Butlerian
Not robot-ist just don't like 'em
No bio...
User ID: 1558
Butlerian
Not robot-ist just don't like 'em
9mo ago
So all the graphs and quantitative data show there's no UK economic decline... and the response is that people write articles wondering how the economic decline has managed to hide itself from statistics?
Hear hoofbeats, think horses not zebras. Maybe there's just no economic decline? Hell, if we're trying to be rationalists, the decline's absence from the statistics means that DEFINITIONALLY there is no decline.
As many of the commenters on Scott's site speculate: one gets the feeling that "UK Economic Decline" is something that europhilic economists want to be able to talk about (and blame on Brexit), therefore they assume it exists as an article of faith and spend their time conjuring up epicyclic reasons for how those dastardly Tories managed to hide it from every single graph in the world by gaming the metrics.
Butlerian
Not robot-ist just don't like 'em
5mo ago
Offering to euthenize veterans when they have the temerity to complain that their wheelchair ramp is taking a long time to install is not what I'd call "who's diseases are really bad".
Butlerian
Not robot-ist just don't like 'em
11mo ago
and even if you think it's in pursuit of a pointless or harmful goal it is actual things being done and work produced.
The definition of a Bullshit Job, as per Graeber's original essay, is exactly as you describe: one in which the product is useless or harmful, not one where there is no work done at all.
Butlerian
Not robot-ist just don't like 'em
1mo ago
Is there anything to this post beyond sneering at a member of the outgroup?
This isn't sneering at a member of the outgroup, it's policing the crazies of the ingroup.
Do not forget themotte.org's heritage, we're an offshoot of an offshoot of an offshoot of LessWrong. EA is kind of our great-aunt in terms of Internet genealogy.
Butlerian
Not robot-ist just don't like 'em
9mo ago
forced post-Covid amnesia is that the media went all in on lockdownism and that's increasingly embarrassing
I came here to post "Normies stopped talking about it because the media stopped talking about it", so in that sense I agree entirely. Absent the daily orders of What Current Thing To Support being beamed into their devices 24/7, the Normie does not support it, and so when the media messaging stops, the Covid hawks vanish.
I'll also give a moderate agreement on your reasoning as to why the media stopped. Reminding people about Covid might remind them of a glaring example of how Big Government (and it's Cathedral tentacles in academia, NGOs, media, civil society, experts) fucked up. Which is a line of thought they want to assiduously avoid planting in the proles' heads, so better to just memory-hole the whole experience.
If the government is truly dedicated to putting down a rebellion, then a well regulated militia isn't going to stop them. You might have guns, but military has more guns, and their guns are bigger.
"The government has jet fighters you can't fight them with handguns" is a favoured rhetorical flourish of gun-grabbers anywhere, and it is factually incorrect. AK-47s beat thermonuclear weapons. Because you don't have to kill their army to make occupation untenable, you just have to kill their tax collectors.
I accept that in the post-AGI world this is less clear though, simply because everything is less clear in the post-AGI world. I'm sure the AGI knows that the best way to clear out freedom fighters is with biological weapons, but the government should beware of Principal-Agent problems here: is the government's AGI really trying to help the government put down an insurgency, or is it trying to Kill All Humans?
Butlerian
Not robot-ist just don't like 'em
11mo ago
Maybe this kind of stuff is needed because people like you deny the Holocaust and argue that Jews control our lives?
Does everyone in America really need to be right about something that happened on another continent 80 years ago?
I'm not saying the Holocaust didn't happen, I'm saying we shouldn't care whether it did or not; certainly not to the extent of making laws about it.
Butlerian
Not robot-ist just don't like 'em
11mo ago
You're all fucked, some just about to be fucked before the others.
Aren't you Indian?
Don't you have a ridiculous civil service which people kill to get into because once you're there, some quirk of iron rice bowls and pork barrels and constituency building has basically made Indian civil service jobs a sinecure where you never have to do any work but also you can't be fired, and this situation has persisted for 70 years despite the grinding poverty of all other sections of the Indian economy, because it's politically impossible to untangle this snarl?
And you think people are going to lose their jobs... because new labour saving tools become available?
Most jobs don't exist to fulfil tasks. Most jobs exist to fulfil government kayfabe. That an AI can perform a task is therefore completely irrelevant to the question of who has a job.
Butlerian
Not robot-ist just don't like 'em
11mo ago
I did think Rishi reading "We give thanks to Jesus Christ our Lord, who is the son of God and etc. etc." was particularly farcical.
I guess it just feels like an extra notch in the subsumption of British particularism into the soup of globohomo when the Establishment doesn't respect the culture enough to even try to maintain the kayfabe. I mean, sure, I doubt Bojo's a sincere Christian at heart and him reading epistles would be rank hypocrisy, but even purely nominal Christianity is better than official Hinduism. With Rishi, you know it's just his mouth making sounds and the words are not believed. With Bojo, you'd merely strongly suspect it.
Much was made during the Trump years of "Why are you supporting this man who from his actions clearly doesn't give a shit about the white working class", and the answer was often "I can't get positive actions from any of the candidates, so I'll take the one that at least one pretends to care over the others who don't even bother with the pretense". Having a Hindu read homilies during the King's official pledge to protect the Christian spirit of Britain? That has to me the taste of a ceremony that didn't even pretend to care about the ancient mores of the sceptred isle.
Butlerian
Not robot-ist just don't like 'em
2mo ago
The critics had the whole season available to review.
And videogame journalists have the whole game to review, but a recurring feature of videogame reviews is that the reviewer obviously played a game with 100 hours of content for about 2 hours and then wrote their assignment.
People are lazy and cut corners in their jobs, c'est le vie.
Butlerian
Not robot-ist just don't like 'em
10mo ago
I'm not going to be paying attention to what anyone else is saying; my world would have been shattered and I'd be doing my damnedest to keep every attention-sucking ghoul out of my mourning.
I think you do not understand how Bongland policing works.
The families in such cases are harangued into giving such a statements by the urging of the "friendly" "support" officers assigned to family liaison. I mean, the police's remit is the maintenance of public order, not the coddling of the bereaved, so I can't say they're not technically doing their jobs by hassling the families to come out with this kumbaya drek.
So in a sense you're right, the families probably would, in a vacuum, react emotionally as you would expect them to. But the police don't let 'em.
In the interests of drawing a line to contemporary culture war from the 30 year old news story that Uncle Ted is, I just want to highlight the extent to which reporting on his death is desperately trying to prosecute said culture war by smashing a square peg into a round hole:
His crimes seemed to begin shortly after he was fired from the family business by his brother for posting abusive limericks to a female colleague who had dumped him after two dates.
"Seemed" is doing a tremendous amount of work here. To me it SEEMED like his crimes began when he saw machines tearing up the forest. Who is it exactly, to whom there seemed to be an incel agenda?
Reading that paragraph, the words that reach my eyes are as printed, but the words that I think they're trying to get to reach my prefrontal cortex are
"Doing anything that a women doesn't like makes you a terrorist. All bad people are incels and all incels are bad people. Anyone who complains about globohomo only does so in bad faith because they're sexually frustrated."
Butlerian
Not robot-ist just don't like 'em
11mo ago
"they are not stupid, so if they are at the bottom it can only be because society has placed them there."
But if you actually prove that they are stupid, then what?
This is MathWizard's point: progressives don't actually disbelieve that the stupid deserve to be at the bottom of the pile, they simply disagree about who are the stupid ones.
Butlerian
Not robot-ist just don't like 'em
1mo ago
Women are more than half of our population but research on women’s health has always been underfunded.
He didn't say (or at least you didn't quote) "underfunded relative to men", he just said "underfunded". Is it not that he could have been speaking in an absolute rather than a relative sense?
*DISCLAIMER: I actually believe that his words should be seen as tribal applause lights and so fact-checking them is missing the point, but there you go.
Butlerian
Not robot-ist just don't like 'em
10mo ago
The hypothesis that Hollywood types believe in the "mere exposure" effect causes a lot of scripting oddness to suddenly resolve into comprehensiblity. If you think that simply seeing/hearing a thing on a screen will stochastically cause some number of impressionable audience members to believe and/or copy it, then the total excision of taboo positions from even villains' mouths makes sense, as does cramming a massive overabundance of LGBTQ characters into every show.
Butlerian
Not robot-ist just don't like 'em
11mo ago
We can broaden this to a discussion about climate change or even immigration. Sure, there will be issues, but the doomsters on both issues were proven wrong historically.
This proves too much, because it implies that all those 1700s Native Americans whining about Pilgrims stealing their land were just paranoid doomers.
Sometimes, bad shit actually does happen
For those who are bearish on AI's ability to upend the stock photo industry, how much time do you think it will take? What further developments need to occur?
Procurement officers in mid-to-large companies are the most conservative people in world history. They have their purchase order numbers, their tried-and-tested procedures, and their domain knowledge of the bureaucratic BS that goes into buying (this being how they earn their bread). They are inherently hostile to disruption to the status quo and change won't come until they retire/die out of the workforce to be replaced by n00bs not so set in their ways.
So I give it about 15 years.
Is there any historical precedence for this? Has there been a time and place where popular culture so heavily converged on recycling products that the flow of new products was stymied.
Well, there's "literally every point in history except between the Enlightenment and now", as a starting point. The culture of the 1420s was not exactly fresh and original compared to the 1410s. Hell, pretty much everyone believed that history writ large was cyclical before then, not just culture.
(Alternatively, maybe most of the cinematic creativity is flowing into television where for a variety of technical and cost reasons, interesting stuff can still be made on a big budget (ie. HBO).
Then again, your main analysis is probably too doomer and I think it's more likely this. Due to some strange pathology in specifically Hollywood blockbuster financing, movie moguls like rehashes this season. You don't see the same trend in TV, or in literature, or in any other center of cinema production (Bollywood? China?), so I don't think it's time to start sounding the horns of the apocalypse.
Butlerian
Not robot-ist just don't like 'em
1mo ago
Any other incentives people can think of?
I think it's kinda "I want to get Biden reelected", but as a kind of epiphenomenal second-order effect. Even if you are not a leftist ideologue, you may perceive that your superiors / friends / funding board members are leftist ideologues, and you suspect you will get more social capital (or actual capital) if you tell these people what they want to hear, so you cherrypick your metrics in order that they show what these people want to hear, and, lo, "Statistics show the economy is doing great actually".
There was an opposite-valence situation in the UK a year or so ago, where the economic indicators were good but all the leftist journos were going "How can the economy be good under this Conservative Brexit government, they must be gaming the metrics somehow"?! Perhaps the civil servants who staff the Treasury Department / Office of National Statistics are just good at statistical brown-nosing, whatever country it is and whatever party's in power.
Butlerian
Not robot-ist just don't like 'em
3mo ago
Not particularly easy to get through state legislatures, though. To actually pass an amendment it doesn't have to be popular with normies, it has to be popular with politicians.
Butlerian
Not robot-ist just don't like 'em
6mo ago
It seems the height of intellectual arrogance to think you can reliably predict which events currently in the news will never have any direct impact on your life in the future
Sounds like an isolated demand for rigour to me. Just because we don't have a 100% cast-iron lock on future prescience doesn't mean we can't make reasonable predictions. Adopting your attitude would make investing impossible, for example: the commodity might go down instead of up, just as the news might prove relevant rather than a nothingburger.
But being neither Muslim nor Jewish and having only one friend who's either, I struggle to think of a plausible conduit by which shenannegains in the holy land could ever become relevant to me.
And anyway, OP's complaint seemed not so much "this is irrelevant" as "this is pushing actually relevant stuff off the front page of the BBC", which I feel is a stronger argument. To almost everyone in Britain, this coverage is essentially bread and circuses: a bunch of flashy explosions which has the convenient by-product of distracting them from their real, non-News-Problems with fake (as in, fake relevance) News Problems.
Butlerian
Not robot-ist just don't like 'em
10mo ago
Another thing I'll steal from Jokul or the Deep Left on Twitter is how the elites know more than you think. One thing he mentioned is how the guy who got accused of bribing Clarence Thomas is a white southerner Republican who literally was funded by Charles Murray. His point was do you honestly think this guy isn't red pilled on racial IQ gaps?
Yes.
I think the elites give each other money based on who's brother is married to who, and / or who liked the cut of the other's gib at the last socialite cocktail soireé. I don't think any of them read each other's actual philosophical writings; it's Mean Girls highschool politics all the way down.
Butlerian
Not robot-ist just don't like 'em
10mo ago
Even when TheMotte was on Reddit, I never used Reddit for anything other than... interacting with TheMotte (OK, OK, I lurked some porn subs too). So for someone with very little experience interacting with Reddit, can you explain to me how the proposed changes would actually be expected to affect the modal Reddit user?
Because I expect that the modal Reddit user doesn't even know what an API is, and certainly never previously paid for it. So messing with its price ain't gonna affect him or her.
The changes sound like a problem exclusively for nerds and corpos who like to data-harvest off of the backend; something which has no effect on the modal user AND no effect on the stereotypical powermod who's there to defend Cathedral talking points. With these two vital demographics' interests therefore apparently having no intersection with this change, they SHOULD be completely disinterested. Can anyone explain / speculate how it is, then, that the nerds and corpos have managed to rile them into rebellion?
Butlerian
Not robot-ist just don't like 'em
3mo ago
More well-paid white collar jobs in the form of DEI officials.
This only kicks the can down the road, though. Whites can squeeze out one extra generation of PMC jobbing by jobbing specifically as agitators for their own replacement, but when their children come up against a hiring agent thoroughly steeped in the parents' propaganda, there'll be no cushy jobs for John Jr.
As a practicing academic research scientist, perhaps I can shed some light on this. The short answer is that no-one believes you when you say your end results will be world-changing, so good luck getting funding for even so much as a dinky thermal element radiator.
Scientific funding bodies are staffed by a mixture of know-nothing bureaucrats and ex-scientists turned people managers, neither of whom have seen the business end of a revolutionary scientific discovery for decades at best. No practicing scientist gets any money unless they can present these grey beancounters with colourful diagrams of massaged "preliminary results" which purport to show that a revolutionary discovery is Just One More Grant Award away: and so, cursed by the incentives foist upon them, practicing scientists have to enter a rat race of hyperbole, the end result being that everyone is claiming to be revolutionary at once. This in turn makes the beancounter's incompetence a self-fulfilling prophecy: their inability to assign monies to measured, meritorious proposals means no-one bothers writing measured, meritorious proposals, and the process devolves into a competition about who can spam the most outlandish over-promises, shiny diagrams, and ESG buzzwords. Making skepticism about revolutionary claims retroactively correct.
So the fact that scientists on top of a world-changing discovery are forced to rely on warm mercury backwash from a mine because no funding body will give them $1000 for a space heater is... extremely plausible to me.
EDIT: The above probably constitutes sanewashing. For the record I think the even more plausible explanation is that lazy showrunners didn't give it any thought beyond Corpos Bad, Hard Scientists Bad. The plot device actually does make sense, but my opinion of the show is sufficiently low that I think them correct only by accident.
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