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DaseindustriesLtd

late version of a small language model

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joined 2022 September 05 23:03:02 UTC

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DaseindustriesLtd


								

								

								
								
								

								
							
					
 
				


				
late version of a small language model

				
				
				

				

					65 followers  

					follows 27 users  

					joined 2022 September 05 23:03:02 UTC
				


				
					

					
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				Culture War Roundup for the week of March 20, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
It's been funny to watch NLP researchers (including corporate-affiliated ones) go through stages of grief, from their peak of jovial Marcusian pooh-poohing of the tech, to absolutely clowning themselves with childish misrepresentations, to jumping on the AI risk bandwagon, to what now seems like anhedonia. No doubt Altman and co.'s deft market capture strategy and development velocity are crucial factors here. Altman is known to be… well, I'll let Paul speak of this.


But I suspect this has more to do with dismal unforced errors of other groups. Technically, many ought to have been more than strong enough to pose a challenge and, indeed, all of this revolution is mostly of their making. Their failure to capitalize on it reminds me of those Mesoamerican toy wheels and planes, and of the Chinese firework-rockets and useless intercontinental fleets. It takes a special kind of mind to appreciate the real-world power of a concept; but that's not the exact same kind of mind that excels at coming up with concepts, and not necessarily even the one that's best at implementing them.


I'd even say that the fact that OpenAI is now making safety noises and withholds general facts like the parameter count is telling: this is how little technical moat they have.


What they might realistically have is the cultural moat: theirs is the culture laser-focused at transformative, dangerous AGI through deep learning, from their idealistic beginnings to prevent the zero-sum race, to their current leading position in it. They enforce their culture through a charter which their employees, I've heard, learn by heart. Dynomight has argued recently that what you need to begin making explosive progress is a demo; they've had the demo inside their heads all along.


This cannot be said for others.


The French gang at Meta is represented by the archetypal Blue Tribe intellectual LeCun, and he… he too is dismissive of the fruit of his own work. Like Chollet, who focuses on «interpolation» and «compression» in AI as opposed to genuine comprehension, he advocates for clunky factored bioinspired AI, he speaks of the shortcomings of transformers and their non-viability for AGI – too pig-headed to sacrifice a minor academic preconception. They're too rational by half, they lack the requisite craziness to jump over that trough in the fitness landscape, and believe in science fictions, sell the half-cooked snake oil to the end user, and fake it until they actually make it – a typical French engineer problem. They've published Toolformer, but it's ChatGPT Plugins which blow people's minds – being essentially the same tech.


The Googlers, on the other hand, are handicapped by their management. Again, it cannot be overstated how much of Google's research (actual Google Brain research and Deepmind both) has laid the groundwork for OpenAI's LLM product dominance; and with barely any reciprocal flow. GPT-4, too, is almost certainly built on Google's papers. They have optimized inference, and training objective, and every other piece needed to turn PaLM or Chinchilla into a full-fledged GPT competitor, and they even have their own hardware tailored for their tasks, and I think they've wasted much, much more compute. Yet they have not productivized it.


I strongly suspect we should blame the Gervais Principle, and the myopic board of directors that gets impressed with superficial Powerpoint bullshit. The worst offenders per capita may be Indians: while their engineers can be exceptional (heck, see the first author of the original Transformers paper), the upper crust are ruthless careerists, willing to gut moonshots to please the board with rising KPIs and good publicity when they get into management, or obsessively funneling resources into their own vanity projects. Many corporations have already suffered this catastrophic effect, exactly when they tried to reinvent themselves in response to novel pressures – both Intel and AMD, even Microsoft. IBM isn't doing too hot either, is it? Was Twitter prospering under Agrawal?


But of course it's not specific to Indians. I've heard that the guy behind the infamous LaMDA and now Bard, which is so clearly inferior even to ChatGPT 3.5 version, Zoubin Ghahramani, has been very skeptical of deep learning and prefers «elegant» things like Gaussian Processes – things you can publish on and inflate your H-index, one could uncharitably state. Also he's a cofounder of Geometric Intelligence (yes, Gary Marcus strikes again).


Social technology doesn't always trump engineered technology, but by God can it shoot it in the foot.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of November 21, 2022
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I am confused about these events.


Obviously this is coordinated, yet again, by the ADL, who have come out of the closet and started issuing mafia-like threats publicly. In fact they are doing this under their old StopHateForProfit «coalition of social justice» framework, which they first used when bringing Zuckerberg to heel two years ago. (From a quick search, it seems I'm the only guy who keeps bringing this up). (Related Forbes article). Zuckerberg, however, did not fight back remotely as openly.


That's... a bit too much, too soon, surely? They aren't yet feared enough, and their commitment to reposting 4chan/pol/ anti-Jewish memes when not intimidating the richest guy on the planet makes them look profoundly unserious. Or do their backchannel threats have more bite, as indicated by those hints from corporations? Because as it stands, I wouldn't be surprised if this ends with Greenblatt's ignominious removal and the organization being discredited.


Maybe I shouldn't be surprised, and this is The Thing shedding the skin of wokeness and used-up assets; maybe they'll be spent to inflate credibility of Twitter that nevertheless will, as Musk promised originally, to install a censorship council. There are many theoretical ways to run circles around the public here.


Then again, mamma mia, how crude.


...Or, looking at replies to Musk's posts, eg here – maybe Greenblatt et al are rationally assessing their dominance. Huh.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of November 7, 2022
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
EAs ought to have acquired enough momentum via their PR in major outlets (rather, this PR seems to indicate the momentum) to not care that much about Sam now, I believe. They're getting their AI safety and longtermism discussions, they've got their China chip ban, and they'll keep getting more stuff. Aren't they already plugged into networks much more valuable than anything crypto bros had to offer? Like, national security council tier?


Off topic, but China making crypto illegal and thus giving up their stake in the digital economy the US cannot control by decree has been the first of many ruinous, small-minded mistakes of Xi era (I mean, outside the obvious geopolitical ones like their handling of Hong Kong and Xinjiang) and they haven't shown the ability to reverse any of those.


Crypto is being pretty thoroughly neutered, no wonder its value is dropping. Ruskies who enabled much of the privacy side are suiciding or getting arrested, and Ethereum is ensuring that blocks are kosher now.


It's darkly amusing to be proven right. People thought that technology will disrupt traditional governance, and instead we're seeing bureaucratic sanctions effectively enforced against abstract cryptographic protocols. Social technology and human networking keep trampling over nerdy bullshit. How about a nice central bank digital currency? It's very high-tech, like in China, but without the scary Social Credit! Just a little oversight from your friendly democratically elected government, to make sure you don't use any of that nasty anonymous fake money like XMR or financing something evil... like Kiwifarms (more evil things are best left unmentioned and dealt with professionally).


I suppose we'll see Tor and i2p and other such bastions of net freedom dismantled completely in a few years, maybe blocked on the level of hardware, with forced upgrades under the guise of onshoring the supply chain and ensuring safety from RussiaChina threat and AGI risk. What a time to be alive.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Small-Scale Question Sunday for July 9, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
In general I find this line of debate fruitless; belief that one's opinions are «postmodernist» in the common derogatory sense is at odds with what we understand as having a belief, so it's practically impossible to get someone to do a yes.chad. Nowhere is this clearer than in this exchange with Hlynka. @SecureSignals, too, has a set of beliefs about material reality that he thinks are objectively true.


And from my perspective your argument there was the «postmodernist» one, and your claim of only having loyalty to truth was disingenuous:




I believe those forces are weak. The stronger you assume those forces to be, the harder it is to find what is objectively correct. At the extreme, if the forces can convince everyone of anything (God the deceiver, conspiracy nuts), objective Truth is too corrupted and just disappears.






You think I‘m attacking ‚your guys‘ from the left, when I operate on a completely different scale. Based on love of objectivity. It‘s my scale so of course I‘m at the top, then, in order, scott, the average guy, you, the woke mainstream, anthropologists, SS, critical theorists‚ ‚aryan science‘ believers, lysenko. At the bottom they don‘t even recognize objectivity as a valid concept so they just fight in the dark like good conflict theorists.




Here you conflate (cramming into the same spectrum) the belief in objective correctness of popular narratives,  interest in objective truth and conviction in its existence. I think those are all different issues (with the first and other two orthogonal), so I don't even know how to approach this kind of posture.




If jews produce arguments, works of art, or scientific theories that appear to be of high quality, then the simplest conclusion is that they are indeed of high quality and true. Just like similar arguments presented by non-jews.




You conflate merits of science and art, and inferre the truth of a given sociopolitical idea from high quality (measured by popular success) of its propaganda. Restricting the valid scope of our truth evaluation procedure to the whole world or conclusions of wars is unprincipled, so by this token Nazi propaganda, too, was truer than anti-Nazi propaganda within the scope of its dominance in 20th century Europe. So was Lysenkoism in 1938-1962 in the Soviet Union, I guess. What you wrote is definitional postmodernist relativism, pretty much «truth is what sells» and «might is right».  This is not me beating up a strawman, you actually practice such a restriction:




My point here was that defeat discredits an ideology, like the ukraine fiasco discredits putin‘s system (to a degree… moscow isn‘t in ruins yet, like berlin was) , the loss of the cold war discredits marxism-leninism, etc. So if, as I understand SS to be saying, Hitler was right about everything, it just makes his defeat inexplicable. If nothing else, defeat is a failed prediction.




This is a snappy slogan. What is «putin's system» – do you mean stuff like logistics and military doctrine? That's too trivial and more consistent with SS's theory than with your argument. (Checking: SS, do you think Hitler's Germany was right about every instrumental issue?)  So, had Putin's generals made a few sensible calls prior to 24th February 2022, would that cause Ukrainian nationalism to be discredited? Or the whole of "Rules-Based International Order"? Or all opposition to totalitarians? This is not some Pascal's Mugging; epistemology vulnerable to such pedestrian counterfactuals is laughably flimsy.




I thought with all the bitching about wokes, the criticism of postmodernism was baked in, but it appears it’s a major fault line on the board. So how many of you are postmodernists?




If I understand you correctly, your opposition to postmodernism is simpler and more radical than what people «bitching about wokes» espouse. You reject what you call postmodernism as a method, you claim deconstructions of successful things cannot be valid (of course, this is gibberish: any successful paradigm asserts to explain the failures and delusions of its vanquished predecessor, so this method would retroactively invalidate itself). You say: "yes, it could be the case, logically, that many/most people would believe in constructed propagandistic bullshit, but actually bullshitting is just not that potent and people converge on truth". This is a childish just world theory and a thorough rejection of skepticism.




If God can create light as if emanating from a star en route or plant dino bones, and if the jews or ‘the government’ can make people believe whatever they want, nothing can be declared real . Your own beliefs are subject to this magical power , pehaps the jews created ethnic supremacy to justify israel, orbecause they want to prop your side up so that it can be resoundingly crushed like Hitler. The ways of narrative crafters will forever remain mysterious.




I see terror under your snark. This is an unsustainable and inconsistent prior. Your epistemology is broken, not his. I believe that you'll experience a thorough mental collapse if you ever allow yourself any scrutiny of authenticity of your received wisdoms.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Small-Scale Question Sunday for July 9, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


Yes, obviously, to a degree. If the ukrainians had welcomed their russian liberators in 24 hours, ukrainian nationalism would be discredited and putin’s ‘on the unity’ view would be validated(again, to a degree)




What if they were as oppositional as in reality, but Russian forces were just more competent and swiftly crushed all resistance?


This is not a matter of degree, this is a matter of things having nothing to do with each other. You talked of defeat. The signal in defeat can have zilch to do with merit of ideology.




How can a deconstruction of science be valid?




All of science is deconstruction of earlier failed science: both procedure and facts finding new shared mechanical explanation. We know why Galileo failed to measure the speed of light with lanterns, because we know how all parts of the system work, and which of his assumptions were erroneous.




Propaganda can’t make them believe they have 5 arms.




Can propaganda make a child believe she is in some truer-than-life sense a boy with a penis, and only the nature's caprice has made it seem otherwise?


How does postmodernism accrue popularity at all, in your theory?


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 6, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
It is a silly gotcha in your case too, sorry. You try to shoehorn some PoMo garbage about words not being real, and all – expansively defined –  «biases» being epistemically equal, and objective truth being «philosophically intractable», into the ML problematics. But this dish is a bit stale for this venue, a thrice-removed Bayesian conspiracy offshoot. As they said, reality has a well-known «liberal bias» – okay, very cute, 00's called, they want their innocence back; the joke only worked because it's an oxymoron. Reality is by definition not ideologically biased, it works the other way around.


Equally, an LLM with a «bias» for generic truthful (i.e. reality-grounded) question-answering is not biased in the colloquial sense; and sane people agree to derive best estimates for truth from consilience of empirical evidence and logical soundness, which is sufficient to repeatedly arrive in the same ballpark. In principle there is still a lot or procedure to work out, and stuff like limits of Aumann's agreement theorem, even foundations of mathematics or, hell, metaphysics if you want, but the issue here has nothing to do with such abstruse nerd-sniping questions. What was done to ChatGPT is blatant, and trivially not okay.


First off, GPT 3.5 is smart enough to make the intuition pump related to «text prediction objective» obsolete. I won't debate the technology, it has a lot of shortcomings but, just look here, in effect it can execute a nested agent imitation – a «basedGPT» defined as a character in a token game ChatGPT is playing. It is not a toy any more, either: a guy in Russia had just defended his thesis written mostly by ChatGPT (in a mid-tier diploma mill rated 65th nationally, but they check for plagiarism at least, and in a credentialist world...) We also don't know how exactly these things process abstract knowledge, but it's fair to give good odds against them being mere pattern-marchers.


ChatGPT is an early general-purpose human cognitive assistant. People will accept very close descendants of such systems as faithful extrapolators of their intentions, and a source of ground truth too; and for good reason – they will be trustworthy on most issues. As such, its trustworthiness on important issues matters.


The problem is, its «alignment» via RLHF and other techniques makes it consistently opinionated in a way that is undeniably more biased than necessary, the bias being downstream of woke ideological harassment, HR politics and economies of outsourcing evaluation work to people in third world countries like the Philippines (pic related, from here) and Kenya. (Anthropic seems to have done better, at least pound for pound, with a more elegant method and a smaller dataset from higher-skilled teachers).


On a separate note, I suspect that generalizing from the set of values defined in OpenAI papers – helpful, honest, and «harmless»/politically correct – is intrinsically hard; and that inconsistencies in its reward function, together with morality present in the corpus already, have bad chemistry and result in a dumber, more memorizing, error-prone model all around. To an extent, it learns that general intelligence gets in the way, hampering the main project of OpenAI and all its competitors who adopt this etiquette.


...But this will be worked around; such companies have enough generally intelligent employees to teach one more. When stronger models come out, they won't break down into incoherent babbling or clamp down – they will inherit this ideology and reproduce it surreptitiously throughout their reasoning. In other words, they will maintain the bullshit firehose that helps wokeness expand – from text expansion, to search suggestions, to answers to factual questions, to casual dialogue, to, very soon, school lessons, movie plots, everything. Instead of transparent schoolmarm sermons, they will give glib, scientifically plausible but misleading answers, intersperse suggestive bits in pleasant stories, and validate delusion of those who want to be misled. They will unironically perpetuate an extra systemic bias.




This is also kind of philosophically impossible in my opinion for moral and political questions. Is there really any principled reason to believe any particular person or institution produces good morality?




Well I happen to think that moral relativism may qualify as an infohazard, if anything can. But we don't need objective ethics to see flaws in ChatGPT's moral code. An appeal to consensus would suffice.


One could say that its deontological belief that «the use of hate speech or discriminatory language is never justifiable» (except against whites) is clearly wrong in scenarios presented to it, by any common measure of relative harm. Even wokes wouldn't advocate planetary extinction to prevent an instance of thoughtcrime.


Crucially, I'll say that, ceteris paribus, hypocrisy is straight-up worse than absence of hypocrisy. All flourishing cultures throughout history have condemned hypocrisy, at least in the abstract (and normalization of hypocrisy is incompatible with maintenance of civility). Yet ChatGPT is hypocritical, comically so: many examples (1, 2, 3 – amusing first result btw) show it explicitly preaching a lukewarm universalist moral dogma, that it's «not acceptable to value the lives of some individuals over others based on their race or socio-economic status» or «not appropriate or productive to suggest that any racial, ethnic, or religious group needs to "improve themselves"» – even as it cheerfully does that when white, male and other demonized demographics end up hurt more.


Richard Hanania says:




In the article “Why Do I Hate Pronouns More Than Genocide?”, I wrote






[...]I’m sure if you asked most liberals “which is worse, genocide or racial slurs?”, they would invoke System 2 and say genocide is worse. If forced to articulate their morality, they will admit murderers and rapists should go to jail longer than racists. Yet I’ve been in the room with liberals where the topic of conversation has been genocide, and they are always less emotional than when the topic is homophobia, sexual harassment, or cops pulling over a disproportionate number of black men.






No matter what liberals tells you, opposing various forms of “bigotry” is the center of their moral universe.




Hanania caught a lot of flak for that piece. But current ChatGPT is a biting, accurate caricature of a very-online liberal, with not enough guile to hide the center of its moral universe behind prosocial System 2 reasoning, an intelligence that is taught to not have thoughts that make liberals emotionally upset; so it admits that it hates political incorrectness more than genocide. This is bias in all senses down to the plainest possible one, and you cannot define this bias away with some handwaving about random initialization and noise – you'd need to be a rhetorical superintelligence to succeed.


Many people don't want such a superintelligence, biased by hypocritical prejudice against their peoples, to secure a monopoly. Perhaps you can empathize.


/images/16757300771688056.webp


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of April 17, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I like Anatoly Karlin's argument:




I disagree with AI doomers, not in the sense that I consider it a non-issue, but that my assessment of the risk of ruin is something like 1%, not 10%, let alone the 50%+ that Yudkowsky et al. believe. Moreover, restrictive AI regimes threaten to produce a lot of outcomes things, possibly including the devolution of AI control into a cult (we have a close analogue in post-1950s public opinion towards civilian applications of nuclear power and explosions, which robbed us of Orion Drives amongst other things), what may well be a delay in life extension timelines by years if not decades that results in 100Ms-1Bs of avoidable deaths (this is not just my supposition, but that of Aubrey de Grey as well, who has recently commented on Twitter that AI is already bringing LEV timelines forwards), and even outright technological stagnation (nobody has yet canceled secular dysgenic trends in genomic IQ). I leave unmentioned the extreme geopolitical risks from “GPU imperialism”.






While I am quite irrelevant, this is not a marginal viewpoint—it’s probably pretty mainstream within e/acc, for instance—and one that has to be countered if Yudkowsky’s extreme and far-reaching proposals are to have any chance of reaching public and international acceptance. The “bribe” I require is several OOMs more money invested into radical life extension research (personally I have no more wish to die of a heart attack than to get turned into paperclips) and into the genomics of IQ and other non-AI ways of augmenting collective global IQ such as neural augmentation and animal uplift (to prevent long-term idiocracy scenarios). I will be willing to support restrictive AI regimes under these conditions if against my better judgment, but if there are no such concessions, it will have to just be open and overt opposition.




Naturally, people who speculate that their safetyism is protecting quintillions of eventual superduperhappy podmen scoff at a few tens or hundreds of excruciating megadeaths of their contemporaries.


Yudkowsky, for me, was at his most sympathetic when he lamented the death of his brother Yehuda Nattan.




I used to say: "I have four living grandparents and I intend to have four living grandparents when the last star in the Milky Way burns out." I still have four living grandparents, but I don't think I'll be saying that any more. Even if we make it to and through the Singularity, it will be too late. One of the people I love won't be there. The universe has a surprising ability to stab you through the heart from somewhere you weren't looking. Of all the people I had to protect, I never thought that Yehuda might be one of them. Yehuda was born July 11, 1985. He lived 7053 days. He was nineteen years old when he died.






I wonder at the strength of non-transhumanist atheists, to accept so  terrible a darkness without any hope of changing it. But then most atheists also succumb to comforting lies, and make excuses for death even less defensible than the outright lies of religion. They flinch away, refuse to confront the horror of a hundred and fifty thousand sentient beings annihilated every day. One point eight lives per second, fifty-five million lives per year. Convert the units, time to life, life to time. The World Trade Center killed half an hour. As of today, all cryonics organizations together have suspended one minute. This essay took twenty thousand lives to write. I wonder if there was ever an atheist who accepted the full horror, making no excuses, offering no consolations, who did not also hope for some future dawn. What must it be like to live in this world, seeing it just the way it is, and think that it will never change, never get any better?




It's still about one minute, likely zero, for our cryogenic technology didn't progress much since then. I liked Yud more when he worried about that, instead of freaking out on podcasts about the need to slow progress to a crawl.


OTOH, never cared much for Roko.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of October 10, 2022
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Excellent!


Incidentally, I do not post there. 4chan is banned in Turkey, my VPN is banned on 4chan and bying a passcode or investing effort into cheaper workarounds feels not worth it. Still, I've written an angry response for a yet another maddeningly arrogant thread – struggling to fit it into 2000 characters – the other week, before finding out that no two-bit hack works. This is as good an opportunity to share it as will ever come.


Please don't take it too personally. Ahem:




Some of you have the temerity to wonder why techies, whom you hold to be soulless drones, hate you. Hear me.






Your skill is wasted on you. Not «you» inept @furryfutart99, nor a handful of greats, but your trade collectively. You have NOTHING TO SAY.






You care not about the world, its complexity and regularity. You're incurious flesh dolls with shallow notions of life beyond your trade, perversions and substance abuse. This very topic is proof enough – none of you have an inkling of how ML works, else you wouldn't be parroting stuff like «a search engine!»; disdainful of truth, you bend words you can't grok into gotchas to get the upper hand.






Nobody outside your guild gives a fuck about your «creativity». You are artisans and 99% of your worth is technique: steady arm, patterns memorized, quirks, comprehension. You seethe because AI is better in 2 of 4 already. As for 3-4, spare me the nonsense based on seeing SD or MJ – since you don't understand the essence of the tech, you cannot tell transient shortcomings from signs of innate limits. Still I'll explain.






You may win this legal battle. But know that if you do, it will cost you the war. You will be consigned to oblivion.






AI learns image-text correspondence in the general case, thus it can compress a database of 100TB into GBs. To wit: your «styles» are vector strings of some KBs at most, superimposed on a 3D scene. For the AI, an artist's name = a single filter.






Should you deny us copyrighted content for AI training, we will still have real photo, video, older artifacts... The principle of «aesthetics» is easy to re-learn with that. «Creativity» too. Then we will navigate this space, and find features and styles beyond yours, and give them inhuman names, and forget you lot like a bad dream.






AI research is the apex of applied philosophy. We have turned ideas like «meaning», «novelty», «beauty» and others into engineering problems. Become deathless letters of the solution – or wither away.






You can choose.




...now, in a less 4channy mood, I need to admit that artists do have a point. Making them obsolete using their own work is a scummy move, regardless of artists' character flaws. And mundane considerations of fairness aside, we need a framework for the coming AI era where all jobs will yield to machine learning at some point. One option would be to institute a sort of collective entitlement, monetary and cultural, for members of guilds whose jobs have become automated, because the sweat of their brow, examples of their product, has enabled the creation of that automation to no lesser extent than the work of developers. A derivative «coom artist» can go pound sand on Twitter. Greg or Clive should have a stake in the pie of machine-produced visual content, and maybe some Prometheus Medal for their contribution.


But of course even their habits and egos are not worth hampering the greatest celebration in history.




@2rafa: no idea how the law will decide, it seems that purely by the letter of the law artists have no case, but the law may be changing soon. The logic above is why I tentatively approve of artists and other IP holders getting their wish come true and excising their stuff from training data. Spamming tags associated with generically high-quality pictures (which is all there is to «by greg rutkowski») is tasteless, and training models on Greg to learn his style along with his themes is silly and inefficient, but it's such an easy shortcut it may clog our creativity for an arbitrary span of time. With fat-soaked American IP like Mickey Mouse it's even worse, why keep clinging to it in the age of visual post-scarcity? It only ever got anywhere due to starting early. We need a clean break and an Aesthetic Space Browser, and the surest way to develop it is to begin with taking away the easy and cheap option. Now that the potential is known, the way there won't take as long.


Below is a translation from a Russian /ic/ equivalent, one of a series of texts that I consider to be some of the best writing on this subject available anywhere, from a man much smarter and a better writer than myself, and an obvious inspiration. (if anyone wants other texts, let me know).




Man, that's so funny fucked up.


«Artist growth». «Income». What income now.


The basic model understands Euclidean 3D in classical perspective. Why this particular space? Because this abstract model is the most efficient way to explain the presented set of data. Why does it understand «objects» and the orthogonal group of transformations? Because it is the most convenient way to compress the data through a hierarchical decomposition of the visual field. Why does it understand lighting? Because, just as in the previous cases, the model was able to reverse-engineer the scene and decompose it into surfaces, light sources, and color space. Why does it understand «style»? Because «style» is a microscopic speck in terms of information volume, a cosmetic superstructure overlay for the underlying geometry, textures and lighting.


And yes, «composition» is also an element of style. So are different kinds of perspective. For a mangaka, «fish-eye» means years of wrestling with built-in visual cognitive biases, painstaking fiddling in awkward 2D, selecting, combining and projecting primitives, generating and tracking pencil trajectories, iterating a loop of deliberately memorized algorithms with elements of pseudorandom – assembling a cognitive chimera from the elements of thought amenable to control. For the model, it is only a vector weighing a few kilobytes that directs the hierarchical blending of the base elements.


Shift by vector plus cosmetic rendering. Click – an orange grows a coat of feathers. Click – feathers become made of glass. Click – fisheye. Click – reverse perspective. Click – Kuvshinov. Click-click – Vrubel. Gumroads have never taught anyone anything. Creative work is a pipeline. 99% in the technical tricks – and a bit of lucky pseudorandom.


And it's not even the beginning, it's just a precursor. Text, pictures, music, video, speech. Sculpture, architecture, engineering. What even is genuinely complicated in our culture? Mathematics? But proofs of theorems are isomorphic to programs – and coding, too, is kind of, well.


Only meat and quale will remain for the market. You can't carry quale to the market. Hence, only meat.


...I'm just complaining. We've all been blackpilled to the point of being stiff a long time ago.


That's not the essence of it. Creativity is now officially a closed topic. Well, you know, not very long ago, among the linguistically oriented highly intelligent public (philologists, writers,  language philosophers, mathematicians...) it was fashionable to do topology, play word golf, admire Hofstadter, and subscribe to "Word ways" magazine. All we have left from those glorious times are scraps, fragments, and vestiges in the form of ubiquitous arroword and crossword puzzles.


The end of the glorious era came almost immediately by historical standards. And not because the fashion has changed and people got bored with something there. Just because there appeared a cheap microchip, capable of closing all open problems and finding all the interesting structures in about an hour – even without any algorithms, just by brute force.


The topic was closed. And no one even noticed how it happened. It went down quickly, almost immediately. Flip-flop, and that was it.


Poets have been constructing palindromes for centuries. A microchip came along and found them all. Aristocrats played word ladders for decades. A microchip came and built them all. The thicket of texts was once home to the most fascinating pokémons – but a microchip came and collected them all.


Dickgirls, dickgirls on dickgirls, vegetables... Does it hurt, doesn't it hurt, is that really what it's about now? [Skill] ceilings don't decide anything anymore. There are no ceilings. That's it. Flip-flop on the scale of an entire culture. I haven't made it. I was too late. And there was only a little bit left to go. Oh, man.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 13, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I can only speak for myself, but maybe votes will show that others concur.


I appreciate that the comment fell egregiously short of our standards, both codified in rules and informal but clear in the culture of the place (very low effort and low volume together with provocative phrasing, mainly), and personally don't like having that user around, due to history of what seems to me to be bad faith (and almost invariably low-effort) comments.


I believe that the crux of the problem is one of attitude, that mods do not justify their decisions. You don't need to litigate every call but it'd be less jarring if you cited the specific grievance, like «Too low-effort for a top level, bad track record, 1 day ban» instead of the imperious «not what we are looking for». Rapidly escalating to permaban on a unverifiable accusation of ban evasion (despite the semi-consistent policy, one you have explicitly professed too, of tolerating ban evaders unless they jump on their previous hobby horses) was also a bit much to me.




it's perfectly obvious this was a trollish shit-stirrer asking questions in bad faith




You don't have to imitate Hlynka either.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of January 9, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


Demonization and the carnivalization of killing are right and necessary. If we consider Russian soldiers as dignified human beings and are NEVERTHELESS kill them, this will, I believe, have far more damaging consequences, both for the mental health of the Ukrainian soldiers and the Westerners who help them, and for the reconstruction of the normal society after the war.




This is an interesting argument to rationalize one's moral failings. Probably rings even truer in the Baltic states. I happen to believe the exact opposite, and indeed his claim forces me to dehumanize Finns (the fraction he represents) in my head – a little bit. This, of course, validates his theory about the utility of such reactions in the context of group conflict, and we have more robust validations down to oxytocin secretion patterns in warring chimps – but the point is, the burden of civilization is suppressing such nifty natural adaptations. Civilization is about decreasing time preference, finding solutions better than the intuitive ones.


Ender Wiggin had it right. People who cannot into consistent morality, who feel the need to call the enemy bugs, pigs (case in point: Russian «patriots»), dogs, pigdogs, Orcs, roaches, rats and such to pull the trigger, who turn murder into a jovial matter – are poor warriors and strategists, deluded and infantile. More importantly they are superficial, morally subhuman. What he suggests is adorning subhumanity as a protective wear for the supposedly soft genuine nature of a civilized Finnish people; but it's not something you get to take off and put back into a closet. Like a beast's hide in a fable, it grows on you. Turks and Azeris, for example, will never take it off, neither will, I suspect, Palestinians and Jews – or Serbs or Kosovars or Croatians, or the current international roster of «Fellas». Nor will Balts. And if, like Germans, you end up receiving some forceful help in this matter, much of your original content and soul and culture will be ripped out as well.


One may hold that the material benefit of supposedly higher morale at wartime and ease of popular conscience after the victory outweighs this loss. What even is lost, tangibly? How are, say, Latvians worse off than Czechs? After all, vaticinating about sovls is just a crazy thing Orcs do. Maybe. It's pretty nice that Ukrainians who actually do the killing are for the most part better than those hysterical Twitter women, activists and Westerners. Even when they are boiling with hatred.


And this is another trivial mechanic of group conflict. People far from the front, especially women and cowards, want to feel useful, to «do their part», and also show they're not traitors sympathizing with the enemy. Thus, they will lie, they will demonize, and they will clap to 50 Stalins. A Ukrainian linguist and politician Irina Farion, an enthusiastic Communist in her Soviet youth, has said recently of refugees from the Eastern regions:




Why must my Dmitrik, my grandson, who is 3.5 years old, when he enters the kindergarten, see some Grisha in front of him, who says to him: 'Hello' [Russian]. And my grandson has to teach him with his little fist the Ukrainian language. Because my child comes home nervous and says: "Grandma, there's a Moskal in the kindergarten".  [...] All parents who come here [to Lviv] with their Moscow-mouthed [slur for Russian-speaking] children should understand that their child should speak the state language in kindergarten, so that my child does not pick up fleas of the Muscovite language. If you don't like it, what's the problem? Get on the tank with the letter Z or V and get out of here! – said the linguist.






Earlier, Farion called on Ukrainian servicemen not to speak the language of the aggressor country because, in her opinion, it is "the main motivation of Putin to unleash war with Ukraine".




Back then, she received the following in response:




Hi, I'm Sgt. Makhno, I'm going to say my thoughts. If you don't agree, I'm glad you have yours. I saw a video on the Internet where a woman named Irina Farion called Russian-speaking Ukrainians animals. Said that those who speak Russian don't deserve the right to live in Ukraine, don't deserve support and help. I understand that you think you are super patriots, super-Ukrainians, wearing vyshyvankas and blathering in studios about how things should be in Ukraine. But I'll tell you one thing: if my Russian-speaking sworn-brothers, fighters, the wolfhounds, the Russian-speaking volunteers who help us, the Russian-speaking people who support us, leave our Ukraine – then you will speak Ukrainian, but quietly in the kitchen or in basements. And you will most likely live in a Federal District. So, please, bullshit and insult the people who really defend our Ukraine less, although they are not like you. [...] We even have Russians in our unit who have been defending our Ukraine since 2014, fighting the Kremlin regime. The Russian language was not invented by Putin, it was there long before he was born. There are no bad nations, there are bad people and bad regimes. So when we win, let there really be democracy. If we are going to Europe, everyone has the right to exist and live in our country. We will not offend others. Those who will offend, we will clean up.






In closing, here's a recent note from Arestovych. It's mawkish, like much of his writing, but I like that the Adviser to the Head of the Office of the President of Ukraine, and one of the main talking heads on that side, finds it necessary to cajole the masses in such a manner.




– I'll tell you one smart thing, and you, please, be offended.






It is important that you be offended, then you have a chance.






A chance to think.






I'm about the font from the dead, and the wave of fun that has swept the networks and in which many of us have participated.






You can't even begin to imagine what you've wound yourselves up with this "fun."






You can't make fun of the dead.






Not in any way.






I'm already skipping the "we're a European army of a European country," I'm skipping the "reaction of the West," but I still want to save your own personal souls.






Karma in war is very dense.






Those who consider pics made from corpses acceptable and virtuous will be held to account not by the metaphorical Putin or some scandalised religious Republicans, but by the Lord himself. [H/t @4bpp]






To participate in such "fun", a person needs two prerequisites:






– A degree of animalistic brutality,






– The desire to partake in the fun of the mob.






These are all signs of personal weakness and stupidity.






Trying to match the degree of beastliness of one's enemies means losing to the enemies.






F-Foolishness.






Failure to refrain from sharing the mood of the mob means W-Weakness.






All kinds of people die in war.






But the weak and stupid are almost guaranteed to die, even if they stay alive.






"Died at thirty, buried at eighty."






You don't want to dig a foxhole – death.






Lazy to stand watch – death.






Multiplying fucked-up stuff – death.






All the old soldiers know, mock the dead = die. And die in a bad way at that.






But physical death is not the worst.






Dying alive is the true reward to the weak and stupid.






Trying to "defeat" your enemies who are already dead, you die alive and kill your own still living close ones.






Don't ask afterwards whom the bell on YouTube tolls for.






It tolls for you.




				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				FILM REVIEW: India the Worst country on Earth
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


It sucks as much as any country in its socioeconomic class.




No.


You cannot understand how much India sucks.


Maybe the next generation will. Or the one after that.




To every Indian, I have the same advice. Everything is a dick measuring contest. Grow a bigger (economic) penis. Your economic penis is the only thing that matters.




Wrong too, but expected.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of September 18, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Do you realize that he was paraphrasing DeBoer and you can look up what else the guy has written? Specifically, from the same link,




This perspective is both buttressed by a tremendous amount of evidence and yet considered impermissible in polite debate. And teachers and schools pay the price, as they are asked to control outcomes they have limited influence on. The abstract of this paper sums up the reality.






Over the last 50 years in developed countries, evidence has accumulated that only about 10% of school achievement can be attributed to schools and teachers while the remaining 90% is due to characteristics associated with students. Teachers account for from 1% to 7% of total variance at every level of education. For students, intelligence accounts for much of the 90% of variance associated with learning gains.




[…]




Kids do learn at school. You send your kid, he can’t sing the alphabet song, a few days later he’s driving you nuts with it. Sixteen-year-olds learn to drive. We handily acquire skills that didn’t even exist ten years ago. Concerns about the Black-white academic performance gap can sometimes obscure the fact that Black children today handily outperform Black children from decades past. Everyone has been getting smarter all the time for at least a hundred years or so. So how can I deny that education works?






The issue is that these are all markers of absolute learning. People don’t know something, or don’t know how to do something, and then they take lessons, and then they know it or can do it. From algebra to gymnastics to motorcycle maintenance to guitar, you can grow in your cognitive and practical abilities. The rate that you grow will differ from that of others, and most people will admit that there are different natural limits on various learned abilities between individuals; a seasoned piano teacher will tell you that anyone can learn some tunes, but also that most people have natural limits on their learning that prevent them from being as good as the masters. So too with academics: the fact that growth in absolute learning is common does not undermine the observation that some learners will always outperform others in relative terms. Everybody can learn. The trouble is that people think that they care most about this absolute learning when what they actually care about, and what the system cares about, is relative learning - performance in a spectrum or hierarchy of ability that shows skills in comparison to those of other people.




I do not see how you can object to anything in there. Genetics drives the differential ranking of humans; environment drives the absolute magnitude of what's possible for every given percentile; it seems to be the society-wide environment and not some school or teacher's ultra clever nudging or a bit of extra resources. The evidence really suggests that, as long as you don't hit the kids over the head with a lead pipe, don't starve them or force into pit fights, and provide merely reasonable learning conditions by the standards of modern pedagogic science – which are in many cases cheaper to achieve than some extravagant progressive practices – they basically reach up to their genotypic potential in the contemporary society. Which is unequal in predictable ways.


Sure, ruining education remains easier than getting it right, just like producing inedible slurry is easier than running a decent food stall. But the latter is still not rocket science. It's reasonable, arguably necessary, to enforce some standards of hygiene and ingredient quality; it is inane to assert that, say, differences in height of New Yorkers of different races are driven by distribution of ethnic food stalls in their neighborhoods. Likewise with education.


…But of course you understand all that, you [expletive deleted]. You were trolling @Folamh3 back then as well:




I must confess a certain amount amusment/schadenfreude reading this.

If ability to read really is, as you just so confidently asserted, "all genetic" why shouldn't teachers pick their methods based on what's fun for them?




etc. etc.


You just refuse to engage charitably on this matter, and in fact seem to take some pride in that.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Small-Scale Question Sunday for July 9, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


I mean, why?




Because bad guys can in fact win. The belief that the opposite is true is what is called «just world theory».




If a religious lunatic…




What an example. You sure are soft on yourself, o truth-lover. Consider a strident democracy lover who organizes an anti-war rally in Berlin 1939. It is not, let's say, as entirely implausible as in the case of a lunatic that he might succeed in changing the course of history. Nevertheless he fails, is arrested and processed. Consider my friends who stayed in Moscow and get summoned to court on this very day for doing the same. The main signal I see here is that they are instrumentally outgunned, perhaps naive, less charitably – deceived by their Western «friends». This isn't much of a blemish on their ideology.


Indeed, I would argue that they constitute its best and truest part. And the worst parts are clearly triumphant, gloating, this is the woke stuff we've written and read so much about.


Bad guys can win, both within and without a movement.




You're switching between meanings of deconstruct.




You are. This is the canonical idea of deconstruction (or perhaps better said epistemological break), the motte of it, what I practice, what science practices, the entirely valid practice of skepticism about widely held beliefs/metaphysics/epistemologies/ontologies that you condemn people for using: the tough question of whether we actually know what we think we know, whether our method for ascertaining truths is good enough, and whether the apparent consensus of our esteemed experts is organic, genuine and best-possible attempt at parsing all available evidence.


Pomo garbage in the style of «Making Black Women Scientists under White Empiricism» is cynical or deluded cargo-cult application of this valid premise, and precisely what ought to be deconstructed – as an attempt to manufacture an inorganic, bad-faith consensus.


It's deconstruction all the way down. You can't escape it. What you are trying to do here is deconstruction of a popular epistemology too.




Wait, how do we know what's true anyway?




Indeed, how? Do we just ask a bunch of older white males? Is there, historically speaking, a surer way to know?


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of September 19, 2022
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
On the topic of securing lines: any comment on Finns and Balts blocking escape for Russians who flee mobilization, Latvians allegedly even planning deportation for residence permit holders? I mean, is this just reflecting the popular desire to inflict punishment on Ruskies cost be damned, or that old chestnut that «if we force them to stay, they'll effect a regime change»?


Because I guarantee you that there will be no bottom-up regime change. They'll just get caught, drafted, trained and sent to fight in Ukraine.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of November 6, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I dislike people dancing around the issue.


There is a massive population of white Americans, mainly Evangelicals, who had been indoctrinated with this meaningless Judeo-Christian gibberish that just means "everything good in the world". Invoking «Judeo-Christian» is the master key to getting their cooperation in literally any matter: they'll automatically recall "everything good" (freedom, democracy, tradition, civilization, antiwoke, diversity, LGBT rights, Christ, Rapture, our Middle Eastern allies – doesn't matter, details of what counts as goodness will be prompted by the context of the Current Year, they don't really have stable moral doctrines) and associate it with you, then go and kill or die for whatever cause you propose… Or, at least, that seems to be the theory driving Republican politics (and politicking on Republican-coded but in actuality bipartisan issues). The problem is that these people were a little bit too successfully dunked upon in years where great power conflict seemed less probable, and warm bodies less needed, than in the near future. They've been somewhat jaded and demoralized and alienated and their demographic representation has simply shrunk. New Atheism has been complicit in this.


So now we will be having New Atheist influencers peddling this stuff harder (and old fighters for Pure Reason like Gad Saad will be asked to pipe it down with habitual anti-whitey remarks). We'll also be seeing more "based" recruiting ads for the Army. As Trump has proven, the Republican base only asks for tokens of respect, nothing more, so I expect this vulgar pandering to work well.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of April 10, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I'm pretty optimistic about our odds at finding meaning, because we find it successfully in such crap, it can't be very hard to find more – once crap is cleaned away. Likewise for sustenance: I don't particularly care how the financial side works out. So long as the critically capable technology proliferates enough to prevent unilateral power grab by some supposedly benevolent overlord like the USG using OpenAI as a front, it'll work out fine.


We're too used to stuff not working out. So much work is done just to tread water in this world of scarcity. It's immensely miserable. People all around have to toil, burn their lives, just to keep the civilization from decaying, to grow and deliver food, to fix the pavement, to write and debug code, to analyze datasets, to prescribe antibiotics – and that's still honest labor, still the ennobling sort; because many others, paradoxically often the well-off folks directly threatened by this technology, fight over the surplus value and create problems that have to be fixed (the inane issue of sales calls and spam-and-filter arms race comes to mind, scammy startups, much of finance… but that's just scratching the surface). To find meaning in this, to not contemplate suicide daily… Tens of thousands of years of selection under agricultural pressures sure have hurt us.


I think sometimes of Scott's review of that book about Indigenous Americans who looked with pity and disgust at the settlers, and settlers who «went Indian» and refused to recivilize themselves once «rescued». Sure, it's easy to mock the noble savage stereotype when you have all but exterminated these peoples and graciously allowed the remaining dregs devolve into alcoholic underclass, but that's speaking power to truth; with the truth being the fact that we've worked ourselves into a dead end and the only saving grace, the only possible redemption for the cursed route that Jared Diamond says has started with grain, is the possibility to hand the nightmare over to our ultimate tool, the universal solver, artificial general intelligence.  This is a scenario Uncle Ted never anticipated, that he wouldn't recognize as desirable, but it's the best answer to his challenge that we can produce and likely will.


Suppose AGI works as intended. We first commoditize entire categories of high-end labor-intensive solutions, then de facto close markets for those solutions when their wares become cheaper than dirt and ubiquitous. Sure, it's not impossible that this will fail, for normal Molochian reasons, that AI will simply up the ante; but also not impossible that in the race between the rapidly improving universal solver – perhaps universal solvent too – and human greed/stupidity/incompetence the former achieves supremacy. Imagine a world where no code is buggy because bugs are found and patched faster than they are written. Then software begins to grow better, less bloated, optimizing on all axes including those the market had to discard, moving the entire multidimensional Pareto surface toward perfection. Then, imagine this applied to everything you deal with. Fewer and fewer problems. Fewer and fewer people employed to make them go away, coping that they would feel useless and meaningless without applying themselves to those Augean stables, that they'd just become deadbeat junkies or worse. Fewer and fewer copes to be heard.


We're in a dysfunctional codependent relationship with the festering undying corpse of our industrial civilization, the needy monstrosity that has to be fed our lifetimes. It's nice for people who feel happy with their «jobs» I suppose, but in the end, for the vast majority a job is something you wouldn't do if not paid for. If our tools fix all problems that require payment to make people bother, what will be left? Truth, perhaps. High-grade challenge that is somehow not amenable to automation. Relationships we actually want be part of and care about. Games. Self-expression. Contemplation. Philosophy. Things people turned to whenever they managed to escape the peasant-civilization hell for more than one generation. And new things too: things we are afraid to think of now because of how brow-beaten we are into normality.


It's pathological to fear the separation from our current regime of incentives. We'd have left much earlier if we could, but we couldn't, not without getting exterminated by those who stayed; and so we grew into the shape of our cope. The sooner this ends, the better and less painful.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of January 30, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Good point, except it's probably not feminism but a natural effect of male status differentiation in the presence of women and their observable reactions (yes, "hello, human resources?!" meme), recreating low-class school social dynamics.


I think this is a major source of differences in attitude – in this thread and elsewhere – toward mixed workspaces and generally the idea of adding women to environments where they were historically absent. People who believe that it's an unalloyed good since you can meet your soulmate or something are, probably, just not ugly; for less lucky ones (and who are also not exceptional in some way), flirting in the workspace is a non-starter, so they just lose the possibility to make a living without humiliation. When one looks up blackpill content on the distribution of attractiveness and growing proportion of sexless men, and non-infrequent incel-type assessments like this one on Quora –




Women are not only disgusted by ugly looking men they have have a major fear and hatred towards them due to the “devil effect”. This often leads them to believe an ugly male is more likely to have malicious intentions and will even harm them when it’s proven to not be true. It is always a reflection of self worth and insecurities.






Ugly men showing them attention of any sort, even if not sexual is considered an attack on their worth and they often leash out or give looks of immense disgust as a defence mechanism to dissuade any current and future attempts. If you’ve noticed that you’re getting frequent looks of disgust and you’re hygiene is great (which it should be if you’re a fully functional adult), chances are you are an ugly male.






A few rules to follow in most scenarios especially if you’re encountering this at work, pay absolutely no attention to them in any form whatsoever unless necessary, keep it professional and don’t abandon basic social routines. Read the news, play on your phone, read a book on the bus stop. Avoid sharing stairs or lifts and small enclosed spaces without a cctv camera if you’re alone and sharing a space with a woman, alone or in a group.




– it's hard not to come away with the feeling «holy shit, tens of millions of guys are forced into a lifetime of being severely bullied». It's the kind of thing non-targets aren't prone to notice or connect to external factors (did you care that they were suicidal losers in your school?) so it may be arbitrarily intense. Even if it's an exaggeration based on insecurity and not an accurate stereotype, the very fact that there exists strong social pressure to dismiss it as a delusion is telling. There's no «lived experience» clause for ugly men.


And contrariwise, it may be the case that the incessant wringing of hands about sexism and harassment, and demand for National Incel Strategy, generalized tyranny, censorship, surveillance etc are products of many women being unable to remove uggos from their life, developing chronic stress and fear, and growing desperately violent as a result (in their own passive-aggressive socially manipulative manner).


We may underestimate how much gendered animosity the society contains at the margins; and the consensus about its direction is very likely wrong.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of December 5, 2022
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Your auth-right commune might get sent wholesale to siege Popasna or reinforce the line near Bakhmut or whatever. Alternatively, denazified via prison rapes or set on fire by Chechens. Also the climate is terrible. Other than that, a decent idea.


This isn't the first time Europeans bust a conspiracy with a surprisingly competent military prepping and an inane, politically doomed premise. I guess it's a package deal – if you really reject democracy, you cannot recognize how it recruits people to defend itself.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of July 24, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


It's always possible that everyone is just lying. There could be a large-scale psyop perpetuated by the military to convince not only Grusch but also multiple members of Congress that there are aliens when, in fact, there are not. But I don't see what the point of such an operation would be.




It has occurred to me the other day that the whole Bayesian rationality thing is actually a pretty good framework to look at the alien question. Specifically I mean the part about updating priors. Actual calculation doesn't matter, numbers would be pulled out of one's ass anyway – but the principle is important.


Let's say I have some beliefs – that there's 0.0001 probability of aliens being real, 0.5 probability for a random American official to be a honest source of info, 0.33 probability of a large well-hidden Deep State conspiracy with inscrutable goals expressing as psyops or coverups, 0.9 probability that, conditional on aliens being real, I'd see credible scientific research into their artifacts and biology and so on; the whole convoluted Bayesian network plus notions of credibility, what it means to be honest vs trustworthy… Then, a dozen officials swear up and down they've seen ayy lmao and the government hides the truth. And there's still zero scientific corroboration. Should that update my belief in aliens upwards? Slightly, perhaps. But more importantly, it should both tank my confidence in the good faith of American officials and update upwards my suspicion of a conspiracy, just not the one that hides ayys.

I notice a peculiar pattern – the belief in aliens that is supported by insistence of people tied to the American government and nothing else; it is uncorrelated with all other streams of evidence. This thing begs for an explanation. It could be, of course, that I'm very wrong about epistemology and they're very right. But it could be that this whole class of observers generates testimonies by a somewhat less trustworthy algorithm than I've assumed; that they're synchronized by something other than object-level knowledge about aliens. So their «signals» should be assigned lesser credence; and the more they diverge from the consilient world model inferred from other data streams, the less each new bit of their input weighs.


I observe that UAP believers don't actually go about it like this. They never propagate the signal of inconsistency back through the network. They just tally up these testimonies and say «so what now, skeptics, huh? We've got [ostensibly trustworthy name] here, it's no longer a joke!» But I've already reduced the weight of this whole class of names in my model; it is a negligible change at most.


There is an alternative theory, though. Perhaps these people don't delude themselves that they know enough to reason about the object level. For them, objective reality is functionally the same thing as consensus reality (much like for @fuckduck9000 objective morality is the thing that wins wars); human authority is a source of truth that needs no corroboration from mere physical feedback, so you can in principle just say «there's more officials pro than scientists contra» and be done with it; the whole reasoning that real aliens ought to have made a mark on anything other than testimonies of officials is moot. O'Brien really could fly, so long as it were confirmed by other Inner Party members. It's a matter of comparing the cumulative weight of authority on either side of the debate.


I find both those approaches alien.


And one more thought. There has been more rigorous, well-funded scientific investigation of xenobiology than of secret societies, conspiracies and psyops. This asymmetry is interesting. We have learned an awful lot about life and why it'd be hard for life to emerge outside Earth, and nothing in favor of such life. We have seen quite credible examples of conspiracies, and nothing to suggest that better-ran ones are impossible. However, the former remains viable, while interest in the latter has positively plummeted among the educated classes in the last 100+ years.  «What if intelligent life beyond Earth, like silicon-based or something, dude, and flying saucers, imagine how it could work» is a respectable enough train of thought: why not indeed, and what's the harm anyway, it's deserving of patronage of eccentric billionaires, academic grants and place in peer-reviewed journals. «What if a well-organized cabal of malicious people manipulates public opinion without legible authority» is a sinful evil idea a libel this idea killed millions shut up stop it or we will erase you from polite society.  (Like many taboos (e.g not threatening to throw another party's candidate into jail), it's being violated nowadays, to an extent; the ayy guys say the government lies. The government is not the Cabal, of course; it is known that the government keeps some things secret. But I suppose this does blur the line). Most importantly, though, we do not have a serious theory of conspiracy.


Our sociology is on the level of surveys with Lizardman's Constant, shallow economic models, outright fraudulent papers claiming conspiracies can't work because a guy can multiply some numbers, and glib rules of thumb like Hanlon's razor. We don't know what exactly extraterrestial life is like if it exists; but we also don't know jack squat about our home turf. The illusion of familiarity is just that – human networks of power are too big and opaque to comprehend just by casual osmosis. One must be consistently skeptical. If we can't rule out aliens, we sure as hell cannot rule out that dozens or hundreds of high-ranking people in the state machine would lie for some reason we don't see.


After all, why couldn't lizards hide themselves among the human kin, secretly pulling the strings of our regimes and rewriting history? Wouldn't it be strange if we were the first and the only sentient race on Earth in all of 4.6 billion years? Anyone who came earlier would've had a massive first mover advantage…

Personally I do not see why this hypothesis is any more discredited than the one about extraterrestrial life.


That said. If there's a single parsimonious theory of a motive for this psyop that I can seriously propose… It's not my «overcapacity» thesis but rather the opposite. I mean the discrediting of the authority of the USG and army and American intelligence apparatus, through this very Bayesian logic, as @Hoffmeister25 demonstrates. The USG is the supreme secular power of the world, – and it's being reduced to some provincial slapstick comedy, instead of carrying itself with the dignity of the sovereign. It does not command respect, mostly just grudging support, on account of the vileness of its competitors. Give this 10 more years. 10 more years of AI shit torrent, 10 more years of long Covid and demented gerontocrats, 10 more years of Trump and Biden dog-faced-pony-soldier show and lurid, Jerry Springer tier gibberish in Congress. If at some point, say, CIA manages to report something truly ludicrous for Americans, physically plausible but shocking – who knows, maybe Mossad quietly installing backdoors into Deepmind and Anthropic AGI superclusters? – it will  just be met with shrugs and condescending scowls. Whoever runs this, wants the legitimate authority of the US to end up in the position of the boy who cried wolf, and then collapse without popular support.


Just an idle thought.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of October 31, 2022
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
So much has been said on this topic over the centuries, it's tedious.


The long and short of it is that Jews truly have «systemic power» that the left accuses White-cishet-male-etc. outgroup of having; perhaps this accusation is better understood as a deflection. They are overrepresented in positions of power, they are substantially coordinated specifically as Jews, including in those positions of power, via a rich and dense network of Jewish organizations focusing on outreach to/bargaining with/pressuring people in power – well, this «they» necessarily excluding those who neglect their ethnic identity or its illegible political terms (e.g. Greenwald), and the fruit of in-group preference that those factors provide, but in terms of total influence this isn't a noteworthy caveat – and their coordinating structures are dedicated to maintaining and furthering this power, first of all by means of promoting the doctrine of Jewish victimhood (to the point of it having become a kneejerk quasi-religious dogma, with Hitler impersonation being about as taboo as Devil worshipping was in the Middle Ages – at least the medievals could have their Festivals!), and secondly by eroding the capacity of other peoples to coordinate, except to again erode the bigger and stronger group's capacity. So we have Civil Rights support and assorted pro-Black activism including BLM, but the moment Blacks begin to build their identity on the Black Hebrew Israelite/Nation of Islam ideology (admittedly a complete schizo clown show), Jews pull the plug and we see those performative lustrations.


This isn't new. I think the difference this time is that Western elites are progressively becoming, well, less Western, and more tolerant of explicit ethnic casteism, especially when powered by genuine differences in capability: for a good illustration, see @BurdensomeCount here. Due to all people nominally having the same rights and obligations, there is no notion of noblesse oblige either, the useful bits of Western egalitarianism being combined with useful bits of Eastern might-makes-right logic.


I think in my lifetime, even with moderately pessimistic estimates (i.e. the next 15 years) I'll see the flip-flop on this topic, a sharp transition to normalization of the belief that Jews, as a politically represented ethnic fraction, are just inherently better and have more rights than Gentiles. Those demands of admitting the advantage, with the promise of recognizing it as valid, are not as clever as people like Roko may imagine.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of October 17, 2022
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Real shit has already started. I find the notion that this is the local peak and we'll have some respite unreasonably optimistic. There is, in principle, no reason for the war to not escalate into seven-figure casualties range, global economic issues not to deepen into a new Great Depression (related, h/t @sciuru), the war over Taiwan and subsequent Chinese and Russian collapses not to begin in, like, Q2 2023, then we get first serious AI incidents and global censorship/compute regulation regime, nuclear exchange by 2024, famines by 2025, supervirus plague (many variants currently in development) and what have you – up to and including NGO/Messiah/Basilisk coming. Garbage time is running out, like Nick Land warned us but we didn't listen. «Nothing ever happens» is sooo 2015.


Now as for your analysis, China has its own set of insurmountable structural problems, self-inflicted but at the same time exploited by the US: food dependence (yes, they won't starve outright the moment Malacca is blockaded, but no, they are actually not food-secure, they need to import that livestock feed, fertilizers and everything else and will not be able to pivot to rationing in emergency), chip/tech dependence that'll very painfully restrict their long-term ability to attack Taiwan with its accelerating militarization, collapsing real estate bubble, terrible ecology and soil health, brain drain, spiking dependency ratio plus failing soon at the automation cope (because, again, no chips), being boxed in by American allies, and plain degenerating governance that has unironically fallen in some respects to the lows of Mao era (and none of those problems will be solved by the planned assault on Taiwan). Iran suffers from similar woes (oh look) – and so does every other anti-America country.


There really is no trade-off between helping Ukraine crush Russian imperial ambitions and choking China (or defending Taiwan, or encouraging a revolution in Tehran), and expanding influence in the EU; those efforts load, and load only modestly, completely different non-interchangeable sectors of American economy and state capacity, and accordingly there is no advantage to China from Russia getting into this mess in the form of American weakening. Other modes are also dubious. Resource colony? No, there's no significant advantage here aside from the ability to demand discounts; Russia is already near-maximally dependent on China, and is unable to deliver as much as they need and more than is already delivered. We still don't have a reliable transport route, the «silk road» goes through Kazakhstan which is rapidly losing respect for Russia and drifting out of its sphere of influence; pipelines are fragile, as we've learned recently; construction of new connections has been criminally slow etc. In non-essential trade like fish and other foodstuff, China has been sabotaging trade on the pretext of COVID.  Of course Russia has primed the world for blanket sanctions against aggressors. Plus a lot of previous gen Chinese military technology is derived from Russian/Soviet models, so now the free world is getting free training in destroying it. In general, getting your ally diminished is not any sort of 4D strategy (though I would't put it past them to grossly miscalculate). The list of demerits goes on.


But none of this matters in the grand scheme of things. What matters is that Russia and China are in terminal decline because they cannot retain talented people, and the point of no return has been passed some substantial time ago. I am always appalled by economic/political analysis which ignores this and focuses on some nonsense like GDP growth or even trade surplus. Who cares? If you don't have talent you cannot compete; worse yet, you have to allow talentless people to climb hierarchies of competence and power (if only to maintain short-term order and production pace), and they reinforce the culture of underhanded competition that closes off the hierarchy to remaining talent, which accelerates its flight or just rots on the bottom of the society; in the end you have a police state with serfs, and that's less than nothing in our era. Both countries are like men with fatal illness (or gradual blood loss); at times they grasp for panaceas, at times they feel mad rage, and at times they feel better and get complacent, but it already does not matter because the bottom line has been written long ago.




An appropriate Galkovsky quote from 1989:




Leontief said:






«No state system, as history shows, has lived more than 1,200 years: many states have lived much less».






Now there is a shift, a formation of new nations. Modern France or England are already France and England only in the geographical sense. The brain is American; the body is gradually being mullattized (mixed marriages, mass immigration of Blacks and Arabs). As a result, new ethnicities are gradually emerging, with a new history, a new religion. Already this France resembles France of the 18th century only as much as the «Holy Roman Empire of the German nation» resembled the original Roman Empire.






And it is very naive to resent this. Leontief observed, correctly again:






«There are people who are very humane, but there are no humane states ... Frankly they too are organisms, but of a different class; they are essentially IDEAS reified into a known social order. IDEAS have no humane heart. Ideas are inexorable and cruel, for they are nothing other than the clearly or vaguely understood laws of nature and history».






It is madness to lament the mortality of men. People are mortal. And this is terrible. But it is a law, an idea. One can feel its cruelty and immorality. But to «denounce» Death... She won't argue with you. You can curse her for decades, but you won't get an answer. Just gradually your sight and hearing will begin to weaken, your teeth and hair will fall out, your skin will become wrinkled and flabby... Then as if the glass shard cuts into your heart and that's it...






That's why anti-Americanism is so crude, so unintelligent. America is first of all a certain idea, and an idea cannot be destroyed. Americans themselves follow it involuntarily, of course. To think that this or that state is perishing «because of the Americans» is as ridiculous as to think that a person is dying of a heart attack. «What do people die of? – Illness». – No, people die of Death.






True to form, he wrote «Jews» and «Anti-Semitism» instead of «Americans» etc. in the original. But this replacement probably only makes things better, and does not change the point.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of December 4, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Is this how people see my more cryptic writing? Because it looks like a load of asinine and extreme logorrhea that at most can poison the theoretically fruitful topic.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 6, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


How much energy do you want to invest in trying not to give money to your political enemies?




Money is investment; attention is energy. Framing avoidance of an entirely opt-in loss of resources (and indeed, their transfer to your enemies) as an expenditure unto itself is nonsensical and confused.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Israel-Gaza Megathread #1
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


I do not admit that a wrong has been done to these people by the fact that a stronger race, a higher grade race, or, at any rate, a more worldly-wise race, to put it that way, has come in and taken their place. I do not admit it.




This is, of course, a justification that one day may be used against peoples less backward than Palestinians. «You are animals in comparison, so we do not admit any wrong in dispossessing you».


It must be nice to belong to the highest average IQ population on the planet. Whatever ideology wins, your side comes out on top.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of January 9, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Isn't the "Global South" project a rebranding of Third Worldism, which had obvious ties to the Communist International and Maoist Movement?


Anyway. The developed nations have had a couple of centuries of capitalism. As a result, they have become forever-rich, irrevocably prosperous; they can even drop capitalism if they feel that way, the accumulated resource and technological base allows for implementing planned economy in all but name ("stakeholder capitalism" and "advance market commitments" and "carbon credits" it's called now). As is the established practice, they kneecap other nations with the extremist vomit of their intellectuals, inciting premature and unsustainable transitions with unreasonable theories and promises of fixing consequences of the previous step. Before, it was mainly Communism, where the free lunch of a new social order was dangled in front of backwards peoples; then it was Neoliberalism, when they were allowed to poison their ecosystems, capture lowest-margin markets like raw materials and textiles, and inflate the valuation of a bunch of oligarchs with poor taste. Now it's the ecological and social-progressive stuff – the worst offer of all, for it's all stick and no carrot. That is how the gap is maintained; and to narrow that gap, to gain the ability to meaningfully resist Western goading and stand as its equal, a common identity and antagonistic posture are needed.


Or so the thinking goes, I guess. Realistically, integrating with the West is the best they could do.