FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
No bio...
User ID: 675
They're not engaging in analysis, right.
They aren't, though. That's an observable fact to me, and I'm okay if you disagree with that, but I'd be interested in seeing what arguments you'd present to support that disagreement.
Neither John Oliver nor Jon Stewart nor Steven Crowder nor Sean Hannity are optimizing for truth. All four of these people are entertainers, and their schtick is to offer a just-so story where their tribe is obviously correct and the other tribe is some combination of stupid or evil. All of them build their argumentation around isolated demands for rigor, cherry picking, motte-and-bailey, and the rest of the dark arts. The talking points they generate are frequently absurd, and require complete ignorance of the facts of the matter to maintain any significant persuasive value. They sell low-information politics to (politically) low-information people for whom politics is essentially a spectator sport, similar to football or baseball. The version of "politics" they present has only the most minimal connection to the realities of how our system apportions and exercises power.
It is not pretension to point out that every four years, both major presidential candidates give a speech on how they're going to fix the education system, and every four years both speeches are remarkably identical both between the candidates, and between all previous candidates in living memory. Meanwhile, the educational system has been obviously broken and getting worse throughout living memory, has been repeatedly "reformed" every few years, and not only have those reforms failed, some of them have failed two or even three times, the failures being recorded, forgotten, and then recapitulated in a system without memory, accountability, or even direction. That is not a result that serious, thoughtful, dedicated people will produce. And many, perhaps even most political matters observably operate in this fashion. If the economy improves, the incumbent's supporters will say he did it, and his detractors will say it was the last guy. If the economy declines, his supporters will say it was the last guy and his detractors will say he did it, and they will do this regardless of what they previously said and regardless of the evidence. Ditto for most other areas of domestic and foreign policy. We were "winning" the war in Afghanistan for twenty years across three separate administrations, until we abruptly lost it upon the arrival of the fourth, in an event that was absolutely predictable fifteen years in advance. Pick your favorite issue of policy, and I'd wager a similar situation is what you'll see when you dig in. The captain's wheel of Democracy does not appear to be linked to the rudder of concrete policy; spin it left, spin it right, take your hands completely off, it doesn't actually matter much.
I guess if your idea of analysis is pseudo-scientific half-readings of social science papers (which isn't a real field unless the paper supports your conclusion btw)
My personal standard is admission against interest, actually. If the findings make the researchers extremely unhappy and unpopular with their peers and co-tribals, but they can't find a way around the data, the data's probably worth considering.
... inability to separate personal bias from the external world, and a strong superiority complex then it should be painfully obvious why no one wants to engage with you IRL.
I had a lot more trouble engaging with people back when I took them all seriously. Now when I get hit with a low-information call-and-response, I just give them a milktoast-moderate version of their preferred ping and it's all good. If they actually are trying to engage in analysis but lack the background, I give them a step past wherever they are, and then shrug and say "but who knows, really" to offer a non-threatening exit, that tends to work pretty well. If they're a serious person with a serious interest, it's not hard to tell and then we can have a serious conversation, but that's relatively rare.
I do not concede that everyone who considers themselves "serious about politics" is actually serious about politics. I do not require that people agree with me about politics to consider them serious. I do require that they have a decent grasp on political history, and a grasp on the relevant facts over the last several decades for the issues they claim to care about. If they "care" enough about a subject to want to talk about it, but don't care enough to actually read up on the relevant information beyond the talking points their preferred partisan pre-packaged for them, and if they are more interested in those talking points than in making actual predictions based on the available evidence, it seems to me that their actions speak for themselves. If they "care" about politics the way an NFL fan "cares" about their team, I see no reason why "caring" more than them would lead to better outcomes. And indeed, my experience is that it does not.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
2d ago
First time?
Everyone in the Culture War has this experience sooner or later. It sucks, but eventually the realization settles that this is how it is and it's not going to change, so you make your peace with it and move on with life.
For me, it helped to realize that most people who talk about politics and culture aren't actually engaging in analysis, but rather an informal group-bonding game built around call-and-response meme-trading. This doesn't make them stupid or irrational, any more than posting dogespeak memes means they don't understand proper grammar. They aren't trading John-Oliver-tier (or steven crowder tier) talking points because they're interested in pursuing objective truth, they're doing it because it generates a feeling of togetherness. Sure, it's alienating to you, because the pings they're generating are pings your brain rejects, but that's not really their fault. People are different, is all.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
10hr ago
lol, that makes a lot more sense, thanks for the explanation.
Free will is essentially a legal fiction. It is incredibly useful, but it isn’t actually true.
Every human has a lifetime of direct experience of something that appears in every observable and testable way to be free will. Complex predictions can be accurately made on the assumption of free will's existence.
Neither statement is true of Determinism, which, if it exists, can neither be observed nor tested in any way. Entire generations of scientists claimed otherwise, and their claims were dramatically falsified over the course of the last century. Belief in Determinism is axiomatic, not evidence-based.
To the extent that "true" is a meaningful term, free will is true. It is true in all the ways that gravity is true, and rejecting it involves exactly the same sorts of commitments and actions that rejecting gravity involves: namely, discarding huge portions of one's moment-to-moment experience as fundamentally unreliable, without any compensatory increase in predictive power.
Your thesis was tested in the Sexual Revolution, and it seems to me that it's more or less bankrupt at this point. The tide isn't going the other way because Lewis Enthusiasts spammed Lewis quotes. It's going the other way because the results of the Sexual Revolution are so obviously, inescapably, unendurably wretched. You can argue either "Simping Is King Shit" or "It's your turn to swipe left" as much as you like; the percentage of people who not only aren't buying it but who are viscerally appalled by the evident results continues to rise organically and exponentially over time.
Shame is an innate and necessary part of the human mind. It's a warning alarm, and it exists to warn you of the existence of a serious problem. Turning off the alarm doesn't make the problem stop existing.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
5d ago
And just like with feeling shame about a choir, the seeds of the sexual revolution lie in the fact that if you shame too much it becomes just as much of a problem as shaming too little. We historically shamed too hard and too deep and as with all oppression, a revolution will form. ...Shame too many people (whether for sexual immorality or for racism or sexism or whatever), then there is a tipping point.
It doesn't seem to me that the shaming norms immediately prior to the Sexual Revolution were particularly strict, from a historical perspective. Nor does this comport with my understanding of how revolutions generally work; they generally don't happen when conditions decline past some critical threshold, but rather when things are getting better, but people think they should be getting better faster. Is that not your understanding? In any case, it's hard to believe that 1950s America leaned harder on shame than, say, Puritan America. Why didn't Puritan America result in a Sexual Revolution, under your model?
The previous norms of sexual shaming were crushed, because they were not moderated, because so many people ended up being shamed that they were in fact able to overthrow the shame mongers.
Historically speaking, I do not see the Sexual Revolution being driven by people who had been shamed reaching a critical mass. Rather, what I observe is people who were not being shamed buying into the idea that the shame-enforcement system they were already on the right side of could be dismantled without cost or consequence, that the fences against sexual misconduct were pointless and that tearing them down would have no downsides and only benefits, because We Had Progressed. Without a broad-based commitment to the big lie of Progress and all the "little" lies that supported it, the sexual revolution would not have happened. Without Enlightenment champions like Marx and Freud selling unmoored Utopianism to an Enlightenment society desperately eager to believe them, the sexual revolution doesn't happen.
Likewise, I think this is why the Sexual Revolution and the rest of the works of the Enlightenment are not going to last much longer. The lie only works when it hasn't been tested or when the results of the test can be concealed. We've been running the test for decades now, and the systems that work to hide the results are breaking down. Once our society completes its current trajectory, the ideological precursors that created and maintained the Sexual Revolution will no longer be capable of sustaining any degree of credibility.
But what you feel shame about is culturally formed. Kids don't feel about being naked or touching themselves until they are trained to do so. Catholics don't feel shame about the things they feel shame about until they are trained into it.
Is it culturally formed, or is it culturally deformed? We agree that people can be made to feel shame about things that should not be considered shameful. The question remains whether there is a coherent cluster of behavior that is naturally shameful to humans, which can be altered through significant effort, or if it's all just a random walk. I think it's the former.
I'm sure kids aren't born being ashamed of nakedness or of touching their genitals. On the other hand, they aren't ashamed of casual cruelty either; they have to learn that other people exist and to empathize with them, but that doesn't mean that empathy itself is a cultural construction that we can take or leave as we will. I think modesty is similar: you aren't born knowing it, but you learn about it soon enough unless others expend a great deal of effort trying to hide it from you, and even then sooner or later it'll be back.
The Sexual Revolution pitch was that we could remove shame from sex completely, that everyone could have all the sex and everything would be fine. That pitch has been gradually walked back as the resulting disasters become increasingly undeniable. The relatively slow pace of that walk-back has been, in my view, only achievable through large-scale deceit and the intentional obfuscation of the horrors the Revolution's architects unleashed and refused to recognize.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
4d ago
and the state would struggle to dispute a claim by a gay couple that they fastidiously avoided that particular act
Are you familiar with the gun-law term "constructive possession"?
The "struggle" involved in proving a crime exists because the authorities in question want it to be a struggle. if they decide they don't feel like struggling any more, they can simply remove the struggle and go straight to enforcement.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
10d ago
I would take the other side of that bet. What makes it different than Oblivion's potato faces is that they already had good art, and replaced it with bad art. The difference is not subtle, so a lot of people knew in advance that the new art was bad, which would obviously undermine any plausible benefits to the change. Nor is there any serious technical challenge to hide behind; these are low-fi models and textures implementing what is probably the single best-understood and simplest-to-implement 3d art style there is. There's a DEI entity being paid by the company to propose CW changes to the game, and this matches quite well to a DEI change. Having been involved in the sausage-making for DEI-mandated changes to video game art in the past, that's what this looks like to me.
If what you say about locked accessories is true, this was probably seen as the cheapest way to double the number of custom options available to each player.
I'm sure that's roughly accurate to how they sold it to management. From experience, my guess would be that the artists got their marching-orders from management, decided it wasn't worth fighting, and did exactly what they were told with full knowledge that they were making trash, given that the alternative would involve a direct threat to their employment for a ~zero-percent chance of achieving anything. Your boss paid money for the bad advice because it's the bad advice he wanted. Having paid for the bad advice, he's not interested in you telling him that it's bad. Shut up and push the buttons, art monkey.
There's a lot of hilarious edge cases that proposal invokes
"Constructive Possession" should create lots of hilarious edge cases as well. They become less hilarious when the government simply deploys a YesChad.jpg.
To be clear, this is not an endorsement, but rather an attempt to highlight the fact that the "struggle" inherent in law enforcement is not an innate feature of law enforcement, but rather a choice the enforcers are making. The truth value of the statement "This would be impractical to enforce" often smuggles in a number of assumptions about the nature of enforcement.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
6d ago
here ya go. He just gave the cliffs notes for the shooting that started the Kenosha riot which Kyle Rittenhouse more or less ended.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
3d ago
You and Lewis are basically arguing against the weakest possible version of the anti-egalitarian position. No one thinks we should beat old men because they can't cross the street fast enough. That's just silly.
It's Chesterton, not Lewis, and the argument explicitly is not that people should beat old men because they don't cross the street fast enough. The argument addressed is:
Discipline for the whole society is surely more important than justice to an individual.
and
you must allow for a certain high spirit and haughtiness in the superior type.
and
Just as the sight of sin offends God, so does the sight of ugliness offend Apollo. The beautiful and princely must, of necessity, be impatient with the squalid and...
For this particular brand of argument, it doesn't get more sophisticated than that. There is no stronger version. That's the position, one can either accept it or reject it. @BurdensomeCount wrote quite a lengthy and well-argued post hammering on this exact thesis not too long ago. It's the point of view people argue from here when they cite Nietzche and start throughing around terms like "slave morality". It's the steeliest man of this particular viewpoint that there is.
I don't think this is surprising. A lot of Ukraine's ability to resist was predicated on US assistance, which has become increasingly rare due to resistance from House Republican leadership.
Maybe don't promise things you can't deliver? I never supported Ukraine, I have no interest in supporting Ukraine, and I'm not interested in voting for people who support Ukraine. If more people thought like me, it's entirely possible that this war would not have happened. Given that this war has happened, I'm not going to change my mind because "you broke it, you bought it". I didn't buy shit, and I think anyone who's still on-board with writing blank checks to the American foreign policy apparatus is too stupid to be allowed to vote. If the last twenty-four years of disasters wasn't enough to drive the lesson home, they're simply incapable of learning.
This is so bizarre to me. Ukrainian women are... people? They are not the property of Ukrainian men.
This would be a better argument if those Ukrainian men weren't faced with forced conscription into indefinite service in a meatgrinder war of attrition. They are also people, no? But naturally, when it's the men, it's honor and duty, and when it's the women, it's human rights and individualism. Women have, after all, always been the greatest victims of war.
I do not think "maintaining the territorial integrity of Ukraine" is an "abstract geopolitical goal of NATO."
Then I submit that you are not very good at assessing what is and is not an abstract geopolitical goal of NATO.
Do you have an experiment to determine if an individual exhibits free will as opposed to just making decisions based on its incentive landscape plus perhaps internal sources of randomness?
I don't think I do, no. All I can do is observe my own internal mental states, and compare those observations to other peoples' descriptions of their internal mental states. The result is, as I said, the appearance of free choices being directed by individual will, and that appearance is seamless. It may well be an illusion masking deterministic mechanisms, but if so, the mask is impenetrable under current conditions.
I observe myself exercising my will without apparent restraint, and making choices through the exercise of that will. Near as I can tell, this is what everyone else observes as well. All effective methods of human social organization assume that humans have free will, and then proceed with methods to either convince them to choose cooperation, or trick them into cooperation, or else nullify their choices through the exercise of power against them. No effective methods of social organization have been found that allow one to simply engineer cooperation from the uncooperative, and this despite many trillions of dollars and millions of human lifetimes spent explicitly trying to achieve that exact objective.
If humans have free will, do dogs too? LLMs? Frogs? Insects? A ball travelling through a Galton board?
The ball travelling through a Galton board certainly does not. We can predict when it will fall (when we drop it) and we can predict the statistical probabilities of its travel. We have a good understanding of the mechanics involved, and there do not appear to be any great mysteries involved.
Dogs, LLMs, Frogs and Insects, I don't know. I have no access to their internal experience. Is their behavior deterministically predictable and manipulable? If so, then clearly we have grounds to say that they're deterministic. If not, then it may be deterministic and simply too complex for us to grasp, or it may be something else.
For humans, I do have access to the internal experience, and it certainly is not deterministically predictable. I have no reason to assume that my observations, and those of all other humans, are mistaken, and they uniformly indicate free will. The direct evidence we have on the question in hand is that Free Will exists.
How is free will compatible with a physics world view?
It isn't. So either our understanding of physics is wrong, or our observation of free will is wrong. As it happens, we know for a certainty that our understanding of physics is wrong in other places, so it being wrong here too is not entirely unexpected.
It has been frequently claimed that Materialism should be the null hypothesis, and that there is no evidence against materialism. But if free will appears to exist, and free will cannot exist according to Materialist axioms, then the apparent existence of free will is evidence against Materialism in the same way that Materialism is evidence against free will. Likewise, the falsification of Determinist theories is evidence against Materialism. It is obviously not conclusive evidence, and it's still possible that further technological development will salvage Determinism at some indeterminate point in the future, or that Determinism is correct even if we can never prove it due to intractable complexity. But if one claims both that their position is evidence-based, and that contrary evidence must be discarded because it contradicts their position, they have left the bounds of rationality.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
4d ago
The drug addicts are on drugs and "have no choice". The rich guy cheating with 8 different mistresses only "feels shame" insofar as he is found out and it affects his status when they play it on the news.
I think both the addict and the rich philanderer have, through their intentional choices, crippled their capacity to feel shame. I don't think this happens automatically; people who haven't intentionally crippled their own capacity for shame continue to feel it. Those who do cripple their capacity for shame in this way have damaged an important part of their own mind, making them less sane in a meaningful sense.
That said, I agree with you personally, and I would never cheat on my wife, but I come on here to exercise the rational part of my brain, not the boyscout part.
I would argue that the boyscout part is a subset of the rational part. Shame is deeply rational. Those who have crippled their capacity for shame are less rational, not more.
Most is not warranted in this day and age, vestigial nonsense, like people who say they won't sit with their back to the door.
Some fears can be vestigial nonsense, depending on the specific environment. Fear itself remains rational, and always will so long as humans survive.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
4d ago
Shame is a low class cultural marker.
Shame is a human constant in all social classes.
If nothing is a threat to you then you have no shame.
No human has ever or will ever exist in a state where nothing is a threat to them.
The rich and famous certainly have very little of it if it exists at all, mostly just a cultural nod to the lower classes when at that level, and you only feel it in defeat.
For every shameless rich person, I can point to ten drug addicts shitting themselves on a sidewalk without apparent shame. Further, it seems to me that the absence of shame is the marker of defeat, when one is no longer even trying for goodness and virtue.
It is a fear based emotion that only has the power you give it.
This at least is true, as far as it goes. Unfortunately, fear is a necessary and entirely rational response, because there are better states and worse states, and many of the worse states are extremely wretched. Rational fear is a motive force, a protective force. Its absence is a sign of insanity.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
2d ago
So I don't exactly disagree with you, but the things that give me pause are things how people change after brain damage. So I think at the very minimum the material medium in some way constrains or shapes free will.
The brain damage examples give me pause too, but we've had two centuries since Phineas Gage, and for a good portion of the last one people were actively attempting to make progress of psychosurgery. As I argued in the threads linked above, my position is not a dogmatic one, and I'm entirely willing to admit that I'm wrong if Determinism could be demonstrated. I will even readily admit that it's entirely possible that determinism will be demonstrated within my lifetime. I'm betting it won't be, though, and I'm very certain that all attempts to demonstrate it to date have failed.
I'm also certain that people who believe in Determinism, and further believe that their belief is based entirely on direct evidence that proves Determinism, have made a serious error in their reasoning.
I might not consider hitting my wife, but jam a needle in my brain and I might choose just that. And I will probably think it is my own free choice.
It is entirely possible that this is true, but I will believe it when I see this process actually demonstrated under controlled conditions, and not before. What I notice is that a lot of people seem to easily slide from the hypothetical of a needle in the brain, to a belief that the needle in the brain is an actual, verifiable reality right now. Worse, a lot of people seem to be completely unaware of the numerous, well-funded failures to actually design needles for the brain, in a sort of crowd-based file-drawer problem. Massive, well-funded efforts to develop Determinist methods of controlling or engineering individual humans repeatedly fail, and those failures not only do not cause an update on peoples' priors, but are completely forgotten.
This seems like a pretty serious failure of rationality to me.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
3d ago
It's strange to be hated by the far-left for being rightist, and hated by the far-right for being leftist.
It's less strange if you consider that far-left and far-right are not polar opposites, but instead something approximating Stalinists and Trotskyites: members of a coherent ideological tribe, sharing basic values in common, driven to mutual hatred by surface details.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
4d ago
That escalated quickly. What's the logic here? I don't take it particularly personally, but it seems a bit out of left field.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
5d ago
Consider the time immediately before the Russian Revolution. Everyone has a bone to pick with the Tzar. Does the Tzar represent Culture or Counter-culture?
"Socially dominant but clearly on the way out" seems like a coherent social category to me.
well, between you, @AhhhTheFrench and this in-depth discussion I'm hoping to continue with @jimm, We've now covered all the possible positions on the subject of hypnosis. I'd certainly be interested to see more discussion about the facts of the matter.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
8d ago
He's one of my favorite posters of all time, but he ran out of charity and couldn't bring himself to put in the effort necessary to participate here. Neither he nor anyone else paying attention was surprised by the permaban.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
10d ago
Biden has been enlisting the Kennedy family to disavow one of their own and prop up himself as the ultimate and only possible candidate for Democrats recently, to the point where Bobby Jr.’s own brother has rejected him and has said on record that he will to the best of his ability attempt to persuade his sibling to drop out of the race.
...Why is this news?
Family ties aren't all that strong anywhere, and they certainly aren't that strong in any political dynasty anywhere on either side of the aisle. RFK Jr. is a pretty fringe dude, he has a roughly zero percent chance of actually winning the presidency, and a much higher percent chance of acting as a spoiler against the Democrats.
There is no concievable world where his own family don't prefer Biden to him.
Also, how does "black irish" apply to either biden or the kennedy family?
The term "sheep" is inescapably condescending, because it implies that a "sheep" is all someone is, and that generally is not true. A more accurate way to put it would be that with regard to some things, especially very complex things that generate a lot of epistemic learned helplessness, people can get pretty sheep-like. In any case, the people in question almost certainly are not accurately described as sharks, or any other form of predator.
The people quoting John Stewart to each other generally are not ideologues, and they certainly aren't pod people looking to point and shriek at the first identified heretic. They're doing a pedestrian social thing, and if you're at the point where it's grating, it's easy to play along more or less seamlessly, or duck out. The problem isn't that they're witch-hunting, the problem is that if you're in this situation, you probably are an ideologue of some description, and your instinct is to start an argument. They aren't looking for an argument, they're doing a pedestrian-normie-carebear thing. Just dial down the autism for two whole minutes, and everything will be fine.
(It should be obvious, but the above is self-description of past-me, so please don't think I'm saying anything about anyone in this thread that I wouldn't say about myself. I know full-well how hard it is to turn off the autism, but learning to do it is a critical social skill. Also note that the above is very explicitly about Stewart and Oliver and similar CNN-Chyron-tier normie-feed. If they're quoting Kendi or bell hooks or the SCUM manifesto, or Trotsky, etc, etc, dive dive dive. Those are the actual sharks, and they are actively dangerous to interact with.)
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