FtttG
User ID: 1175
FtttG
3d ago
Well, the reason for why "not zero" is due to inescapable facts about the human condition, so describing this situation as "optimal" seems entirely apt to me.
FtttG
3d ago
I disagree. I think the book presents a convincing case that, impossible utopias excepted, a world with no fraud would be worse than a world with some amount of fraud. Some amount of fraud is the price you pay for living in a high-trust society (and all the economic and social benefits that entails); a few iatrogenic deaths is the price you pay for a national healthcare system; a few murders is the price you pay for living in a free society etc.
The ideal or perfect amount of [bad thing] is zero. But we don't live in a perfect world, and it's pointless wasting our time on pie-in-the-sky fantasies of what it would be like if we did. As long as there is division of labour in a scarcity economy, people will need to trust each other to get anything done, and where there is trust there are opportunities for fraud.
FtttG
4d ago
In May, he hung up a poster advertising World Potato Day, saying that it fell on Thursday, May 30th. I very politely pointed out to him that May 30th falls on a Friday this year. I was legitimately annoyed about this - I'm not saying you have one job, but this responsibility of yours is a profoundly easy one, and you still managed to fuck it up?
FtttG
4d ago
What @Rov_Scam said, but with one pointer: as noted by someone else offering similar advice back when we were on Reddit, it's important to learn the dating app "meta" in the city in which you reside. In some cities Tinder is the "hookup" app and Hinge is the "serious relationship" app; in other cities, Tinder is the hookup and serious relationship app, and Hinge is unheard of. On a first pass my assumption is that Tinder is the hookup app and Hinge and Bumble are the serious relationship apps, but this may vary a lot from place to place. I met my girlfriend via Tinder, and I know at least three married couples who met via Tinder.
FtttG
4d ago
It's a lot of fun to read and go "wow that isn't a war crime
Can you give some examples of things which were described as war crimes but which actually weren't?
FtttG
4d ago
My mum was reading that a few months ago, and I teased her that she was reading a book by an admitted climate-change denier.
FtttG
4d ago
The Secret of our Success by Joseph Henrich. Just as fascinating as Scott's review of it made it sound: I'm less than halfway through it and I already feel like I've learned so much. I've quoted so many interesting anecdotes from it to my girlfriend that she wants to read it as soon as I'm finished.
FtttG
4d ago
Every month in our office canteen, a member of the HR team hangs up posters on the noticeboard of notable days or commemorations which fall within that calendar month. For July, these included World Friendship Day (July 30th), Nelson Mandela's birthday (July 18th) and World Chocolate Day (today). There's also International Non-Binary People's Day, which it will not surprise you to learn made me roll my eyes (the aforementioned member of the HR team had only just taken down the innumerable pride flags festooning the office for the duration of June, but apparently we need an extra day outside of that just for the they/thems). But what interested me was that International Non-Binary People's Day falls on July 14th, the same day as Bastille Day. There's an implicit hierarchy here, wherein the HR department are tacitly insinuating that non-binary people deserve international commemoration in a way that French people don't.
FtttG
7d ago
100%, Cypher is a detransitioner and also depicted as a cowardly traitor: not a coincidence.
FtttG
7d ago
The Seinfeld is Unfunny effect.
FtttG
7d ago
the concept of "the world is revealed to be an illusion" has been done better
At the risk of spoiling the works in question for myself, which works are you thinking of?
FtttG
7d ago
I once heard that so many people were requesting to have their ashes scattered at Old Trafford that Manchester United actually bought a dedicated ashes-scattering plot for their fans.
FtttG
7d ago
Well, he specifically talks about the industrial revolution being a disaster for the human race. It's a few years since I read it, but my vague recollection is that he thought that the pre-industrial tech level was not so advanced as to be incompatible with authentic psychological flourishing. But I admit I could be mistaken.
I read that their original plan was for Switch to be played by a male actor inside the Matrix, and by a female actor in the real world (or maybe vice versa). They wisely decided against it because they reckoned audiences would find it too confusing, but the fact that that was the original plan makes their intentions all the more explicit.
Consider also the scene in which Agent Smith holds Neo down on the train tracks addressing him as Mr. Anderson (i.e. deadnaming him), but Neo insists that his name is Neo and refuses to let himself be killed by the oncoming subway. Now consider also that, at some point prior to filming, Lana Wachowski was feeling such intense despair brought on by their gender dysphoria that they considered throwing themselves in front of a train. With all the high concepts flying around, it's easy to forget what an intensely personal film The Matrix is for its creators. It was not some commercial film they did for a paycheque: for better and worse, they put every ounce of themselves into this thing, and its first two sequels.
FtttG
8d ago
What was the home video market like in the US?
Dunno, didn't grow up there and don't live there. Funnily enough I have a feeling that The Matrix Revolutions was the last film I bought on VHS before the transition to DVD was completed.
A lot of people have pointed to 1999 as being a high-water mark for mainstream American cinema. It's remarkable to think what a widespread influence on Western Anglo culture two concepts from movies released that year had (taking the red pill from The Matrix, "special snowflake" from Fight Club), and how durable their staying power was. A quarter-century after the film's release, you can use the phrase "taking the red pill" in conversation with a group of Anglophones of varying socioeconomic backgrounds and income levels, and reasonably assume that they'll understand the metaphor and that it won't seem dated or clichéd, even if they haven't seen the movie from which it originated. ("Snowflake" will be understood by most audiences, but won't have the desired effect, after years of conservative commentators beating it like a dead horse.) In this regard (that even most people who haven't seen the movie have a passing familiarity with at least one of its key images/concepts), The Matrix is right up there with 1984 in terms of its cultural penetration. The Matrix was a true four-quadrant movie, equally appealing to fans of action movies, sci-fi nerds, philosophy eggheads, undergraduate Buddhists, spiritualists and weeaboos. In today's era of disposable pop culture, where Marvel Studios are delighted if people are still sharing GIFs of their latest capeshit instalment so much as one year after release, that kind of durable cross-demographic cultural staying power is hard to even wrap your head around. Nothing from the current decade of cinema seems likely to equal it: offhand, the only movie from the last decade which might is Joker* (and I think that film's star has well and truly fallen after its disastrous sequel); from the decade before, The Dark Knight.
*I was tempted to say Drive, but I have to remind myself that that film only made a tiny fraction of what The Matrix did: it's universally beloved in the circles in which I move, but not necessarily beyond that.
A lot of Marxist false consciousness and its derivatives seems very reminiscent of certain ideas about the demiurge.
The Matrix is obviously a big Gnostic metaphor (the machines have pulled the wool over our eyes and trapped us inside a false reality, we must see the truth and escape into the real world; machines = Demiurge). The Wachowskis later claimed that they'd always intended the film as a metaphor for coming out as trans, which inspired a lot of eyerolls and accusations of revisionism. But I don't think that's the case at all, I really do think that's what they intended at the time of writing:
the reason this interpretation doesn't jump out at most people is because they're approaching gender ideology from the perspective of "most people are cis, but some people are trans and that's okay and they deserve respect and compassion" as opposed to the perspective of "everyone is trans, but most have been brainwashed into believing they're cis - freethinkers whose eggs have hatched see the truth". Cypher is a detransitioner and also a cowardly traitorous villain: not a coincidence.
Everything about trans activism, really, has Gnostic undertones: the very concept of a "gender identity" which is wholly distinct from one's sex is obviously sneaking dualism in by the backdoor, but the way so many trans people talk about being trapped inside these nauseating flesh prisons and their transhumanistic desire to mould, slice and sculpt their bodies to better achieve their embodiment goals carries a big whiff of it too. This is part of a broader trend since the emergence of the internet towards Gibson's "relaxed contempt for the flesh": the tendency to see your body not as "you" but as a tool or vehicle you are controlling. Sometimes this can end up in weird science-denial places: fat acceptance activists who deny that the laws of physics apply to human beings just as much as anything else, that the only thing that can cause disease is mean words and fat shaming. It almost seems to come off like a denial of the existence of an objective external world: instead, we are all just souls trapped inside flesh prisons, and the only way one soul can be harmed is if another soul inflicts harm upon it.
At the extremes, you get into whatever the Zizians were doing, with their outré decision theory ideas about doing whatever it would be optimal for every one of your paraselves to do elsewhere in the multiverse - but they're a noncentral idea of the trend I'm describing.
FtttG
8d ago
So much of modern leftism has Gnostic parallels, it's unsettling once you know what to look for.
FtttG
8d ago
Say what you will about the Amish and similar, they hang on. In 3000 AD there may not be a Silicon Valley but there will be Pennsylvania Dutch.
Per Wikipedia, even the Amish are only 300 years and change old. We're talking about Harvard, not the Catholic Church.
I understand. My point is, every generation has always had this complaint about the one following it. Everyone's parochial about the technological level with which they're familiar, and suspicious about every one following. We can even acknowledge that some of the doomsaying predictions made about this or that new technology were right on the money, and yet that the technology in question was still a boon to the human species on net.
"Now that they're written down, no one's able to recite long passages of text from memory anymore!"
"Now that we have guns, no one knows how to hunt animals with a compound bow anymore!"
"Now that we have player pianos, our vocal cords will atrophy from disuse!"
"Now that we have internal combustion engines, everyone will become fat, slovenly and sedentary!"
"Now that we have cheap and reliable medicine, there's no incentive for people to live secularly healthful lives!"
"Now that we have slide rules calculators, no one can perform complex arithmetic calculations in their head anymore!"
"Now that Word automatically spellchecks your writing, no one can spell anymore!"
"Now that Google Maps navigates for you, no one can read an OS map or perform basic orienteering anymore!"
That's not to say that I'm not at all concerned about the impact of ChatGPT on literacy and logical thought, particularly on developing brains - if I had children, I wouldn't be giving them smartphones until they were of age.
But at the same time, I don't feel like I've lost out that much because I don't know how to hunt game, or that I can travel a few hundred kilometres in three hours rather than several days, or that I've outsourced the task of navigation to Google Maps. When it comes to ChatGPT, it's important to bear in mind that this technology is very new. We may soon find that having it at our disposal affords us the ability to perform intellectual tasks we couldn't do otherwise, or frees up our time which would otherwise be wasted on time-consuming and labour-intensive tasks. Or maybe it'll turn all our brains to mush. At this point I think it's too soon to say, and I'm not yet at the point of wanting to wage Butlerian jihad.
And to return to my previous point: the advent of weaponry did result in us becoming physically weaker than chimpanzees. But I kind of - don't care? Doesn't seem like that big a deal in the scheme of things.
I think that level of imprecision is pretty darn normal when describing preferences.
Is it, though?
- Vegetarian: a person who does not eat meat, including fish and seafood.
- Vegan: a person who does not consume animal products.
- Pescatarian: a person who doesn't eat meat, but does eat fish and seafood.
All of these concepts are simple enough that a child can understand them. They get misused by people for stolen valour reasons, but that's not to say the concepts themselves are imprecise.
I don't think it's impossible, but the people who object to the process remind me of King Canute. Plant your stick in the ground and say you'll have no part in it if you must: the great tide of technological progress will sweep on just fine without you.
Perhaps in the far future there will be people who have been dependent on external software peripherals for so long (generations of them, in fact) that their native pain receptors have atrophied to the point of disuse, like the appendix. Maybe we'll find that the concept of "pain as a warning to avoid injury and death" has been wholly consigned to the dustheap of history. Would that be bad? Sure. But in a list of things that make me unnerved when thinking about fates that might befall humanity in the distant future, it wouldn't crack the top ten, probably not even the top fifty. I'm far more worried about e.g. humanity signing over our ability to feel anything for the sake of economic progress than merely our ability to feel pain, especially when the threats that pain evolved to protect us against (predators, fire, poisonous food etc.) are becoming increasingly irrelevant for humanity in general and for Westerners in particular.
No, and the book quite lucidly explains why this counterintuitive assertion is actually true. Fraud is only possible in a society in which most people are assumed to be trustworthy. Montreal was for years known as the scam capital of the world, specifically because the number of trusting investors eager to invest in promising new startups made it catnip for scam artists. By contrast, in a society where nobody trusts anyone else, people are famously unwilling to lend out their money, which results in low rates of fraud but also sluggish economic development.
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