07mk
1yr 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
2yr ago
First of all, I do think this post is pretty much just "why is my idiotic outgroup so idiotic as to believe in idiotic things?" and not the kind of thing I like seeing here, personally.
Second, I think the things you describe about biology-denial is common not just in "wokes" but in much of the general population as well. The wokes certainly are the most fervent believers in it and also one of the primary driving forces that push it onto the general populace, but they're by far not the only ones to buy into the denialism hook-line-sinker.
Third, I think the answer to your question is just that most people don't actually care to do the research into this stuff. Most people, wokes included, follow a sort of cargo-cult version of principles that happen to be convenient for them in the moment, not principles themselves. An example that comes to mind - because it was one of the first I noticed back in my SJW days - was wokes (perhaps proto-wokes? "Woke" wasn't nearly as common a term back then as it is now, and they were usually called SJWs) calling opinions they disagreed with "gross" as a way to denigrate them. It came as a shock to me, because those same individuals had spent the past decade denigrating the notion of objecting to something on the basis of personal disgust in the fight for gay rights and gay marriage. Yet there they were, objecting to something on the basis of personal disgust. It made me realize that they mistakenly believed they were principled; it wasn't that they believed in the principle of non-judgment on the basis of disgust while their conservative opponents didn't, it was that they just didn't find gay marriage disgusting and so had no issue with using such a principle as a convenient momentary tool with which to beat down their conservative opponents.
So when it comes to science and specifically the evolution of the human brain and human societies, they don't actually follow the principles of science to do the research into figuring out truths about the universe, they just think cheering really loudly for the banner that says "science" on it while pushing all the same ideas they already believe in is what it takes for them to be pro-science.
I don't think this is unique to wokes. It's perhaps particularly worse in them than many other ideologies, because woke-ism specifically has concepts designed to turn off critical thinking. But then again, that's not exactly unique to woke-ism either. It just happens to be the one that is acceptable to people who consider themselves pro-science through optimizing itself to have the most convincing, shiniest pseudo-academic/pseudoscientific veneer that hides the fact that it's all made of cardboard.
07mk
2yr ago
Series co-creator Will Graham became greatly concerned about bias built into Amazon’s system for evaluating shows, which multiple sources say often ranked broad series featuring straight, white male leads above all others.
...
Still, several Amazon veterans believe the system remains too dependent on those same test scores. “All this perpetuation of white guys with guns — it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy,” says one. And another: “Relying on data is soul crushing … There’s never, ‘I know the testing wasn’t that great, but I believe in this.'” Graham declined to comment.
As someone who grew up in an environment where third wave feminism was just taken for granted as the obviously correct thing (well, really 2.5th wave, I suppose, and it was just called "feminism"), I'm reminded of the basic attitude that I noticed there, which I'd sum it up as "feminism can't fail, it can only be failed." I've noticed this sort of attitude being a very strong feature of the downstream cluster of ideologies that have followed since, i.e. "identity politics," "SJW," "woke." There's this strong and constantly reinforced idea that we know that our ideology is the obviously correct one that we only need to present to others whose sole correct response is to agree and submit. Any sort of pushback is necessarily a failure on the part of those pushing back, reflecting their bigotry/stupidity which we have no responsibility to account for. This is the core of a lot of the very popular and influential memes in this space like "sit down and shut up," "white fragility," or "tone policing."
But when you're making products for a business, you run into the issue of actually having to appeal to potential customers so that they give you their money for the product. I think the principal-agent problem is certainly at play here, where the decision makers are motivated to push the kind of media they believe ought to be produced, regardless of their profitability. And if the audience doesn't reward them with their money, then so be it; these people are stupid bigots, and even if our company fails, at least we were morally righteous along the way.
But the reality of the market is that without that income, you eventually run out of people willing to fund your videos. This can take a long time, but most people still understand that it's unlikely to go on forever, which I think leads to a couple of different strategies. One is to use the same bullying tactics referenced above in sociopolitical situations, to try to shame the audience into giving them their money. I believe Amazon's Rings of Power's marketing had some of this with the emphasis on the diverse cast and accusations that believing that the racial diversity of some of the isolated population groups would take away from the immersion was bigotry. And more broadly, it's been a popular tactic in the industry with the creators of films like Bros, the Charlie's Angels reboot, and Terminator: Dark Fate outright saying that supporting their films was what good open-minded people would do. This tactic has worked extremely well in sociopolitical contexts where social or outright coercion are options, but I think in media it has had very little success at all.
The other strategy I see, a much more long-term one, is emphasizing socialism or some similar variant of anti-capitalism as the obviously correct way to move society towards. The idea being that without capitalism, video producers would be free to create whatever without constraints based on the audience and as such the media landscape would be more full of the morally correct kind of media, which would then help to reinforce the morally correct sort of sociopolitical views in society. Whether or not this kind of scenario is realistic, I think many people truly believe it, and that's why someone like, say, Anita Sarkeesian, one of the most famous and influential 3rd wave feminists in media in the past decade, has openly come out against capitalism.
07mk
2yr ago
I've been pretty obsessively playing around with AI image generation the last 3 or so weeks, and after learning what I have in that time, it's struck me how the culture war arguments seem to miss the contours of the actual phenomenon (i.e. like every other culture war issue). The impression that I got from just observing the culture war was that the primary use of these tools was "prompt engineering," i.e. experimenting with and coming up with the right sets of prompts and settings and seeds in order to get an image one wants. This is, of course, how many/most of the most famous examples are generated, because that's how you demonstrate the actual ability of the AI tool.
So I installed Stable Diffusion on my PC and started generating some paintings of big booba Victorian women. Ran into predictable issues with weird composition, deformities, and inaccuracies, but I figured that I could fix these by getting better at "prompt engineering." So I looked at some resources online to see how people actually got better at this. On top of that, I didn't want to just stick to making generic pictures of beautiful Victorian women, or of any sort of beautiful women; I wanted to try making fanart of specific waifus characters doing specific things (as surprising as it may be, this is not a euphemism - more because of a lack of ambition than lack of desire) in specific settings shot in specific angles and specific styles.
And from digging into the resources, I discovered a couple of important methods to accomplish something like this. First was training the model further for specific characters or things, which I decided not to touch for the moment. Second was in-painting, which is just the very basic concept of doing IMG2IMG on a specific subset of pixels on the image. (There's also out-painting which is just canvas expansion + noise + in-painting). "Prompt engineering" was involved to some extent, but the info I read on this was very basic and sparse; at this point, whatever techniques that are there seem pretty minor, not much more sophisticated than the famous "append 'trending on Artstation' to the prompt" tip.
So I started going ahead using initial prompts to generate some crude image, then using IMG2IMG with in-painting to get to the final specific fanart I wanted to make. And the more I worked on this, the more I realized that this is where the bulk of the actual "work" takes place when it comes to making AI images. If you want to frame a shot a certain way and feature specific characters doing specific things in specific places, you need to follow an iterative process of SD-generation, Photoshop edit, in-painting-SD-generation, Photoshop edit, and so on until the final desired image is produced.
I'm largely agnostic and ambivalent on the question of whether AI generated images are Art, or if one is being creative by creating AI generated images. I don't think it really matters; what matters to me is if I can create images that I want to create. But in the culture war, I think the point of comparison has to be between someone drawing from scratch (even if using digital tools like tablets and Photoshop) and someone using AI to iteratively select parts of an image to edit in order to get to what they want. Not someone using AI to punch in the right settings (which can also be argued to be an Art).
The closest analogue I could think of was making a collage by cutting out magazines or picture books and gluing them together in some way that meaningfully reflects the creator's vision. Except instead of rearranging pre-existing works of art, I'm rearranging images generated based on the training done by StabilityAI (or perhaps, the opposite; I'm generating images and then rearranging them). Is collage-making Art? Again, I don't know and I don't care, but the question about AI "art" is a very similar question.
My own personal drawing/illustration skills are quite low; I imagine a typical grade schooler can draw about as well as I can. At many steps along the process of the above iteration, I found myself thinking, "If only I had some meaningful illustration skills; fixing this would be so much easier" as I ran into various issues trying to make a part of an image look just right. I realized that if I actually were a trained illustrator, my ability to exploit this AI tool to generate high quality images would be improved several times over.
And this raises more blurry lines about AI-generated images being Art. At my own skill level, running my drawing through IMG2IMG to get something good is essentially like asking the AI to use my drawing as a loose guide. To say that the image is Artwork that 07mk created would be begging the question, and I would hesitate to take credit as the author of the image. But at the skill level of a professional illustrator, his AI-generated image might look virtually identical to something he created without AI, except it has a few extra details that the artist himself needed the AI to fill in. If I'm willing to say that his non-AI generated images are art, I would find it hard to justify calling the AI-generated one not art.
Based on my experience the past few weeks, my prediction would be that there will be broadly 3 groups in the future in this realm: the pure no-AI Artists, the cyborgs who are skilled Artists using AI to aid them along the process, and people like me, the AI-software operators who aren't skilled artists in any non-AI sense. Furthermore, I think that 2nd group is likely to be the most successful. I think the 1st group will fall into its own niche of pure non-AI art, and it will probably remain the most prestigious and also remain quite populous, but still lose a lot of people to the 2nd group as the leverage afforded to an actually skilled Artist by these tools is significant.
Random thoughts:
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I didn't really touch on customizing the models to be able to consistently represent specific characters, things, styles, etc. which is a whole other thing unto itself. This seems to be a whole vibrant community unto itself, and I know very little of it first hand. But this raises another aspect of AI-generated images being Art or not - is it Art the technique of finding the right balance when merging different models or of picking the right training images and training settings to create a model that is capable of generating the types of pictures you want? I would actually lean towards Yes in this, but that may be just because there's still a bit of a mystical haze around it to me from lack of experience. Either way, the question of AI-generated images being Art or not should be that question, not whether or not picking the right prompts and settings and seed is.
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I've read artists mention training models on their characters in order to aid them in generating images more quickly for comic books they're working on. Given that speed matters for things like this, this is one "cyborg" method a skilled Artist could use to increase the quantity or quality of their output (either by reducing the time required for each image or increasing the time the Artist can use to finalize the image compared to doing it from scratch).
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For generating waifus, NovelAI really is far and away the best model, IMHO. I played around a lot with Waifu Diffusion (both 1.2 & 1.3), but getting good looking art out of it - anime or not - was a struggle and inconsistent, while NovelAI did it effortlessly. However, NovelAI is overfitted, making most of their girls have a same-y look. There's also the issue that NovelAI doesn't offer in-painting in their official website, and the only way to use it for in-painting involves pirating their leaked model which I'd prefer not to rely on.
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I first learned that I could install Stable Diffusion on my PC by stumbling on https://rentry.org/voldy whose guide is quite good. I learned later on that the site is maintained by someone from 4chan, and further that 4chan seems to be where a lot of the innovation and development by the hobbyists is taking place. As someone who hasn't used 4chan much in well over a decade, this was a blast from the past. In retrospect this is obvious, given the combination of nihilism and degeneracy you see in 4chan (I say this only out of love; I maintain to this day that there's no online community that I found more loving and welcoming than 4chan).
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For random "prompt engineering" tips that I figured out over time - use "iris, contacts" to get nicer eyes. "Shampoo, conditioner" seems to make nice hair with a healthy sheen.
07mk
1yr ago
I ask, after seeing Musk apparently fail to understand Wikipedia costs money to provide, who wouldn't?
The most charitable read here is that Musk thinks Wikipedia deserves less money, not no money
The link goes to a screenshot of Musk's Tweet, whose first sentence is (emphasis added):
Have you ever wondered why the Wikimedia foundation wants so much money?
Note the bolded "so much," which was not "any." As such, it actually isn't the most charitable read here that Musk thinks Wikimedia deserves less money, not no money, it's the obvious and straightforward read. And it's a highly uncharitable, to such an extent as to be just plain wrong read to say that this indicates a failure to understand that Wikipedia costs any money to provide.
To address the actual question of the post, I think it's notable that even midwits (I hate this term, but whatever, it's the original term used here and it conveys the meaning well enough) tend to look down on people who infer the broad competence of someone in some general endeavor based on a highly uncharitable and downright twisted interpretation of a single Tweet made by that person. Such an inference is so obviously unjustified and so obviously reflective of the interpreter's mentality rather than that of the person making the Tweet that it takes very little intelligence to understand that.
I don't intend this to sound condescending, but this parallel has been so obvious to me for probably the better part of a decade by now, that I'm surprised that someone on TheMotte would only notice it now. Though perhaps it actually speaks ill of me and my hobby of paying attention to the culture wars around popular media that I noticed the parallels so early and found it so obvious.
The all-woman Ghostbusters remake came out in 2016, almost a full decade ago, and that was one of the earlier big examples of the whole "we didn't fail the audience; the sexist, misogynistic audience failed us by not giving us money to spend 2 hours watching our film" narrative being made. That was 2 years after Gamergate, which wasn't quite that specifically, but it was a major flashpoint in video game culture where major video game journalists, devs, and commentators were explicitly telling their customers that their tastes were wrong, and that they had a responsibility to submit to the enlightened, correct tastes of the then "social justice" (equivalent to "woke" today) crowd. This knocked over some dominoes that resulted in many video games designed to appeal to that SocJus crowd being released 5-10 years later, i.e. the last 5 years. Examples of these include failures like Concord or Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League from last year, as well as successes like The Last of Us: Part 2 and God of War: Ragnarok (I suspect that it's not a coincidence that these successes were both sequels to hugely popular games that built on a strong base).
In film, besides 2016's Ghostbusters, 2017's The Last Jedi, as well as most Star Wars works that followed, and 2019's Captain Marvel, as well as most Marvel movies that followed, were major examples of this phenomenon. And though many of these films did fine or even great in the box office, they had plenty of controversy around more old-school fans reacting negatively to various plot points and characterizations, and then being called bigots in return both by filmmakers and commentators. There were smaller examples as well, such as Terminator: Dark Fate or the Charlie's Angels remake-remake, both of which bombed in 2019.
A big part of it, I think, is that SocJus mentality, of all of reality being dominated by power differentials, and as such, each individual of [demographic] is necessarily disadvantaged compared to each individual of [some other demographic]. This means that if that individual of [demographic] fails or just doesn't succeed as much as they imagine an individual of [some other demographic] would have, then their failure is due to the bigoted society that created these power dynamics that made them disadvantaged, rather than due to that individual's own flaws. This, of course, is how millionaire stars can claim to be lacking in "privilege" - the claim isn't that they're not wildly successful, but rather that they aren't as wildly successful as an equivalent person of [some other demographic] would have been. Also of course, this is completely unfalsifiable.
And if you approach things with that mindset, that belonging to [demographic] means that any failure is due to the structural bigotry that reinforces the power dynamics of society, then naturally, when your film/video game/electoral candidate fails, you're going to blame structural bigotry. I.e. your audience, the gamers, the voters.
Also of course, if you just blame external factors, it hampers your ability to self-improve. But you can still succeed as long as all those external factors submit to your demands; if calling someone racist can get them to buy your game, then that's just as good as just making a better game. In practice, this doesn't really work. But the people making these decisions seem to be in echo chambers where calling people racist does get them to submit to their demands. And while everyone lives in echo chambers to some extent, the left/progressive/Democratic crowd has been very openly and very explicitly calling for strengthening the boundaries of their own echo chambers through censorship of opposing voices. Which leads them to model the general audience very poorly. Which costs you money. If you have a big bankroll, you can keep going with that for a while, but eventually, that money runs out. I think 2024 was a big year for when many of these decision makers finally recognized that they were able to see the bottom of the barrel of money they've been feeding their projects. In video games, we might see an actual closure of Ubisoft this year, depending on how their next Assassin's Creed game - one that had direct inspiration from the BLM riots of 2020 according to a developer, IIRC - does, after the mediocre reception of their Star Wars game last year.
I wonder if the Democrats will eventually have a moment when the stark reality of their failures simply can't be tolerated anymore, resulting in a change in tact. I was hopeful right after the election last year, but most signs since then have made me pessimistic. I just hope it comes sooner than later, because, as bad as SocJus is, I fully expect Republicans to be just as bad if they find that they have nearly unchecked power without a strong opposition party.
07mk
2yr ago
The podcast Sold a Story claims that “whole language” and “balanced literacy” became mainstream curricula for reading instruction in American schools despite the fact that they are almost certainly trash.
I'm not sure that "despite" belongs there for any sort of widespread policy, government or otherwise. It just seems to me that "is this thing almost certainly trash?" simply isn't a thought that crosses anyone's minds when implementing this kind of stuff, and certainly not when they're following it. It's more, "Can it convincingly appear to people, especially people I consider important, to be effective?"
But to get away from the snarky cynical aside, I must admit that I find myself feeling little vindicated at learning of this. I'm a Korean immigrant to the USA, and I had immense difficulty learning how to read English when I first moved here, starting from no English knowledge at 1st grade. There was one lesson that was a huge breakthrough for me, which was when my father sat me down one day and wrote out for me each of the 26 letters and then the Korean (Hangul) next to each that came closest to the pronunciation of that particular letter. (E.g. "아" for "a"). From then on, I was able to mentally map English letters to Hangul and sound them out that way, eventually internalizing the English directly and getting to the point where my English reading was better than my Korean.
This had its issues, since English doesn't neatly map letters to sounds like in Hangul. And not just exceptions, but just standard usage - e.g. is the letter "a" more commonly pronounced like in "dab" or like in "haha" or like in "anus?" I don't know. Whereas "아" is always - almost definitionally - pronounced like the "a" in "haha." But it was, in my case, still evidently good enough to use as a base to make me reach the point where my reading skills were indistinguishable from that of a native.
I always assumed that my experience was atypical. Now I'm wondering how many students learning English are suffering like I did, but without having access to that sort of breakthrough lesson where they're taught explicitly the phonemes of each letter.
07mk
2yr ago
What made them think hiring subpar writers, rewriting lore, rewriting characters of one of the most popular fantasy IPs while simultaneously drafting off of the brand was a good idea? It feels like the motive isn't even to make money but solely to push an agenda, but who would do that?
I don't think they thought they were hiring subpar writers. I think they just have a different measure of what a quality writer is compared to the general public. When people who push this sort of agenda say that having representation of people of certain races/genders/sexualities makes a piece of fiction better, I think they actually believe it. They really do believe that if you take an existing successful franchise and tack on a story that appeals to such sensibilities with diverse characters or allegorical plot threads, it makes the work, in some real meaningful way, better. And thus hopefully more successful. And so they prioritize doing just that.
But, of course, there's no such thing as prioritizing everything at once. If you prioritize the messaging, you necessarily put less priority on the actual quality of the work in terms of things like world building, character development, interesting plot, etc. And making a good TV show isn't easy; you can't just de-prioritize those things and expect to end up with good results. But, again, the people making this stuff genuinely believe that the messaging is what makes the TV show good. There's much to be skeptical about when it comes to the narrative of Hollywood/filmmaking leftists being too far in their own echo chambers to understand what appeals to the general public, but the more I observe the leftist echo chambers in my own environments, the more I can believe in such a narrative.
Of course, such delusional beliefs do have to encounter the stark reality of revenue and watch numbers, but culture like this tends to turn slowly, and there's enough money to keep them afloat and going. And the always-dependable narrative that "we didn't fail the audience; the bigoted audience failed us by refusing to watch our show" (examples abound, but the recent Billy Eichner movie comes to mind, as well as the Charlie's Angels reboot-reboot from a couple years back), followed by "but next time, as the march of progress continues on and our side gets more and more vindicated as being the right side of history, the audience will be receptive to our correct notion of what constitutes quality."
07mk
11mo 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
2yr ago
Your post brings to mind something Jonathan Haidt has been saying for a while, which is that modern SocJus/idpol/wokeness/progressivism/etc. is performing anti-Cognitive Behavioral Therapy on the populace (one contention of his being that this is largely responsible for increase in mental health issues among teenagers and teenage girls in particular). CBT teaches various techniques for dealing with negative experiences, such as decatastrophizing - not jumping to the worst conclusions based on the data - or taking ownership of one's reactions - instead of "this made me feel bad," it's "this happened, and I reacted by feeling bad." These have obvious direct negative counterparts in SocJus, with microaggressions being explicit calls to presume some sort of bigotry from ambiguous behavior, and claims that speech that one deems as hateful are directly responsible for literally harming that person.
From my mostly nonexpert layman perspective, as someone who grew up immersed in the antecedents of modern SocJus, I definitely think there's a lot of truth to this. One example that really struck me happened way back in 2016 after Trump got elected, and a lesbian I knew was literally shaking for fear that it would be at most a couple of years before she would be sent to death camps. I recall being baffled by how absurd a belief that was, and how clearly her suffering was caused by all the people who had actually convinced her that Trump would be the next Hitler, rather than by Trump and his ilk.
07mk
3mo ago
I recently rewatched the Lord of the Rings trilogy and was reminded of how much people were claiming that Samwise was obviously in love with Frodo, rather than that they had a fraternal love for each other as friends, which I saw a bunch in the 2010s. Watching it again now, I can kinda see it that way if I squint, but it definitely strikes me as the modern audience projecting something onto what was likely something inspired by the type of brotherhood that someone like Tolkien probably experienced among men in the early 20th century.
Of course, to a lot of the types of people who see homosexuality in Lord of the Rings, that's just proof that a huge proportion of the men back then were actually in-the-closet homosexuals who just couldn't express their inner innate homosexuality due to the repressive society in which they resided.
07mk
2mo ago
A part of this that hadn't occurred to me until I saw it pointed out is that there seems to be a sort of donation duel between this lady's case and that of Karmelo Anthony, who's a black teen charged with murdering a white teen during a track meet by stabbing him in the heart during a dispute over seating. I think there was a top-level comment here about this incident before, but there was a substantial amount of support on social media for Anthony on racial grounds, including fundraising for his defense. I get the feeling that a lot of the motivation to donate to this lady is by people who feel that the support Anthony has been getting on racial grounds has been unjust, and supporting her is a way of "balancing the scales," as it were. This isn't the instantiation of "if you tell everyone to focus on everyone's race all the time in every interaction, eventually white people will try to play the same game everyone else is encouraged to" that I foresaw, but it sure is a hilarious one.
Now, one conspiracy theory that I hope is hilariously true, is that the guy who recorded this lady was in cahoots with the lady herself and staged the whole thing in order to cash in on the simmering outrage over the Anthony case. But I doubt that anyone involved has the foresight to play that level of 4D chess.
07mk
30d ago
However, perhaps I'm frail hearted or something because it does hurt to see so many attack her so viciously, when they clearly have so much hate in their hearts. Perhaps it's Pollyannaish but I wish that we could do our shaming in a more dignified, and less clearly antagonistic way. It seems that most of the people shaming her, from my read at least, clearly enjoy looking down and judging someone harshly, seeing themselves as better than her. From my perspective, that's not just as bad as what she's doing, but still bad.
I agree with this paragraph broadly, but I also see people jumping from this to claiming that Aella has been "bullied" or that people have been "cruel" to her. From what I can tell from the original link to the tweet in your post, she had to actually search her name in order to find these acts of shaming. If these tweets weren't directed at her or perhaps her immediate peers, I don't see how these could be acts of bullying or cruelty. It is perhaps uncouth, even shameful, to speak ill of someone else in a public forum, but it is neither bullying nor cruel. It's only when it's persistent and directed at the target in an unavoidable or difficult-to-avoid way that it can cross that line.
As far as I can tell from reading the post and the tweet, she's just upset that strangers are speaking ill of her and there aren't enough other strangers defending her in response. This seems like entirely a problem she invented for herself by deciding to place boundaries on things that strangers on the internet talk about with each other concerning her. The "I consent!/I consent!/I don't!" meme comes to mind.
07mk
10mo ago
This was my first thought, too. I haven't read much of Marcotte ever, and certainly none in the about 10 years or so since Scott Alexander himself had made a blog post that referenced her by name, but from what I recall of her writing, she seemed to slot into a type of female 3rd wave feminist writer who tends to project all her own beliefs and insecurities onto men. One of the most well known bits of such projection is when it comes to dating, where some 30/40+ career woman seems confused why her great financial success and maturity isn't translating to romantic attention from high quality men and concluding that men must be so fragile as to be threatened by her success, instead of recognizing that, for the vast majority of heterosexual men, unlike for the vast majority of heterosexual women, a potential mate's career success counts for close to nothing relative to her looks, youth, and even her personality, which are things a middle-aged woman who spent most of her effort making it in the workplace hasn't been able to work on very well.
In this case, Marcotte seems to be projecting her own obsession with keeping the people around her politically/ideologically pure onto men, who she believes have even more power than her because of male privilege, without recognizing that this obsession with ideological purity, to the extent that they'd coerce them to agreeing with them, of their partners is not quite as common in men as it is in women*.
* This part is not proven and could certainly be wrong; I'm going off my own anecdotes and stereotypes, but I think this is a common observation by many men nowadays.
07mk
2yr ago
To a large extent, I think this isn't even particularly malicious or intentional. The phrase I keep thinking of when I encounter other leftists in CW contexts is "cargo cult." There's just a real lack of understanding of how things work and a deep belief that pantomiming the general behavior of things that did work in the past is how to make things work. One example would be the anti-climate change "strikes" by kids not going to school until They do Something about the Problem. Strikes worked because they were literally workers that company owners needed to literally do stuff so they could literally make money from real customers; kids not going to school doesn't put any such pressure on governments. A more minor but much more common example is calling people "Nazis" as a way to discredit them; Nazis weren't bad because there's something magical about the syllables "nah" and "zee" when put together in order; they were bad because of real things they really did to real people using real guns held by real men.
Likewise, awards like Hugo's aren't prestigious or well-regarded because there's some ceremony and the author gets a fancy statue or whatever; it's because there's some credibility in the institution that chooses the award recipients that provides a sort of promise that the works they selected meet some level of quality that readers value. Handing out awards to people based on sociopolitical preferences doesn't give prestige to those sociopolitical preferences, it just kills the credibility of the awards.
My guess is that this sort of thing is just as common in the right as well, but I just don't see it because I'm a leftist who's mostly exposed to leftist things.
07mk
1yr ago
He compares the situation to Germans hating Jews, or Hutus hating Tutsis, but in both of those cases, the party on the offensive accused the other party of a pretty specific set of misdeeds. Those accusations may have been false, but they mobilized a lot of hatred. It appears that the Blue Tribe today does not accuse the red tribe of anything specific at all (barring some attempts that certainly haven't had the hoped-for effect, like mass Residential school graves or Jan 6). One might point back to the legacy of slavery or something, but that is largely absent from other Western histories, and the tribes have sorted themselves out the same way, with even more hostility, as in Canada, where the Blue hatred for Red (using the american color scheme for consistency) takes the form of quite overt punching-down.
As someone who was essentially born into the Blue tribe of the culture war and raised to be its soldier, I think you almost have it with "legacy of slavery," but rather, it's the broader oppression narrative, of which the legacy of slavery is one type. When I was growing up in the 90s and 00s in the bluest of blue areas, this oppression narrative was just taken for granted as Obviously True, with the notion that all the Bad Stuff like slavery, misogyny, homophobia, etc. in our society could be gotten rid of, while keeping all the Good Stuff we like, if only those ignorant people would stop holding up these old, decrepit, sexist, racist patriarchal structures. There was generally a real sense of pity for these ignorant bigots, though certainly there was some disgust as well.
It seems that in the decades since I was in school, this kind of teaching has only become more common in schools in less-blue and non-blue areas. It also seems to me that encouragement of active disgust instead of condescending pity has come into vogue in that time. Given that, I don't think Blue tribe's nigh-genocidal hatred of the Red is that surprising.
Of course, this just moves the question back a step: why is the Blue tribe teaching its kids in such a way as to make them believe this narrative about the evils of the Red tribe? I think that's a result of status games without correction. Much of the ideas behind this oppression narrative came from academia, and specifically parts of academia that are largely allergic to empirical testing. Sans empiricism, success in the field became even more about winning status than it normally is, which freed people to make more and more extreme statements (e.g. any old idiot can argue that murder is wrong, but it takes a true genius academic to argue that murder is right) without the messy real world getting in the way. And so teachers taught the (then-current) endpoints of these runaway status games to their students under the wholehearted belief that they were teaching something verified to be True.
Of course, that just moves the question back another step: why did the Blue Tribe allow the humanities in academia to be so freed from empiricism and basic checking as to allow status games to dominate over truth? That one's probably above my pay grade, but my guess would just be generic laziness, nothing interesting in particular. Doing rigorous analysis of anything is tough, and the appeal of taking shortcuts is always there even when you know others will critique your work. When you can be confident that others won't, and this becomes common knowledge among everyone in the field... it'd be surprising if it even accidentally produced truth even once.
07mk
2mo ago
If Harvard values racist discrimination so highly that they would rather allow funding for valuable research they're doing to be cut than to stop that, it really is a damn shame and, TBH, rather perverse. I'd hope that non-racist institutions could pick up the slack, but obviously researchers and research institutions aren't fungible, and that sort of adjustment would take a lot of time. Optimistically, it's possible that falling behind some years on this kind of research will be a decent trade-off for reducing racist discrimination in society's academic institutions in the long run, though even time might not be able to tell on that one.
07mk
4mo ago
Though I will say that I am surprised to hear that how much ink you have spilled defending him and denigrating his opponents, and how strong your reaction was to my original post.
As someone who voted for Hillary in 2016, Biden in 2020, and Kamala in 2024, I second what Folamh3 responded about this apparent arguments-as-soldiers worldview. But I also want to add on that, we can combine the last 2 paragraphs of that comment to see that, from a purely selfish, power-hungry perspective, this sort of thinking is counterproductive. There's no shortage of very good, very well-supported, and very non-partisan reasons why Trump is and would be a terrible POTUS. Yet much of the messaging against him was so filled with hyperbole that even in 2016, calling Trump "Giga-Hitler" or whatever was considered cliche. Things have tended to escalate since.
And this has resulted largely in the discrediting of the people and organizations that kept up this hyperbole. When someone keeps demonstrating that they want to send a message in order to accomplish a certain goal instead of wanting to describe reality accurately (which, at a minimum, requires taking a highly skeptical view of one's own biases and welcoming criticism and feedback from people who disagree with you vehemently), then other people notice and lower their credibility accordingly. I believe it was a commenter here that described it as something like "Media keeps pressing the 'attack Trump/hurt own credibility' button" or something like that, and that's what I've been seeing play out over and over again over the past decade. And it's resulted in people seeking out and even creating alternative sources of information and commentary that mainstream news outlets used to be the primary sources for. Arguably, Musk's purchase of Twitter was also an effect. And this has tended to help Trump. And not just Trump, but also people who actually are the types of genocidal fascists that his critics make him out as.
Which, IMHO, has always been the biggest danger to this whole Trump thing that's been going on the past decade. Again, as far back as 2016, I recall reading someone, maybe on SlateStarCodex, saying that they're not afraid of Trump, they're afraid of who might come after Trump. Now, I'm somewhat afraid of Trump, but not that much more than any other Republican POTUS, but I'm definitely more afraid of what could rise up from the farther, even more extreme right wing due to much of the left having so completely discredited its ability to criticize such people.
I think the only way to gain back credibility is to demonstrate that there are very powerful, very influential internal controls that engage in self-reflection and self-criticism of one's own side, in a way that attempts at getting at the truth, especially if the truth helps one's opponents and hurts one's friends. Unfortunately, I've seen a dearth of such things over the past decade, though it's not zero.
I guess that's just a long-winded way of saying that The Boy Who Cried Wolf is, unironically, a pretty decent fable with a pretty decent lesson.
07mk
7mo ago
Your explanation of the phenomenon reminds me of a stage play or professional wrestling, where everyone knows everything is fake, but we're supposed to suspend our disbelief in order to have a good time. As a Democrat, I feel immense frustration at the kayfabe that the DNC apparently wants all of the electorate to play along with, for the sake of their careers and status and pride and all that, when politics is theoretically supposed to be about actual real life. An election loss like this has consequences; the people who failed to win should be expected to be held accountable for their failures and to honestly assess their failures so as to not repeat them, because their failures hurt many more people than themselves, and yet they're just insisting on play-acting on stage for the audience.
I think Dave Chappelle called Trump an "honest liar" for just telling the electorate that the whole system is fake, while playing along with the fakery. I wonder if there's room in the Democratic party for someone to take on a similar role.
I'm also reminded of the line "magician is the most honest profession there is; he tells you he's going to fool you, and then he fools you." Magic shows are fun, but a stage magician who insists that everyone truly believe that he has supernatural powers, and not as part of his act, is probably not going to gain too many fans other than cultists
07mk
2yr ago
I’ve sometimes heard that the left wing takeover of corporate America is a hollow one - they don’t REALLY cars about minorities, just look at umm their Middle East twitter accounts! They care about $$$ and aren’t true believers
The whole thing about the corporations not really caring about these ideologies but are just mouthing the words is what always struck me as hollow. Given that their actions and words are indistinguishable from that of a true believer, why does it matter the true content of their heart of hearts? In terms of consequential actions and decisions, they might as well be true believers, and that's really what matters.
In terms of the actual question of whether they really are or aren't, I think one can make the case that they really are true believers who are willing to sacrifice $ for ideology, but I think it's also likely that they care about $ but are mistaken about how effective the ideology would be for getting them more $. Where things can get messy is that the ideology itself also posits that following the ideology is a route towards more $ and all the other backwards companies that haven't bought into the ideology are leaving $ on the table (implying those backwards companies are the ones prioritizing their status-quo/"regressive"/"conservative" ideology in favor of $). So it could be that they're true believers who got fooled into believing that this was how to make $, or they're profit-hungry cynical capitalists who were misled by the ideology's claims that it will bring in $.
Obviously, any set of decision makers in a large company like Disney is likely to have plenty of both. What's notable is that there seem to have been no decision maker (with enough power, anyway) who was enough of a cynical profit maximizer to actually properly analyze the ideology's claims of profitability and to put a stop to this kind of ideology-prioritizing behavior. I think the way the ideology discourages skepticism and critical analysis of its claims - in fact, encouraging the coercive suppression of such things - could have played a part in the lack of such decision makers being present or being emboldened enough to push back.
07mk
2yr ago
I assume the creator chose this because he couldn’t make a pie chart that cheats so hard.
I can't recall where I saw it, but I saw some newspaper clipping a while back that just straight-up had no correlation between the pie chart size and the percentage. With subtle manipulation, this would be hard to detect and could even be plausibly denied as intentional manipulation rather than carelessness, but this one, IIRC, had a sliver with a number greater than 50% over a slice whose arc was clearly under 180 degrees. It certainly made me more careful about paying close attention to every part of a chart and their correlation to the underlying data whenever I encountered a chart in some article. Which kind of defeats the purpose of charts, but what can you do.
07mk
3mo ago
In this specific sort of example, the cheat code that people discovered was claiming that due process that includes things like trying to figure out the facts of the matter based on evidence was misogynistic when applied to women accusing men of bad sexual behavior. This, I think, was an instantiation of the larger principle that "lived experiences" described by people who were categorized as "oppressed" were incontrovertible. It seems to me that more and more people are growing wise to this vulnerability, which makes me wonder what the next cheat code will be, to circumvent inconvenient things like the sort of due process you're talking about.
07mk
4mo ago
Other times, your foot gets infected, and if you don't cut off everything from the knee down, your entire body shuts down. And other times, some cells in your breast starts reproducing uncontrollably, and if you don't cut off most of the breast, again, your entire body shuts down. The pain and loss of those healthy cells - a majority of the cells that were cut off were probably healthy! - are real and shouldn't be downplayed. But sometimes it's the least worst option.
I'd say that infections that spread toxicity through the rest of the body or a cancerous growth that grows uncontrollably in a way that crowds out and kills the healthy cells are better metaphors for this situation in academia than a prefrontal cortex sometimes not making the best decisions.
07mk
7mo ago
You don't need to convert as many of them as you do men for a similar payoff, which in theory should be easier.
My guess is that this is the correct explanation. 10+ years ago, when I was all-in on social justice, the prevailing belief was that the primary reason women didn't play video games in exactly the same amounts as men was that the video games hadn't been designed to appeal to them, with most of the rest of the reasons being the video game community being misogynistic and hostile to women. Thus, by changing the way the games were designed, the theory went, video game companies could tap this untapped market and make even more massive profits, all the while also making the world a better, more Socially Just place. How convenient it is that we live in a world where doing what matches my preferred ideology also results in making more money! You'd have to be a complete idiot or an extremist bigot not to pick up that free money that's just sitting there on the table!
I think the recent high profile failures of "woke" games (arguable if "woke" is the same as "trying to appeal to women," but one of the core arguments for uglifying women in "woke" content is that such things are more relatable/appealing to women) such as Concord, Star Wars: Outlaws, or Dragon Age: The Veilguard show that many of the people in charge of the purse strings were true believers of this theory.
I believe that the lesson that those people will learn is that this proves that the video game community is even more misogynistic than they thought, and also that the content directed at pulling in woman customers in these games didn't go nearly far enough, and therefore next time they need to double down and also bully the existing toxic primarily-male gamer fanbase even more, so as to make the space more friendly to women. After all, when you're on the right side of history, you cannot fail, you can only be failed by all the bigots around you who have just not caught on yet that they're headed for extinction.
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.
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