Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
"...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
12hr ago
You literally just need to write one paragraph. Five to six sentences. I have never seen a post that had at least one paragraph of original thought get modded for effort.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
4hr ago
Checking their current discussion thread, the posts for this month are about the role of community and tradition in conservatism, the declining usage of "social construct" language in political debates, furry aesthetics, whether we can really designate some societies as more advanced than others...
Damn, I've been cheerleading for TheMotte this whole thread, but I have to admit they have us beat! I'd love for our CW thread to look like that.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
12hr ago
Posts about the war in Ukraine consistently get some of the most engagement out of all top level posts. We've had at least two posts in the past month about Ukraine that generated lots of discussion.
There doesn't necessarily need to be a new post about Ukraine every week because most weeks, nothing newsworthy happens.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
4hr ago
Hmm... I always felt like the most salient divide was between current events posters and everyone else. Concrete vs abstract, basically. People in both camps could be interested in the culture war to a greater or lesser degree, but the current events camp is more likely to be interested in "let's analyze the most likely outcomes of Greg Abbott's border policy" types of CW talk and the theory building camp is more interested in "let's uncover the general mechanism by which Ivermectin became coded as right-wing".
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
14hr ago
In some sense the weekly thread format is vestigial at this point, but, I still like it and I wouldn’t want to change it. It draws everyone into one conversation, it encourages people to read posts that they might normally not, and it creates a FOMO effect which spurs engagement: if you want your reply to have maximum visibility, you have to strike while the iron is hot, because you only have about a day before a post gets buried under new top level posts and not as many people will see the old posts.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
11hr ago
Write too little, and you get a lot of "This isn't what we like to see from a top level post" mod warnings.
Warnings for effort on top level posts are handed out pretty rarely. I made this very short post about Iran's attack on Israel (over half of it was copy-pasted quotes) and I didn't get modded for that. The bar is pretty low.
In fact, posting virtually any topical bit of news often gets you a "boo outgroup" warning
Going through last week's top level posts, the Eurovision post didn't get modded, the Mike Cernovich post didn't get modded, the summary of Trump's trials didn't get modded, the post about DEI at MIT didn't get modded... there are lots of topical posts that don't get modded.
I definitely don't agree with all the mod decisions here. But it's also false to claim that the mods are paralyzing all discussion, because it's just a fact that the vast majority of posts don't get modded.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
6hr ago
@DaseindustriesLtd, @self_made_human, and... I'd be tempted to give it to @HlynkaCG if he were still here, but he's not, so, I'll give it to @2rafa.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
8hr ago
If they don't have anything original to say, but do want to hear what others think
Frankly, I'd rather that we have rules that select against those types of posters. If someone can't even write one paragraph of non-trivial thought in response to a news story - not world-historically original thought, not thought worthy of prestigious publications, but just a simple "hey I've been thinking about the Israel campus protests and how they compare to BLM, I wonder if this will help Trump in November because he's more of the law and order candidate, could tip the scales in some battleground states" - then they're probably unlikely to post worthwhile replies in response to other people's posts, and we really don't need them here.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
9hr ago
so most large, well formatted top level posts get at a minimum 20 upvotes
Actually not true! It's clear that the community favors some long posts over others, they don't just all get automatically upvoted.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
9hr ago
Adding a paragraph of blather about Columbia
I'm confused by this attitude. Why do you assume it would be blather?
You have to find value in some of the writing on this site, otherwise you wouldn't be here. If you don't like the top level posts, then you must find value in the replies. Replies that often feature multiple full paragraphs. But you don't dismiss those as blather.
What's wrong with the idea of taking one of those paragraphs, like the ones you see in the replies, and putting them in a top level post? Why is that such an onerous effort? Why do you assume that there could be no value in that?
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
9hr ago
But the world is not made up entirely of strivers. Some people just want to raise their kids, and play soccer with the boys on the weekend.
So what do strivers do on the weekends?
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
2d ago
Player-Driven Emergence in LLM-Driven Game Narrative (and accompanying discussion on HN):
We explore how interaction with large language models (LLMs) can give rise to emergent behaviors, empowering players to participate in the evolution of game narratives. Our testbed is a text-adventure game in which players attempt to solve a mystery under a fixed narrative premise, but can freely interact with non-player characters generated by GPT-4, a large language model. We recruit 28 gamers to play the game and use GPT-4 to automatically convert the game logs into a node-graph representing the narrative in the player's gameplay. We find that through their interactions with the non-deterministic behavior of the LLM, players are able to discover interesting new emergent nodes that were not a part of the original narrative but have potential for being fun and engaging. Players that created the most emergent nodes tended to be those that often enjoy games that facilitate discovery, exploration and experimentation.
Recently there’s been increasing interest in the integration of LLMs and video games. With currently available models, creating an entire living virtual world with an unlimited number of realistic side quests, characters, and interactions is now a “mere” engineering challenge. No more pre-scripted dialogue trees; instead you can simply converse with NPCs in natural language with no limitations (or at least that’s the promise, as models become increasingly efficient).
This is another step towards what appears to be the natural endpoint of the technological development of video games: the recreation of life in replica, a replica at one’s mercy, an infinite horizon of choice without responsibility or constraint.
For a long time I thought that video games were the necessary next step in a development that could be described as “spiritual”. Games are largely an amalgamation of prior media - literature, painting, music, film - but they do introduce a new element (or at least they develop this element to previously undreamed of heights), and that is the element of interactivity, i.e. the ability to make a choice, to participate as the player in the creation of the art and to make the art be something other than what it would have been in your absence. I conceived of interactivity as the raw material out of which a new aesthetic language would be fashioned which would bring us closer to realizing the promise of art. But I have since begun to grow uneasy with this way of thinking.
In some sense I was too seduced by the possibility of finding something “new”, anything new, to detect the longstanding inconsistencies in my own thought. From a young age I always preferred linear, narrative-driven games as opposed to open world sandboxes. My favorite games were games that were devoid of choice, games that robbed you of the ability to make a choice. I found the idea of multiple endings for a story to be distasteful. Yes, you can choose to save this character or not, you can choose to join the bad guys or not - but now that we’ve had our fun imagining all the what-if scenarios, can you tell me what really happened? Do you have the courage to tell me? Do you have the strength of vision to see the truth, the singular truth?
Choice is antithetical to the aesthetic sacrifice. The artist sacrifices all alternate possibilities to distinguish one thing and one thing alone, to say - this one, and no others! No matter how lowly a thing it is - a dirtied article of clothing (as in Van Gogh’s A Pair of Shoes), a completely ordinary sequence of events on a day in Dublin in the year 1904 (as in Joyce’s Ulysses) - he is now stuck with it. This is where he signs his name and stakes his wager, for better or worse. It is this seemingly inexplicable devotion to one law, one vision, one truth, that makes possible any kind of experience that may be called aesthetic. An artist who hedges his bets and does not accept the risk that accompanies his act inspires no confidence in us.
The receiver of the message too enters into a sacrifice, insofar as the message may be incomprehensible or even dangerous to him. In this way an oath is forged between artist and audience. The failure to foreclose the horizon of possibility is the deferral of the signing of the bond.
Is there any great work that would be improved by the addition of choice, by the addition of alternate possibilities? Would Plato’s account of the trial and death of Socrates be better if there were a possibility of Socrates simply... not dying? If Callicles’s warning to Socrates, that his devotion to the “effeminate” subject of philosophy would be his downfall, might not come to pass? If Socrates might be able to eloquently defend himself at trial and avoid conviction? If he might escape from prison before his execution?
The deferral of the inevitable here would be nothing more than the refusal to establish the founding myth of philosophy, the myth that links philosophy with the sign of death. The internal law of Plato’s drama is clear (and the law of historical fidelity is irrelevant): Socrates must die. This is not to say that one is forbidden from creating new works in which new possibilities are imagined. Only that the unity of the original work should remain undisturbed in its repose.
Or you can just like, have fun with GTA6 when it integrates LLM-generated missions, I guess. Whatever.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
2d ago
She claimed that many women who responded with "bear" were victims of violent rape who literally would rather die than be raped.
Something's not adding up here.
Suppose we have a rape victim who says this. Then, regarding the time she was raped, she would prefer it if she had died instead.
But she can replicate the effect of having died back then by simply committing suicide now. But she doesn't - she chooses to keep living instead. So it seems that her revealed preference is that she actually doesn't want to have died back then, because she rejects the necessary consequences of that choice.
I certainly believe there are fates worse than death. But I also think that in the majority of cases where people say "rape is worse than death", it's just hyperbolic social signalling rather than a genuinely held conviction.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
1d ago
Should your voting record be public too?
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
1d ago
Yes, I had that dialogue in mind when I wrote that sentence. He of course chooses to remain in prison.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
2d ago
There's no requirement for art to be a perfect reproduction or imitation of reality (otherwise, why bother with writing fantasy and sci-fi stories?), so saying that it deviates from reality in this way or another can't be a generalized criticism without further elaboration.
Most human artifacts entail a reduction of entropy, that's almost the definition of what it means to create something. You don't want your car to be a confusing mess of possibilities and unpredictability, or your medication, or your web browser. You simply want it to work correctly and perform as advertised. I don't see why art should be any different.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
5d ago
I think you're implying that we've become too ideologically homogeneous and people's viewpoints aren't being challenged often enough here. Maybe that's true if you restrict yourself to only looking at "basic" culture war issues - Trump, trans issues, DEI, etc. But if you look at the total range of issues that get discussed here, we have lots of arguments over lots of things. We have plenty of substantial disagreements with each other.
It would be better if we had more "garden variety" leftists who were anti-Trump, pro-trans, etc. so we had more ideological diversity, but, the reasons for our lack of leftists have already been discussed ad nauseam.
I also see that you haven't made a top level post in the last 3 months. You are the forum. If you think the posts here are low quality, then write the kinds of posts that you would prefer to read.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
2d ago
the core artistic advantage that video games have is that they force the player to experience the decision-making that goes into a choice, not just the rationale and consequences
Yeah. I didn't want to go into all the requisite nuance and bloat the post to astronomical proportions, but, obviously interactivity can do a lot of things that are artistically fascinating. Tim Rogers's excellent analysis of Earthbound touches on these issues.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
9d ago
Women carry around a nagging anxiety that their own existential authenticity is always in doubt; there is an unresolvable neurosis over the possibility of being reduced to a mere biological function. The fear is that all the rhetoric about girl bosses and shatter-prone glass ceilings and a more egalitarian future really is, at the end of the day, just rhetoric, no matter how many Emmy Noethers and Angela Merkels and Jane Austens dot the pages of our history books.
A man may be a scoundrel and an outcast and a criminal, but at least these are proper symbolic roles - they require the attribution of human agency. If your identity is fully coextensive with the biological function of reproduction, then the worry is that this makes one more object than human - more like the scaffolding that supports the stage, rather than a proper player in the drama.
This is why the threat of "objectification" carries such a sharp sting. I would be so bold as to speculate that this is, in some sense, a trans-historical feature of femininity as such - the division between the human as rational agent and the human as embodied biological organism almost demands a group of people who fall on the wrong side of the divide - and therefore cannot be assuaged by any amount of empirical evidence that women are in fact capable of leading much the same types of lives and engaging in the same sorts of intellectual pursuits as men are.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
6d ago
Lots of Hispanic blood in a future American population isn’t an HBD-wrecking catastrophe.
But you just acknowledged that the Hispanics are underrepresented among engineers and doctors. If the broader population becomes more Hispanic, would you not also expect that population to produce fewer people who are capable of becoming engineers and doctors?
An immediate corollary of HBD is that a Brazil-like population leads to Brazil-like conditions.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
12d ago
This is going to sound like edgy contrarianism for the sake of edgy contrarianism, so you'll have to take my word for it when I say that it's not:
I really don't care. And if you told me that counter-protesters were being funded by Israel, I wouldn't care about that either. In a conflict where moral fervor runs high, I am an advocate for the freedom to simply not care.
I'm just tired of the moral guilt tripping from both sides. If you want to criticize the protesters, criticize their tactics. There's plenty to criticize there. But their alleged ties to Hamas add nothing to the story for me. In general I have always felt that concerns over "foreign manipulation of political sentiment" were paranoia of the worst kind. If the governments of Russia or China or the US (organizations that have engaged in plenty of nasty unethical behavior in the past that could plausibly be classified as "terrorism") want to pay for a Times Square billboard and fund some student organizations to get their message out then I say let them. Free speech doesn't stop at our borders; I am for open trade in a global free market of ideas.
I can't reasonably bring myself to be invested in every ethnic and sectarian conflict that happens around the world, particularly when its direct impact on me seems rather limited. If the Sudanese Masalit want to organize protests in the US against the RSF then bully for them; whether they win or lose in their struggles, I'm not going to lose sleep either way. I view Israel-Palestine similarly: just another in a long series of ethnic conflicts in a region of the world that is known for being prone to violent ethnic conflicts.
In some sense I am forced to care, due to the generous financial aid that the US supplies to Israel. But my investment doesn't extend beyond that.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
5d ago
I remember some of those specific comments you're referencing. But I don't see what the problem is?
Some of the views that get expressed here are views that I find deeply objectionable. Like, not just silly, but actually upsetting. But in spite of that (in some senses, because of that) I think this is a very valuable discussion space. Other people think differently than I do, that's life. I'm just glad we have a place that doesn't moderate on content where we can discuss controversial topics in a relatively civil manner.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
6d ago
Brazil’s dysfunction is due to a very high black population
Wikipedia says their black population is 10%, i.e. a smaller percentage than what the US has.
We have better institutions
But institutions are made of people. They can only be as good as the individuals that comprise them. There's no magic dirt, no magic paper.
If you import the population of Central/South America wholesale, the people who staff your institutions will increasingly resemble the inhabitants of Central/South America, and they will begin to reproduce Central/South American conditions.
and can function with a lower average IQ than we currently have
But why would we want to?
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
3d ago
What happened to @ymeskhout?
Different people want vastly different things out of TheMotte.
A few times over the years I've seen people share their lists of their all time favorite Motteposters. Some names are expected, other names make me go "...wait, what? That guy? Why?". Sometimes people will list someone who I find to be totally uninteresting and whose posts I skip over as a matter of course, because they write about topics that aren't relevant to me. This doesn't mean that I or them have bad taste. It just means we have different interests and we want different things out of TheMotte.
For my part, I'm not particularly interested in a play-by-play of current events, unless the event is particularly earth-shattering, or the post has a novel theoretical take. I don't really care that Canada introduced new hate speech laws for example, but if you have a new argument I've never heard before for why hate speech laws are actually a good thing, then that could be a post worth reading.
As usual, you are the forum. If people aren't writing the kinds of posts you want to read, then you should write more of the kinds of posts that you want to read.
EDIT: Why do you think the response to your post about abortion was abysmal? I think the response was pretty good. It generated a decent amount of engagement for a top level post and it prompted some interesting replies from @RandomRanger and @self_made_human about transhumanism, so, job well done, mission accomplished.
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