OliveTapenade
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User ID: 1729
OliveTapenade
1d ago
I think what he's saying is that techno-futurism is not perceived as a religion because techno-futurists do not make metaphysical or fundamental claims.
Personally I think this is mainly a semantic difference. It's not clear to me that there's a difference between "X is not perceived as a religion because X does not do these things typical of religion" and "X is not a religion". Isn't religion defined, at least extensionally, by the things typical of religion?
I don't think the concept of religion helps very much here. Better to just say that AI hype is a form of collective irrationality or delusive behaviour, if that's what he means.
OliveTapenade
1d ago
I think this includes a number of questionable assumptions built into the idea of 'human level intelligence'. The models we have now are very good at doing some things that humans struggle with, but are also completely incapable of some things that are trivial for humans. There isn't a unified 'intelligence' where we are at a specific level, and machines are approaching. Rather, human intelligence is a highly-correlated cluster of aptitudes; aptitudes which do not necessarily correlate in machines. It seems at least plausible to me that existing AI models continue to get better at the sorts of things they are currently good at without ever becoming the kind of thing we would recognise as intelligent.
Now on one level that doesn't matter - I'm just suggesting that AI might keep improving without ever becoming AGI. But AI doesn't need to become AGI to cause technological unemployment, or to give some nation or other a major military advantage, or whatever else it is we're worried about. But I'd still like to know what the mechanism we're predicting for that unemployment, or military advantage, or whatever else might be, because it is not immediately obvious how a language model produces any of those things.
OliveTapenade
2d ago
To be honest the existence and shape of much of this discourse continues to baffle me. There's a discourse around AI causing unemployment, even though AI thus far has not caused any unemployment, and there isn't an obvious mechanism for it doing so. Isn't the evidence so far that incorporating AI into a workplace increases workload, rather than decreases it? It's always possible that this changes, but I'd at least like to see the argument that it will, rather than it just being assumed.
The pattern seems to play out time and time again - Scott's last post about China made me want to scream something. Where is the reason to think that AI is so militarily and economically significant at all? What if this is all nonsense? Isn't this all based on a vision of AI technology that has no justification in reality?
Maybe there's an AI 101 argument out there somewhere that everybody else has read and which passed me by entirely, but right now I continue to be incredibly confused by this discourse. We made systems that can generate text and images, but which are consistently pretty crap at both. Given time I can imagine them becoming somewhat less crap, but where do they pivot or transform into the sorts of devices that could cause massive technological unemployment, or change a war between great powers?
OliveTapenade
5d ago
Declaring Maimonides the only Jewish authority who counts is no less arbitrary than the rest of this cherry-picking. Maimonides is a very influential figure historically, yes, but this is the rough equivalent of pointing out that Thomas Aquinas is a Doctor of the Church and therefore declaring that the only thing you need to read to understand Catholicism is the Summa Theologiae. Much of what Maimonides taught was disputed even in his own time - for instance, his thirteen principles were immediately contested by other rabbis and do not enjoy consensus support today.
Moreover, to what extent are Maimonides' teachings even active, living forces in the lives of contemporary Jews? Even a very strict Orthodox Jew does not apply everything ever penned by Maimonides, no less than the most devout tradcath applies everything in Aquinas. Insofar as you are trying to make generalisations about Orthodox Jews today, I think it is necessary to look at what Orthodox Jews actually believe, and how Orthodox Jews actually behave.
Looking at actual behaviour is where I come to when it comes to study. Do Orthodox Jews actually try to prevent non-Jews from studying the Talmud? Really? That does not seem to actually be the case in practice, and I think it is telling that your case otherwise is conspiratorial - you assert that Orthodox Jews are just lying to people all the time. What's more likely? That the entire tradition is engaged in a universal deceit that you've seen through just by reading a book that your own argument would imply should be concealed from you? Or that you're talking nonsense?
Last of all, I am deeply skeptical of you drawing a distinction that excludes Conservative and Reform Jews here, for two reasons. Firstly, in my experience Conservative and to an extent Reform Jews absolutely study Torah, Talmud, and the entirety of their tradition. Secondly, I think that in actual practice yourself and the Motte's other anti-semites (pardon my language, but I do believe it's accurate) do not restrict your criticism of Jews to Orthodox Jews. I think Orthodox Jews are the motte, and you're probably going to go back to the bailey of opposing all Jews.
OliveTapenade
5d ago
I can find you more quotes from the Talmud regarding the ban on showing mercy to idol-worshippers (a category in which they universally and firmly place Trinitarian Christians).
The category of shituf in Jewish thought is more complex and contested than that.
That said, I think Amadan has the correct approach here. Let me ask a question, though I'm really just echoing him. Why should I believe that your cherry-picking of nasty-sounding passages from the Talmud is somehow more constitutive of modern Judaism, more accurate as a description of what actually-existing Jews are like, than what I learn from actually talking to Jews? Why is your interpretation of Jewish tradition more trustworthy than that of the rabbis that I have spoken to and who have explained their point of view to me?
I'm both a Christian and a veteran of the New Atheist flame wars of the 2000s, so I am extremely familiar with the genre of hostile outsiders cherry-picking nasty quotes and then condescending to explain my own tradition to me. This inclines me to sympathy when Jews (or for that matter Muslims, who are also frequently exposed to this) face malicious outsiders chucking a bunch of quotes at them, and wearily explain that, no, those quotes are not an accurate or proportional representation of either their faith or their way of life, and that if I'd like to know more about what they really do, I am welcome to come to synagogue or Torah study or other social events and learn more.
OliveTapenade
9d ago
Yes, absolutely. There's definitely an interpretation you can take of the Reformers as people trying to rationalise and straighten out the immense, frequently convoluted, tangle of late medieval Christianity. You can't read Calvin or Luther for long without noticing the systematising urge that drives them.
Even so, I tend to think that in any group of humans of significant size, there are going to be people of a more rationalising, systematising bent, and there are going to be people of a more mystical bent, and as such any mature religious tradition is going to have ways to accommodate both types of people. (And for that matter further types - there are people whose spirituality is almost entirely based in practical work, for instance, or those for whom everything is about community membership.) Since the 16th century, both Catholicism and Protestantism have undoubtedly become mature religious traditions unto themselves, and therefore both have found ways, on their own terms, to accommodate both the rationalists and the mystics.
I think taking Snoke as the 'main bad guy' of TFA isn't really treating that movie fairly. You can see what TFA is doing in outline - Snoke is Palpatine, Ren is Vader, Hux is Tarkin - and even within that outline, Snoke is barely in the film. Ren and Hux are the primary villains of TFA, and they remain the primary villains in TLJ.
On the EU - yes, I think the lower barrier to entry made a big difference. Novels and comics are much easier and cheaper to produce than films or television series, which allowed for a lot more of the experimentation we're talking about. There were limits to what could be done with major film characters, but the specific example you give doesn't seem like a great one, to me? Luke was paired up with a bunch of different characters, and eventually I think the fan and writer consensus settled on Mara as the best one, and they went with that. Mara wasn't the result of a higher authority pushing an agenda. (As far as I'm aware, not only did Zahn not originally intend her as a love interest, it was actually Kevin J. Anderson who encouraged that idea to Zahn, which is an impressive degree of cooperation considering that it was also Anderson who'd also developed Callista more, after her introduction by Barbara Hambly.) By contrast, the Jaina ship war was settled by higher authority - KJA had probably pushed her more toward Zekk, but Troy Denning liked Jag Fel more, so she ended up with Jag. So that seems like a case where the core, film character went through a more organic, evolutionary development, while the EU-original character struggled with top-down interference.
One option might have been, as you say, to try and mine what worked best in the EU and turn that into films. I'm not sure how well that would have worked. It has generally worked for superheroes, but superheroes are already a mess of different continuities, and films have been considered their own separate continuities from core Marvel or DC canon since the 70s. More usually, reboots premised on simplifying and retelling the best stories from a convoluted and mature continuity fail.
I think I'd distinguish between a hypothetical ST-as-EU-reboot, that is, the ST as a kind of 'Star Wars Ultimates', which I think would probably have failed, and the true MCU or superhero film strategy. The latter is what I think Ross Douthat recommends here - "treat Darth Vader like Batman". There are many Batman films, but for the most part they don't even try to be in continuity with each other. They're all just different takes on the one central idea. Would that have worked? Maybe. But it's a different strategy because it doesn't involve trying to tie it all into one integrated universe.
OliveTapenade
9d ago
You wouldn't count Le Guin's work as being among golden age classics? Or by the golden age, are you restricting yourself to the 50s and early 60s? Again I'm just a bit curious what you'd think of specifically.
I'm not really convinced by the AI example - I think the LLM essay you link on Twitter doesn't really read like an SSC article. And I'm more inclined to take Paul Schrader's comment as an indictment of film executives than a defense of LLMs. Obviously you and I are going to have a hard time arguing literary taste with each other, but I would say, at least, that my experience with LLM writing (and I have spent some time prompting it, writing, roleplaying, etc.) has been that it is only capable of a very superficial, formulaic level of production.
OliveTapenade
10d ago
Yes, which is why I said elsewhere that Kathleen Kennedy is ultimately at fault for letting Johnson do this shit. Abrams shouldn't have been allowed to make ANH 2.0. But, once that's done, Johnson shouldn't have been allowed to fuck it up even more.
Sure, I'll absolutely agree that the core problem is the overall management of the franchise and lack of vision.
But I'm not sure that following up a stale retread of ANH with a stale retread of ESB is that much of a betrayal, really? That sounds more like he understood the brief. To the extent that he tried to do anything even a bit more interesting than just making the OT again (and again I think the extent to which TLJ is subversive or radical is wildly over-stated), I'm more inclined to give him credit for at least trying something. Sure, it didn't really succeed, but I give a film-maker more credit for trying to do something, even if they fail, than I do one for just painting by numbers. If nothing else, a TLJ that just painted by numbers would have done nothing to arrest the decline.
Quarrels between authors are, as you say, not unknown from the EU. EU author-feuding or attempts to undermine or pull back on each other were common - Traviss and the Mando hissy fit, Troy Denning misunderstanding or trying to retcon NJO, Timothy Zahn sniping at Dark Empire in Hand of Thrawn, KJA writing Callista and the various Luke shipping wars, you name it. I feel a bit ambivalent about all that in hindsight. It was undoubtedly bad from the perspective of maintaining a uniform level of quality, but it also meant that the EU, lacking a single dominating authorial voice, became a case of survival of the fittest. The Luke shipping wars were not resolved by some voice from above coordinating all the others - instead a number of different authors wrote love interests for Luke and eventually the one that achieved the most buy-in from the fans was eventually given the nod. (Ironically, the only one that wasn't originally written as a love interest.) Callista and Gaeriel and all the others have just been dismissed with "yeah, the early EU was weird". The Mandalorian stuff is a huge mess and there are multiple contradictory ideas of who the Mandalorians are as a people - Traviss and Filoni are probably the biggest influences, but let's not underestimate the TotJ comics, the KotOR portrayals, even Republic Commando - and generally the ideas that resonated were taken up by subsequent authors, and the rest abandoned. The EU was a big pool where different authors sank or swam, and because Lucasfilm back in the day were quite generous with the license, a lot of people tried different ideas. And now in hindsight, well, ask any EU fan and they will give you a curated list of the good bits, and those are the parts that live on.
OliveTapenade
10d ago
Well, the first response that went through my head was something like, "well, if you're content with AI slop for entertainment, you do you, but that's cold comfort to those of us who expect more than that". That's probably too mean and contemptuous a thought, though, so let me back up and try again.
I've yet to see anything to convince me that AI can write a half-decent film script. Even if, for the sake of argument, it can do better than the worst human writers, I'm trying not to be content with the bottom of the barrel, or even the middle of the barrel. George Lucas definitely has limitations as a writer and director, though I think some of them are overstated. He struggles with some types of dialogue more than others; and at any rate, I think much of that is compensated for by his immense skill as a visual director. Lucas can compose a scene or a shot incredibly well, far better than most of his contemporaries. For films like Star Wars, which are substantially about immersion, awe, and atmosphere, I can't underrate that.
I'm a bit curious what you mean by 'some proper SF'? What sort of SF do you think AI would make possible? What are you hoping for?
OliveTapenade
11d ago
I don't think this is true, actually. My experience of fandom debate was that TLJ certainly had a lot of people talking about Star Wars, and it didn't end it all. On the contrary, some of the post-TLJ material was well-received. If anything, I think the biggest ST-era breakout was The Mandalorian, which was post-TLJ. I've seen in the wild people with Mandalorian bumper stickers on their cars, or graffiti murals of Baby Yoda. The ST itself didn't make much impact, but The Mandalorian did. (Some years after that, Andor went on to have widespread critical success, but I rate that a bit lower because I don't see as much genuinely popular reaction to Andor. There's no Andor equivalent of Baby Yoda.)
My recollection of the time was that TFA brought with it a lot of hype and optimism, TLJ was extremely divisive and split the fanbase, and 2019 brings us both RoS, which was universally panned, and The Mandalorian, which was successful and widely enjoyed, even by people who disliked the ST itself. Rogue One was also genuinely popular on release, with maybe hopes that the franchise might be rallying after the disaster of RoS, but everything since then has been a steady drip of mediocrity - nobody cared about Solo, and nobody cares about The Book of Boba Fett, or Ahsoka, or Obi Wan, and then The Acolyte was the nadir of the TV progression thus far. Official Star Wars material has slid into mediocrity and garbage and nobody cares any more. Andor is the one bright spot in terms of fan reaction, but Andor is noticeably a much more niche product.
I agree that Star Wars is functionally dead, as a franchise, and that Disney is mostly to blame, but I see doom setting in with the very premise of the Sequel Trilogy. TFA was well-received at the time but it set the films on a course towards irrelevance.
I'm just not at all convinced that TLJ is why RoS was bad. I agree that TLJ doesn't give you a whole lot to go on, but then, TFA didn't either! None of these films seemed to be written with sequels in mind. The problem is the whole premise of the Sequel Trilogy, and it seems to me that blaming everything on TLJ is scapegoating Johnson too much for Abrams' failures.
That seems particularly evident to me if we look at the directors' other work? I didn't think much of Knives Out or Glass Onion, but I found them more-or-less watchable and entertaining, in a dumb sort of way. With Abrams, however, the obvious comparison is Star Trek (2009) and Star Trek Into Darkness. Abrams had done this once before - ST2009, like TFA, is a soft reboot that leaned into the popular perception of what the franchise was classically about, which at the time was greeted with a lot of hype and received positively, and then STID, like RoS, is a stale, creatively bankrupt attempt to imitate the original franchise, which was widely panned. Abrams fumbled the set-up with Star Trek, and he went on to fumble the set-up again with Star Wars, in pretty much the same way. Would he have done better if not for Johnson? I just cannot see any reason to think that. He screwed up and effectively killed a big budget science fiction film franchise in exactly the same way before people gave him Star Wars.
OliveTapenade
11d ago
Eh, I haven't seen Andor, but I'd describe Rogue One as both the best of the Disney films and an extremely forgettable, mediocre outing. There's just very little in Rogue One to like, I find? It has some pretty space battles if CGI spaceships blowing each other up does it for you, I guess.
You are much more optimistic about AI than I would be. I'm afraid I consider AI an unmitigated disaster for creative industries.
OliveTapenade
11d ago
I'm certainly not saying that I think Luke should never fight. There were plenty of excellent EU stories featuring Luke where he got up to dramatic adventures. But I think there's a fundamental tension in Star Wars - on the one hand, Yoda is right, wars don't make one great, humility and pacifism are good. On the other hand, adventure is good. Ambition, that yearning to do something more, everything epitomised by this scene - that's also good. The best Star Wars stories, in my view, manage to navigate this tension and find a balance. Passivity or apathy are not virtues.
At the same time, mere activity is not a virtue either. Violence or ability to destroy by itself is not to be lauded. That's why, for instance, that scene with Luke in season two of The Mandalorian is such a painful exercise in point-missing. What does it to take to be prepared for heroic action, without glorifying action as such? What is the proper internal disposition of a Jedi?
It makes me think of Kipling - to wait and not be tired by waiting, to dream and not make dreams your master.
OliveTapenade
11d ago
Well, I'd agree that there's a level of counter-signalling in the critical love for TLJ, or at least, automatic contrarianism to a fanbase perceived as stupid, entitled, and so on.
Where I disagree is with the suggestion that TFA was anything other than an active dumpster fire in its own right. To be as clear as possible, I don't think TLJ is good. TLJ is a bad film. I just think that TLJ is the least bad of the sequels. The fact that TLJ is as bad as it is while also being the least bad of the sequels says something truly dire about the other two, and that's the point I'd argue more fiercely.
OliveTapenade
11d ago
Even LotR is a good example of a movie failure along these same lines - the films injected a lot of arbitrary or fake drama dependent on character stupidity (e.g. everything with film-Arwen, Sam abandoning Frodo in Cirith Ungol), rather than trust that the original story was tense enough on its own.
OliveTapenade
11d ago
I actually think that TLJ itself is extremely derivative and not deep. Critics who said that it was were, in my opinion, engaging in, if not cope, then I think a type of reflexive disagreement with fans. TLJ is mostly a by-the-numbers retread of ESB, in the same way that TFA was a by-the-numbers retread of ANH. You have the desperate flight from the Empire, bickering on a spaceship in an extended escape sequence, an excursion to a corrupt world run by shady businessmen, the protagonist being disappointed and challenged by a cranky old Jedi Master living in exile, a dramatic showdown between protagonist and central villain in which the villain reveals a horrible secret about the protagonist's past, and then the movie's conclusion is the heroes just barely managing to escape and regroup. TLJ isn't a swerve - it's the same damn thing as TFA.
The people hailing it as a clever subversion or deconstruction of Star Wars were mostly people illiterate in the wider Star Wars canon and therefore ignorant of the many superior deconstruction stories already in the franchise.
OliveTapenade
11d ago
Those scenes present Ren as a petulant child, which suffices for my point, I think? The ST fails to develop truly credible villains.
OliveTapenade
12d ago
This scene is in TFA. As is this one.
Ren was a figure of mockery from the first film.
I mean, I do find TFA near-unwatchably bad, but I'll grant that maybe I have an unusual hatred for it. But I think that if your contention is that TLJ is to blame because it didn't radically swerve course and reinvent the whole ST, then that still seems like a position where a lot of blame would unavoidably fall on TFA for contributing so little to the trilogy that the second film had to reinvent it from scratch.
Considering that TFA was an Abrams contribution, and the universally-despised RoS is also an Abrams contribution - could even a hypothetically perfect TLJ have rescued the trilogy beyond even Abrams' ability to screw up in the third act? I doubt it.
OliveTapenade
12d ago
Eh, I feel like that reading could only make sense if The Force Awakens by itself was a tolerably good film, and it just isn't. TFA already sucked. Maybe you think TLJ made it worse, but I really don't think TFA is defensible on its own merits.
OliveTapenade
12d ago
I like the observation around spiritualism in politics, though I don't agree with the denominational framing. It seems to me that even in the 16th century, and continuously both then, both Protestant and Catholic traditions have included both strong intellectual and mystical currents. For every pietist movement, among the Protestants, there's a resurgence of interior practice among Catholics. For every Catholic intellectual spring, there's a flowering of Reformed theology. The identification of Catholicism as more systematic, analytic, or 'ordered', versus a more experiential, personalistic Protestantism strikes me as a bit too cute to be plausible.
I think it is true that within a left wing of politics that has largely abandoned traditional Christianity there are new outlets for spiritual or mystical practices, and interest in Buddhism and New Age practices are one sign of that. The rise of spiritual-but-not-religious people would also fit into that category. Across different political tribes there is a common need (not in literally all people, but in enough people) for some sort of spiritual engagement, and if traditional religion becomes unpalatable to one tribe, they will find some alternative way to express that need. The risk of this on the left, I suppose, is that doing this from step one again carries with it all the risks of individualist religion - solipsism, narcissism, or even just falling into common pitfalls that a mature tradition might be able to warn you against.
OliveTapenade
12d ago
Look, I don't want to defend TLJ overall, because I think it's a bad film, but I feel like this deserves a reminder of what the OT was about. Remember that the dramatic climax of the OT is Luke Skywalker throwing away his weapon and refusing to fight. The idea that what a Jedi needs to do is lay huge beatdowns on people is explicitly contrary to the text. Jedi are humble servants of peace, remember? Wanting a flashy show of power, a character demonstrating his dominance by crushing his foe, is Sith logic.
I thought that scene worked, actually, because even though Kylo Ren has all the physical power in the scene, he is obviously a pathetic loser and nobody, not even his own underlings, has respect for him. He has power but no presence. Meanwhile the projection of Luke has no physical power at all, but he has all the presence. He does not even need to be there to be more powerful than Ren could ever be. He, like Obi Wan before him, is more powerful than someone like Ren could possibly imagine.
The OT repeatedly makes that point. Just being able to destroy stuff, just being able to win fights, is not what makes one great. You may recall that the power to destroy a planet is insignificant next to the power of the Force.
Again, I am not defending TLJ in totality. I think that the entire Sequel Trilogy is a creatively bankrupt exercise in point-missing and I never want to watch that film again. But in this one, very limited context, I think it is really missing the point of what the OT was saying about power to conclude that Luke was in some way a failure because he didn't physically dominate Ren.
OliveTapenade
12d ago
That description is also untrue.
I feel like I'm only going to have to say this more and more in the future, but do not trust AI summaries about anything, especially not niche subjects. Come on, if you want to know what I, Jedi is about, the Wook has a detailed plot summary right there.
Let me ask a practical question. That's a lot of if statements you made there.
Has AI actually done any of those things? The specific examples you give of things that already exist are mostly speculative - all I can find about AI-designed computer chips, for instance, are hype stories in pop science magazines, rather than anything credible, and even they include the note that most of the AI designs did not work.
In general I am skeptical of the argument that goes, "I can tell it's valuable and useful because people are paying billions for it!" In a sense that proves that it's 'valuable', insofar as you can define value in terms of what people are willing to pay for, but none of that proves that it's useful. People are willing to pay vast amounts of money for obviously worthless things on a regular basis - NFTs are one infamous example.
I can concede a handful of highly technical niche applications - protein folding, plasma confinement, etc. - though even there I'm a little cautious. (I don't understand those technical fields, but in fields that I do understand, where AI is being hailed as a major breakthrough, the breakthroughs once analysed turn out to be, at best, heavily overrated.) But the AI-believer position, in cases like this, are that AI is literally going to make labour obsolete, or that AI is going to become superintelligent, achieve god-like power, and either usher us all to utopia or to utter destruction. And that's a position that is so far in excess of any reasonable estimation of what this technology does that I have to raise my eyebrows. Or yell at a blog post on the internet, I suppose.
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