I think the rage-inducing element is the total divorce of monetary ‘value’ from any other possible source of value whatsoever.
A Gucci handbag, jewels, stocks in Nvidia… we can quibble about the true value of these things but there’s SOMETHING beautiful or useful there under all the posing.
With NFTs the value is literally zero. There’s nothing. You haven’t bought the image, because anyone can have it just by right-click-save. You haven’t earned it like a video game skin; it doesn’t look cool on your weapon. You’ve literally spent money to buy a token saying ‘I spent money’. It’s financial games and screwed-up monkey politics in its absolute worst, most braindead and bestial form.
Corvos
1yr ago
Reminds me of a corporate case I heard about, a few decades ago, with a contract that had been drawn up by a team of accountants and lawyers. Unfortunately none of the lawyers could understand the maths, and none of the accountants could wade through the law, so they specified quite different responsibilities for each party in certain circumstances. Big panic when they found out.
Corvos
1yr ago
Thank you for the detailed look into Gucci brand dynamics! I quite agree with you that an exclusive proof of ownership for say, a house, has many practical applications.
Let’s get back to this:
The NFT comes to represent the brand value of authenticity, divorced from the value of the bag itself. It makes the bag it is attached to real. In theory, if you get a Superfake which perfectly meets construction specs of the bag you purchased originally with NFT, and you sell the Superfake on to someone else with the NFT, the Superfake becomes the Real bag and the bag you own, originally manufactured by Gucci, becomes the fake.
If authenticity means anything, surely it must mean that the bag was designed by Mr. Gucci and was once touched by one of his skilled artisans, in the same way that a signed copy of the Lord of the Rings was once touched by JRRR Tolkien himself.
If none of that is true, if it’s literally just another chinese-manufactured fake with a certificate attached, how can the NFT possibly have any meaning beyond ‘I paid far too much for a SuperFake’? At this point I think we’re right back to the monkeys: apelike competition for a limited number of tokens purely on the basis that they’re limited. Even a child stealing another child’s toy on the playground knows the toy has some inherent value beyond just being something that somebody else wants.
I envision a world where notaries and title agents are largely NFT brokers, with the NFT representing true ownership.
Entirely possible! But the point of owning the NFT would be to obtain the physical rights to the thing you actually want, surely? What good does it do me to own the rights to a little getaway in Valencia if the original ‘owner’ is squatting in there and the police refuse to make him leave on the basis of my NFT?
(I accept that I might be a little out of the general stream on this. I’ve always felt that a really good fake of a thing is pretty close to being as good as the actual thing. I’d pay a bit more for that signed copy of LoTR or an authentic 10th century castle, compared to an identical physical copy, but only a bit.)
Corvos
11mo ago
Second person plural ‘you’. The equivalent of ‘vous’ in French. In this case meaning ‘the people of Sweden’. Best used cautiously for exactly this reason, it risks offending.
It’s not royal, incidentally. The royal ‘we’ refers to using an explicitly plural pronoun to refer to a singular person (the king or queen), presumably on the basis that as King they embody all the people of their nation.
Corvos
11mo ago
When England led the world in coal and textile production, we proselytised for Free Trade. It became one of our great societal convictions, and as a country we became very rich.
Then the coal started running out and we didn’t have oil. Factories in other countries could take advantage of cheap labour and generous subsidies. And suddenly Free Trade meant globalisation hollowing out our economy.
Because the West is in many ways an ideological concept, and the US is an explicitly ideological state (reflected in the constitution), and because western countries have historically been rich and pleasant places to live, we have avoided asking ourselves if our ideologies caused our success or were contingent on it.
I don’t think we can assume that due process causes high trust societies (rather than vice versa), and that free markets produce prosperity. They may! But I’m not currently willing to take it as an axiom in the way that I was 20 years ago.
Corvos
11mo ago
We’re getting there with the Oxford PPE (Philosophy, Politics and Economics) degree in the UK. Explicitly intended as a ‘preparing to govern’ degree.
https://amp.theguardian.com/education/2017/feb/23/ppe-oxford-university-degree-that-rules-britain
Often criticised for being too wide-ranging and shallow, producing an elite who think they understand everything about everything.
Dominic Cummings wrote on his influential blog: “If you are young, smart, and interested in politics, think very hard before studying PPE … It actually causes huge problems as it encourages people like Cameron and Ed Balls to … spread bad ideas with lots of confidence and bluffing.”
Corvos
11mo ago
I felt that you could usually tell whether you were reading a Pratchett section or a Gaiman section by the tone of the writing.
Pratchett is essentially a satirist and a humourist, and nothing really terrible ever happens to the people in the Discworld books. Even when people do suffer (like the murdered dwarves in Thud!) it happens offscreen or is skimmed over.
Whereas Gaiman is a dark fantasy / horror writer. When something really grim happens, like
Corvos
11mo ago
Those are the same thing seen through different eyes, right? If I took a video every time my mother forgot the name of something or why she came into a room, I could absolutely make her look demented. If all you have is a set of videos curated by interest group A, and another set of videos curated by B, your final conclusion is going to have to rely on your pre-existing opinions or some other set of evidence (frequency of videos, or lack of unscripted public appearances). A lot of Ds should have known better, but I can see why people like Scott weren't convinced.
Corvos
11mo ago
To take just one example, I used to work next to a small woman with a high-pitched voice who decided one day that 'she' was now 'he'. I had to interact with her on a daily basis, lying literally every time I referred to her with a pronoun, knowing that if I ever slipped up once and accidentally used 'her' in the office then my impeccably liberal employer was almost certainly going to fire me. It was stressful and humiliating, and I don't think she even meant to put me in that position. But that's the reality when you're surrounded by HR machinery that is willing to enforce liberal social mores at any cost.
Corvos
11mo ago
I would be more than happy to slot him in with Joss Whedon as examples for the rule: "The more a male celebrity is feted for his feminism, the more likely he is to have done skeevy things with young women."
Britain is going to the polls today. All signs point to Labour's Keir Starmer getting Britain's largest ever landslide on one of the smallest vote shares. I'm hesitant to change the system of voting we've had for centuries on the basis of one election but it's very awkward that Labour is likely to get approx. 450 seats on 40% of the vote while Reform UK is expected to get approx. 10 seats on slightly under half that.
Poll of polls is here: https://www.politico.eu/europe-poll-of-polls/united-kingdom/
A couple of interesting phenomena:
- Reform UK suddenly doubled its vote share in the last month, drawing even more strongly from (the left-wing) Labour party than from the right wing Conservatives. This can be pretty much purely attributed to Nigel Farage entering the race and shows how important a single charismatic figure can be IMHO. The great forces theory of history has much to recommend it, but it's also true that Right Man in the Right Place historical contingencies have more effect than I think is commonly credited to them.
- Reform UK suddenly dropped in the last week, and all the freed voters go to the Conservatives. I would bet good money that this resulted directly from Farage saying* that eastward expansion of Nato had provoked Putin and given him an excuse to invade Ukraine - something he had predicted ten years ago. Not sure whether he would have done better to lie like Marine Le Pen, but he seems to have paid a price for honesty.
*Quote:
"It was obvious to me that the ever-eastward expansion of NATO and the European Union was giving this man a reason to his Russian people to say, 'They're coming for us again' and to go to war,"
‘Preaches virtue in public but realises they can get away with vice privately’ is pretty much the classic definition of hypocrisy though.
I do question how much of this is 'intentional' predatory behavior where they disguise their intent in order to lure young women in by appearing 'safe' to be around and able to offer sexual mentorship, vs. just an incidental outcome of modern social mores contradicting more basic instinctual drives.
From an external perspective those are pretty much the same thing. I think you’re right in at least some cases, but that sounds awfully like those men are deluding themselves into believing what’s convenient to believe at any given moment.
If they do it once and are horrified that they fell to temptation, okay. But otherwise they implicitly know that what they say about how men and women interact is a lie, and they are choosing not to think about it too hard, all the while coming down heavily on other men.
Corvos
11mo ago
I've tried this with my parents, it doesn't work. They just think I'm making excuses for Brexit (in a well-meaning way). I think this strategy would also run the risk of activating the 'Blitz Spirit' gene. There's nothing Brits are more proud of than suffering for the sake of a good cause.
Corvos
11mo ago
Oh, sure. But one of the things that made Pratchett so readable (until he started losing his touch near the end, around or just after 'Going Postal') was that he didn't usually feel the need to indulge in those fantasies. I'm sure he had them - he had a lot of pent up rage against the world - but he was self-aware enough not to let them come out in print. Even Lord Rust, who is usually treated as an absolute buffoon, has a way of dealing with problems that makes Vimes "darkly impressed". He's not humiliated, or cast out from society, or eaten alive.
100%. I'd rather replay a short-ish game many times than get bored half-way through a long one. My most-played is still CoD Modern Warfare 2: about ten/fifteen hours of pretty good gunplay and exciting story, nicely divided up into forty minute missions. I miss levels, and level select screens.
If you like that length, have you played Doom 2016? It's neither too short, nor too long, and it's the first time for years that I honestly had so much fun that I had to sit down and play until I was finished.
Do you have some recent AAA recommendations?
I'd love to see him crush the NIMBY malaise, bulldoze the greenbelt and get infrastructure and housing being built once again.
Apologies if I'm misrepresenting your preferred policies, but the constant insistence that we need to build more annoys me. I grew up in quite a nice part of the countryside. How about we leave that the way it is, and we don't import 600,000 people every year? The population of native British people is shrinking - we don't have a housing crisis, we have an immigration crisis and an economy that encourages treating shelter as an asset.
Infrastructure and nuclear, granted, we need.
Corvos
11mo ago
I voted Reform, and I'm very annoyed about the vote : seat ratio, but I'd still be hesitant to rush headlong into changing our voting system on the basis of one freaky election. European countries with proportional voting don't seem to have significantly happier and more representative politics, and FPTP has mostly worked for 200 years. I think our problem boils down to the professionalisation of politics more than to our voting system. Having 4 parties of PPE graduates doing backdoor deals doesn't necessarily seem like an improvement.
Corvos
11mo ago
I always thought there must be some instinct at work, telling the child that they need to know what kind of big, scary things are around. Same thing that makes young children - especially boys? - obsessed with diggers and other large machinery.
Corvos
11mo ago
In theory, I agree. The conservatives tried it with the Building Better, Building Beautiful Commission but like so much else they failed to follow through. The head of the Commission (Sir Roger Scruton, the UK's equivalent of Thomas Sowell) was monstered on twitter using misrepresented quotes and the 'moderate' wing of the Conservatives instantly fired him (within five hours of the first tweet). I remain flabbergasted by the sheer wasted potential of the last 5 years of Tory government.
If Labour picked up the program, I would still argue for getting the population under control before doing lots of building, but I would be much happier with a proposed building spree.
Corvos
11mo ago
I agree completely. But as I say, proportional voting doesn't seem to be sufficient for producing a democratic system (look at the Cordon Sanitaire in France, or the way that the AfD are treated) and I'm also aware that we've had our current parliamentary system for 300 years give or take and changing it based on a twenty-year crisis is a drastic step.
(Imagine a Lib Dem, Labour, Muslim Independents, Green and Conservative Wets coalition and shudder).
because women often won't be publicly honest about what they actually find attractive and actually want from males when interacting with them.
But if that's true, and our hypothetical feminist knows it's true, then he has to choose between being honest vs. being a black-and-white 'if she doesn't say yes, she's saying no' feminist. If you believe that women sometimes want men to be a little pushy, you cannot reasonably call for men to be punished for trying it on with a girl they legitimately think is into them. In practice, these people are hypocrites. They act as if the world is one way in public, they act entirely differently in private, and they profit.
a famous man who is preaching the female-preferred social standards AND engaging in the female-preferred behaviors when dealing with a romantic partner is still being consistent as to the female perspective.
If you're intending this as an explanation for why a woman being pursued by a feminist celebrity doesn't smell a rat, fair enough. You may well be right. But the man is still a lying hypocrite.
I do find it interesting that whenever I venture into left-wing spaces, they have a very similar mindset to the right-wing ones re:
- the uniparty is neutering politics, pretending to hold our ideology whilst throwing us under the bus at every opportunity (citing e.g. the lack of long-lasting legal change despite the Floyd riots)
- even when our guys are popular the moderates in our party close ranks to keep them out (Bernie Sanders, attempted with Jeremy Corbyn)
- mainstream media lies to build complacency and takes every opportunity to identify us with the worst of our movement (e.g. the /r/antiwork interview, the UK media's treatment of Corbyn)
- the opposition wants us gone permanently, and any election risks them finally getting enough power to manage it
I think that conservatives have a much stronger leg to stand on here: the illiberal centre is left-wing and actively persecutes right-wingers; the fact that it's not quite left-wing enough for the radicals doesn't fill me with sympathy.
But I think that the paranoia on both sides is basically driven by structural problems:
- An oligarchic form of government that is unaffected by election results (the Deep State, the Civil Service)
- The professionalisation of politics (almost all politicians come from a very similar and unusual background and are beholden to the Overton window amongst people of that background).
- An increasingly weighty cruft of legal systems and regulations that have got ever more tangled and impenetrable over time and prevents movement. This (and the production of 'clients') produces a 'ratchet' model of politics where losses like Brexit are often permanent.
- Genuine ethnic and moral tribalism vastly reducing the space of beliefs that are shared by a supermajority of people.
The result is that
"My ingroup is relentlessly oppressed by the supposedly neutral authorities, who are actually in the pockets of my enemies. The outgroup is highly organized and relentlessly hateful of people like me. If my side loses a battle, that's just further proof that I'm right and the whole thing is rigged. If my side wins a battle, it's also evidence of how right I am because the only way we'd win against such odds is by being twice as correct as the enemies. My side is the victim. It's all a conspiracy rigged against us."
is essentially true for anyone except the most anodyne of the centre-Left. It hasn't escaped my notice that much of recent right-wing thought (conflict theory, the long march through the institutions, the Cathedral, who/whom) is very much from a left-wing critical tradition, because they are used to being political outcasts and have more mental tools for dealing with that. Often it literally comes from (former) communists - people like Brendan O'Neill, Peter Hitchens, Freddie de Boer.
I think horseshoe theory is overrated, but dissident/complacent is often a useful axis to go alongside left/right and authoritarian/liberal when you want to model how groups will behave.
Corvos
11mo ago
I was trying to make a version of this using LLama v3 (70bn) and a predictive algorithm which learns to predict the user's replies (and therefore implicitly actions, thought processes and needs). It's a work in progress: I turned it on, it told me to get up out of my chair and do something useful, and I turned it off.
But a 'programmable superego' is exactly what I want out of AI.
I’d never thought about it in precisely those terms before but this has to be true. Having crowds of strangers tell me that they love and admire me would break my brain. It’s the ultimate superstimulus for a social species.
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