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Primaprimaprima

Bigfoot is an interdimensional being

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joined 2022 September 05 01:29:15 UTC

"...Perhaps laughter will then have formed an alliance with wisdom; perhaps only 'gay science' will remain."


				
User ID: 342


				
				
				

			

		

	














	


		


			



	

		

			

			

				

					

						

							
						

						

							
							

								
Primaprimaprima


								

								

								
								
								

								
							
					
 
				


				
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being

				
				
				

				

					2 followers  

					follows 0 users  

					joined 2022 September 05 01:29:15 UTC
				


				
					

					
"...Perhaps laughter will then have formed an alliance with wisdom; perhaps only 'gay science' will remain."



				

				

				

				

				

					

					

					
					
					

					
User ID: 342


					
					
					
				

			


					

						
					



		

	

 











			
			

			
			

			




	


		

			
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				Culture War Roundup for the week of July 22, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I think this is what you're talking about?


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of July 22, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


I want to register my distaste for quoting and upvote-analyzing prior discussions




This one doesn't bother me.  The sentiment / revealed consensus of TheMotte is a valid topic of discussion for TheMotte, and past comments can serve as important data for many conversations.




ChatGPT summaries of articles




This one I agree with.  LLM summaries shouldn't serve as a replacement for your own analysis and commentary, even when they're marked as such.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Small-Scale Question Sunday for July 14, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


Titanic, Beatles, poetry




They probably don’t care that you don’t know about these things.


You’re probably imagining that this is a bigger deal than it actually is.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of July 8, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Why would this be deep state? I can’t see how this will do anything except make him a more sympathetic figure.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of July 8, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


But I can’t see Mary as self-deluded.




Transsexuality isn't about delusion - it's about desire.


And no one escapes desire, no matter how smart you are.




If a random person insists on referring to Mary as a man, and I’m required to say that between the two of them one is a fool, I’d have to say that Mary is not the fool.




It's reasonable to take Mark's assertion that "X is true" to be strong prima facie evidence of X, if you generally trust his judgement.  But surely you recognize that Mark's beliefs are still defeasible, correct?  Mark can still be wrong.


If he were to say, for example, that God is real - and that, more specifically, Islam is the one true religion - I doubt you'd be running out to convert to Islam tomorrow.  Islam doesn't become true just because Mark says so.  That claim still has to be evaluated against the totality of available evidence and argumentation, even though the source is trustworthy.


Or suppose that he told you that a person can be both 18 years old and 36 years old at the exact same time.  That's something that you know to be false, just based on an analysis of the structure of the sentence.  Mark's statement to the contrary wouldn't be (or shouldn't be) enough to change your mind.


So why not treat Mark's claim that he is actually a woman named Mary the same as those other two examples?  At worst, obviously false nonsense, and at best, a highly contentious claim that should only be accepted after a careful examination of the supporting arguments?


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Small-Scale Question Sunday for July 7, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
It is an empirical fact that the list of entities which are admissible into our disease ontology changes over time.


We used to believe in medical conditions like neurasthenia and hysteria, but now we don’t. When presented with the same physical and psychological symptoms, we might just say that it’s part of normal variation, or we might just attribute it to a bad episode, or we could bring the symptoms under the heading of a different disease category altogether - either way, the old categories have been abandoned.


Merely being able to identify a clear biological antecedent to a trait is not sufficient for that trait to be conceived of as a medical condition. It’s reasonable to think that the Big Five personality traits have a substantial basis in genetics, but no one thinks that being extraverted (within reason) is a disease. Extraversion is not medicalized.


The ask is that “I’m intersex” should provoke the same social response as “I’m extraverted” - an “oh, I see” rather than a “wow that’s crazy, what’s that like?”  It should be seen as part of normal human variation, rather than conceived of as a wholly distinct category.


Whether this is feasible or desirable is a separate question. But that’s how I understand the request.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Small-Scale Question Sunday for June 23, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


Honestly the whole period felt like nerds who didn't quite get it saying "what exactly do you mean by declaring all of us Moral Mutants to be Exterminated by Progress?"




I don't think it's really accurate to analyze the Culture War as just "nerds and aspies who didn't get the memo".  (At the very least, we can always ask, why this particular memo, with this particular content?)


I was around 20 when all this got started.  That's really young!  I was naive and I didn't know shit back then.  (I still don't, but I hope that I've learned at least a few things since then).  So I believed a lot of false/stupid things and I had to figure things out through trial and error.


People aren't born with an innate knowledge of history, politics, and philosophy.  It has to be acquired - both on an individual level and a social collective level.  Memes propagate through society and help people avoid the mistakes of the past.  Social phenomena always happen for a reason - it's a mistake to think "well if people just did X Y Z then we could have avoided all that mess".


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Friday Fun Thread for June 21, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


does anyone have a favorite myth regarding a paradisal or ideal state for humans?




Leibniz's Theodicy.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Friday Fun Thread for June 14, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
It doesn't look like you've made any posts in the CW thread this week (top level or reply).


You are the forum.  Any criticism of the forum is a criticism of yourself.  If you don't like what's being posted in the CW thread, make the kinds of posts that you do want to read.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Friday Fun Thread for June 14, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


Then it got to the sex scene, where the aforementioned Ms Piggy got plowed, and it was horrific.




Well, no.  Nuclear war is horrific.  ALS and prion diseases are horrific.  Whatever is being experienced by any remaining Israeli hostages in Gaza is horrific.  But this... - what should we call it? how should we describe this body? is it a portent of disease and disability, an abdication of potential, or is it a body into which is inscribed a steadfast refusal to press oneself into a form that would be more conducive to capitalist-utilitarian labor? - this body cannot be horrific unless the image of such a body occupies a particularly peculiar position in your libidinal economy.


Nonetheless if it does occupy such a position for you, then that is still in a certain sense commendable, as a form of taking responsibility for one's own horrorscape.  The root of any experience that could be properly called "aesthetic" is the determination to find what is most uncanny in what is most familiar.  If you did indeed experience the uncanny in such an otherwise innocuous stimulus, then the film, as well as your particular receptive experience of it, was a success.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of June 10, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I confess that I don't know what you mean here.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of June 10, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Vibe check on whether current AI architectures are plateauing?


Recently a few insiders have started backing away from the apocalyptic singularity talk, e.g. Francois Chollet saying that LLMs are an offramp on the path to AGI.


OpenAI's CTO recently said "the AI models that OpenAI have in their labs are not much more advanced than those which are publicly available".  She tries to spin this as a positive thing - the average person off the street is able to use the same cutting-edge tech that's being used in our top research labs!  But this is obviously a concerning thing to say to the optimists who have been convinced that "AGI has been achieved internally" for a while now.  Of course, you can interpret this statement as not including GPT-5, because it doesn't exist yet - and once GPT-5 is finished training, they will have a model that's significantly more advanced than anything currently available.  So we'll have to wait and see.


Based on posts at /r/stablediffusion, the newest version of Stable Diffusion 3 appears to be a regression in many ways.  Perhaps the model has latent potential that will be unlocked by community finetunes, but if we were experiencing exponential progress, you would expect the models to get better, not worse.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of June 10, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Occasionally we are told that there is an epidemic of "male loneliness" or "male sexlessness" - an increasing number of young men are going long stretches of time with few or no sexual partners.  But why is this a problem?  Why should anyone care except for the sexless males themselves?


Evolutionarily, men have always been the disposable gender - the average male was historically much less likely to produce any offspring than the average female.  In fact, depending on which estimate you go with, the average male is still significantly more likely to reproduce in a first world Western country today than he would have been historically.  So why is there such concern over this particular dip in fertility?


You might say that a high number of sexless males is more likely to lead to violence and social instability - but plainly, that hasn't happened so far, certainly not on any appreciable scale.  It's never been harder to imagine actual widespread social unrest occurring in the modern West, given how thoroughly people have been anesthetized with material abundance and cheap entertainment.  (This question has been raised a few times recently, about the possibility of the culture war "going hot" over the Trump verdict or the border crisis or whatever - I am of the opinion that no, it won't "go hot", and such a development is essentially unthinkable at this point).  Plus, certain MENA societies provide a case study in how you can have a resilient social order where the majority of women disappear into the harems of rich men and the majority of men are left sexless - these may not be pleasant places to live, but the society is capable of reproducing itself all the same.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Small-Scale Question Sunday for June 9, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Why would alien life be a problem?


As far as I understand it, the Catholic church is relatively agnostic about the possibility of alien life - it's not explicitly forbidden.


Also, would microbes be a problem, or only intelligent life?


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of June 3, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


If they're around and we're not, then they would be better than us.




Well, let's do a thought experiment.  Suppose a civilization invents a technology that gives them an extreme competitive advantage but, for some contrived reason, it can only be powered by immense amounts of human suffering.  Everyone gets plugged into the machine and subjected to intense unending physical torture, like an inverted hellscape version of The Matrix.  Presumably, you would never choose to live in such a society, no matter how evolutionarily successful they were.


You could bite the bullet and say that, yes, because they survive and outlast, they are better - but this would only be the most abstract type of "better", because your revealed preferences would show that you could never actually accept such an arrangement.


You have the luxury of extolling the virtues of Darwinian competition because, coincidentally, the most dominant civilization on the planet right now is also the one that provides that most lavish opportunities for hedonism.  The social organism itself becomes more competitive, while the individual is allowed to become more sedentary, more secure, increasingly protected from the vicissitudes of nature - a strange kind of "competition" indeed.  If being competitive meant actually living the life of a drug cartel lackey or a post-apocalyptic warlord, if it meant actual physical competition and actual danger, then you would likely find that a reassessment of your fundamental values would be in order.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of June 3, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Anecdata of 1: I served on a jury that had about an even split of men and women, for a domestic violence case. The women on the jury seemed more upset about the case in general and had less sympathy for the defendant, but the case that the prosecution put forward was so flimsy, they were forced to agree that we had no choice but to acquit.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of June 3, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Keeping humans in the loop puts pressure on the processes to be more legible and comprehensible. If you dump everything into an inscrutable ML model, then the danger is that people will simply offload their thinking to the model and take its word as law. When your account gets banned at youtube, no one can actually say why (except in high profile cases) - it’s just, “The Algorithm said so, and we trust The Algorithm”. I don’t want society to work that way. I want there to be a person who has to take responsibility for the decision, and who can explain their reasoning. No hiding behind a binary blob of trillions of parameters.


Of course, humans can build labyrinthian inscrutable bureaucracies too. And humans can be outright evil. But I’d still rather take my chances with humans. Unlike AI, they have skin in the game - they are conscious entities, they have desires and fears. They can be persuaded or bribed, they are subject to political and social pressures, they will grant exceptions under the right circumstances. These are not aberrant modes of operation - they are necessary to the functioning of a humane society.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of June 3, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I don't see why regulation is a bad thing here.  I don't want AI making hiring decisions, or monitoring what I write on the internet for wrongthink, or deciding verdicts in criminal trials.  Anything that helps prevent that (even if imperfect and incomplete) is a good thing in my view.


(You may say that the use of AI in these domains is inevitable and cannot be prevented - but then, why get upset about the regulation in the first place?  Why worry about something that you think will have no impact anyway?)




This is the type of vague, awful, impossible regulation that is focused on writing politically correct reports and which actually kills innovation.




I think there should probably be less innovation in this space.


What, specifically, are you worried about losing or missing out on?


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Moderations, Bans, and the State of the Motte - Let's have a Discussion
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


My actual preference, for here and for every web forum, is to just eliminate upvotes and downvotes entirely.




Occasionally I write an effortpost that gets few or no replies, but still gets a significant number of upvotes.  I like having a signal that my post was appreciated, even if no one had anything to actually say in response.  It's no fun just screaming into the void.


I think the actual solution is for people to just stop taking downvotes personally.  As you point out, all a downvote means in most cases is "I disagree".  That's fine!  People can disagree!  That can be a valuable and useful signal, to know where you stand with regards to the consensus community opinion.




Can the Motte change, and attract a more ideologically diverse user-base, and also make its atmosphere more attractive to people with different and challenging perspectives?




I don't know what concrete steps could be taken to do that at this point, except maybe relaxing moderation somewhat against users who have clearly unpopular opinions.  But even then, probably not.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Moderations, Bans, and the State of the Motte - Let's have a Discussion
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Well, on a personal level I simply don't think that's much of a problem.  If someone wants to be in a constant revolving door of one year bans that's fine by me - particularly if it helps decrease the likelihood that we end up permabanning a valued community member.


If you think that sort of system would place an undue burden on the mod team then I respect that, although I don't think a cap of one year on bans would actually add that many more posts to the mod queue, given the small number of users who would likely find themselves in that sort of situation.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Quality Contributions Report for May 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


One of the post is just taking a simple argument and making it 5k words … My definition of very bad writing when you just go for length




In all likelihood, the post does contain more information than could be compressed into 200 words. It’s pretty hard to write coherent, sensible sentences that literally say nothing, unless you really go out of your way to do it.


Typically when people say that writing “uses too many words” or “says nothing”, what they actually mean is that there is content there, but they simply find the content to be trite, false, uninteresting, irrelevant, etc. All of which may be valid criticisms. But that’s different from there being no content at all.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Moderations, Bans, and the State of the Motte - Let's have a Discussion
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


For the time I have spent here, I don't think I got any serious challenge from someone across the political aisle from me.




This has been discussed extensively before.  There's only so much that can be done about it unfortunately.


There's currently some very spirited disagreement going on in the thread about Trump's conviction!  Sometimes, all it takes is the right issue.


Anyway, on the subject of moderation: imo permabans should be reserved for literal bot/spam accounts and other obvious bad actors.  I think there's very little reason to ever permaban a genuine good faith poster.


For Hlynka-type cases, where the person is clearly contributing constructively but they also persist in violating the rules on decorum, I think that bans should cap out in the 6-12 month range.  This would make it clear that breaking the rules has consequences while also preventing situations where the mods are forced to permanently exile valued community members.  There would also be no accusations of favoritism, because this is where bans would cap out for basically every good faith poster, regardless of number of AAQCs.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of May 27, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


Trump is a convicted felon.




This isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Our current treatment of felons is very unjust and needs reform: e.g., they should all have their voting rights reinstated for a start. Personally I’m proud and excited about the prospect of voting for a convicted felon in November. Perhaps it will help signal that we’re ready to start easing the stigma surrounding convicted criminals.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Small-Scale Question Sunday for May 26, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


...And I have zero confidence that the above communicates anything across the gap, any more than it did last time I tried.




What do you think you failed to communicate in that thread?


Let me try to give my own gloss on what I think you were getting at.  I often find myself on the side of defending... -  subjectivity? I'm not sure what the best word for it is - against those who would argue for a purely rationalist technocratic worldview.  I think consciousness is a real phenomenon that can't be explained away as an illusion, I think the arts and humanities are important and STEM supremacists get on my nerves, I think that individual choices matter and people aren't just reducible to their structural roles in the social system.


If you have an affinity for those positions, then perhaps we're not as far apart as you might think.  Even if I might disagree with some specific formulations you put forth.




I was thinking in terms of systemic control, doing my utilitarian calculations, shutting up and multiplying




Well, I'm certainly no utilitarian and never have been.




death is deeply natural and that Good Deaths exist




I'm in complete agreement.


I think I understand the difference in perspective you're trying to articulate here.  But, as usual, I simply disagree that it divides the space of political ideologies cleanly in two.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of May 27, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


It's not clear because it doesn't clarify the important question, which is: what are the documents Trump is being charged with falsifying?




The definition of "business record" itself is just a definition of a term.  It's not going to include any specifics about what business records a person did or did not create in a particular concrete case.  Presumably, that information would have been discussed during the trial proper.




According to your interpretation, the government could prosecute you for writing on a post-it note in your office, determining that this is a business document, and then alleging that you lied when you wrote it. That's not clear at all!




"Unjust" and "counterintuitive" are not the same thing as "unclear".


I was purely addressing the assertion that the definition was "word salad", nothing more.  I think that accusations of that sort are thrown around too liberally on TheMotte so I felt that it was important to address.  Too often people default to calling something "bad writing" when actually they have a different (and more specific) complaint with it.