07mk
1d ago
This doesn't capture what I'm talking about. Classical mechanics is a very good approximation for relativity when dealing with mass and accelerations that humans generally tend to deal with in everyday life, which is why it was - and still largely is - considered "correct" despite necessarily being inaccurate to the real world. This is very much not the case for the actual IRL examples, where actually studying the underlying science reveals that the things that people are saying don't require mere refinements to get at the truth, but rather have basically no relation. It'd be akin to the discovery that, actually, it's impossible to store or release energy in molecular bonds like in oil. Imagine that were proven beyond any doubt to you, and yet all the world still functions and runs the way that you've perceived it all your life. That'd be utterly mind blowing.
07mk
1d ago
even though the definition of "obvious" depends on the audience and is famously a little slippery.
My favorite variation of this has the professor saying, "It's obvious, but it's not obvious that it's obvious."
07mk
1d ago
Pre scientific people were intentionally mislead by smarter ones too: mystics, false religions, etc.
The difference in my view is that mystics, false religions, etc. didn't provide some structured, well-established method at arriving at facts and the truth the same way science does. Generally, mystics, to whatever extent they believe that their mysticism gives them access to the truth, doesn't purposefully corrupt their mysticism in an effort to "discover" that what is true is everything they wanted to be true all along (arguably the mysticism itself accomplishes that, which is one part of what makes it different from science). Right now, the people purporting to do science are doing exactly that, despite having all the tools and knowledge and information required to understand that they are indeed corrupting science and also how not to corrupt science. That's what makes their stupidity extra stupid.
Like how someone with training in arithmetic and calculators who declares the calculator as a tool of White Supremacy and therefore 12 x 12 = 1212, not 144 like what the calculator said, has a sort of stupidity that goes beyond the stupidity of someone who just never had access to mathematical education and declares 12 x 12 = 1221. 1212 is slightly more accurate because it's even like 144, not odd, and also closer to 144 than 1221 is, but the process by which the person arrived at that was arguably more stupid.
07mk
2d ago
As flawed as academia is, I still think we'd be stupider without it.
I think you're right. But:
- That's what anyone living in the Stupid Ages would think.
- We may be crossing - or already have crossed without knowing - a boundary where academia contributes greater stupidity than it alleviates, and so past performance isn't indicative of future performance.
- Stupidity isn't some single-dimension attribute that we can place on "humanity" and move up or down, but rather an aggregation of countless little individual things, so we could be less stupid thanks to academia and more stupid, with the possibility that the harms of the latter are so significant (though not necessarily greater than the benefits) as to mark our current time.
07mk
2d ago
I'm sure there's stupidity to be found there, but when the real world REQUIRES you get things right in order to actually succeed, the accountability is to some extent baked into the cake, even if various institutions will try to put a few layers of obsfuscation between themselves and the outcomes.
That's exactly why if all that turned out to be a facade, it would be absolutely wild and crazy and turn my world upside down. I'd guess that the odds are low, but also, I'm quite sure that the true believers in those already-discredited fields would also judge the odds as being low for whatever field they're a true believer to.
No matter how stupid people are today, I'm sure they were dumber pre-1900, especially before we normalized hand-washing. Although if you want to call the entire history of humanity "the Stupid ages" I'd agree to that.
I think it could make sense to call the ages the Stupid Ages if the cause of us being stupid was the very thing that was for the purpose of addressing/avoiding/escaping stupidity, which is sort of what's happening with academia, which are ostensibly for the purpose of something like addressing stupidity, even if, overall, we're less stupid than any other age. There's something to hubris that is extra stupid than just being plain old stupid. Especially since hubris is, itself, a concept that is taught in academia as something bad and to avoid.
07mk
2d ago
If it's a facade, it's one that is at least very functional and works reliably day in and day out. Sociology isn't demonstrating it's functional correctness billions of times per second on each of billions of devices.
Right, and imagine just how you'd react if it were proven to you that this was indeed all a facade? My model of the world doesn't have much room for something like that, where something that works literally quadrillions of times a day in basically exactly the way that all the scientists and engineers and experts and my own limited expertise say they do, and yet all of those are complete lies. This would be a revelation that comes close to - not quite, but close - to waking up in a pod and discovering that you had been in The Matrix.
Significantly, I'd wager that the belief by the typical non-stupid layman believer in those already-proven-to-be-stupid fields like sociology, [x] studies, psychology, etc. is about as strong and about as confident as mine is to electrical engineering. It's both reinforced by and causal to the constant defense such people run against scrutinizing such things with basic scientific/academic concepts like "evidence" and "logic." And if those people can be fooled into such stupid beliefs about sociology, then I could be fooled into an equally stupid belief about electrical engineering.
07mk
2d ago
I think LLMs making people stupider doesn't have much relation to LLMs' ability detect past stupidity that had been sufficiently hidden via exploiting human biases. As long as it doesn't uniformly make all the smartest people stupid (possible, but I think LLMs likely have an effect that's bifurcated on smart/stupid people in terms of their intelligence, if at all), some smart people will exist who can direct the LLMs towards detecting and revealing that stupidity.
I suppose the depressing possibility (likelihood?) is that the populace will be so stupid due to LLMs that all the revealing-of-stupidity just makes the smart people feel like they have no mouth and they must scream. Probably a better apocalypse than the AM takeover? In any case, to avert the apocalypse, perhaps the thing to do is to accelerate the revealing of stupidity and discrediting of these institutions even more, faster than LLMs can make everyone stupid (though we may already be too late on that, even in the pre-LLM times).
07mk
2d ago
I'm starting to think that Futurama was rather prescient in calling the turn of the century from 20th to 21st as the Stupid Ages. More and more of the facade of credibility of organizations, institutions, people, ideas, etc. that people used to believe were not stupid - justifying using them to guide their decisions to be less stupid - have revealed themselves to be deeply stupid. I hope that LLMs will become so cheap and reliable that all the previously hidden stupidity will be aired out for all to see soon enough. I just dread what unexpected stupidity will be found - sociology, [x] studies, psychology are the obvious no-brainer candidates which have already largely gone through the process, but what if it turns out even very "hard" or concrete fields like electrical engineering or chemistry are built on a bunch of stupidity that has just enough facade to be convincing to the in-field expert and certainly more than enough to the layman?
07mk
3d ago
On the other hand, it seems equally intuitive to think that middle-management is not so concerned with appearances, instead prioritizing the bottom line.
This doesn't seem intuitive at all. From what I've observed, middle managers aren't especially known for prioritizing the bottom line - even upper managers and CEOs aren't known for that, though they're generally moreso. They're known for prioritizing their own career progression, which is sometimes helped by the bottom line, but, for middle managers, often are overwhelmed by other, often zero-sum/negative-sum concerns like office politics, which often intersects with actual politics.
07mk
3d ago
I just want to say, from what I can tell, HereAndGone2's description:
The guys at the top, if they're smart, certainly can't believe in supernatural nonsense. So they know the truth, but they cynically power grab by manipulating the gullible masses in their ignorance. To get a top job in the hierarchy, you can't really believe the supernatural crap, so selection for smart cynics ensures the leadership is always majority, if not completely, 'we know it's bullshit but it enables us to rule over the dumb peasantry so we pretend, too'.
is basically the standard model of how the typical atheist progressive liberal believes all major religions work. Hence the talk about US imperialism and oppression and such to explain the motive behind Islamic terrorism against various Western targets, always foregoing any sort of religious/faith-based explanation except for the useful idiots who are manipulated by their ostensibly-Muslim-but-actually-atheist leaders into actually blowing themselves up. This is also related to the common notion among them that "We've already had an atheist president, but we just don't know which one," or even the during-2008 "common knowledge" belief by Democrats that Barack Obama was a lying liar who lied about his opposition to gay marriage so that he could cynically manipulate the country into legalizing gay marriage once he gained power.
07mk
3d ago
Plenty of noob directors have been fumbling existing franchises with no problem recently, despite the risk of backlash. It beggars belief that nobody wanted to take a chance.
I think the idea that "these nerdy loser franchises for nerdy losers that somehow still broke out to mainstream success ought to be taken over and transformed to appeal to cool people like me" just wasn't as common or popular in the 90s or even 00s compared to the 2010s-20s.
07mk
3d ago
I’m skeptical of the proposition that Anthropic employees are our moral and intellectual superiors, but clearly it cannot be discarded outright.
Intellectual, there's probably a strong case to be made. Moral, it cannot be discarded outright, but also any moral/ethical question that acts as a filter for becoming an Anthropic employee seems unlikely to provide any information for determining this, since the morals that people say they will follow is almost always entirely reflective of what they believe a morally good person would follow, which only coincidentally sometimes intersects with what they themselves would follow. That's before accounting for bad faith liars.
If she actually is mentally ill, then consenting to treatment is taking responsibility.
Given that there's currently a trial where other people are choosing whether or not to direct this towards her without her consent, it seems evident that she isn't taking responsibility, and lots of people are supporting her avoiding responsibility on the basis that she is suffering from things that are consequences of her being a mother.
In any case, "taking responsibility" for one's actions and being held accountable are different, though related, concepts.
EDIT:
Actually, I realized that this was just a non sequitur. Her being mentally ill isn't the issue here, it's whether or not she's an example of how many women are claiming that hormones make them "mentally ill" to the extent that they ought not be held accountable for their actions, in the sense that when they "take responsibility," it's through "consenting to treatment" rather than "prison, like any non-mentally-ill person would do."
So the above paragraphs that I wrote aren't all that relevant, actually. The whole point here is that we understand that "consenting to treatment" isn't actually meaningfully held accountable to anyone except the mentally ill; to claim that her hormones just made her that mentally ill as to be placed in that lower tier of being "held accountable" is also to claim that vast swathes of women in general ought to be suspected of being so "mentally ill," which puts into question their equal rights.
07mk
4d ago
I was not the most aware kid in the 90s, nor was I a Star Wars fan, but I recall that Star Wars held a near-sacred status among both scifi nerds and film enthusiasts in that time. IIRC, they were the highest grossing movies of all time until Titanic, and with about a decade having passed between the 3rd and then-latest installment, in the days of limited VHS or TV runs, its myth and legend grew. I imagine that the responsibility of handling such a holy franchise and the pressure that comes with it was probably too daunting for most directors, perhaps even Spielberg. Since Lucas was still alive, if the results were anything less than mindblowing and revolutionary like Star Wars was in 1977, whichever director was at the helm would surely get dragged through the mud (Lucas himself was dragged, of course, mostly deservedly so IMHO).
07mk
4d ago
Clancy is still getting punished. Spending years in a hospital for the criminally insane is not a good thing.
Sure, but this is only "punishment" in the same sense as that she's getting punished by being a mother whose kids are dead, which is also not a good thing. Going to the hospital for the criminally insane is there to help her get over her insanity so that she can be cured and re-enter society as a safe member, not for punishment; the unpleasantness is just a necessary consequence of the treatment, like how some medicine doesn't taste good. We can label any negative consequence of someone's actions as "punishment," but I don't think that's what people are referring to when talking about not being held accountable. If a bank robber with poor impulse control spends all his money on heroin and overdoses to death, one can claim that he was "punished" in some divine sense for his sins, but I don't think it makes sense to claim that he was held accountable in some meaningful, concrete sense.
07mk
4d ago
I'm not sure how it's possible to reference the former without referencing the latter, since the former exists as a reference to the latter.
07mk
4d ago
Whether your motivation for this discrimination is neutral or harmful does not change that.
Sure, but then this just makes it so that "racism" describes lots of entirely innocuous and even virtuous and desirable behavior. That's the far more important aspect of that definition of "racism" due to how it takes away what many people would consider perhaps the most salient characteristic of that word, which is that it's automatically bad.
07mk
4d ago
If fully automated luxury communism requires sufficiently advanced technology, then so be it, the technology must advance but until it does we can already get to work on implementing the desirable ideology it will surely enable.
This perhaps gets too much into Culture Wars, but I will say, I'm in a camp similar to this, except that I follow "the technology must advance" with "to truly overwhelming and crazy scifi/magic levels, which can only be done in an immensely wealthy and productive society, and only capitalism is known to be even capable of generating such wealth and productivity, which is why capitalism must be maintained as strongly as possible right now." I honestly don't see any other route into a Communist future that is actually desirable (i.e. doesn't equalize everyone at 0).
07mk
5d ago
This seems like an easily mostly-solved problem: if the suits are confidently unanimous you don't bug the chief; if not, you send a quick email, archive the response, and summarize it in the Show Bible.
I don't think we're there yet, but this seems like the kind of thing LLMs could be used to handle. However, LLMs could also obviate the need for an actual coherent extended universe, as the sheer volume of fanfiction being generated could take away the meaning and value of official canon in the eyes of fans.
07mk
5d ago
How much of this is just a function of people who saw the prequels as kids imprinting on the films at an early age, and enjoying them despite their uneven quality? Similar to all the people who love Disney direct-to-video sequels because they grew up with them.
This is an open question, and certainly it's nonzero, but my anecdotal experience is that, even among the younger viewers, respect for the prequels (mostly undeserved, IMHO) seems more driven by how much better they are than the sequels than by nostalgia. I've seen a number of completely new young fans who never watched the prequels or the sequels (or the originals) until recently express the opinion that the prequels are much better than the sequels.
If that's the true explanation, then just as the prequels started to be rehabilitated in the public eye as people who saw them as kids grew up and started making video essays about why the prequels were great, I wonder if we won't see the same thing happen as the kids who grew up with the sequels grow up?
We should be able to detect this pretty soon, if not now. The Force Awakens came out 11 years ago, which is less than the 16 years between The Phantom Menace and that film, but still plenty of time for then-10-year-olds to become influential in the social medias to shape the overall public view of it.
07mk
5d ago
Wouldn't it be a contradiction for any woman to become a thought leader as an anti-feminist? By definition she should be trying to not lead
I don't think that is the case. Even using the motte definition of "believes that equal rights between men and women is just," there's no reason why someone who is anti- that would believe that women ought not be leaders. If we take the more well-understood definition of something like "supports the movement that is labeled 'feminism,'" then it becomes even more stark, because the idea that women could be thought leaders is neither unique nor even unusual to the feminist movement.
I can't think of a reasonable definition of "anti-feminist" that would map onto the real world that would imply that they must be against women being thought leaders.
07mk
5d ago
By women I meant corporate bitches.
Ah. I'd guess
sex differences in how people react to things they hate in the modern environment
is a big factor in that case, since corporate bitches tend to be some of the least encumbered when it comes to expressing righteous indignation over some sort of ideological/political issue and/or have immense amounts of practice and encouragement of it in the last few decades, which should be the formative years of most of anyone in corporate.
In terms of the threat to their actual work, if we presume that corporate bitches disproportionately fill what might be hyperbolically called sinecures, doing makework, versus men who disproportionately fill jobs where their actual productivity actually drives the company's performance, I'm not sure that women are worse situated either. AI is able to do productive work, allowing the productive workers to be replaced, but sinecures and makework can be justified and invented as much as needed, to fill demand, and I don't see any signs that the demand for more corporate bitches is going down any time soon.
However, there's also the argument that AI is capable of making the productive people so much more productive and capable of performing a lot of the makework tasks such that companies do decide to cut down on the demand for corporate bitches, in favor of profits. So who knows.
But most importantly, the perception of the corporate bitches versus men could indeed be that the former is more threatened than the latter, since, presuming that there's truth to the hyperbole, the former's work is, in fact, easier for AI to replace than the latter's. So you're probably right.
07mk
5d ago
I too feel like I've see fake-out deaths happen more and more often, and I don't know if it's me growing up or if it's a real thing. But it just seems to keep happening in basically all major mainstream media works, like in the last couple seasons of Game of Thrones where, e.g. Jon Snow was saved from falling into an icy lake by his uncle coming out of nowhere, and then during the Battle of Winterfell, we kept seeing character after character get overwhelmed by zombies, only to cut away, and then later see that they somehow got out perfectly fine. Or the latest Star Wars films where we saw Kylo Ren walk out of a crashing spaceship unscathed without explanation, and then later come back from falling into a pit to save Rey, and then have Rey "die" only to get saved by him. Or recent Marvel films like Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness where Wong fell down the side of a mountain, only to be revealed to have landed on a ledge to survive. I haven't watched the latest Jurassic World film, but I heard that there was a scene near the end where a major character says "go on without me" to do a last stand, only to show up 15 minutes later unscathed, to be rescued.
If there is indeed a trend, I feel like it has to do with the extension of childhood that's been happening all throughout the West at least since my millennial generation and possibly longer. The writers want the benefits without the costs, the power without the responsibility, to have their cake and eat it too, to have that emotional death moment without the death. Children get to enjoy some of that, because they (usually) have guardians to take care of the responsibility stuff while giving them the benefits. I also expect that this effect might be stronger among mainstream media writers, as, I'm guessing, they're more likely, due to nepotism, to come from more wealthy and well-connected families which can allow them to live as children for decades at adult age.
This is just the apex fallacy, and it has been standard operating procedure for any social analysis of population groups considered low status by the SocJus-inclined for at least a couple decades, I'd guess longer. I recall noticing it first in the early-10s, when people were yelling at nerds for claiming to have had difficulties in life due to their nerdiness, which couldn't possibly be the case since Zuckerberg is a billionaire. There's also the all-consuming gender war where feminists, to this day, often claim that the sexual revolution was a pro-patriarchy psy-op because it gives them easy access to women whenever they want, while women have to put out in order to compete for the men, because men below a certain level of attractiveness just don't register to them as counting. This extends to the trans phenomenon too, where girls transition to becoming trans men, under the belief that they'd get to enjoy life like a high status man (a high profile case right now is Elliot Page, who is openly complaining about not getting Hollywood roles, after transitioning from a very high status woman to a trans man).
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