OliveTapenade
No bio...
User ID: 1729
OliveTapenade
19d ago
While the word 'religion' isn't indigenous to this context, there is definitely a Chinese sense that the Confucian school, so to speak, is the same sort of thing as Daoism or Buddhism. This is depicted allegorically, and indeed forms the 'three traditions', as you term them.
Speaking of language, the Chinese term for Confucianism is 儒教 (rújiào) - the former character means 'scholar', and the latter means 'teaching', 'school', or sometimes 'religion'. Confucianism is the teaching of the scholars. I bring this up because it's similar to the names of schools that are uncontestedly considered 'religions' in the West. Daoism is 道教 (dàojiào, 'teaching of the way'), Buddhism is 佛教 (fójiào, 'teaching of the Buddha'), Christianity is 基督教 (jīdūjiào, 'teaching of Jesus', this term tends to have a more Protestant connotation), Catholicism is 天主教 (tiānzhujiào, 'teaching of the lord of heaven'), Protestantism specifically is 新教 (xīnjiào, 'new teaching'), Islam is 伊斯蘭教 (yīsīlánjiào, 'teaching of Islam', they just transliterated the name directly; 回, huí, is also common for Chinese Muslims as an ethnicity), and so on.
The point is that linguistically these all seem to be treated like different species of the one family - they are all types of jiào. Not all ideologies or systems of belief are jiào. For instance, communism, liberalism, and fascism, in Chinese, are all called 主義 (zhuyì, which means 'position' or 'doctrine'). The word jiào suggests something roughly similar to our word 'religion'.
The historical context, as hydroacetylene alludes to, is that Matteo Ricci and some of the early Jesuits in China really didn't want Confucianism to be a religion, because they liked Confucianism. If Confucianism is not a religion then Chinese people don't have to give it up in order to become Christians, which is obviously very helpful if you want to convert a bunch of elite Confucians, as Ricci did. (This is also why the name for Catholicism is so bizarre - Ricci tried to equate God with ancient Chinese belief in Heaven or some kind of Lord of Heaven, in order to make the case to the Chinese that embracing Christianity would be consistent with the ways of their ancestors. Interestingly, some modern Chinese Christians try to make a similar move - people like Yuan Zhiming preach pseudohistorical theories whereby ancient Chinese were prophetically proto-Christian. For instance, Zhiming argues that the Chinese character for 'greed', 婪 (lán), depicts a woman standing beneath two trees, suggesting some ancient lost knowledge of the Eden narrative.)
If you ask me, I'm not totally without sympathy for Ricci's approach - a Chinese convert to Christianity is not obligated to abandon everything taught by Confucius, but only those things incompatible with the gospel. Everything else may be retained, and that may well end up being an awful lot. But "Confucianism is a different religion, therefore it must all be thrown out" and "Confucianism is not a religion, therefore it's all fine" are both lazy shortcuts. They're attempts to shortcut past real discernment of the content of a teaching with the cheap label 'religion'.
Even so, if we have to use the label for convenience, I'd say Confucianism is more like a religion than it is not.
OliveTapenade
9d 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
9d ago
That's what they've been doing with 'sovereignty never ceded', they've been treating it like a slogan for people to say and feel good about.
My lasting frustration with 'sovereignty' dialogue in Australia has been the steadfast refusal of the indigenous lobby to ever define exactly what it is, or what they think it means. These examples are pretty representative - there's a lot of waffle about a spiritual connection to land but it is not remotely clear what that means in practical terms, or what it is that they think they need but do not have. If sovereignty is a spiritual sense of oneness with the land, in what sense do they currently lack it? What do they think other people need to do in order for them to practice it? Or is the idea, sometimes hinted at but rarely expressed, that Aboriginal people are a different nation to Australia? If so, would some sort of secession movement be the result? The establishment of a new and independent nation on the Australian continent, alongside the Commonwealth of Australia? It doesn't seem like anybody wants that, if only because any such nation would be desperately poor and would survive only insofar as the Commonwealth props it up with foreign aid.
It just doesn't seem to mean anything. It's a slogan - 'sovereignty' is a word that people say, but there's no shared understanding, and it feels to me like a set of goalposts designed to be moved.
I don't go so far as assuming there's an intentionally nefarious conspiracy here or anything, but the indigenous lobby definitely has a lot of ambiguity in what it preaches.
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
9d 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
6d 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
9d 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.
OliveTapenade
11d ago
Some people think being patriotic is some kind of duty, but I'm not one of those people. Your truest and highest duty as a citizen is to make a thoughtful vote at every given election opportunity.
This is something I'm inclined to disagree with. No comment on patriotism, which I think is a snarl word that admits of too many different meanings to be useful, but I think what you've done here is an instance of fetishism. Voting is one thing that dutiful citizens often do. It is not identical to dutiful citizenship. I think you're mistaking one expression of a duty with the duty itself.
As I would have it, responsible democratic citizenship does require participating in the political life of the community. That often involves voting, but voting itself is not sufficient for it. A responsible citizen may choose not to vote in certain circumstances (as act of protest, for instance); and an irresponsible citizen may exist even while regularly voting. I don't deny that there's a correlation - responsible and thoughtful citizens vote more often, the irresponsible and incompetent vote less - but the correlation shouldn't be seen as absolute. Moreover, there are many ways for a citizen to participate in the life of their community and support their fellows that do not involve voting, and I value a lot of those ways above voting itself.
(This is a long tangent, please forgive me.)
There are different versions of that theory, some of which are obviously nonsense. You can find more of Yuan Zhiming's version here. (His whole book is here if you can read Chinese.) Much of it is nonsense and some of it is just obviously falsehood. For instance, dào does not actually mean the same thing as Greek logos. It's true that logos in John 1:1 is translated as dào in some translations, but this is a somewhat free translation. In their more natural senses, dào means 'path' and logos means 'word'. Translating "in the beginning the dào was with God and the dào was God" is not being terribly literal with the words, but is an attempt to convey some of the same meaning in a different cultural context.
However, there are some attempts to inculturate Christianity in Asian cultures by looking for pre-Christian or proto-Christian resonances that I'm much more sympathetic to. Arguably the same thing happened in Europe - they found points of connection or resonance with pre-Christian philosophy, in order to reconcile Christianity with existing cultural and intellectual heritages. Plato or Aristotle or Homer didn't get thrown out entirely, and where there were commonalities, as with Greek conceptions of virtue, or philosophers verging on quasi-monotheistic ideas, they emphasised those.
One example I'm a little fond of is from Inazo Nitobe's infamous Bushido: The Soul of Japan. While this book is often disliked for being the source of a lot of romanticised, historically inaccurate information about samurai, I think it's fascinating because Nitobe himself was a convert to Christianity who was educated in the West, and indeed the book shows an erudite understanding of the Western canon. What Nitobe wanted to do was find some way to reconcile his Christian faith with a strong affirmation of Japanese tradition and nationhood. He does this by asserting, if not quite a proto-Christianity, at least ways in which God made himself known to the ancient Japanese, which would prepare them for the fullness of revelation later. Thus he writes:
Should any of my allusions to religious subjects and to religious workers be thought slighting, I trust my attitude towards Christianity itself will not be questioned. It is with ecclesiastical methods and with the forms which obscure the teachings of Christ, and not with the teachings themselves, that I have little sympathy. I believe in the religion taught by Him and handed down to us in the New Testament, as well as in the law written in the heart. Further, I believe that God hath made a testament which maybe called “old” with every people and nation,—Gentile or Jew, Christian or Heathen.
[...]
One cause of the failure of mission work is that most of the missionaries are grossly ignorant of our history—“What do we care for heathen records?” some say—and consequently estrange their religion from the habits of thought we and our forefathers have been accustomed to for centuries past. Mocking a nation’s history!—as though the career of any people—even of the lowest African savages possessing no record—were not a page in the general history of mankind, written by the hand of God Himself. The very lost races are a palimpsest to be deciphered by a seeing eye. To a philosophic and pious mind, the races themselves are marks of Divine chirography clearly traced in black and white as on their skin; and if this simile holds good, the yellow race forms a precious page inscribed in hieroglyphics of gold! Ignoring the past career of a people, missionaries claim that Christianity is a new religion, whereas, to my mind, it is an “old, old story,” which, if presented in intelligible words,—that is to say, if expressed in the vocabulary familiar in the moral development of a people—will find easy lodgment in their hearts, irrespective of race or nationality. Christianity in its American or English form—with more of Anglo-Saxon freaks and fancies than grace and purity of its founder—is a poor scion to graft on Bushido stock. Should the propagator of the new faith uproot the entire stock, root and branches, and plant the seeds of the Gospel on the ravaged soil? Such a heroic process may be possible—in Hawaii, where, it is alleged, the church militant had complete success in amassing spoils of wealth itself, and in annihilating the aboriginal race: such a process is most decidedly impossible in Japan—nay, it is a process which Jesus himself would never have employed in founding his kingdom on earth.
[...]
It has been predicted—and predictions have been corroborated by the events of the last half century—that the moral system of Feudal Japan, like its castles and its armories, will crumble into dust, and new ethics rise phoenix-like to lead New Japan in her path of progress. Desirable and probable as the fulfilment of such a prophecy is, we must not forget that a phoenix rises only from its own ashes, and that it is not a bird of passage, neither does it fly on pinions borrowed from other birds. “The Kingdom of God is within you.” It does not come rolling down the mountains, however lofty; it does not come sailing across the seas, however broad. “God has granted,” says the Koran, “to every people a prophet in its own tongue.” The seeds of the Kingdom, as vouched for and apprehended by the Japanese mind, blossomed in Bushido. Now its days are closing—sad to say, before its full fruition—and we turn in every direction for other sources of sweetness and light, of strength and comfort, but among them there is as yet nothing found to take its place. The profit and loss philosophy of Utilitarians and Materialists finds favor among logic-choppers with half a soul. The only other ethical system which is powerful enough to cope with Utilitarianism and Materialism is Christianity, in comparison with which Bushido, it must be confessed, is like “a dimly burning wick” which the Messiah was proclaimed not to quench but to fan into a flame.
To Nitobe's credit, he does not present some nonsensical theory of historical origins - rather, he thinks that God has, in each culture prepared the ground in certain ways, and that the gospel must be planted in that native soil.
We may not want to go the full way with him, and we may not want to automatically or thoughtlessly proclaim every culture a repository of divine revelation, but in broad strokes, I have a lot of sympathy for this approach. Start by looking for whatever elements of grace or truth are found in the pre-Christian culture, because God is very unlikely to have left that culture with nothing - and then look to the gospel to redeem and perfect the rest, rather than obliterate it.
(I'm fond of of "logic-choppers with half a soul" as a criticism of utilitarians. Ha! Forgive my pettiness.)
OliveTapenade
19d ago
I was thinking particularly of descriptions of impulsivity, immediacy, and emotional intensity. I read accounts by trans men saying that all their desires become both powerful and immediate, as if someone had switched caps lock on for their desires. They didn't get hungry, they got HUNGRY. NOW! And so on. Ironically, the emotional balance they described reminded me more of being a child, prior to puberty, so it was hard for me to associate that with puberty or testosterone.
For what it's worth, I myself had a quite gentle puberty - it was a gradual slope, rather than a wall breaking. As such I've never subjectively understood either why some kids fear it, or why some adults describe it as a very painful, tempestuous time of their lives. It just happened to me quite smoothly, and over a few years my voice dropped lower, I got more hair, and I experienced sexual attraction, but there was never a moment where I found it painful or disconcerting. I was even a little disappointed that nothing dramatic happened. Maybe sex ed at school had just hyped it up too much.
Anyway, their descriptions of getting very horny on testosterone didn't seem to match my experience of sexual desire. I had my sexual awakening just like anyone else, the phase where I hid pictures of sexy women underneath the bed and snuck guilty glances at bikini-clad models on magazine covers, and so on. But it was never a consuming fire for me. Maybe I'm just unusual and this is a universal experience I'm missing, but I don't think that's it? I got turned on by the hot girl sitting in front of me in class. All the basics seemed to happen to me. It just internally didn't feel like this overwhelmingly, uncontrollably powerful force. It felt like, "oh hey, that's happening to me, all right, deep breaths, focus on something else".
I'd be somewhat interested in other men's experiences of this. It's not something I really talk about with other people, since it's obviously a personal and embarrassing subject, and I suspect that the kinds of men who talk about it openly are self-selected for being uninhibited and horny.
OliveTapenade
19d ago
(And I say this as someone who likes playing around with tarot imagery but don't treat it as serious.)
In the hope of trying to find something more positive to talk about -
I wonder if there are any other Motters with a passing interest in tarot? I used to be fascinated by it as well. I give no credence whatsoever to divination, but I think the imagery of the tarot is extraordinarily rich and multi-faceted. Its supposed divinatory powers, I hazard, have more to do with the way that that imagery is both endlessly open to interpretation and psychologically provocative. If you find yourself mentally 'stuck', a randomised pile of images from the tarot may well give you the jolt you need to consider new perspectives.
I don't use it for advice myself, but I can still appreciate the symbolic language it provides. If there are any other Motters familiar with it, maybe it's worth a chat in the Fun Thread one day?
Clearly I'm coming at this from the angle of someone who naturally had these hormones all my life, so I can't speak as to what it would be like to experience the effects for the first time.
This has always fascinated me when I read accounts by trans men. Their description of what testosterone does to their mental processes sounds completely alien to me. I cannot relate to it whatsoever. There are a number of possible explanations for that, one of which is, indeed, that I've had this level of testosterone all my life, and my body is accustomed to it. It's just part of the way I think, and any downsides or difficulties that come with it are things that I have had decades of practice compensating for. Someone who suddenly shifted from a much lower level of testosterone to the level of a natal male like me, however, probably would experience it as an overwhelming flood, and that might explain, for instance, them having problems with impulse control that I have never had.
If so I can only guess that it's plausible that a natal male suddenly taking a much higher dose of estrogen would experience a similar shock, but in the other direction, and that it would be something that natal women cannot relate to either.
Of course, as the top-level poster mentioned, it also seems likely that there's some element of placebo as well. If you're telling yourself that you're taking a chemical that's going to make your more feminine or girly, well, you can probably just think yourself into that absent any chemical effects at all. All the more so if you're also making intentional behavioural or social changes. So plenty of grains of salt seem warranted here.
OliveTapenade
24d ago
I believe it's to do with dispensationalism and particularly with Cyrus Scofield?
For the unfamiliar, dispensationalism is a theological belief - some, probably including me, would say it's a heresy - that says that God divides the history of the world up into several phases. These phases are called 'dispensations', and the conditions, both material and moral, of the world depend on the dispensation in question. Thus what is required of people in the age of grace may be different to that in the age of law, and then also different to that in the age of the church, and so on. Great events in the world may mark shifts between dispensations.
As far as that goes it may seem harmless. It's unbiblical, but if you want to invent a scheme to guide you through your understanding of history, why not?
The thing is, Scofield felt that the nation of Israel played a role throughout the various dispensations, that particular promises to it endured, and most tellingly, he identified 'Israel' in the biblical sense with a visible nation even down to the modern day (which for him was the late 19th century). This predates the establishment of the state of Israel, but Scofield was a Zionist, albeit due to his understanding of Christian prophecy.
This is in itself a somewhat unbiblical move. Notably in Romans 9, the apostle Paul distinguishes between those that are Israelite 'according to the flesh', and those included and justified on the basis of faith. He asserts that 'not all Israelites truly belong to Israel, and not all of Abraham's children are his true descendants', but rather membership of the true Israel is to be reckoned on the basis of faith. In this you may see parallels to Matthew 3:9 and John 8:39, where both John the Baptist and Jesus appear to place one's deeds and one's character above one's descent according to the flesh. So whatever it is New Testament authors are doing with Israel as a concept, it's not simply identifiable with a hereditarian group or an ethnicity, much less a political structure.
I understand Cruz to be roughly in the Scofield-ian camp, but this camp would not be recognisable to most historical Christians, including many around the world today. Cruz has a weird obsession with Israel that doesn't play well with everyone - famously he was booed off-stage by actual Middle Eastern Christians back in 2014.
For what it's worth my understanding, from a Christian perspective, is that the state of Israel is, theologically speaking, completely irrelevant. It is of no greater or lesser value than any other nation on Earth. There is no special reason to support it and no special reason to oppose it. The biblical category of Israel - and the covenant with Israel - is continuous with and contained within the new covenant of Christ, particularly insofar as Christ himself becomes a kind of microcosm or representation of Israel itself. The promises made to the Jewish people according to the flesh remain valid so far as they go, but where they were always intended to go was towards the redemption of the world in Christ. As such, insofar as contemporary Jews hold to those promises, that is good, but the promises are incomplete without their fulfilment. And any further that direction lies a more complicated discussion about what evangelism means in the admittedly unusual context of evangelising to Jews, but we don't need to get into that now.
OliveTapenade
11d ago
Reminds me of Umberto Eco's Cult of the Imperfect. He applies the idea even to acknowledged masterpieces - one of the reasons why Hamlet, for instance, has been so compelling is because it is in some ways badly written. Lakes of ink have been spilled on trying to interpret Hamlet's motives because they are not clear in the play - because they are actually rather arbitrary and inconsistent, in a way that would probably strike us as bad writing, if Shakespeare did not have the reputation that he does. And while you could just conclude it's because Shakespeare was rushed or made some bad calls, it's so much more interesting to treat the text as whole, the arbitrariness as intentional, and dive into psychoanalysing the hero.
Star Wars is also in that golden zone of imperfection, I think. Even in the OT, the films are frequently disjointed, and characterisation changes wildly without explanation. It's pretty obvious that ANH is written for a universe in which Luke's father and Darth Vader were different people, and Luke and Leia are not related, for instance. In ESB, Luke hates and fears Vader and wants to kill him, and Vader disloyally seeks an ally to stage a coup against the Emperor; in RotJ, without any explanation, Luke now regards Vader with this self-sacrificial love, and Vader is so broken upon the Emperor's will as to consider revolt impossible. It's not inconceivable that something happened in between the films to cause both of them to change their minds (maybe Luke struggled long and hard with the revelation that Vader was his father and eventually came to the painful conclusion that he must love him the same way he thought he loved Anakin; maybe the Emperor discovered Vader's plot and tortured him into submission), but there is no hint of either of these processes in RotJ. The characters are just... different.
And yet I can't make himself dislike Star Wars because of this, or view the OT as lesser. I even like the PT. I still love those films, all six of them. (There are only six Star Wars films.) In many ways I love Star Wars because of its flaws, not only because of its strengths.
OliveTapenade
22d ago
Surely it makes no sense to blame TikTok for anti-white, anti-male, or anti-American attitudes on campuses? TikTok was first available in 2016, and I believe its popularity only really started to shoot up in 2018. Campus nonsense well predates that.
OliveTapenade
9d ago
Eh, I think it's contextual? The terrain is different depending on each nation. You don't find exactly this sort of thing in the UK because the UK isn't a colony.
However, the proper comparisons here are between Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and the United States. On those terms I feel like Australia is arguably the least grovelling. All three other Anglo colonies already have treaties with indigenous peoples that make those peoples semi-autonomous. Australia is the only one that doesn't, and the Voice was roundly rejected by the Australian people, which tells me that actual grassroots support for this is pretty low.
Yoorrook is part of the activist industry, and it's supported by the government because the government and the public service are deeply in bed with Group-like NGOs. That's a bad thing, but I'm not sure it tells us that much about l'Australie profonde, so to speak - and if the existence of that whole complex is the problem, well, half of that is imported from the United States anyway. We're downstream of American culture wars and tend to absorb their worst elements, albeit a few years too late.
So I certainly wouldn't advise the Americans to be too smug.
As for the British... honestly, I think they have their own issues to deal with. They aren't colonial in nature, but national pride and identity in the UK are complicated enough as to need their own post.
OliveTapenade
21d ago
I've always been very ambivalent on the 'missing mood' argument.
On the one hand, if someone's explicitly-stated argument seems like it implies a particular emotion, and the person making the argument lacks that emotion, that does seem like a good sign that the argument is not motivating for them. The argument is excuse or justification, rather than the real motivation for the position.
On the other hand, taken too seriously, the missing mood argument also sounds a lot like, "You don't feel the way that I imagine you ought to feel - therefore you are not serious." But human psychology is extremely diverse and unpredictable, the way people express their deep emotions varies very widely as well, and you should not typical-mind. Caplan summarises it as, "You can learn a lot by comparing the mood reasonable proponents would hold to the mood actual proponents do hold", but the phrase "the mood reasonable proponents would hold" is doing a lot of the work there. What is the mood reasonable proponents would hold? Are you sure? Is there only one such possible mood? How confident are you of what's going on inside another person's head?
I suppose I think missing moods can be a weak piece of evidence, which may suggest that we ought to look more deeply into a person's agenda, but nothing more than that. Unfortunately the actual examples Caplan gives in his piece are unconvincing and suggest a lack of moral imagination on Caplan's own part. Other people don't appear to feel what Caplan thinks they should feel, so he concludes they're insincere. But maybe Caplan is just wrong about they ought to feel. Maybe he's assuming that they accept facts and moral principles that Caplan himself accepts, and if he looked closer he would realise that they don't.
OliveTapenade
1d 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
8d 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
9d 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.
OliveTapenade
5d 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
5d 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
5d 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
6d 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
6d 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.
The continuing saga of Aboriginal issues in Australia!
You may recall that in 2023 Australia had a referendum on changing the constitution to attach a permanent Aboriginal advisory body to parliament. That referendum was rejected around 60-40. We discussed it here at the time, and since then I've been keeping an eye on the issue. Since then, many state governments have stated their intention to go ahead with state-level bodies, or even with 'treaty'.
'Treaty', in the context of Aboriginal activism in Australia, is a catch-all term for bilateral agreements between state and federal governments and indigenous communities. Whether or not this is a good idea tends to be heavily disputed, with the left generally lining up behind 'yes', and the right behind 'no'.
Anyway, I bring this up because just last week, in Australia's most progressive state, Victoria, the Yoorrook Report was just published.
This is the report of a body called the Yoorrook Justice Commission, a body set up in this state with public funds whose purpose is to give a report on indigenous issues in the state. They call this 'truth-telling' (and indeed 'Voice, Treaty, Truth' was the slogan of the larger movement for a while), though whether or not the publications they put out are true is, well, part of the whole issue.
Here is the summary of their report.
You can skip most of the first half - the important part is their hundred recommendations, starting from page 28 of the PDF, all beginning with the very demanding phrase 'the Victorian Government must...'
This puts the Victorian government in a somewhat difficult position. They love the symbolism of being progressive on Aboriginal issues, and indeed are currently legislating for a more permanent indigenous advisory body to parliament. However, the actual recommendations of the Yoorrook Report are very expensive, very complex, and in many cases blatantly unreasonable, at least to my eyes. Some examples would include recommendations 4 (a portion of all land, water, and natural-resource-related revenues should be allocated to indigenous peoples), 21 (land transfers), 24 (reverse burden of proof for native land title), 41 (recognise waterways as legal persons and appoint indigenous peoples as their representatives, like that river in New Zealand), 54 (decolonise school libraries by removing offensive books), 66-7 (universities must permanently fund additional Aboriginal support services and 'recompense First Peoples staff for the 'colonial load' they carry'), and 96 (establish a permanent Aboriginal representative body 'with powers at all levels of political and policy decision making'). Needless to say the recommendations taken as a whole are both expensive and politically impossible, especially since even Victoria rejected the Voice 55-45.
Possibly from Yoorrook's perspective the idea is just to open with a maximal demand that they can then negotiate down from; or possibly it's to deliberately make demands that cannot possibly be satisfied so that there will remain a need for activists in this space. From the state government's perspective it's tricky, because they will want to appear responsive and sympathetic, but not want to actually do all this. I predict that they will accept a couple of the cheaper, more fig-leaf recommendations and ignore the rest, maintaining a status quo where we engage in symbolic acts of recognition and guilt but nothing more, and the Aboriginal rights industry, so to speak, continues to perpetuate itself.
If the Victorian Liberals (the state branch of our centre-right party) were more on the ball, I might have expected them to politically profit from this and make a good bid at the next election, but unfortunately the Victorian Liberals are in shambles and have been for some time, and the recent smashing of the federal Liberal party at the last election doesn't make it look good for them either.
More options
Context Copy link