07mk
18d ago
"every movement bends the truth, it doesn't make social justice bad just because we lie, too" or "so what if the woke encourages nosy busybodies and wokescolds? The conservatives do it, too". I've never known how to argue back other than just insisting that they should be better than stooping to low techniques then making excuses.
This looks similar to arguments I've had with myself as someone who used to be "woke" before the term was popularized ("social justice warrior" was the common term back then), and hashing out the argument was one of the many factors that got me to abandon the ideology.
On lies, it took very little thinking to recognize that lying is a habit that one can get into that's very difficult to turn on and off at will, especially since it's often difficult even to recognize when one is lying. This goes even more for lies that one tells oneself, which is by far the most common kind of lie and the most difficult lie to avoid telling even under the best circumstances and with the purest of intentions. It's also difficult to recognize which ideology is better than others if your beliefs are based on lies; as such, if I want what's best for the world rather than merely my team winning, then that means choosing the best ideology on the basis of an honest assessment of the facts and truth. But if I make it a habit to lie to others for the sake of convenience, then it'd be easy for me to unintentionally lie to myself for the sake of convenience, e.g. I could lie to myself that this ideology that happens to be popular among my peers and happens to give me social status for overtly supporting also happens to be the best or most correct ideology - what a convenient universe for me this is, that these characteristics happen to coincide in this one ideology! It also raises questions about how I was won over to the ideology, and whether those were based on lies that other follower of the ideology decided was convenient to tell to me for the sake of recruiting another follower - questions that can only be answered by taking a brutally honest look at the actual underlying reality, and that brutal honesty only comes about by making honesty a habit, which obviously includes doing so towards one's ideological opponents.
Unfortunately, I don't see this as being possible when a third party is involved, because the ideology is so hardened against external (and internal as well) scrutiny that only scrutiny that comes from an internal desire to get things right can survive long enough to actually have any effect. I think there are right wing parallels, such as some Christians dismissing some arguments as literally satanic, or Islam allowing for dishonesty towards non-Muslims as a way to win them over, but these are explicitly faith-based religions where the followers openly acknowledge that the reason they chose their team is faith. This is contrast to modern progressive idpol, whose followers claim to genuinely believe that they figured out the correct (or, at least more correct than the others) ideology through non-faith-based means. Genuinely believing this while also intentionally corrupting one's ability to discern lies from truth - and more generally abiding by the intentional corrupting of this ability in the followers of this ideology - seems like cognitive dissonance. Which, again, just doesn't seem possible to penetrate as a third party. Without the genuine will to actually figure out what the best ideology is for the world, most people will be happy enough to lie to themselves that the ideology they like also happens to be the one that is the best one for the world. Again, not lying to oneself that way is hard enough even under the best circumstances and with the purest of intentions.
07mk
18d ago
Entropy means disorder, randomness, chaos, and the like, so "low entropy" would refer to something that is well ordered or well structured. I think most people would interpret that in this context as something that has less "noise" compared to the "signal," since "noise" could be considered to add entropy, due to adding content without adding meaning.
07mk
19d ago
We're probably at least a year away from something that meets all those requirements, if not forever (the "free" part is the big one there). I don't think we even have free AI image generators yet that can generate 1920x1080 individual images that doesn't involve installing Stable Diffusion locally.
Regardless of the specific issue, I'm rather skeptical of this possibility. Perhaps we could imagine better norms which, if people followed them, would create a better society or a society that at least suffers less from this one particular problem, but that's just a creative writing exercise. Whether we could develop better norms in the sense of actually directing norms and enforcing them in society in general in such a way that they solve the problems they're intended to solve without introducing worse problems (or negating the solution in some other way) is a different question.
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