FtttG
User ID: 1175
FtttG
1mo ago
FtttG
1mo ago
The anime image is stupid annoying, the video is "why are these brats running around with knives and hatchets in public? they need discipline, have they no parents rearing them?"
It sounds like you had a stronger emotional reaction to the video than to the AI-generated image.
FtttG
1mo ago
I suppose not. In the link under "sorry my finger slipped", Scott explains the chain of reasoning better than I can.
FtttG
1mo ago
I can't remember the payoff matrix for the iterated prisoner's dilemma, so it's possible.
In On Writing, Stephen King outlined his writing process in broad strokes:
- Get the first draft down on paper as quickly as possible while the idea is fresh in your mind, aiming for 2,000 words a day.
- Leave it for six weeks.
- Read over your first draft, ideally in one sitting.
- Revise the first draft into a second draft.
- Allow one or more people you trust to read the second draft.
- Using their feedback, revise the second draft into a "polish" (or third draft, depending on how you look at it).
My girlfriend finished reading the second draft of my NaNoWriMo project, and rated it somewhere between a 6.5 or 7 out of 10. She confirmed that it was never boring or cringe, often very entertaining to read and emotionally affecting in places. She had two major criticisms which I'm taking seriously, and a couple of smaller criticisms and suggestions. Work now continues on the "polish", or third draft.
FtttG
1mo ago
I can't comment on the specific tactical wisdom of Trump buying stakes in private enterprises. I'm not even persuaded that his motivation for doing so was anything as simple as "revenge" or "retaliation".
FtttG
1mo ago
It's a known issue of pretty much any system that those who seek power are disproportionately those who wish to use it for their own personal gain.
More than that - it's a known issue of every system that agents who are optimising for seeking, maintaining and consolidating power within that system will outcompete agents who are optimising for anything else.
FtttG
1mo ago
“When they go low we go high” was the motto for quite a while.
I would love to hear some specific examples of occasions on which Democrats went high while the Republicans were going low during the Obama administration.
FtttG
1mo ago
Note that tit-for-tat recommends cooperating until you are defected against. If there's no first defecter, cooperate-bot and tit-for-tat produce identical behaviour.
FtttG
1mo ago
When he's not being a thin-skinned emotionally incontinent manchild, Freddie deBoer can be remarkably perceptive:
Do you want to know what ideology is? What we mean when we say “ideology at its purest”? It’s not a collection of policy positions. It’s not a political party you vote for. It’s not even your conscious beliefs about right or wrong, your philosophy about how humans should act individually and collectively and the relationship between those acts and the public and private good. No, ideology refers to those beliefs you do not examine because you do not see them as beliefs at all. Ideology isn’t a matter of ingesting arguments about better or worse, right and wrong, and evaluating them to determine your own beliefs. Ideology is fundamentally the unexamined framework of the system through which you perform such an evaluation, the part you can’t and don’t see; it’s the assumptions that you cannot understand as assumptions.
FtttG
1mo ago
For clarity, when I said "no argument here", I meant that I wasn't disputing that many MAGA types are calling for their opponents' heads. My point is that I don't think this observation in and of itself disproves that MAGA types are making the game-theoretic-optimal choice at this point in the decision tree.
To steelman the political revenge framework, consider it from a game-theoretic perspective. Alice and Bob are playing iterated prisoner's dilemma and raking in money by cooperating with each other. One turn, Alice hits the defect button and makes more money than Bob. Bob says "what the hell" and Alice says "sorry, my finger slipped". Even if she's (probably) lying, Alice likely isn't stupid enough to pull the same trick on the next turn, so in the short-term, Bob's best bet is to hit cooperate on the next turn too. But if he does this, Alice will realise that she can occasionally hit the defect button and face no repercussions for it. So in the long term, it might make more sense for Bob to hit the defect button in the next turn (even if Alice pre-commits to doing so as well) in order to send a credible signal that defection will be punished: if he doesn't, he's incentivising Alice to repeatedly defect in future. Thus, the tit-for-tat strategy which (as I understand it) outperforms all others in iterated prisoner's dilemma.
A member of the Red Tribe may not think it's in the best interests of the country if Blue Tribers get fired from their jobs for opinions they expressed privately, a fate which befell many Red Tribers (or even insufficiently ideologically pure Blue Tribers) between 2009-16. But they may also be aware that, if the Blue Tribe faces no repercussions for the cancellation campaigns they wrought in the period, then they're bound to give it another try as soon as the boot is back on the other foot (as it inevitably will be sooner or later). From a game-theoretic perspective, the best solution might well be sending a credible message that "if you do this to us, we WILL do it back to you, so don't do it to us in the first place and we'll all get along just fine".
The obvious rebuttal is that there's a missing mood and the Red Tribe aren't dispassionately weighing up their options and reluctantly opting for tit-for-tat as the best of a bad bunch: they're baying for blood. No argument here: lots of MAGA types really are calling for their opponents' heads. But I refer you to The Whole City is Centre. Evolution gave us a set of instincts which approximate the game-theoretic-optimal choice that a learning algorithm would naturally arrive at by trial and error. The fact that two people learned how to play iterated prisoner's dilemma using different algorithms doesn't necessarily mean there's any difference in the course of action they would opt for at any point in the decision tree.
My point is just that the only difference between you and the pro-punishment faction is that you are following an explicitly-calculated version of the principled consequentialist defense of punishment, and they are following a heuristic approximating the principled consequentialist defense of punishment, and their heuristic might actually be more accurate than your explicit calculation.
When Alice hits defect and Bob hits defect in retaliation, his blood is pumping and his face is bright red. If Alice was playing against ChatGPT and hit defect, ChatGPT would weigh up its options and calmly, dispassionately hit defect in retaliation. But both Bob and ChatGPT hit defect in retaliation.
For a lot of political principles, you'll have a coalition made up of people who sincerely endorse that principle, and people who contingently endorse it so long as it's convenient for them and will abandon it at the drop of a hat when it no longer is. Annoyingly, the members of the latter group often masquerade as members of the former and even do such a good job that members of the former group are taken in by them.
I'm a principled free speech absolutist, as a consequence of which I sincerely believe that Mahmoud Khalil should be able to disseminate Hamas propaganda on college campuses without the federal government weighing down on him (or Kneecap waving Hezbollah flags, for that matter). During the period 2009-16 (and to a lesser extent 2021-24) I was under no illusions about the conservatives railing against "cancel culture": I knew full well that a significant proportion (perhaps even an absolute majority) had no interest in free speech as a general principle and just wanted to be the ones doing the cancelling. I'm old enough to remember when the boot was on the other foot and the Red Tribe held enough institutional power that the Dixie Chicks could face lost earnings owing to their criticisms of George Bush. It's a lonely life being a principled supporter of free speech: there aren't enough of us to be a real political movement on our own, so until a political leader comes along who shares our values, we're forced into alliances of convenience with whichever group isn't currently holding the whip: Democrats when Trump is in the White House, Republicans when Newsom is; Tories when Labour are in power, Labour when the Tories are. It's all the harder to be a free speech absolutist when prominent organisations which used to share our values (e.g. the ACLU) faced a choice between sticking to their guns and going under, or staying alive by skin-suiting themselves, and opted for the latter.
(I will cop to a bit of Schadenfreude about how short-sighted many of the arguments progressives were making in defense of censorship between 2009-16 were. I routinely pointed out that the "it's a private company, they can do what they want" argument was bound to come back to bite them in the ass sooner or later - this was several years before Musk's Twitter buyout. A lot of self-identified Marxists really do not seem to grasp the concept of the veil of ignorance.)
I understand a few people on this site really abhorred RF Kuang's 2023 novel Yellowface. Freddie deBoer has a tremendously bitchy article today taking Kuang to task for her perceived false modesty in her New Yorker profile, which doubles as a very harsh review of Yellowface itself. It's transparently written from a place of envy and spite, deBoer barely pretending to mask how much he covets Kuang her literary success in comparison to his own meagre book sales, but entertaining for all that, and I'm sure that any of you who disliked Yellowface will find much to agree with in his critique.
(Without having read Yellowface I can't comment on its literary merits or lack thereof — but its author is pretty cute and I would.)
FtttG
1mo ago
Usually goes in small-scale, although it's arguably a better fit for this thread.
FtttG
1mo ago
Hardspace Shipbreaker. Attempting to dissemble a ship as neatly and efficiently as possible with a minimum of waste was enormously absorbing, appealing to the same part of my brain that can't relax until everything in my apartment is in its right place.
On Halloween I was coming home from the pub at maybe 10 or 11 pm when I happened on a girl who'd passed out on the street after having too much to drink. I immediately realised she needed to get to a hospital to have her stomach pumped, so I called an ambulance and put her on her side in case she was sick. Her two friends called me a pervert and accused me of groping her, then left, abandoning her to her fate. Because of the occasion, I had to wait somewhere in the region of three hours for an ambulance to arrive. At least some other passers-by stopped to help, including two nurses in training. A day or two later the girl texted me to thank me and said she was cutting ties with the two friends who'd abandoned her.
In July I went into my local cornershop, in which a customer was accusing the staff of short-changing him (I assume he was mistaken). He attempted to climb over the counter to assault them, whereupon I stepped in to put him in a half-nelson and drag him out of the shop. He feebly attempted to attack me before being dissuaded by his (I assume extremely embarrassed) girlfriend and slouching off in defeat. The staff were very grateful and made a point to thank me when I came into the shop over the following few days. Another patron came up to me immediately afterwards and quipped that I was in the wrong line of work and ought to become a bouncer.
A few weeks ago, my parents were flying back from Australia, and I offered to drive them home from the airport as I knew they'd be jet-lagged. When we got to the car, my mother, God love her, offered to drive. I very gently pointed out that the sole reason I was there was to save her the trouble of having to drive.
FtttG
1mo ago
Jussay Smol-yay is back in the news this week, with the release of a new documentary The Truth About Jussie Smollett?, which purports to tell an alternative perspective on Smollett's claims to have been the victim of a racially motivated (and homophobic) hate crime on the streets of Chicago, for which he was indicted and convicted for filing a false police report. I think the question mark in the title tells you everything you need to know about the director's confidence in his narrative. Even film critics at progressive media outlets are giving it short shrift.
FtttG
1mo ago
Less than a hundred pages from the end of Speaker for the Dead. Still can't really say I'm loving it, and certainly I'm not enjoying it half as much as I did its predecessor.
I have a copy of The Children of Men which I've never read, but I've seen the film adaptation several times and (one major plot hole aside) loved it. Well worth checking out. I believe the author gave it her seal of approval.
I think it's fair to say that @netstack was referring to "killing some percentage of the population that resides within one's own country". Even if one accepts your claim that the Palestinians in Palestine are being "genocided", they are neither American citizens nor resident within the US.
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