EfficientSyllabus
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User ID: 827
EfficientSyllabus
1yr ago
Just because men and women play different roles, wear different clothes etc at different historical times and technological circumstances doesn't somehow negate that they are men and women. We don't need a new concept (gender) to be able to say that women had lives and jobs like this before but like that after.
Also if gender is merely the difference between the roles in different cultures or times, are transgender people adopting some roles from a different era than today? I thought they transition from male to female etc. and not from 21st century to, I don't know, 8th century.
EfficientSyllabus
1yr ago
In the real world, normal guys who study art and hope to support themselves off it are ridiculed as lazy unserious dreamers who have no willpower to study something difficult or work hard. In Hungarian they are nicknamed canteen-cloakroom degree programs, implying they don't have to go to lectures. I get the impression that it's similar in Western Europe too, not sure about the US. If a normal middle class parent hears that their kid wants to "become an artist" the reaction is "what the fuck, you want to flip burgers at McDonald's?". Art as in Michelangelo, Leonardo, etc. is in high esteem but not "art grads". It's a rockstar profession where a tiny minority gain high status with it.
EfficientSyllabus
1yr ago
I wonder if that would really suffice for them. After all, the guy may generate the image at home on his PC, then memorize it and paint it on site from memory. If this is still "A-ok", then this is a weird esthetic preference.
people with black skin seem to feel some sort of absurdist kinsmanship with other people of their skin color
Is it so? I heard that recent African immigrant communities in the US often don't feel much kinsmanship with African Americans (descendants of slaves).
Also by white/whitey they don't tend to mean Poles, but people descended from colonizer nations and empires, who are mostly Western Europeans (by ancestry).
EfficientSyllabus
1yr ago
Those sound absurd, but it's more ambiguous which style is better for things like musical instruments (learn sheet music notation or just play songs until it sounds right) or foreign languages (memorize conjugation tables or just watch Netflix in the target language with subs and start speaking on day 1).
EfficientSyllabus
1yr ago
Photoshop does not contain anything specific to mickey mouse, I have to know what he looks like if I want to create a picture of him. Meanwhile, SD does know what mickey looks like, I don't have to know. Even a blind man who has no idea what the mouse looks like can create images of him because SD contains the info of what the character looks like.
I'd agree with you if I had to type in a full, detailed description of what mickey mouse looks like, color, shape etc, and SD knew how to draw him only afterwards.
SD pretty much contains a representation of mickey mouse in the model weights. I'm not allowed to release a textured 3d mesh of mickey mouse, even though the user first has to choose a viewing angle and a light source position etc in order to render a pic of mickey from that 3d asset. Similarly here with SD we don't have a 3d mesh, but have something that can be controlled in slightly differently but is still a representation. Just because the format is neural weights instead of explicit 3d assets, the situation is very similar. Else what do you say about neural encodings of distance fields from which the surface can be recovered? How about NeRFs?
EfficientSyllabus
1yr ago
Well, it's good to bash attention-seeking but this sort of competition is constant. So what, should teens just be good boys/good girls and not compete for status and attention? But it's oneupmanship all the way. A quiet nestling won't get fed.
Teens are right to join fads, going through them creates shared experiences, the acting out of various social roles, etc. It's a form of play, even if it feels serious from the inside at the time.
The bigger question is why our broader culture is drifting in a way that the fads are becoming self serving, narcissistic, self referential, navel gazing and misanthropic.
There are many ancient myth story types, killing one's father, the father devouring the sons etc. Is there an archetypal story of the daughter refusing to give birth to the new generation just to spite the tyrannical father? Because I think that's the story our current culture is playing.
EfficientSyllabus
1yr ago
It was the same in Hungary. All the grandmas watched the Mexican and Brazilian soap operas throughout the 90s. The first classic was Escrava Isaura back in the 80s. Then in the 90s it was Esmeralda, La usurpadora, and so on. Today many watch Turkish soaps. In the 90s the series Dallas was also hugely popular. Surely my Eastern European peasant grandparents watched Dallas because they shared the culture of Texan oil magnates. And also Latin American culture, sure. Oh wait, no, it was because of skin tone (grandpa got quite tanned on the sun, working outdoors, so he surely identified with the Brazilians).
I think Americans don't quite get how absolutely normal it is in rest of the world that TV doesn't depict your own culture, cities, stories etc. People who travel to the US are often surprised that "wait, this is really like that, and it's not only the movies?", like yellow school buses, college football, high school lockers, doorknobs, whatever. It's all foreign but we are used to TV being a different world. When my grandma saw the skyscrapers in the Dallas opening sequence it was as foreign as watching some sci-fi. But she still liked the series because the human stories aren't all that different. Sure, you miss many cultural references but it's rarely crucial for the entertainment.
EfficientSyllabus
1yr ago
If an intelligent person is externally motivated to do stuff, by teachers, parents, expectation, poverty etc. they can perform well.
So basically, drive can be substituted by something else, but the cognitive power of your brain can't be replaced through external influence.
To tie it back to the original point: just because you get good grades in high school, and get good test scores, doesn't mean you'll be a good at practical programming. You can even do a full CS degree program and still not be good at programming compared to your peers who pour a lot of hours into it from this itch to create stuff.
EfficientSyllabus
1yr ago
I'd add reading other people's code. I picked up a lot of coding by osmosis as a kid just fumbling around existing codebases, just trying to get a program to do something I wanted. I literally had no idea what is a for loop or what are function calls, I just dived in and tweaked it. Of course it works better the more background knowledge you have. But the main point is to se real code, instead of the idealized stuff that a lot of courses teach, eg "design patterns" just for the sake of design pattern, unrealistic standards of code cleanness, like the very opinionated Clean Code etc. The best open source products from respected companies don't code like that, but get shit done. I'm not advocating for spaghetti code, just to get a taste for real, working codebases as opposed to toy examples with unrealistic elegance. By reading code you can pick up good or bad habits alike, but that's not a reason to avoid it.
The pope recently went to Canada to apologize to the indigenous people for the treatment of kids in residential schools. I've been meaning to ask about this but this is a good opportunity. Is there any new discovery that prompted that pope visit? Because last time I've read about this stuff I got the impression that, as you say, these graves were just detected from the surface with some radar but there were no excavations, prompting suspicion that these may not actually be mass graves. Has this changed?
As for the question. I think it depends on how seriously you take this "mission". Because you are going against the mainstream here, if you simply don't wear the shirt, people won't be able to wrap their heads around why. Like are you actually so evil that you support the murder of indigenous children? Remember, most people, including teachers, probably know much less about the details and have read up on it much less than you have. Simply rejecting the narrative and symbolism won't change any minds, it just puts you into the "bad person" category in people's minds. If you want people to understand your resistance, make sure that you explain your rationale (this will be good towards ignorant normies, but it may attract the wrath of the already invested activists). If you don't trust yourself to keep calm and explain your reasoning over and over, then it's probably better to just wear it and shut up. Or maybe wear it but explain your reservations about the whole thing at watercooler conversations etc.
EfficientSyllabus
1yr ago
seeing a 9/11 a week
This is a misleading unit of measuring death tolls. 9/11's significance was mainly not in the number of dead victims, but the symbolism and terror instilled in a nation, a felling of invincibility evaporating. Imagine the alternative history where they fly into the statue of liberty instead or the WTC but at night and only 300 people die. It would still be a pretty similarly big deal.
EfficientSyllabus
1yr ago
Sure, this is a much better argument because now you have to address the substance of who (or what, if an AI isn't a who) is allowed to utter the n-word and whether non-blacks can utter it indirectly through the operation of AI systems or whether it causes "harm" or not.
EfficientSyllabus
1yr ago
If I oppose you shooting a bunch of cannon balls at my house, I'm not canceling ballistics, I'm canceling your use of ballistics in this particular way.
"Cancelling" math would be something like what the Pythagoreans did (though cancel isn't the best verb) when trying to suppress the proof/discovery that root 2 isn't rational (please let's not get bogged down in the historicity of my characterization of this particular example, it's an analogy). To consider mathematical facts themselves as dangerous or harmful. These people didn't cancel machine learning or convergence proofs or gradient descent. They cancelled an application of machine learning. If I say that a Chinese style social credit system or all encompassing surveillance infrastructure are bad or should not be implemented, I'm not cancelling the math. Just the application area.
EfficientSyllabus
1yr ago
Maybe whites unconsciously or consciously feel more powerful and feel that they need more conscious high-brain-levels restraint on their animal instincts. A bit like how a strong large man needs to learn to control himself because he can inflict real damage, while a small woman lashing out is seen as harmless and maybe even endearing and cute/funny. Meaning, when non-whites do some in-group biased thing, whites may think it cannot have any consequence, it's just like a lion cub doing some cute roaring. But when whites get into that style of thinking it leads to very professionally and industrially-scientifically orchestrated and engineered genocide, like the Holocaust.
In other words it could be a paternalistic attitude. That a white person must know better or something, while non whites don't quite grasp it yet and anyways don't have the necessary power to do too much damage so just let them play.
EfficientSyllabus
1yr ago
"Gender roles have varied across time and culture" is the motte, "who is male or female has so far been entirely socially constructed to uphold an oppressive patriarchy, but from now on it should actually be decided by everyone themselves based on their inner feelings and this decision is unquestionable" is the bailey.
EfficientSyllabus
1yr ago
We attach social roles to many attributes of people. For example, there are social roles for old people and young people that can differ between cultures. So do we need a new word for "age" that describes the social role attached to one's age?
Similar to becoming "queer" (in genZ):
Only 53 per cent of Gen Z consider themselves exclusively straight, and 40 per cent have patterns of attraction that could be described as queer.
https://www.dazeddigital.com/life-culture/article/57149/1/its-official-gen-z-is-really-really-gay
Since being straight white cis is like being the devil in the current media environment, and bonus points are given if you aren't one, why not just identify as queer? Similarly, people don't want to be just white, that's dusty boring dinosaur boomer stuff.
And Warren wanted to be a cool fellowkid who totally keeps up with the young ones.
EfficientSyllabus
1yr ago
It took some time for me to figure out what bothers me most about this. And it's the smell of cold dispassionate bureaucracy, lawyers, signatures, stamps, database entries. I imagine it was some nurse who administered the lethal injection, passed down the bureaucratic chain of command.
Euthanasia may be sometimes the less bad option, when someone cannot live a life of dignity any more. But it's still a tragedy and the person who puts someone out of their unbearable misery should still feel conflicted. Belgians managed to make this clinical and indirect, decision by committee, hiding behind each other. Instead, the chief bioethicist should have personally injected the poison.
Somehow our modern view of life is that it's merely a vessel for positive emotions and fun. If it doesn't deliver that, then it should be tossed aside. That one's life's purpose is one's own quality of life (and that on the short term, too). That's not the only way to view it. One can also see life as duty, towards a community, towards higher purposes. In this sense, she was wrong to ask for euthanasia as she had the potential ability to do good things in the future.
That life is good is an axiom, I can't argue for it rationally. Not a particular life, but life overall. It's not a statement that everyone's life is enjoyable, it's that life is valued. Other things are downstream from that. It may even be seen as the thing that breaks the symmetry of the antonym pair of good and evil, good is the one which is life affirming, which comes from life and points to life. It's deeper than rationality or religion. It's pre-numerate, it's not about perverse extremes of shutting up and multiplying. It is to be felt and then modulated by the intellect, to see how it works out for a particular situation.
The climate alarmists seem to still have an incling towards this when Greta complains that CO2 producers will ruin the lives of our children. But sooner or later the antinatalist strand will take primacy and the misanthropy will become clearer. "Climate anxiety" is already a thing. Apparently (as mentioned in a motte post) some young adults now even skip work based on their climate anxiety episodes. How long before we hear that euthanasia is a good way to deal with one's climate anxiety? It reduces the carbon footprint after all. If you're white, you also make more space for BIPOC.
EfficientSyllabus
1yr ago
First, I agree there is some value in putting in effort into something. It demonstrates a virtue in the person, the ability to delay gratification, to work towards a purpose. The reason we like this is probably evolutionarily determined, as such people are useful allies in bad times. Admiring people for the effort they put into climbing a mountain etc. is alright, it pushes us to become better and apply effort in smaller scale things. It's a symbolic distillation of our everyday struggles and shortcomings. That's all fine.
What I don't see as virtuous though is the other half of the attitude you show, namely that you want to feel that the stuff around you was done with a lot of human effort. Essentially this is the opposite of striving for efficiency, which we have been doing as humans since time immemorial. It would take more effort to swim to the other shore, but instead we build ships. It would take more effort to walk, but at some point people decided to ride horses instead and then invented cars.
Things that are made in an inefficient way for the purpose of demonstrating extra human effort are luxuries. Probably it would feel nice to be carried around town in a litter but why do that if there are cars? Understandably, it is a way to signal status if you can get many people to do inefficient work for you. Essentially it's a way for you to show that you can boss people around, having amassed (perhaps over generations) enough effort-tokens (presumably through some efficient method, using leverage, not by the sweat of your brow) to do this. It makes one feel important. I, however, think that the enjoyment of other people's senseless labor for showing off one's own status is a vice.
We should continue to use our brainpower to achieve more with less effort. This is not an argument to be lazy, but to work smart and get more done. Putting up artificial constraints makes no sense in general. Now if the constraints allow for the exploration of something interesting, that's another things. For example it could be a way to hone one's wits, eg the limitation of size in demo scene demos etc., to see novel ideas and creative solutions. That's all fine. It's also all fine if the actual hand made product is better. Furniture made of solid wood, designed to fit your rooms is better than the cheap stuff you buy at IKEA. But the reason to want it is that it's better. Also if you want lots of stuff done for you manually, how do you justify that? What makes you think that you deserve the fruits of all that effort? And independent of the answer, can you understand that many people can't afford having so many people jump around to their whim, and for them increases in efficiency can bring more improvement in quality of life?
Heavyweight champions are certainly seen as more important and impressive than featherweight ones. The featherweight champion could any day participate in heavyweight matches but would get his ass whooped. Meanwhile the heavyweight champion is banned from featherweight matches because everyone know he'd massacre those guys.
But yes, weight classes are a good comparison to sex segregation. Another example is age segregation, eg U19, U20, U21... tournaments in football. But also there the main one is the unlimited one and few people follow the U20 World Cup.
EfficientSyllabus
1yr ago
Are you saying that the leftist educators (or the philosophers who came up with the justifications behind the techniques used in education) in western countries like the US intentionally want the kids to be dumber and learn less efficiently, in order to harm the country?
This doesn't happen in Hungary though. There are specific stigmatized grammatical quirks that are present in some dialects but they don't make understanding harder.
Imagine for example if there was a German dialect where instead of "größer als" they'd say "größer von". L And people who learned it so in their village would be ridiculed for it or assumed uneducated. "Haven't you paid attention at school? That makes no grammatical sense! It makes me cringe like hearing nails on a chalkboard!"
I know that in German there are dialects that aren't mutually intelligible with the standard, so there it can make sense to require standard knowledge for a job (not sure whether that's legal though). But in Hungarian we only have slight pronunciation differences, some regional words and some minor grammatical differences.
The question still stands: why don't inclusive German leftists fight for the proud right to speak dialect and fight against linguicism, encourage dialect use as a form of diversity etc? (maybe they do)
EfficientSyllabus
1yr ago
It depends on how deeply you both are certain and convinced and how well-founded your beliefs are. Most people only very shallowly know politics, if you prod a little you very quickly find that they don't have solid reasons for believing things, there are many contradictions and inconsistencies and questions they have not though through ever. I definitely feel so myself when reading certain people here, and then some people I know are even more so.
So explicit politics is often pretty arbitrary. It depends on one's social circles and is a bit like religion: a protestant and a catholic can be in a good marriage if their confession is not a deep and central part of their life.
Whats more important are implicit political beliefs that may actually (consciously or not) be opposite to the explicitly proclaimed beliefs. Implicit beliefs and culture, like the practical rubber-meets-road understanding of gender roles, parenthood, what a relationship is and what it's supposed to be about, whether to have kids and if yes how to raise them.
These worldview aspects are important of you are looking for the mother of your future kids. But if you're just looking for a sex partner for a few months, then who cares? Then what matters is probably mostly sexual attraction, compatibility and whether any beliefs stop either party from having sex (very conservative, religious etc).
So I think explicit political beliefs can actually falsely make it seem like two people are so different, but if they broadly actually do and want similar things in life (eg value college education, see similar things as desirable for the future like where and how to live), then it can work. In such cases the politics is just a thin aesthetic preference.
But it's not always so. You may find someone who is a progressive climate doomer who refuses to have a car, despises you if you have one, is obsessed with zero waste, is vegan and doesn't tolerate you eating meat in your shared home. Then it will be hard to live together. It all depends on how much it impacts real life everyday decisions and how much he/she believes that it's not only about her/his choices but those choices must also be enthusiastically mirrored by you,or if they are more tolerant and chill and understand that their understanding of what's moral isn't complete and 100% right in every aspect.
I'm not from Britain, but to me the intended meaning was clearly "it is now all too common that they go out armed with knives with the intent of using them on humans." Maybe in your world everything is about constant conflict and you obviously need weapons with you but for people who have lived their lives in general stability where you could mostly trust the people you meet in your town in your evening stroll, for them the idea that people are out there at night with knives intended against humans is a definite step backwards, further from ideal society. If your philosophy is "every man must fight for his foothold in this universe", I can see how the desire for knifelessness is repulsive.
Also, there's no clear boundary between knives and swords. And I for sure don't want people walking about carrying samurai swords, machetes or katanas in the streets. Some kind of blade length restriction seems good.
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