FtttG
User ID: 1175
FtttG
27d ago
I guess this is that "postmodern religion" thing I've heard so much about. "Religion is a pack of lies - believe it anyway"?
FtttG
27d ago
I was raised Catholic, I've read significant chunks of the Bible (probably significantly more than most self-identified Christians I've known personally), I've studied the arguments for and against the existence of a personal God for years at a university level. To reiterate - I think I know the worldview well enough to be able to denounce it from a place of knowledge. Your defense of your worldview, frankly, has not persuaded me that there are any massive gaps in my knowledge.
FtttG
27d ago
But what advantage does this worldview have over a secular one? You're just adding in extra epicycles that have zero impact on the bottom line.
Secularists: "Your child died of cancer because the universe is random and indifferent to our suffering."
Religionists: "Your child died of cancer because there are demons out there trying to fuck shit up for their own amusement. There is a God who cares very deeply about your child's welfare, but even though he definitely exists, is benevolent and is powerful enough that 'omnipotent' might be a reasonable characterisation - he nevertheless allowed the demons to cause your child to develop terminal cancer, or was unable to prevent them from doing so. I appreciate that, in practical terms, this looks indistinguishable from a universe which is cold, uncaring and absent of God."
I really, really do not understand why "your child died of cancer because there are demons out there who want to hurt you for no reason" is meant to be comforting (in the "everything happens for a reason" sense), but "your child died of cancer because the universe is cold and indifferent and sometimes bad things happen to innocent people for literally no reason" isn't. The former just sounds like a poetic framing of the latter.
There seems an obvious selection effect. The only people who need to find a way to rationalise away immeasurable (and random) suffering are people who have undergone said suffering - if they didn't rationalise it away, they'd promptly sink into despair. People who haven't underwent immeasurable suffering look at the knots the former group are tying themselves in to persuade themselves that the completely random suffering they underwent is actually meaningful and significant, and not unreasonably conclude that this is all an elaborate cope. Which is not to say they themselves wouldn't be tying themselves in knots if they underwent a horrifically traumatic experience - there but for the grace of God go I, so to speak.
Maybe it's true that there are no atheists in foxholes, but that doesn't actually tell us anything about whether the atheists are right or wrong. If you only find yourself believing in God when you're in a life-or-death scenario, to me that actually sounds like strong evidence against the existence of God, rather than in favour of it.
Some say it's because the devil is still at work in the world with his demons, implying God isn't fully omnipotent as we might understand it.
Even this interpretation implies that bad things don't happen for "a reason" in a cosmic sense, but just because demons want to fuck shit up out of sheer bloody-mindedness.
To a widow, I can't imagine that "the reason your husband died is because demons were fucking shit up in the south Pacific for their own amusement and God was powerless too intervene" would be much warmer comfort than "the reason your husband died is because he got shot by a mugger and the EMTs didn't get there in time to save him".
FtttG
27d ago
Probably I don't understand the religious worldview terribly well, but I think I know it well enough to know it's not worth pursuing.
FtttG
28d ago
I don't think most of the people on Twitter using the strong form of this phrase would have any aversion to calling American police officers stupid, evil or both.
FtttG
28d ago
Anyone know of a good way I can consolidate all of my Steam, GOG, Epic etc. games into one database? I occasionally run into this issue of picking up a game in a Steam sale only to discover I already own it on another platform.
Daniel Dennett was part of the New Atheists, and coined the term "deepity" to puncture what he saw as the pseudo-profound bullshit being promoted by theologians or apologists for various faiths. In this, I agree with him. The idea that every event is part of some grand cosmic spiritual plan is, to my mind, one of the more transparent copes bestowed on the human race by religious/spiritual people.
FtttG
28d ago
I haven't run the numbers myself, but I would be thoroughly unsurprised to find out that the large spike in murders starting mid 2020, which is IMO at least partially attributable to "BLM," actually caused an increase in the total number of murdered black lives.
In a similar vein many films have "I don't get men, they're rapacious bastards"-style quotes by female characters who you are supposed to sympathise with, so I suppose I can say that if you contextualise those as making the films inherently anti-male, I suppose you're consistent.
That's pretty much my attitude, yeah. The key difference being that a lot of these #girlboss movies include lines like that essentially as fanservice for the audience and the creators don't really mean it (although that being said, we've been debating since last week as to whether or not the "purpose of a system is what it does", and I suppose movies are "systems", broadly defined). Whereas The Room is such a painfully honest, unvarnished expression of its creator's worldview and wish-fulfilment fantasy - it seems reasonable to conclude that the worldview the movie espouses is literally that of its creator. I'm not even sure if Wiseau has the empathy and imaginative capacity necessary to model a character with a worldview other than his own. (I feel like he'd struggle mightily with the breakfast question.)
FtttG
28d ago
the name of the original director... has never been revealed publicly, for his own protection.
What, for real? That's insane.
FtttG
28d ago
I don't think any film which portrays women behaving badly is necessarily misogynistic (e.g. Tár's protagonist is a monster, and I don't think that film is misogynistic - in fact it's the best film I've seen so far this decade).
With regards to The Room itself: Lisa is such a uniquely selfish, manipulative and conniving character with no redeeming traits to speak of, who is pointlessly cruel and vicious to everyone around her just for her own amusement. Coupled with Tommy Wiseau's self-insert character laughing uproariously when his friend tells him a story about an unfaithful woman he knew who got beaten up by her boyfriend so badly that she was hospitalised, and banger quotes like:
I just can't figure women out. Sometimes they're just too smart. Sometimes they're flat-out stupid. Other times they're just evil.
which I get the impression the audience is meant to enthusiastically agree with - yeah, I do actually think Tommy Wiseau hates women as a group, or did at the time of writing/filming.
FtttG
28d ago
Would you consider the slogan "black lives matter" (confused by your odd capitalisation) a deepity? To me it comes off more as a motte-and-bailey argument. I can't see any interpretation of the slogan "black lives matter" which is factually untrue, but which would be profound if it was true.
FtttG
28d ago
Thank you very much. I don't think your example is a deepity: it has exactly one meaning, which is true, and not vacuously so. It's a useful observation.
FtttG
28d ago
Up to 92k words on my NaNoWriMo project. Based on the average length of a finished scene/chapter, and the number of scenes/chapters I still have to finish, a first draft is projected to run to 117k words. Kill me.
Not having played any of the old Larry games when I played Magna Cum Laude, I could only view it on its own terms, and as the video game equivalent of Animal House/American Pie/every other silly teen sex comedy, I thought it was decent. The first joke in the game (wherein the big titty blonde Southern girl who wears a cowboy hat and loves country music refuses to have sex with Larry because he... isn't Jewish, and as a Khazar queen she can't sleep with a Gentile) was pretty clever and made me laugh a lot.
POSIWID, deepities and scissor statements
A response to Scott Alexander, with whom I largely agree
Last week, Scott Alexander published an article called “Come On, Obviously The Purpose Of A System Is Not What It Does” followed by “Highlights From The Comments On POSIWID” today. I recommend reading both first, but if you’d rather not I will attempt to summarise Scott’s thesis under the “POSIWID” section.
If you know what POSIWID, deepities and scissor statements mean, feel free to skip down to “POSIWID is a deepity” (spoiler alert for the meat of my argument), in which I offer my own analysis of the phrase.
POSIWID
POSIWID is an acronym standing for “The purpose of a system is what it does”, coined by the management consultant Stafford Beer. As near as I understand it, Beer was hired by companies to audit their existing business processes and suggest improvements. When he pointed out that a given business process or system was producing undesirable results, the C-suite executives would sometimes defend the process by pointing to the desirable purpose the system was intended to accomplish. Beer would retort “the purpose of a system is what it does”: in other words, regardless of what purpose the system was intended to accomplish, the executives must take ownership of what the system is actually doing and what results it is actually producing.
Scott’s recent posts concerned his disagreement with how the phrase is often used in political discussions, such as by progressives who assert that the real purpose of police services is to oppress, imprison and murder black people (and stopping crime is just an incidental positive externality); or conversely, by conservatives who assert that the real purpose of non-profits designed to combat homelessness is actually to exacerbate homelessness: if homelessness were to end, they’d be out of a job! Scott argues that this framing is needlessly hostile, cynical and paranoid; instead, it is more productive to model organisations as having goals that they are trying to accomplish in earnest, but pursuing these goals sometimes incurs undesirable but unavoidable side effects (e.g. carbon emissions, medical mistakes); or the organisation is prevented from accomplishing their goals to their full extent due to factors outside of their control (e.g. budgetary limitations, competing organisations).
Deepities
“Deepity” is a term coined by the philosopher Daniel Dennett, referring to phrases which have the unique property wherein they convey two meanings at once: one meaning is true, but trivial, while the other meaning is false, but would be profound if it was true. The dual meaning allows the deficiencies in one to be shored up by the strengths of the other (and vice versa) which makes them invaluable as rhetorical devices: when the listener notices that the former meaning is trivial, they are reassured by the fact that the latter meaning is profound, and when one notices that the latter meaning is false, one is reassured by the fact that the former meaning is true. The concept is best illustrated by examples, all of which are taken from Coleman Hughes’s excellent article on the concept:
- Everything happens for a reason: It is trivially true that “everything happens for a reason”, in the banal sense that every event has an immediate preceding cause (if I get struck by a car, the underlying cause is that I failed to look both ways before crossing the street). However, the clear implication of “everything happens for a reason” is that every event has a deeper, spiritual purpose in God/Allah/Jehovah/Xenu/the universe’s plan - which is obviously nonsense, but would be profound and insightful if it was true.
- No human being is illegal: It is trivially true that human beings cannot be “illegal”, because legality or lack thereof is a property of actions (theft, murder, fraud), not individuals. “But the second reading of this deepity asserts something extremely controversial: everyone should be able to go anywhere on Earth with no legal or procedural barriers; every border should be fully permeable; strangers should be able to occupy your property—after all, no human being is illegal, and strangers are still human beings when they’re on your property. Needless to say, even advocates of open borders would not endorse this view in full. But if the view were ethically correct, then it would have profound implications for property law, the existence of nation-states, and the very concept of personal space.”
Scissor statements
Scott Alexander wrote a wonderful short story called “Sort by Controversial”, which concerns a tech startup whose employees inadvertently develop a piece of software that generates what the team calls “scissor statements”: statements (and later, events) which are maximally controversial, in the sense that one half of a particular community would enthusiastically endorse them and the other half would vociferously deny them. “Scissor statements”, it is explained, can tear communities apart merely in the fact of being spoken or having taken place: to one half of a community they seem so obviously true/good as to be hardly even worth stating, to the other half so obviously false/wrong as to be hardly even worth rebutting.
Examples from the original story:
- A prospective conservative Supreme Court justice is accused of having raped someone in high school
- A Muslim organisation wants to construct a mosque in close proximity to the Ground Zero memorial in Manhattan
- A bakery refuses to cater for a gay wedding
- An American football player refuses to stand for the national anthem before football games, instead getting down on one knee in protest of police violence against black Americans
To the canonical examples from the short story, I might add “A black gay actor is the victim of a racist, homophobic hate crime perpetrated by two Donald Trump supporters, and is later accused of having staged the attack to further his career”.
“POSIWID” is a deepity
“The purpose of a system is what it does” seems very reminiscent of my first example of a deepity, “everything happens for a reason”. Much as every event obviously has an immediate proximate cause, it is obviously true that a system should only be meaningfully assessed on the basis of its actual outputs. If a particular business process is meant to boost profits by 10%, but consistently fails to achieve that goal, the process must be assessed first and foremost on the basis of the latter fact, not the former. All of this is straightforward and uncontroversial: indeed, true but trivial.1
But the secondary meaning imparted by the phrase implies something far more profound and controversial: that the designers of a given system are fully cognizant of all of its outputs (positive and negative); that all of said outputs were fully intended and desired by the designers; that if the designers are made aware of a negative output thereof and refuse to immediately change it, the only reasonable interpretation is that this negative output is affirmatively sought by the deisgners; and that this is equally true regardless of to what resolution the phrase is applied (whether looking at an individual business process within a company, the company itself, an entire industry, an entire country, or a multi-national economic structure). This interpretation seems to me just as obviously wrong as the secondary meaning of “everything happens for a reason”, in which there is an underlying cosmic purpose to every event, no matter how small or terrible.
Per his second article, Scott seems to recognise this:
When people insist on the confusing and inappropriately-strong version, I start to suspect that the confusingness is a feature, letting them smuggle in connotations that people would otherwise correctly challenge.
Certain people in the comments of Scott’s first article argued that the phrase was meaningful in its original context as used by Stafford Beer, but has been misused by political commentators who misunderstood it as implying its second meaning, to which Scott had a witty rejoinder:
Thanks to everyone who chimed in with criticism of my recent POSIWID post. If I understand you all correctly, you think that Stafford Beer had good intentions when he invented the phrase, and that's more important than how it gets misused in real life. Enlightening!
“POSIWID” is a scissor statement
Scott seems to have been legitimately taken aback by what a fervent response his first article inspired, with a lot of commenters enthusiastically agreeing with it and many others insisting that he’d missed the point entirely. He admits to being confused by the latter group:
Why are people defending this inane statement so hard? This reminds me of the old atheism-religion debates, where some atheist would bring up an awkwardly-phrased Bible statement, and the religious people would contort themselves to say that nooooooo, it’s totally true that the world was created in seven days, as long as you define day to mean “any time period of an indeterminate length”. But at least their motives make sense to me; lots of other things depend on whether Bible verses are true or false. POSIWID was first coined in 2001. Why should people contort themselves to defend this extremely poorly-phrased thing?
In a forum in which I saw Scott’s article being discussed2, the same pattern was visible: a significant number of people enthusiastically agreeing with him, and a second group accusing him of engaging in an elaborate trolling effort, or wasting time on a pedantic argument about semantics instead of acknowledging the penetrating insight the phrase contains. This suggests to me that “the purpose of a system is what it does” is a scissor statement: a maximally-controversial phrase which one half of a community finds so obviously true as to be hardly worth mentioning, while the other half dismisses it out of hand, and finds it baffling as to how anyone could think it was true for even a moment.
Perhaps many deepities are also scissor statements?
Deepities, as discussed above, have two meanings: one which is true but trivial, the other which is false, but which would be profound if it was true. Scissor statements, meanwhile, are maximally-controversial statements which tear communities apart because half of the community finds them so obvious as to be hardly worth mentioning, while the other half dismisses them as obviously false.
Thus in both cases we see a bifurcation in how a statement is interpreted. Perhaps this is not a coincidence?3
For some number of people looking at a Necker cube (the first figure in the illustration below), they will initially interpret the ambiguous shape according to the second figure; for others, the third figure (both of which are equally valid interpretations of the shape). With some effort, we can force ourselves to see the alternative interpretation, but whichever one first jumps out at us feels like the “correct” one. I don’t have any studies backing this up, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it turned out that the split of these two groups is roughly fifty-fifty: in other words, if the configuration of cubes was something we cared about, Necker cubes would make for a perfect scissor statement.
Illustrations in original post
Perhaps deepities work in the same way? Maybe if you looked at a group of people encountering the phrase “everything happens for a reason” for the first time, for roughly half of them, the true-but-trivial meaning would jump out at them instantly, and they would completely overlook the false-but-profound meaning; whereas for the other half, they’d immediately notice the false-but-profound meaning and overlook the true-but-trivial meaning. (Or perhaps the first group would only notice the true-but-trivial meaning, while the second group would notice the false-but-profound meaning in addition to the true-but-trivial one.)
Before long, the two groups are talking past each other: the first group cannot understand why the second group is getting so worked up about an observation which, while true, strikes them as trite and unremarkable; and the second group cannot understand why the first group is ignoring the (allegedly) penetrating insight and instead making glib dismissals like “if I get struck by a car, the underlying cause is that I failed to look both ways before crossing the street”. The first group thinks the second group are intellectual lightweights for getting so bent out of shape about such a trite observation; the second group feels condescended to by the first, and thinks the first group are overly literal-minded pedants who are missing the wood for the trees. Hence, a classic scissor statement: merely in the act of being spoken, it generates outrage and tears communities asunder.
__
1 Admittedly, we might perhaps benefit from reading the phrase backwards: perhaps at the time of its coining, the idea that a business process should be judged primarily (or solely) on the basis of its actual outputs (as opposed to its creator’s intentions for it) was a legitimately novel insight, and only seems trite and obvious to us now because we’ve fully internalised it. Hard to say.
2 I'm sure you know the forum I mean.
FtttG
29d ago
Scott's followup: Highlights From The Comments On POSIWID.
Increasingly starting to think that this phrase is both a deepity and a scissor statement.
Lists of "worst video games ever" are quite a bit different from equivalent lists of books, movies etc., because before you can even begin to analyse whether a game is good or bad from an aesthetic perspective, it has to meet a certain floor of being functional from a technical, mechanical perspective. Hence, these lists often tend to boil down to a list of games which are hideously broken from a technical perspective (Big Rigs, E.T. for the Atari 2600), as opposed to games which are "so bad it's good/horrible" in the sense of aesthetics, tone, quality of acting, poor writing etc.. Of course a game which is so badly designed as to be functionally unplayable is very embarrassing for the studio that designed it, but it doesn't induce the same sensation of discomfort and cringe that a so-bad-it's-good film does. Broken video games, to my mind, are only interesting if you're a game designer or software developer who wants to learn what not to do; to everyone else it's just "they tried to make a game which was mechanically sound, and they failed". These games aren't interesting to discuss the way bad films can be. Probably the closest analogue is in film, in which bad films are often criticised in part for being technically incompetent. But The Room didn't become a classic of the so-bad-it's-good genre because of its primitive green screen, amateurish post-production dubbing and slapdash continuity: those elements were just the icing on the cake of its nonsensical plot, illogical characters, bizarre dialogue and its creator's misogynistic, narcissistic worldview. Even a version of The Room directed by a halfway competent production team (but using the same screenplay and actors) would probably still have been an embarrassment. (And conversely, a film with a passable screenplay and decent actors, but with clumsy post-production dubbing, would never become a classic of so-bad-it's-good cinema on the level of The Room.)
With all of that preamble out of the way, I'm curious what you consider the worst video games ever from an aesthetic perspective. In particular, I'm interested in video games which are technically functional and not completely broken, but which make so many bad aesthetic choices that playing them induces a feeling of vicarious embarrassment comparable to what one might experience watching an Ed Wood or Neil Breen film.
(I'm sure someone's going to mention Deadly Premonition but I'm not sure if it really counts: looking at the cutscenes I get the distinct impression that the developers were in on the joke and deliberately aiming for a cheesy kind of B-movie humour.)
For what use?
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