragged to doing bad things instead of giving into his temptations and learning from the negative consequences of them, along with his iconic lying-leads-to-nose-lengthening being used to help him get out of the cage instead of being punishment for lying to the fairy, shows that the writers simply didn't have a handle on the underlying themes of the story. They say that rules are made to be broken, but they also say that you should understand a rule before you break it, and the understanding of why these narrative rules were determined to be so good and useful that they were labeled as "rules" in the first place seems to be missing.
07mk
21d ago
Yeah - like, there's an argument on this thread about leftists not wanting to argue.
But, this isn't true - go to a Democratic/left-leaning well-educated group of political types and ask them about health care, taxes, etc. and they'll be a bunch of different ideas thrown around.
It's just yes, I don't have much interest in arguing about why the 2020 election wasn't stolen, why the Jew's don't actually control everything, how smart or not specific racial groups are, and how much we have to limit women's freedom to get them to make more babies, and start having them earlier.
As another left-leaning poster, this is the answer I would give to the top-most comment here about why I didn't post any pushback on the comment they were referencing. The topic is something that's so far out of my wheelhouse and expertise that I just have nothing to add or push back on in a meaningful way.
But I think the point about leftists not wanting to argue is less about actually having a desire to argue about this kind of stuff and more about tolerating arguments about this kind of stuff. I'm really, really glad that I get to participate in a forum where people with opinions like that post or the points in the part I quoted above feel free to state such opinions openly. Partly because someone expressing their opinions is, in itself, a good thing, partly because I want the opportunity to learn from the arguments of such people who might even respond to my own comments in other topics, and partly because I want people with such opinions to explore their opinions and collaborate with each other to create better, stronger versions of their arguments which then provide me greater opportunity to learn from them. I can appreciate and even benefit from all this without ever wanting to actually argue with them. And I think it's a shame that most mainstream leftist spaces that I know of just don't have this kind of tolerance.
07mk
21d ago
I am "left-aligned" but this place feels like one of the few places left on the Internet where I'm still a liberal. Anywhere else, if I express my actual (classically liberal, or as the choads on those forums would mockingly say, "cLASSiCly LIbErAl!!!") views, I am immediately tagged as a right-winger. This used to make me say "Wtf?" but now I just accept that I am politically homeless and will be the first up against the wall.
This is mostly my experience as well. I'm a liberal more than I'm a leftist, and in the past, those used to be aligned, but now, leftism has morphed into something that is openly and explicitly anti-liberal, and in that conflict, I'll prefer liberalism every time. As such, a forum like this which is both very right-wing and very liberal is far more interesting to read and to partake in than basically any left-wing forum that I know of. I dislike the right-wing racialism/ethnocentrism, but given that the left side is no better at that stuff, I'll take the liberal discussion about the right-wing than the illiberal (lack-of) discussion about the left-wing.
07mk
30d ago
I haven't read this comment before, but I've had thoughts similar to this rattling around in my head for a while. I think the thought first occurred to me with respect to affirmative action, that the justifications were based around the notion that individuals belonging to demographics deemed as oppressed had been treated unfairly and therefore, at the individual level, deserved benefits to be tilted in their favor in things like school and job applications*. Obviously, the point of these filtering mechanisms is to select for individuals with the skills, ability, wherewithal, motivation, etc. to make the most out of the school and/or perform the job well, which are not dependent on whether or not someone belongs in a demographic group deemed as oppressed. So the benefit that we get better be worth the tradeoff of taking away these educational or employment opportunities from more qualified people to give them to less qualified ones.
But what is the benefit? Ultimately, it's mostly money. There's little benefit people get out of being assigned homework or going into lecture halls to take tests or sitting in front of computers to crunch numbers. People do these things so that, in the long run, they end up making more money. So why not just give these individuals money and let the work be done by people who are qualified?
Well, the problem there then is the "dignity" of the thing or whatever. People don't like to feel like charity cases; they like to believe that they earned the things that they have, through their own hard work, will, resilience, talents, etc. And so we have to get them to play-act the part, to go to classes and offices, to give them the plausible deniability that they actually earned the money that they're getting. This is also why AA is framed as helping people who are disadvantaged, rather than giving people bonus points for happening to belong to particular demographic groups, even though those are literally the exact same things.
And it's this dishonesty that gets me. I wish the left would just say that we should give people free money as a way to make up for injustices we presume they must have suffered due to belonging to certain demographics. We can then discuss and argue about which individuals deserve free money and how much, and there will be plenty to disagree about there, but at least everyone would have an open and honest understanding of what is at stake here. Trying to launder the free money through subverting our ability to put competent people in positions where they can contribute the most to society seems strictly worse than this.
I think this sort of enforced kayfabe is also at play with, say, the whole "transwomen are women" thing. I think it was Scott Alexander who argued that, regardless of how we see things, we should respect transwomen's identities by using their pronouns and such, because it's just the nice thing to do, and we ought not contribute even more to the suffering that they clearly must experience merely for believing that they were born in the wrong sex. I'm not sure if I agree with this, but I'm sympathetic to it, at least. But that kind of honesty is unacceptable in the modern left - the only line that's acceptable is that transwomen are women in every way that matters. This necessarily comes with it many implications about things like sports or pregnancy that many/most people aren't willing to accept. Like how AA only makes sense if you believe that competency isn't relevant in school/work, this kayfabe only makes sense if you believe that sex differences are purely socially mediated, and if we just twist society enough, then transwomen could live lives that are indistinguishable from females.
Again, I just wish people would state these honestly so that everyone can, with informed consent, place their votes on how they want society to be run instead of constantly obfuscating with this sort of play-acting fakery. But I suspect that, to some extent, the fakery is an essential component of the whole structure, and perhaps even the entire point.
* There are multiple justifications, of course, one of which is that, due to systemic oppression, our current filtering mechanisms erroneously judge individuals who belong to demographics deemed as oppressed as being less qualified than they actually are. However, assuming this were true, this, in no way, can support affirmative action; rather, what it would support is fixing our filtering mechanisms to make more accurate, more precise assessments of individuals, which is the opposite of the blunt tool of AA.
07mk
1mo ago
Like, James Damore was unsuccessful, but he did sincerely try to counter wokeness at Google where he worked.
I don't think this is an accurate description of what he did when he wrote and distributed his infamous memo. I'd characterize it more as him sincerely trying to help wokeness, under the belief that the woke (or rather, the equivalents at the time, since I don't think "woke" was nearly as commonly used back then) genuinely wanted to accomplish the things they said they did.
07mk
1mo ago
In the media associated with ROP I saw, the racially diverse hobbits and dwarves seemed rather curious, especially compared to its absence in the Jackson trilogy. I also heard that ROP had the same problem of people teleporting across the continent that plagued the later seasons of GOT (also, apparently at one point Galadriel hops off a ship that's hundreds of miles from nearest land with the plan of just swimming back to shore? And it actually works?). Which points to a very distinct lack of understanding of what contributed to GOT's success. Part of GOT's appeal was in presenting us with a believable medieval fantasy world, which, besides the realpolitik and sudden violence the show was known for, included different peoples from different nations looking, talking, thinking in recognizably distinctive ways. Even stripped of all the costumes, the Dothraki looked different from those from Winterfell and they looked different from those from Dorne, and all that made sense because of the presumed lineage of these cultures and nations. And when people needed to travel a few hundred or thousand miles, this presented real logistical issues that would present challenges to overcome, often in interesting and entertaining ways (IIRC Arya and the Hound running into adventures traveling from King's Landing to just halfway up the continent took a whole season, and it was an absolute blast the whole time!). These aren't things you can just gloss over and expect to still be good.
I wonder if the showrunners just thought that only autistic nerds care about that nerdy shit, and what matters is their ingenious powerful narrative that this franchise is merely being used as a vehicle for delivering. And, arguably, that could have worked! Perhaps it would've pissed off the Tolkien fans, but there are more non-fans than fans, and the world of Middle Earth merely being window dressing for a good story could still have been wildly successful. Unfortunately, from what I've heard, the protagonist, a young Galadriel, ended up being just another aggressive, abrasive, overpowered girlboss whose primary flaw is that everyone else doesn't see how correct she is. Which isn't exactly conducive to a satisfying narrative.
07mk
14d ago
Technology was supposed to automate away the drudgery, so we can devote ourselves to higher pursuits like art, philosophy, and science.
I think technology has done a lot of that, though, with things like dishwashers, washing machines, running water, elevators, cranes, cars, and such. These are all "dumb" tech, though, and they hit diminishing returns; we still have to load our dishwashers and steer our cars (for the most part) manually. I think this just speaks to how difficult the precise and fine manipulation of objects in the physical world really is. From what I heard, image generation AI was actually a consequence of trying to solve this problem; we needed AI to be able to perceive the world similar to humans, which meant identifying objects in images, which was able to be reversed in some way to create new images. And this happened much more quickly than the robotics controls, because manipulating stuff in the digital world is much easier than in the real world.
It's still way too early to tell, but I could also see the argument that AI art does automate away the drudgery so we can devote ourselves to higher pursuits, since it's really primarily good at creating high fidelity illustrations while lacking the good taste or artistic vision required to convey some emotion in a pleasing or provocative way (this is arguable). This allows people to work on the more high level vision of what they want their illustration to look like instead of devoting the time required to develop their manual muscle control.
07mk
1mo ago
It's hard to say, given how the boundaries of "politically correct" has changed in recent years. In the recent The Little Mermaid CGI/live action remake by Disney, they edited lines from Ursula's villain song where she was manipulating the heroine Ariel into giving up her voice in exchange for legs by telling her how men like women who stay quiet and meek, since the notion that women ought to be quiet and meek is offensive. So it seems that certain views are so offensive that even villains being presented as being villainous ought not express them. Pedophilia and rape could fall in that camp.
That said, not having seen Part 2, I'd guess that wasn't a meaningful factor, if at all, in the decision. Having listened to the Dune audiobook a couple years ago after having read it a couple decades ago, I recall thinking that the sexual perversion of the Harkonnens didn't add a whole lot to the narrative. In a film with limited time, it seems reasonable to cut it, or perhaps modify it to a less distracting form.
07mk
1mo ago
DISCLAIMER: I actually believe that his words should be seen as tribal applause lights and so fact-checking them is missing the point, but there you go.
This seems likely correct, but I'd say that not fact-checking tribal applause lights is missing the point. If the tribe I belong to uses applause lights that don't stand up to fact-checking, then that makes me question the tribe's epistemic/honesty standards and thus makes me question if the reason I elected to join to the tribe is due to incorrect/dishonest information. I don't think of myself as some high-minded elite idealist, but I do consider it preferable that I choose my tribes based on true information rather than deception.
07mk
14d ago
I wonder how differently this will impact the music industry versus how generative AI has and will impact the digital illustration industry. I'm not much into music, but I feel like a lot more of the appeal to music comes from the personalities attached to the songs than in the case of illustrations. And the personalities can't ever be truly copied without deception; even if we reach AGI with AI personalities indistinguishable from a human, the knowledge that the personality came from a computer instead of a human who had actually popped out of another human will color the perception. When someone puts on a Taylor Swift song during their daily commute or a workout, the knowledge that it was actually written and sung by Taylor Swift almost certainly plays a significant factor in their preference to listen to that song over something else.
That said, there are plenty of more functional uses of music, like BGM for ambience in works like video games, TV shows, films, other videos, b-rolls and the like, where no such personality matters. Even for big time composers like John Williams or Hans Zimmer, I'd bet the typical movie fan wouldn't care if the music had been made by AI, as long as the music actually served the purpose exactly as well as music that had been written by those people. This is analogous to the functional use of illustrations like for movie props, game textures, or book illustrations that provide employment for unknown low-level illustrators, which is what AI seems to be best positioned to disrupt (probably is already). But what I perceive with the music industry is that, even at the low level, fans tend to care about the musicians attached to the music; they don't go listen to the small local band or buy their albums just because of the audio that they put out, they do so because they want to support those people in particular. Again, AI fundamentally can't challenge this without deception, so those low-level employment opportunities for unknown musicians may survive in a way that it won't for unknown illustrators.
Another aspect is how using technology to automate music production seems to have been more accepted than for illustrations pre-AI, i.e. sampling and stuff like that. Some illustrators seem to see AI art as "cheating" because it allows the creation of very high fidelity, high detail illustrations without developing one's hand-eye coordination through years of practice. Whereas musicians are still respected even if they don't play the instruments or sing the vocals themselves. But generative AI will allow people who didn't even write the music or have any understanding of music to produce high quality songs merely from a text prompt, which is certainly a big difference. But also, just like how AI art is being used by illustrators to aid in their workflow, I wonder how/if AI music could play into it. Udio and Suno go straight from prompt to produced song, but what about prompt to lyrics and sheet music, or prompt + lyrics and sheet music to produced song, or any other intermediate steps? In illustrations, it's pretty easy to use the same tool selectively to aid in the workflow since it's all just putting pixels on a grid at the end of the day, but with song production with the different mediums involved, we'd need to see more specialized tools to aid musicians' workflows.
To some extent, it's understandable - it must be a pretty big blow to one's ego for the art one prides themselves on to be so easily recreated and automated by the equivalent of a Chinese Room, especially when the field is still in its infancy and hasn't even come close to anything we would consider agentic - but I can't help but see many of the naysayers about the ability of AI to achieve supposedly uniquely "human" tasks as being clearly myopic and wrong.
I had a conversation with someone last year who was insistent that actually good (i.e. human-equivalent) voice acting AI would require us to first invent general AI, because the various tones and inflections needed to properly convey the character's emotions to the audience would require actual understanding of what the character was going through with all the various nuances and details and such. I just don't understand this perspective, since voice acting, like music, is merely the production of sound waves at the end of the day. AI will only get better at manipulating sound waves, and there's no need to understand the emotions of the character the same way a human actor needs to, merely what sorts of sounds give positive feedback from the human audience (i.e. evokes certain emotions). Same goes for text, images, and video, of course. But even once these technologies become superhuman in ability to create truly meaningful, inspiring, insightful works of art, I imagine there will always be a subculture of people who will insist on only appreciating the maximally manually produced artworks. It's just hard to tell right now if they will be the mainstream or a tiny niche like the Amish.
07mk
1mo 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
1mo ago
Game writing was dreck before these consultants and is so now, too. The reason for this is simple - almost all game writers are D&D geeks who almost exclusively read science fiction and fantasy garbage and have no understanding of classical literature or even film to broaden their ability. Everything is a Marvel movie to them because it’s all they know.
I think it really speaks to the utter incompetence of the types of writers that work at and are sympathetic to Sweet Baby Inc that even by these extremely low standards, the writing they produce is recognized as significantly worse than the standard dreck of AAA game writing. The way that they allow their ideology to completely subvert their ability to write "good" characters and narratives - again, "good" only by the extremely low standards of AAA video game writing - is actually pretty fascinating, especially given that these are people who specifically claim to have insight about how to write good characters and narratives. This seems to be the same phenomenon as in the film/TV industry where even literal Marvel movies have had what little artistic merit they had nearly completely destroyed in a large part due to this type of writing, with the financial consequences that follow.
I think it's a good reminder of the fact that, in life, things are never so bad that they couldn't get worse, and whether or not it does get worse matters.And, in fact, it's often the case - certainly in this one - that many people are actively pushing to make those things worse while telling you that it's better.
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?
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