07mk
13hr ago
But better than advertisements are murals commissioned to real artists whose goal isn’t to sell something to the lowest common denominator. I prefer those on walls and structures and imagine Fenway Park would look better with them too.
I think there are certainly contexts where this is true. I'm skeptical about Fenway Park specifically; a mural that exists purely for beauty isn't out of the question in an MLB stadium, which are known to have similar things like fountains or statues or even aquariums which serve similar functions. But I think there's something especially beautiful about the way a stadium reflects its purpose - i.e. to generate profit for the owners via providing a space that people are willing to pay money to watch their local professional team play - that is missing in a mural that isn't in an advertisement. The mural could beautify the stadium and provide a more positive experience to the fan which compels them to be willing to pay more or to come more often, but a pretty piece of 2D art on a wall isn't generally something that baseball (or any sportsball) fans find that appealing about going to a baseball game, and so if it's there, it's almost definitely mostly motivated by some desire to make the park more beautiful to look at and experience, rather than the desire to get more people to be more willing to pay more money to come into the park. And, again, there's something beautiful to the park's visuals reflecting its purpose rather than reflecting some desire to show people a beautiful wall.
07mk
14hr ago
Because they should do it to every commercial: I want every non-monopoly with aggressive advertising to be given this (or the Bud Light post trans ad) treatment, until public and online spaces look even better than São Paulo, Lancy Geneva, and Maine (where billboards are outlawed).
Online, I'm with you, but in public physical spaces, I disagree so much. As a Red Sox fan, I remember when the Green Monster at Fenway Park didn't have ads in the 90s and early 00s (in contrast to sometime before that and before my era, when it was plastered with ads), until the new owners decided to plaster it with ads yet again. A high proportion of fans were against it on the basis that it would uglify this holy site, but almost immediately after it happened, I absolutely loved the results and thought it looked far more natural with all the ads (aside: same for the Monster seats; before that, the Green Monster only had netting above the wall). Since then, I've come to appreciate the beauty that is added to things by advertisements that were motivated purely for commercial desires, and often - not always, but often - I feel like there's a real resource being wasted when I see some highly-visible wall or structure of some commercial or industrial building not being decorated with advertisement that could be generating revenue and having a 50/50 chance of helping out the company that's advertising.
I also learned recently that many Torii gates in Japan are sponsored by businesses and the Japanese characters written on their pillars are advertisements for those businesses, so they're roughly the equivalent of a "WALMART" or "DICK'S SPORTING GOODS" stamped on the gate, and learning this made me like these gates even more.
07mk
18hr ago
On this meta note, I've seen a sort of parallel here with "consent" and "denial" that I find really odd.
In the past, I've seen some AGW-skeptics claim that the anti-AGW-activists calling them "climate deniers" is a dirty attempt at associating them with "holocaust deniers" because they're both using "denier." This, despite the fact that "denier" has a very well known, basic non-holocaust- (and non-AGW-)related definition in English that has no derogatory connotations whatsoever and only negative connotations in the sense that "denying" something means "negating" something.
More recently, I've seen some [people who consider AI training on copyrighted material without consent to be perfectly ethical] claim that the [people who consider AI training on copyrighted material without consent to be unethical] pointing out that the former are pro-violation-of-"consent" is a dirty attempt at associating them with rapists - i.e. people who violate sexual consent - because they're both relating to the word "consent." This, despite the fact that "consent" has a very well known, basic non-sex- (and non-copyright-)related definition in English.
Ironically, perhaps, these complaints are, in themselves, attempts to smear someone else as engaging in bad faith tactics merely through association of the same vocabulary.
That said, I haven't seen this that much. Just more than I would have expected and certainly far more than I would like.
07mk
18hr ago
Is there Fiverr or the like in Damascus? Perhaps you could hire a venue, producers, and a few amateur musicians to put on a minimum viable metal show. I have no information, but I would guess that cost of services there are low, such that you could still come out ahead if you win the bet, depending on how much you value izzat.
07mk
19hr ago
The question is whether the taxes raised are going to be a net benefit after fully accounting for the costs of hosting these businesses. At some point it tips over into a net loss, and the closer it is to that point the less worthwhile it is. Given that one side has billions of investment capital and a fleet of corporate professionals dedicated to getting a datacentre built at the optimal cost while their opposition are a set of competitors each consisting of a bunch of minor league politicians and their under-funded, under-paid, under-experienced and under-qualified admin staff who also have to manage their other various duties it's a safe bet that a deal will favour the business.
Nice thing, though, is that it can favor the business and still offer that local municipality benefits far greater than if they hadn't given tax breaks. The devil is in the details, of course, but trying to extract as much from the municipality as possible to the the extent that the municipality has net losses from the transaction is something that would cost the business quite a lot of money, likely with diminishing returns as they have to rely on more and more obscure loopholes (that invite court challenges) or hire more and more expensive lawyers who are better negotiators, and it's not like these data center businesses are lacking for other places in which to invest money that have positive expected value.
I think one aspect that my statement doesn't capture, though, is the humiliation or "pride" at having "won" against the business, which I think may be a big deal for a lot of the politicians and the electorate that support them. I kinda understand that this is important, but also, I kinda don't, and I wish more politicians, ideologues, etc. especially from my side of the aisle, would embrace our side being humiliated if it means that we actually make life better for people; it's only through embracing our humiliation that we can prove to ourselves that we actually care about making life better, rather than about feeling pride at believing that we're the kinds of people who make lives better.
07mk
20hr ago
Why are conservative men treating this like something that necessitates taking away women's rights or like it reveals that the majority of women want to kill their kids?
My experience of social media indicates that this isn't happening, and it's also not really a conservative phenomenon. It's people joking that if - if - the recent social media outpouring of support for Clancy by women on the basis that Clancy's circumstances made her unaccountable for her actions is reflective of some sort of general belief about women by women, then that is a very strong - damning, even - argument that women ought to have fewer rights, proportional to their lesser accountability. The idea that a majority of women want to kill their kids is something I haven't encountered anywhere.
07mk
1d ago
In terms of actual Democratic politicians, I'd guess that the true nature of their opposition is that opposing it makes them more popular among people who they consider it important to be popular to (i.e. their electorate and also political insiders). As for why it's popular among those people, I don't think it's a phenomenon unique or even unusual to the Democratic party: the true nature of their opposition is that their opposition is yet another dimension by which they get to moralize to others in a way that makes them feel superior. Tech bros have been deeply unpopular among Democrats for close to the last decade, the multiple real downsides and predicted future downsides to AI has made tech bros even less popular, and tech bros tend to have a much more liberal notion of morality than what much of the Democratic base is comfortable with, and so tech bros and their tentacles, in the form of data centers, make for good targets.
07mk
6d ago
I can't think of any adaptations that are very different to the source material but still good.
Does Apocalypse Now count? Or is it too similar to be considered very different, or is it too different to be considered an adaptation, or is it not good? For bonus points, where does Spec Ops: The Line sit?
Blade Runner and Total Recall are also both quite different from the source material, but arguably not good, though I'd argue against that.
07mk
6d ago
I think people are primarily complaining about how they did it, rather than what.
07mk
7d ago
that average lower intelligence of a group conveys them a right to enslave any member of that group;
Most people believe this for legal minority/guardianship required. Most mentally disabled people have guardians, and I'm pretty sure legal minority for children is justified based on childrens' lower intelligence.
Guardianship is different from enslaving, though. It's perhaps adjacent, but for mentally disabled people, it's based on the individual actually being mentally disabled rather than group-based identity (though obviously the subset of mentally disabled people do end up forming an identity group). For children, there's more than just lower intelligence, including relative inexperience, weakness, smaller size, and maturity (associated with intelligence, but arguably different), as well as the fact that it's definitionally a stage of life that literally everyone has to have passed through to become not-children (or baby or infant or etc.), so it's got a set per-individual expiration date.
If, by some miracle, the current state of scientific literature on IQ and intelligence and correlations between races and other genetic groups became common knowledge tomorrow, I'm skeptical that a movement to bring US race relations back to pre-Civil War times would be successful. We've gone several generations now since not just the Civil War, but also the Civil Rights movement. "Equality" as a virtue has become so engrained in this society that the most effective anti-equality forces right now are succeeding because they're pushing it under the spoken justification of equalizing old inequality. In that setting, this becoming common knowledge isn't going to somehow be the tipping point to a neo-Confederate takeover. In a way, it's cosmic justice for slavery that fear of bringing it back has so mind-killed so many people at so many places of power that it has gone to cause real harm in our ability to understand the world, which in turn has caused real harm to lots and lots of undeserving individuals.
Given the prevailing desire for equality (with a rather unhealthy dose of desire for equity) in America, I'd be more concerned about some mandatory reparations program justified not based on history but rather based on group IQ, where I, as an immigrant, no longer have an excuse to disqualify myself. And I'm pretty sure if we do go full Harrison Bergeron, whatever comes out in reality is guaranteed to be a thousand times stupider than what was in fiction. What would be interesting is if it compels some serious investment into genetic engineering and gene therapy research especially in relation to intelligence and race, in order to equalize the averages over generations, Bene Gesserit-style.
If AGI/ASI really does arrive and make our own human intelligence obsolete anyway, this would also complicate things somewhat, as financial status could become decoupled from intelligence. Or if not, everyone belonging to certain races could be given earrings with a free Claude subscription for life, in an effort to achieve equity between races which, depending on how things go, could be counterproductive or work too well or both.
07mk
7d ago
31 years ago was 1995. It's easy to notice how much the norms and standards of academia, journalism, and general discourse around intellectual pursuits has noticeably changed in that time. Would a Jason Arday in 1995 have made it as far into Cambridge? I think a reasonable guess is No, he would not have made it as far and, in fact, there's a high likelihood that he wouldn't even have made it to the interview step in applying for the job.
Take that trajectory and extend out another 31 years, with the rock-hard belief that you are on the Right Side of History, that the moral arc of justice will ever bend in your direction. And consider that he was hired in, IIRC, 2022, when there was a lot more optimism on the part of these true believers that their true beliefs were true. It wouldn't be surprising for someone in that mindset to believe that, whenever this does get uncovered, the intellectual environment will be such that such plagiarism and fraud for the sake of uplifting an oppressed black disabled man is actually seen as virtuous or even obligatory. And we can see by how things are playing out they wouldn't have been wrong by much, despite having been found out within 5 years, and with the skepticism to their belief system actually going up in that time.
07mk
7d ago
Does the immorality of suicide cause the self-administered death penalty to be more justified, due to how it punishes not only your life but also your sense of self and identity compelling you into a sort of morally contradictory situation where you feel like you have no choice but to do something you consider immoral, or does it cause it to be less justified, due to how it would require you to commit yet another immoral act? I can see the argument for both.
07mk
7d ago
Gutkin: One of the reasons people might be unwilling, in general, to make hay about these incidents is that they perceive them as feeding into a right-wing campaign against the sector. You’ve been accused of that.
I find this attitude among journalists and academics - i.e. roles in society that are purported to be about seeking and publicizing truth and facts (obviously trade secrets and whatnot being exceptions) - to be infuriating. If you actually have a belief that these things are important, one of the first things that you should be willing to ignore and marginalize are your own personal partisan biases and ideological commitments, because any amount of education should make it obvious that those are some of the most powerful forces that drive one's behavior into irrational and incorrect directions. As such, if some truth or fact would "feeding into" the enemies' campaign, I should embrace it and be even more gung-ho about investigating it and publicizing it. That's the only way that I can credibly claim to care about discovering and teaching truth, rather than to care about pushing forward my ideological biases while wearing academia as a skinsuit to make people believe that I'm searching for the truth.
If revealing and spreading some scientific truth would play into my enemies' hands, then I ought to play into my enemies' hands.
07mk
7d ago
My frustrations with TLOU 2 weren't so much the gay/trans/wokeness (those were relatively minor annoyances), as the way the game spends 40 hours beating you over the head with REVENGE IS BAD as if it's some sort of revelatory message. Like, yeah Naughty Dog, I got it. Do you have anything else to say here?
I haven't played TLOU2 so I don't have opinions about it specifically, but this sort of fits into a pattern I've seen in people talking about "woke" games and other fictional media as being bad not because they're "woke" (i.e. gay/trans/etc.) but because they have other generically bad qualities like leaning on some super-simplistic message as if it's some revelation. But I think this sort of claim ignores a big part of one of the defining features of "wokeness" which is that people ought to get jobs on the basis of identity rather than on the basis of competence. As such, hiring poor writers and poor editors and poor managers who greenlight the poor writing produced by the poor writers and coming up with something that would make a 5 year old embarrassed for stating the obvious as if it's shocking, is a direct consequence of the "wokeness" of the game.
07mk
7d ago
But I can't express that belief because of how obviously irrational it is. It's a demand for cosmic justice, not a real intellectual rebuttal. Yet I can't help it
On this meta issue, I wonder if this harmful tendency of humans to attach moral weight to empirical facts is fixable and if so, how that would work. I feel like it should be standard in schools, starting from as soon as any sort of essays or argumentation is taught, to always use examples of correct arguments for things almost everyone in the tribe considers extremely evil or odious (i.e. fascism, racism, murder, rape, genocide, slavery) to always use examples of incorrect arguments for things almost everyone in the tribe considers good (i.e. democracy, equal rights, feeding babies). Hard to implement, even harder to enforce. I'd also think that, if I were a teacher, I'd try to make sure that the most popular high status kids are assigned to make arguments in favor of the most apparently evil things and the least popular low status kids are assigned the ones in favor of the most universally beloved and apparently good things. But that's even harder to implement and enforce. But if I ever became emperor of Earth, I'd probably edit the common core to include something along these lines.
07mk
8d ago
I think you're not nearly cynical enough if you don't believe that the vast majority of them did believe him. Intentionally modifying one's own judgment faculties in order to honestly believe in things that are convenient for one's status within the ideology is basically ubiquitous among the more involved in the ideology, which is basically everyone in one of these departments. It's something Arthur Chu referenced a while ago on Slate Star Codex, that he "mindkills" himself regulary so that the tendencies in his brain that would be reluctant to SocJus claims can be appropriately suppressed
07mk
8d ago
You know the economy's going poorly when we're down to clipping parentheses, not just coins.
07mk
8d ago
The extra CW dimensions this story has taken on that it didn't need to is pretty fascinating. The core CW issue, of course, is DEI and the logical consequence of which, being Professor Jason Arday of the University of Cambridge. That would have been easily big enough to justify the huge kerfuffle that has been happening the past few weeks. But also, the story was broken by Nathan Cofnas on his personal Substack, and the first thing anyone in the mainstream talks about is Cofnas's "racial realist" views - summarized as "racist" - due to publicly holding HBD views, most famously from affirming Harvard's conclusion that affirmative action is needed for Harvard to have anything more than vanishingly few black undergrads (and extending the conclusion to cognitively-demanding industries/fields in general). Furthermore, Arday added on a layer of either suicide or drug overdose (or both, if we consider the latter is often an instantiation of the former). Which then led to this whole free speech row, with Arday's supporters openly calling for censorship of journalists if their subjects are sufficiently mentally unwell.
The part with Cofnas and HBD is the part I find most interesting right now. Almost everyone mentioning Cofnas is careful to call him a racist and mention that his racism doesn't affect the veracity of his claims, but also that it justifies the skepticism that Cambridge and Good Law Project (dunno their exact connection to Arday, but they were probably the biggest non-Cambridge defenders of Arday when the story first broke) had towards Cofnas's claims of plagiarism. This has led to a bunch of people on Twitter looking deeper into Cofnas's views and claims, researching HBD, and some of them openly defending him as having been tarred unfairly.
I doubt that this will lead to anything really big, but it would be pretty amazing if this affair of Arday led to enough more people to look into Cofnas's claims such that basic scientific facts about HBD become common knowledge or at least unforbidden knowledge. If so, it could very well have been the case that Jason Arday was a net positive for humanity in a way that he never would have been had he not been unjustly elevated to his stature thanks to DEI.
Where things become especially funny is when we consider the arguments in favor of censoring journalists who cover "vulnerable" people in light of Cofnas, rather than Arday. Of course, by the judgment of the proponents of censorship, Cofnas is too white and nerdy for it to be possible for him to be sufficiently mentally unwell as to justify censorship of negative journalism about him, and so it would never apply to him. I doubt that this principle playing out publicly in real-time will have any meaningful effect in the culture, but it's still amusing to watch.
07mk
8d ago
Second, the entire Ivy League except Dartmouth is at best 50-50 male to female now. Most have higher female populations. Notre Dame is the only other topish school that has more males than females (guess conservatism or football draw). So the Ivies almost certainly moderately discriminate against females if anything.
You can't conclude that from that information. Perhaps it's an indication that it's worth investigating, but other elite schools having greater female proportion than Ivies doesn't indicate Ivies discriminating against females; it could be that a disproportionately high number and high quality of male students apply to Ivies compared to other elite schools.
It could also be that other elite schools discriminate in favor of females more than the Ivies do; this would at least support the notion that Ivies are relatively more discriminatory against females (by being less positively discriminatory in favor of them) compared to other elite schools. However, we would still need that applicant information to make such a conclusion.
07mk
8d ago
I don't think you have to believe you're on the side of good, just that enough of your enemies are sufficiently unscrupulous that they would always evoke maximally harsh rulesets against you if they won (so don't let them win at any cost).
"Good" isn't a perfectly easily-definable term, but I'd say that anyone who truly believes that their enemies are sufficiently unscrupulous in that way is someone who can accurately be said to believe that they are on the side that is "good" in some meaningful way that their enemies aren't.
But also, believing that the "I win and you lose" ruleset is a particularly good way to guarantee forever that "I win and you lose" happens (which is very important, because if I lose and you win, then you will be particularly unscrupulous towards me) seems naive to the point of (self-)malice. A ruleset like that is just going to encourage people to circumvent the ruleset and also eventually subvert it, in a way that a ruleset that isn't just purely and obviously who/whom doesn't. And the only way to believe that such attempts to circumvent/subvert will never succeed is if one believes in some supernatural force willing it so, whether that's God or a god or the moral arc of history or whatever.
07mk
8d ago
Not everybody's. What about 'I win and you lose' as a ruleset? That's what they actually want. When it's Farage or someone they don't like, the media is holding them to account. At no point are these rules intended to be applied fairly, it's like how Lockheed Martin doesn't give Iran missiles to shoot back.
That ruleset is fantastic only if it is truly the case that God or the moral arc of history is on your side, since you can guarantee that that ruleset will win out. Otherwise, that can invite alternate rulesets that are even harsher for oneself than it would have been towards others, and it can make that alternate ruleset both more likely and just in a way that the original ruleset wasn't. Thus one can genuinely believe that it's fantastic for oneself/one's party/one's ideology/etc. if one has unwavering faith that they are on the side of God right side of history, even if it is, in fact, not the case that it's fantastic for oneself. This, of course, is an obvious risk that immediately presents itself the moment you start dealing with faith, which is something that anyone who's had even a semester of higher education should find intuitive; that any college-educated people would fall for this is a tremendous condemnation of the higher education system as it exists today and certainly within the last few decades.
07mk
9d ago
I recently played thru FF7Rebirth and Mouse: PI For Hire (both around 7/10 experiences; former is not worth the hours, latter is barely worth the few hours which were needlessly extended with boring writing) each of which limited one only to 30 or 50 saves, so I had to juggle jumping to different save slots by the last ~1/3 of the game. I just started MGS: Delta (played 3 on PS2 back when it came out, 2x), and I'm already 10 saves in thru the prologue, and I'm dreading this one having a limit as well. It's maddening that any game made these days doesn't have the save limit as "as many as the drive will store" and decides to put in some artificial limiter, as if it were a live service game that depends on arbitrary limitations for monetization.
07mk
9d ago
This is why I included a parenthetical in a bracket in the other comment, to clarify the type of perception of lack of agency is involved. Eg slaves in USA in 1850 were known to lack agency, but that didn't confer any particular social or political capital. But that has only a little in common with how Arday was perceived or treated.
07mk
9d ago
That's fair; "definitionally" is wrong in my previous comment. But I do think that people subconsciously seeing you as lacking agency is sufficient for having social and political capital, just not necessary. There are other ways to accrue social and political capital such as by being a charismatic politician with a popular message, but in this case, going towards people who bought into a popular ideology that mandated to them that they perceive people like Arday as lacking agency seems to have been the method.
I suppose it's not too far from "molest" which is also an ordinary word with an ordinary non-sexual meaning, but which almost always gets used sexually these days. "Consent" is perhaps not an "ordinary" word, but I think most people who have been to the hospital as adults are at least familiar with "informed consent" or "consent forms" which have nothing to do with sex. And I think this is to enough of an extent that it's not justified to accuse someone who uses the term "consent" as trying to smuggle in sexual implications.
This is the true issue that should be being brought up in the example I provided. The disagreement with AI training on copyright-protected works without consent is whether or not consent is required. As someone who believes that there's nothing unethical about it, I openly say that I am freely violating the consent of the copyright-holders (and support Anthropic, OpenAI, SpaceX, Meta, etc. doing so) and that I feel no guilt over this, because their consent doesn't matter. Much like your neighbor doesn't need yours in your example. That's the point to make, not the one claiming that invoking the copyright-holders' consent is a way of smearing oneself or AI companies as rapist-adjacent.
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