OliveTapenade
No bio...
User ID: 1729
OliveTapenade
4mo ago
It's possible he thinks that way, or even that he just thinks that owning the character and account is what matters. I suppose one could make a comparison here to his companies: he presumably thinks of himself as designing or making cars or rockets, even though almost all of that is done by lower-level employees. Likewise he may think of himself as playing PoE2 even though almost all of it is done by a lower-level contractor.
To be honest the impression I've gotten with regard to Musk and gaming is that he just doesn't understand how gaming works. That PoE2 YouTuber, as I recall, pointed out that what Musk claims to have done is mathematically impossible - he could not have reached that level in the game in the amount of time available. It's not doable. But I would not be surprised if Musk believes that sheer skill can accelerate one's progress in the game. Is it possible that he just doesn't understand how grinding works?
I suppose I think that he has very surface takes on games. I remember when he claimed that chess was too simple and Polytopia was better. Not only does that tell me that he doesn't know much about chess, it also tells me that he doesn't really know much about Polytopia, which is a quite simple 4X that can be mastered relatively quickly, and which did not hold much interest for serious 4X players. On the surface Polytopia looks more complex than chess, because it has more widgets to manipulate, but in terms of strategy it has less depth. What this tells me is that Musk probably played Polytopia for a few hours, maybe even a few dozen hours, but has never deeply familiarised himself with the genre.
I suspect that Musk finds the idea of gaming interesting, and is enchanted by the idea of being a hardcore gamer, but he is what we used to call a casual.
There's nothing wrong with being a casual. Casual gaming is a great way to spend your time. But a casual who wants to be seen as hardcore, doesn't have the skill, but does have the money... well, that's just cringeworthy.
OliveTapenade
4mo ago
I can understand that case - part of what makes Musk willing to be daring and innovative in business is also what makes him willing to do bizarre and eccentric things in other fields. Having enough ego to disregard the advice of everybody else in terms of what's possible for rockets or electric cars probably goes with having enough ego to, well, do these other absurd things. So you've got to tolerate a bit of weird gamer nonsense as the price for all these other benefits.
I suspect that overall we disagree about the net value of Musk's contributions to society, or about the desirability of things like AI girlfriends or artificial companions more generally. I'm quite pessimistic about AI in general, so I consider it preferable to maintain as large a taboo as possible against using AI for social purposes. If there is a respectability cascade that results in the public considering AI girlfriends/boyfriends to be legitimate or healthy ways to spend one's time, I would consider that a negative development. But we may have different high-level generators of disagreement on this issue.
OliveTapenade
4mo ago
The tennis example strikes me as absurd and lacking in dignity for either Ackman or the tournament, but the presence of a substantial benefit to the tournament does change the calculation a bit for me. The tournament has traded part of its credibility for a large payment. Depending on the tournament's finances, that might have been a worthwhile trade for them, but it's still undoubtedly sordid.
OliveTapenade
4mo ago
Regardless of technical chops, the real value here is of course exposure, a first decent shot at normiefying the whole edifice. Elon may be a fake gamer, the gravest insult I can levy against my fellow man, but fringe interests make for strange bedfellows, and I'm glad to see the first public attempts at rather literal waifutech make the twitterati seethe.
This may speak badly of me, but the Path of Exile 2 incident was actually a big factor in lowering my opinion of Musk. I never particularly liked him but prior to that I had tended to assume that there was a level of baseline stability there.
The PoE2 incident really undercut that for me - it was so obviously pathetic, so clearly the behaviour of a deeply insecure loser, that it was impossible to interpret any other way. It makes no sense in strategic terms, since non-gamers do not care and will not recognise anything about Musk's gamer skills, and actual gamers will instantly recognise that he's never played the game before. It is a move guaranteed to lose him status everywhere. What's more, the stakes are so incredibly low. Musk doesn't need to play PoE2 to get nerd cred. He has easier ways to get that if he wants it. And that's the only prize! Nobody else cares at all, and in fact being on top of a leaderboard for an action RPG is probably seen as vaguely pathetic or dorky by most normies.
It was a childish, ill-thought-out pretence, risks that are all downside and no upside, all for winning a prize that is of no value, and which he could more easily obtain in other ways. It is not the move of a man who has his life together. It is the move of an extremely wealthy person with the emotional maturity of a child and very little impulse control or ability to think ahead.
I have not updated in the direction of thinking that Musk is incompetent at absolutely everything. I believe that he has some skills as a manager and entrepreneur, and his commercial success suggests that there's some real ability there. I have, however, updated in the direction of thinking that even if Musk is a brilliant businessman, manager, and engineer, he is a brilliant businessman, manager, and engineer who is simultaneously a sad, pathetic little man.
I suppose I should say something about Grok.
I can't really think of much. AI waifus have been around for a bit now, so this isn't breaking any ground. What stands out to me most, I suppose, is how tasteless Musk's advertising of this feature is, but again it's not really news that Elon Musk says creepy or tasteless things, on impulse, on Twitter. I suppose my advice to him would be that if you're selling porn, or selling products morally equivalent to porn (i.e. things that most people regard as shameful or anti-social to indulge in), you need to either have some fig-leaf of pretending that you're not (e.g. CharacterAI markets itself as fun and social), or get in the ghetto. AI girlfriends are a ghetto.
OliveTapenade
4mo ago
Late to the party, but that is indeed the thing that frustrates me most. They hint, but when you ask them plain, explicit questions, their responses are usually some variant on 1) evasive non-answer, 2) accuse you of bad faith for asking the question in the first place, or 3) just vanish entirely.
I'm glad when people do give serious answers on provocative topics and I try to appreciate that, even when the answer itself is one that I find pretty unpleasant. But the ones who just refuse to actually say what they think? I think it's pretty cowardly, and probably indicative of an overall lack of intellectual or political seriousness.
OliveTapenade
4mo ago
Wait, doesn't everyone know that Who Wants To Live Forever was written specifically for Highlander? It and Princes of the Universe are movie themes.
It's like hearing that somebody thought that Flash was written independently of Flash Gordon - of course it wasn't! Queen just scored some films, for commercial reasons! The songs became popular because Queen were/are damn good musicians, and sometimes that's enough. Good art doesn't need a sob story.
OliveTapenade
4mo ago
Even in this reply you stroke your own dick by waxing poetically about how you magnanimously tolerate the “Joo-posters” (a derisive term you invented to ridicule those who don't share your pro-Israel bias)
Er, in this context I'm pretty sure that he is not talking about people who are critical of Palestine. He is likely talking about the multiple posters on the Motte who are directly and openly anti-semitic, in ways completely unrelated to the state of Israel. Out of respect for Amadan I won't bother with specific links, but I assure you, the Motte has unrepentent neo-Nazi posters.
It's not accusations of anti-semitism being used frivolously to condemn people who criticise Israeli state policy. It is, bluntly, accusations of anti-semitism being made against people who genuinely hate Jews for being Jews.
OliveTapenade
4mo ago
I don't buy your appeal to normal people here. I think that most normal people do not think that chatbots are intelligent.
Realistically, I don't think most people can explain why they're not intelligent, because most people don't have definitions of intelligence on-hand. I think for most people it's an I-know-it-when-I-see-it situation. That's why we need to philosophise a bit about it in order to produce more reasonable definitions and criteria for intelligence.
Anyway, I think that intuitions of most normal people would say that bots aren't intelligent, and if we explored that with them, and had a patient, philosophically nuanced conversation about why, we probably would find that most people intuitively think that intelligence involves things like, to quote myself, 'awareness or intentionality'.
OliveTapenade
4mo ago
When you find something via Google, do you immediately and unconditionally trust it?
Certainly not. When I research something I look at multiple different sources, make judgements about which ones I find the most trustworthy and credible, and synthesise a judgement.
If I ask an LLM about anything, I need to do the research that I would have done even if I had not asked the LLM. The LLM adds no value. It does not shorten the research process, nor improve what I find by showing me any hints about where to look.
OliveTapenade
4mo ago
I can't actually tell what you asked a bot to do. You asked a bot to 'create a feature'? What the heck is that? A feature of what? At first I assumed you meant a coding task of some kind, but then you described it as writing 'thousands of words of fiction', which sounds like something else entirely. I have no idea what you had a bot do that you thought was so impressive.
At any rate, I think I've explained myself adequately? To repeat myself:
But I think that written verbal acuity is, at best, a very restricted kind of 'intelligence'. In human beings we use it as a reasonable proxy for intelligence and make estimations based off it because, in most cases, written expression does correlate well with other measures of intelligence. But those correlations don't apply with machines, and it seems to me that a common mistake today is for people to just apply them. This is the error of the Turing test, isn't it? In humans, yes, expression seems to correlate with intelligence, at least in broad terms. But we made expression machines and because we are so used to expression meaning intelligence, personality, feeling, etc., we fantasise all those things into being, even when the only thing we have is an expression machine.
Yes, a bot can generate 'thousands of words of fiction'. But I already explained why I don't think that's equivalent to intelligence. Generating English sentences is not intelligence. It is one thing that you can do with intelligence, and in humans it correlates sufficiently well with other signs of intelligence that we often safely make assumptions based on it. But an LLM isn't a human, and its ability to generate sentences in no way implies any other ability that we commonly associate with intelligence, much less any general factor of intelligence.
OliveTapenade
4mo ago
I'm not sure how that helps, since any given LLM's output is based on traditional sources like Google or the open internet. It would be quicker and easier for me to just Google the thing directly. Why waste my time asking an LLM and then Googling the LLM's results to confirm?
OliveTapenade
4mo ago
Well, I wouldn't use intentionality for bots at all. I think intentionality presupposes consciousness, or that is to say, subjectivity or interiority. Bots have none of those things. I don't think it's possible to get from language manipulation to consciousness.
At any rate, I certainly agree that every ideological person believes untrue things about the world. I'm not sure about the qualification 'for instrumental reasons' - I suspect that's true if you define 'instrumental' broadly enough, but at that point it's becoming trivial. At any rate, if you leave off reasons, I am confident that every person full stop holds some false beliefs.
That doesn't seem like the same thing to me, though. Humans sometimes represent the world falsely to ourselves. That's not what bots do. Bots don't represent the world to themselves at all. We sometimes believe falsely; they don't believe at all. They are not the kinds of things capable of holding beliefs.
OliveTapenade
4mo ago
I think translating code is probably a sensible thing to use a bot for - though I'm not sure it's fundamentally different in kind to, say, Google Translate. I grant that the bots have impressive ability to general syntactically correct text, and I'm sure that applies to code as much as it does natural language. In fact I suspect it applies even more, since code is easier than natural language.
I am less sure about its value for looking up scientific information. It is really faster or more reliable than checking Wikipedia? I am not sure. I know that I, at least, make a habit of automatically ignoring or skipping past any AI-generated text in answer to a question, even on scientific matters, because I judge that the time I spend checking whether or not the bot is right is likely equal or greater than the amount of time I spend just looking it up for myself.
OliveTapenade
4mo ago
You said it better than I could, and with more relevant expertise.
OliveTapenade
4mo ago
My experience with AI bots has generally been that they are extremely articulate when it comes to producing correct English text, but they have no awareness or intentionality and therefore no sense of relationship to fact, and no sense of context or meaning. What they do very well is string together words in response to prompts, and despite heroic efforts to get their output to be more fact-sensitive, the fundamental issue has never really been overcome.
I call them nonsense because I think that sense requires some sort of relationship to both fact and context. To be sensible is to be aware of your surroundings. That's not the case with bots.
I would add, at least, that this:
Deepseek, however, with a bit of prompting can be completely insane yet rational and easily smarter than most people you see if you go to any place outside of a professional context.
seems to depend on definitions of rationality or intelligence that I don't think I share. I think bots are very efficient at producing English text, even quite complex text. It's trivial enough to show that a bot can produce a better written letter or better poem or what have you than the average man or woman on the street.
But I think that written verbal acuity is, at best, a very restricted kind of 'intelligence'. In human beings we use it as a reasonable proxy for intelligence and make estimations based off it because, in most cases, written expression does correlate well with other measures of intelligence. But those correlations don't apply with machines, and it seems to me that a common mistake today is for people to just apply them. This is the error of the Turing test, isn't it? In humans, yes, expression seems to correlate with intelligence, at least in broad terms. But we made expression machines and because we are so used to expression meaning intelligence, personality, feeling, etc., we fantasise all those things into being, even when the only thing we have is an expression machine.
Bots and LLMs can produce statements that look very polished, and which purport to describe the world. In many cases, those descriptions are even accurate. But they are still, it seems to me, generating nonsense.
OliveTapenade
4mo ago
I continue to be baffled that anybody takes these bots seriously, or sees Grok or xAI or their competitors as anything other than nonsense generators. A slight change to the flavour of the nonsense doesn't really change my opinion any. Perhaps it moves me in the direction of thinking that Musk is childish and temperamental, but I already thought that, so it doesn't make much difference.
OliveTapenade
4mo ago
I have at least heard the idea from Aboriginal people directly, though the way they framed it to me was in terms of having 'weak genes'. That said, I do not rate the scientific literacy of the person who told me that at all, so I have no idea if it's actually true, or just an excuse one might tell oneself on seeing one's pale skin.
OliveTapenade
4mo ago
In this case the context is also that most senators dislike that oath and took it insincerely. If you look at the recording of Thorpe swearing the oath and making a fuss, the other senators in the room were rolling their eyes. One commented, "None of us like it", and a minister afterwards called the oath "archaic and ridiculous".
Australian parliamentarians are legally required to swear an oath to the Queen (as it was at the time; it's now the King) when they take office, but it is safe to say that very few of them actually believe the oath or take it remotely seriously. This is from 2016, but over half of them support a republic (yes, this is significantly out of step with popular opinion, politicians as a class are often unrepresentative), and I think it's fair to say that on a plain reading of the oath, bearing true allegiance to his majesty and his heirs and successors would be incompatible with wanting to abolish him.
But none of them take it seriously. We are not a nation that takes oaths seriously.
(I would not single out Australia in this respect - I think the West in general has largely given up on oaths. My favourite example of this, actually, is that becoming an American citizen requires a person to explicitly renounce any other citizenship or allegiance, and yet large numbers of people become American citizens while retaining prior citizenships. Nobody cares.)
OliveTapenade
4mo ago
I think that generally holds true for older, more established churches, like Catholics and Anglicans. They tend to be asset-rich and cash-poor, all the more so because many of the most conspicuous assets have substantial maintenance costs. There's a reason why most cathedrals you visit have donation boxes for upkeep, because just having a cathedral is a major ongoing expense.
Younger or more 'low church' groups often don't have this issue. If your church is run out of a big concrete block, or even a warehouse or something, you can enjoy much lower operating costs. You may just rent the building and be quite mobile, or if you own it, it can much more easily be shared with others or rented out for an additional income stream. Traditional church buildings don't have that flexibility.
I note that Deverell's fourteen aspirations put a particular emphasis on property sales, which I take as reflecting the reality that the Anglicans are declining in numbers and are therefore regularly selling church buildings that are no longer used in sufficient numbers to justify their upkeep. The same is true of Uniting, though somewhat less so of Catholics (who have done better at buoying their numbers through migration). Probably there's opportunity there?
Property sales were, to my knowledge, required from the churches to fund compensation about the sexual abuse scandals - or at least, that's what the Anglicans and Uniting did. They just don't have the cash on hand.
Anyway, yes, in general the stereotype that the churches are rich is misleading. The churches often have a lot of valuable stuff, if only because they are very old and have accumulated property intergenerationally, but their actual budgets are much more shoestring than one would expect.
OliveTapenade
4mo ago
Tasmania is an interesting one because it's a case of an almost accidental genocide. The Palawa were quite few in number to begin with, and devastated by disease. They then also decided to set about attacking European settlers in raids, and, because colonial government was fairly weak, the settlers tended to band together and counter-raid them, and since the settlers had guns and the Palawa had sharpened sticks, the results were fairly predictable. By the time the colonial government got together enough to locate and resettle the survivors, there were only a few hundred left, and they didn't last.
Today the Palawa are a rare example of an ethnic group that exists purely as mixed-race. There are no people of pure Palawa descent left in existence - they are all people of mixed Palawa-European heritage, and almost all of them pass as white. Examples today would include Michael Mansell, whom I just mentioned, Marcus Windhager, Alison Overeem, Garry Deverell, and so on. All of them, at a glance, are obviously white or Anglo. However, it is supposed to be racist to question a person's Aboriginality, especially if their appearance makes them plainly white.
Deverell, actually, wrote a piece related to Yoorrook last year that hit many of the same notes as this year's report, albeit focused specifically on churches. The 14 aspirations he links are conspicuously unreasonable, including that every Anglican organisation in the state commit itself to employing Aboriginals as 5% or more of its workforce (bear in mind that Aboriginals are less than 1% the population of Victoria); that all properties granted to the church by the government be made freely available for Aboriginal use and that in the event of any such property being sold, Aboriginal groups with a traditional claim receive it for free; that 15% of the sale of any other church properties be given to Aboriginal people directly as reparations; and that all parishes pay 5% or more of their budgets to local Aboriginal groups. It is primarily a demand for money.
The Anglican response to this, of course, was "no".
OliveTapenade
4mo ago
The short answer is no.
There are a small handful of tribal communities that are mostly continuous with pre-colonial groups, but they are very few, remote, and largely irrelevant to this conversation. The comparison that I usually make is with the Maori, who did have a significant level of political organisation prior to European contact, and when Europeans showed up, pretty quickly recognised the value of having organised representatives for negotiation. That is not the case for Aboriginals, who are not a single unified ethnicity and never had much political organisation beyond the level of the local tribal chief.
No, because there's no umbrella Aboriginal organisation that can police that. It's not like the Maori in New Zealand, who do have their own government-like organisation that can assess who is and who is not Maori.
In theory it's the three part test (descended from Aboriginals, identifies as Aboriginal, is recognised by the Aboriginal community), but as it's hard to apply in practice, most of the time it's just self-identification. This has led to absurdities like people with only tiny amounts of Aboriginal ancestry, who look and sound exactly the same as Anglo people, identifying as a proud Aboriginal man or woman.
I raise you Michael Mansell.
OliveTapenade
4mo ago
For what it's worth, at least, Thorpe only got in because she was on a bizarre Greens senate ticket, and there is no way in hell she is getting re-elected.
I do think that after she refused to take the senatorial oath, and then, when pressed, said it in an obviously insincere way (and admitted that insincerity on the record afterwards), she should have disqualified herself from taking her seat. There is a valid procedural issue there - she is verifiably not in good faith.
OliveTapenade
4mo ago
I might suggest that one of the reasons why native activism in Australia is so maximalist and the demands so bombastic is that there are apparently no documents or conventions that spell out their obligations and the limits of their sovereignty. So native activists can insist that their due is the moon, and there's no way for this to be effectively rebutted without denying any concept of native political power altogether.
Yes, I think this part is probably correct. There is no actual framework to negotiate from, and in effect Aboriginal demands rest entirely on what they're able to guilt the greater Australian society into giving them. If I were feeling suspicious I'd suspect that recent attempts to formalise the relationship with mainstream Australia are motivated in part by the realisation that larger and larger parts of that society are now made of migrants from Asia, and migrants from Asia do not feel guilt about Aboriginals at all.
To the rest of your post, I appreciate all the detail about Native American history, but I do think that on the broader level it's true that much of Australia's most toxic progressive activism is imported from the US. It's just not directly imported from Native American activism, which we are largely ignorant of and do not care about. (Though "the Americans have treaties with Natives" was absolutely a card that gets played over here when Treaty comes up.) However, we did have, for instance, a copycat BLM movement inspired by the American one, which focus on indigenous deaths in custody.
I'm not actually sure we are seeing a rise in more traditional, or 'high' forms of Christianity. There are some links here, but as far as I'm aware Orthodoxy is not growing in America in any particularly significant way, and the supposed trend of people converting to Catholicism is mostly a few high-profile examples, rather than a larger statistical trend. If you take away migration, the Catholic Church in America looks like a mainline Protestant church, like Episcopalians. Their retention is quite dismal, and to the extent that they've managed to hide that decline and retain political or social force, it's on the back of Catholic migrants. Evangelical Christianity remains the 'stickiest' form of Christianity in the US.
Now that said, raw numbers don't tell the whole story - the church that most successfully cultivates elites is not necessarily the one that will have the most social or political influence. The most visible example of this is probably the Supreme Court. Catholics utterly dominate the Supreme Court. At the moment it's six Catholics, two Protestants, and a Jew, and notably it has zero evangelicals. Congress also has slight Catholic overrepresentation, but it's much more marginal - 28% versus 20%. At any rate, it is possible that Catholics will become the de facto representatives of Christianity in the halls of elite power in America - the mainlines are collapsing, evangelicals are too plain and uncultured to ever get in there, and Orthodox are, with apologies, a rounding error.
There is potentially a discussion to be had about how Catholics got into that position, and I'd guess it has to do with the quite large and influential Catholic education system. (I also have a pet theory that religions that place a strong emphasis on the interpretation of law are naturally going to do better in terms of producing lawyers and judges; hence Catholic and Jewish overrepresentation on the Supreme Court, and I'd hazard a guess that Muslims will do pretty well too.) But that's something of a different subject.
Anyway, predictions...
I think Catholicism will not take over America or even necessarily grow that much from its current position, but I think it will get more politically influential, as it seizes ground that used to be held by mainlines.
Mainlines will continue to collapse. Some outward adherence to mainline churches will survive in places, among politicians, but the era of mainline dominance is over. In America more broadly I don't think mainlines will all die out, but they will need to reinvent themselves; I foresee conflicts like the like in the Methodist church, between theological progressives who see the church as handmaiden to preferred cultural causes, and cranky traditionalists, which will probably end with the former withering away and fading into culture, and the latter declining in numbers and turning into a small but devout rump.
Evangelicals will not advance much in terms of political power, but they are disorganised and in constant ferment and will remain a powerful voting base for politicians canny enough to appeal to them. That said, what appeals to them is somewhat unpredictable, as they are a fickle demographic that is highly responsive to charismatic leaders. Right now they are more-or-less solidly behind Trump, but they didn't come to support him for theological or doctrinal reasons, and I think Trump's successors may not necessarily inherit evangelical support. I'm really not sure which way they will go.
Orthodox are irrelevant. Again, apologies for being so blunt, but there are just far too few of them and I don't see any signs that will change.
Mormons are one that I predict will grow and increase in power. I think they have the most gravely mistaken theology of any of these groups, but even so, they are demographically healthy, expanding, and confident. They are currently adjacent to the big evangelical coalition and can sometimes be counted with it, but not consistently, and when you look under the surface there's a lot of submerged evangelical dislike of Mormons, so that may not be stable. I think they will grow in influence unless there is some kind of concerted effort to declare Mormons 'uncool', the same way that evangelicals are uncool, and keep them out of power that way.
As for other religions...
There aren't enough Muslims to be a very significant electoral demographic nationally, but there are towns and potentially states where the Muslim vote matters, so I expect to see local gains in influence for them without making a huge impact nationally. The big question I have with Muslims is whether American Muslims as a community hold on to traditional doctrines or become secularised; there are plenty of people for whom 'Muslim' is an ethnocultural identity but doesn't make moral demands or shape their moral or political thought. (Think e.g. Zohran Mamdani.) I expect a significant number to hold on and continue to practice. As mentioned above, I expect Muslims to do reasonably well in terms of elite roles, especially those to do with law.
Jews are, well, an invitation for certain people to come out of the woodwork and declare them the secret puppet masters of the US. I don't know the future of Jews in America. Until recently I would have said that America has been a very good home for Jews, and I expect American Jews to continue to prosper, but we have yet to see how much Israel/Gaza causes a realignment. This is definitely one to keep an eye on.
Hindus mostly can't be disentangled from Indian ethnic politics. (Sorry, ISKCON, you tried but there aren't enough of you.) I'll skip over that because it's much more to do with ethnicity and multiculturalism than it is about Hinduism as religious belief. Sikhs are in roughly the same camp.
Buddhists are a group that I expect to continue to grow, partly from immigration and partly from conversions, but to have practically zero political impact. Buddhist organisations, at least in the US, rarely mobilise for politics, and most converts practice on their own or in small groups without necessarily applying Buddhism to politics more widely. There aren't many of them anyway; Buddhists as a constituency is not worth pandering to. Maybe in some local contexts where there are heavily Buddhist migrant groups, but I doubt you'll get much more than politicians visiting a temple or dharma centre and saying they appreciate this group.
That's probably most of what matters. Scientologists are few and don't matter, Unitarian Universalists are few and don't matter...
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