Primaprimaprima
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User ID: 342
Primaprimaprima
1yr ago
The rules for what's allowed in the CW thread have always been extremely loose.
It would probably be good to encourage people to create more threads outside of the CW though, because then people might actually start looking at the non-CW threads more often!
Primaprimaprima
1yr ago
The Red Pill explanation of men preferring younger women doesn't seem to fit, since the men with the most options (high earning ones) are more like to choose women the same age.
TRP has a tremendously difficult time conceiving of women as individual humans who have their own desires, interests, and other properties that aren't fully exhausted by their status as women, so that can help explain their blind spot in regards to this issue.
The guy I know who's really into TRP is always saying, "I don't care if she's into what I'm into, I don't care if she's good conversation, I don't care about any of that. I have male friends for that. Why would I go to a woman to socialize?"
Obviously you tend to share more in common with people who are of a similar age and education level to you. And, surprise surprise, the majority of men do want to be able to have reasonable social interactions with the person they're going to be spending the rest of their lives with, funny how that works out.
very INTP of me, I know /s
Haha, yeah that stuff has been on my mind a lot lately. I'm very much an NF type. I have an appreciation for both the strictly logical side and the vibes-based side.
I think Marcuse's claim is level 3 as presented in your list.
I'd say that's basically mission accomplished then.
Something like "Death Note was not that good" is an evaluative judgement of quality, not a statement of fact.
I don't particularly disagree with what you've said here. I just don't draw the same judgements that you do with regards to the text.
If someone writes a review of Star Wars that starts with "Star Wars is the worst movie franchise of all time.", you don't say "ah, the author has presented a value judgement as a statement of fact. Confused as he is about this basic distinction, I must now consign his words to the flames". Instead you say, "he's presenting his value judgement in a hyperbolic manner as a rhetorical tactic. If I already have preexisting reasons to trust this author's judgement, I will continue reading with the reasonable expectation that he will provide reasons for his value judgement that I may be responsive to”.
You were quite correct to say "a big part of convincing people in this regard is trying to force them into your mental framework; to get them to understand you on a qualia-level". That's part of what Marcuse is doing here. When he says "the individual steps out of the network of exchange relationships and exchange values, withdraws from the reality of bourgeois society, and enters another dimension of existence", you're not supposed to go "erm, doesn't he know there's only one dimension of existence?" You're supposed to go, "ok, he's sort of painting a picture with words here. He's communicating his value system and inviting me to share in it. Is that something I'm interested in exploring? If yes, why? If not, why not?"
If there's one thing you should take away from continental philosophy, it's that your values are not set in stone. You can choose to change them.
If you already have a strong prior against Marxism (as I do too!), then you're obviously not going to be interested in sharing his value system exactly. And that's ok! You might still be able to mine his work for concepts and ideas that you can repurpose for other ends of your own.
On the other hand, assertions such as "Art that emphasises subjective experience helps people reject capitalism" aren't of the same nature that "this show was bad" is, in that they are not value judgements. It is a factual claim about the effects of a certain course of action.
Right, that's another part of what he's doing. He's suggesting that his way of looking at things might have pragmatic value for advancing a certain political agenda, and this is a claim that is at least conceivably subject to empirical verification and falsification. Can he prove his claim? No. But I don't think he necessarily needs to. It's fine to just throw stuff out there and speculate sometimes. We can just chill and mull it over for a while. We're just brainstorming. Opening ourselves up to new possibilities.
The question of "standards of academic scholarship" is an interesting one. This is, again, something that will vary heavily based on context, but I'd say that in general continental authors would have some issues with your conception of academic rigor, and would be more likely to see their work as being continuous with "ordinary" thought and speech, as opposed to being distinguished by a particular kind of academic methodology. More like internet shitposters than scientists. (And your revealed preference is that you do see a place in the world for internet shitposting -- you're here, after all.)
Primaprimaprima
1yr ago
Indie meaning non-hololive yeah. Just random women with their own channels.
Primaprimaprima
1yr ago
I can’t remember the last time I saw an “indie vtuber” who didn’t have an OF or a Patreon where she sells audio porn, it seems to be a requirement.
Primaprimaprima
1yr ago
Why don’t you just ask people directly how rich/poor or urban/rural they are?
Primaprimaprima
1yr ago
Hopefully this exchange isn't too tedious to you.
Not at all! There are few things I love more than getting to talk about this stuff.
I have been working my way through The Aesthetic Dimension and already have quibbles with the approach just a small amount of the way in.
The first few pages of this book are great to look at in this context because they both a) demonstrate how analytic and continental philosophy can have convergent concerns and b) they give you a feel for what's distinctive about the continental approach as a whole.
Marcuse in this book is speaking to the debate within Marxism between the humanist Marxists and the anti-humanist Marxists. The two camps disagreed on questions like: what role should individual subjectivity play in our theory of politics, does Marxism even need a "theory of the individual" at all or is everything interesting you could say about an individual exhausted by his class position, etc. These debates are similar to questions that analytic philosophers are working on today, albeit with a much less overtly political bent. François Kammerer is an analytic philosopher whose work focuses on defending illusionism about consciousness: he thinks that consciousness isn't real, he thinks that pain is as real as unicorns are. This seems like it would present a problem for any ethical theory: if there are no sentient beings, then why would anything matter? So he argues in that linked paper that it is possible to construct an ethical theory that makes no reference to subjective states of consciousness.
Marcuse is addressing similar concerns, but he takes the opposite stance: he thinks you can't have an ethics without subjectivity (and furthermore, you can't have a politics without an ethics), and thus the stance of the anti-humanist Marxists is politically impoverished.
This claim doesn't feel meaningful to me.
Well, let's take a step back for a second. What is "meaningful"? The term "meaningless" is somewhat ambiguous unless we give it further clarification.
It seems to me that there are at least four different ways that a sentence can fall short of providing true, interesting, useful information:
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Level 1: The sentence is either just completely grammatically incorrect and can't be interpreted as a valid sentence at all, or it's grammatically correct but it's formed in such a way that it means nothing. e.g. "Colorless green ideas sleep furiously".
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Level 2: The sentence does have a meaning, albeit one that can only be interpreted in a poetic or mystical fashion. e.g. "The element of this ether, that within which even the godhead itself is still present, is the holy".
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Level 3: The sentence is meaningful, but it's trivially false, or it's just uninteresting and irrelevant regardless of whether it's true or false. e.g. "Mathematical entities exist as non-spatiotemporal objects" (I would not put this sentence on this level myself; I think this is an interesting claim that one can have a valid debate about. But I think the average Mottizen, upon hearing this claim for the first time, and receiving clarification that a "non-spatiotemporal object" is very simply a real object that is not located in time or space, would say either "that's obviously false" or "even if that is true, it's irrelevant to anything that matters so I don't care".)
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Level 4: A claim that coincidentally turns out to be false, but would be very interesting and worthwhile if it were true. e.g. "The LHC will find evidence of SUSY".
When you say "meaningless", it's not clear whether you're referring to level 1, 2, 3, or maybe even something in between.
My goal here is to impart to you that the majority of continental philosophy can be brought up to at least level 3, once you're familiar with a specific author's terminology and the historical context in which they were writing. Whether what they're saying is true and interesting is a separate issue that will obviously vary heavily from claim to claim. A lot of times you'll read philosophy and just come away thinking that it's dumb or wrong, as is often the case in many other fields. 90% of everything is crap. (The funny thing about philosophy is that everyone has a different opinion on which 90% of it is crap.)
But "dumb" and "wrong" are importantly different from meaningless. I get the impression that you already think that Marcuse's claims here are at least level 3. You seem to understand what the sentences are saying; you think they're wrong, but you're able to give coherent reasons for why you think they're wrong.
I think it may be helpful here to draw a comparison between Marcuse's claims about value and your own previous comments about anime. You said "I felt like the whole corruption arc was dealt with far better in Breaking Bad". Now, is this something that you could absolutely rigorously logically prove 100%? No, of course not. But does that mean the sentence is meaningless? No, that's not true either.
Granted, you prefaced the sentence with "I feel", so you could say "it's just a pure expression of my own inner subjective state, nothing more, and it's therefore unimpeachable in that regard; and all similar sentences should be interpreted likewise, even if I leave off the implicit 'I feel'". But that doesn't seem to quite tell the whole story. If you're just expressing pure arbitrary subjective feelings, then why did you have the conversation at all, and why did you structure the conversation in the manner that you did? It seems like you're giving reasons for your opinions, reasons that you have at least some expectation that other people will be responsive to: Death Note is subpar because it's not multilayered, because the characters don't have enough psychological depth. It's not a purely rational argument, but it's structured like a rational argument: it seems to exist somewhere between sense and nonsense. We have a shared intersubjective conception of what artistic quality is, and you can reasonably expect that other people will be interested to learn that e.g. a show's characters lack psychological depth. Of course, someone could always come along and flatly tell you "actually I like one dimensional cartoon villains, you can't tell me what to think". And you couldn't prove him "wrong". But that doesn't render your previous utterances meaningless.
One helpful way of thinking about some continental texts (I have to keep repeatedly stressing that there is no single interpretive framework that will apply to all continental texts) is that they're kind of like a movie review, except instead of reviewing movies, they're reviewing society and history / life itself / other philosophers / whatever. Can the critic prove to you that the movie sucked? No. But can he say "the characters were all stereotypes, and the ending was predictable"? Sure. And then you might come away thinking "actually yeah, that movie did kinda suck", even though you may not have realized it at first. Can Marcuse prove that subjectivity invalidates capitalist values? No. Can he suggest that an ethics based on subjectivity could be more humane, more tolerant of individual creativity and expression, more process-oriented than results-oriented, etc. than an ethics based on the profit motive? Yes. And that might end up changing your perspective on things.
This is, to me, a good example of what I said before: "You read it, you feel like it is true or profound in some deep unarticulable way, and follow the author down the garden path for that reason alone."
No, I really have to disagree on this. Many people self-consciously base their own value system on the pursuit of perfectionism and efficiency. No one thinks that there's anything mystical or unarticulable about this. Therefore, its denial should not be mystical or unarticulable either.
Primaprimaprima
1yr ago
Oh I didn’t think you were snippy at all! And even if you were, that’s nothing to apologize for, goodness gracious. Your daughter is the most important thing in your world, of course any time you talk about her it’s going to be emotionally charged. Plus I appreciated hearing the extra context.
I do hope everything works out for you.
Primaprimaprima
1yr ago
My apologies, I didn't know how much you had already tried! The whole "therapists and soft safe closets" thing made you sound like the permissive type, but if you're not, then fair enough.
The design space of possible minds is very large. I suppose there are some people who would just die without drugs; and perhaps they did, for most of history. That's a bit sad though.
Do what you have to do to live a normal (and physically safe) life obviously. Although I do think you should listen to your intuition that "it doesn't sit right with you". At the very least, don't let anyone talk you into thinking that it should sit right with you. You can at least have that much.
Primaprimaprima
1yr ago
idk, when I was super little and I would start acting up in public my dad would physically pick me up, carry me to the car, and say "we are never taking you anywhere ever again if you're gonna act like a brat". And I would usually shut up pretty fast after that. For in-house infractions they'd hide my toys or something until I calmed down. Seemed to work well enough. It's possible I was a more "mild" case though, because by the time I was in first grade I had already become a relatively docile teacher's pet.
Basically I'd throw out all the psychiatry shit and say "sink or swim kid, up to you". That's how people did it for, you know, all of human history up until the last ~50 years or so. You think they had L-Theanine 1,000 years ago? No they said pick up a fuckin' shovel kid or we're all gonna starve this winter.
I think we could all be diagnosed with a little PDA, yeah? I got PDA for days. I'm still a lazy piece of shit as an adult who doesn't like to do anything. The only thing that makes me actually acquiesce to the "demand" is a hard deadline (with consequences) and a swift kick in the ass. It never goes away, you just gotta learn to deal with it. People like me appreciate the kicks in the ass, trust me!
Primaprimaprima
1yr ago
Yeah. You just gotta accept it and move on and make the best of what you got.
Primaprimaprima
1yr ago
Thinking and Feeling aren't so alien to each other.
Right, I'm always trying to explain this to people. The "logic vs emotion" dichotomy is clearly overly simplistic and not really tenable. But at the same time, I think it's pretty clear that different people do think and experience in fundamentally different ways, and we need some kind of language for talking about it, even if we end up not using those terms specifically.
Primaprimaprima
1yr ago
Oh, not sure why you removed the Paul Klee section, I was going to comment on it...
Klee was an artist, not a philosopher. Most artists are frankly not very good at talking about their own work. They tend to not actually be that knowledgeable about art theory, let alone philosophy in general. That's why they're artists and not philosophers.
The Klee stuff you quoted seemed pretty bad and uninteresting and I would have nope'd out after a few sentences.
When someone is actually trained as a philosopher, and their work is recognized as philosophy by other philosophers, you can take it on good faith that there is a method to the madness. I quoted that Heidegger comment about poets for example to give an example of one of his more extreme flights of fancy, but at the same time, it's undeniable that Heidegger was extremely well-versed in the entirety of the history of Western philosophy, and (at least some of) his work makes genuine contributions to legitimate philosophical problems. (His What is Metaphysics is interesting and approachable.)
Thus Spake Zarathrusta threw me badly though and I've not returned to it since.
Aaaaa what a tragedy! Zarathustra is a terrible book, it's easily the worst thing he ever wrote. I don't blame people for assuming that it's a natural starting place for reading Nietzsche though. He himself insisted from the day it was published to the day he died that it was his best work. I have no idea why. He was simply wrong about that. I can only assume that he was just trolling and trying to filter people or something.
If you ever want to return to Nietzsche, I would recommend Twilight of the Idols, Gay Science, and Genealogy of Morality in that order. I think that would give you a relatively balanced overview of his project and his main concerns.
But in general I have the sense that much appreciation of continental philosophy actually primarily relies on vibes and not coherent sense-making.
Like I've been saying, you have to make judgements on a book by book, paragraph by paragraph basis. Almost all the specific books I've recommended throughout this thread are approachable and can be read like any other book, and they do make coherent sense, such that you could explain them to analytic philosophers without too much trouble.
And sometimes you get sentences that function on multiple levels, instead of adhering to a strict "semantic meaning vs vibes-based" distinction. So, for example, when Lacan says "woman does not exist; Woman cannot be said", you can "decode" this to get the "literal" meaning of "there is no single paradigmatic successful example that women can model themselves after, unlike how an individual man can aspire to be 'The Man' (people say 'you're the man, man' but they never say 'you're the woman, girl'); social expectations for women are perpetually and irreconcilably split between the Madonna and the whore". This is how many of his commentators interpret him, especially if they're writing a "Lacan 101" type introduction. But you can also choose to just let your mind run free with the poetic, vibes-based associations. I think some continental texts are very much intended to get your brain to trigger both modes of cognition at once.
I have you pegged as "flighty wordcel who is way too interested in austere, self-referential literature and art" and that's meant as a compliment. The profile of your interests isn't super typical here and it adds flavour and depth to the Motte, I don't like it much when people downvote them.
Thank you, I really appreciate that. Some number of downvotes is actually a good thing. If I only ever got upvotes, then that would mean I was just agreeing with the hivemind on everything and I wasn't saying anything that challenged people and made them push back.
Primaprimaprima
1yr ago
What? The majority of people here are either INTJ or INTP…
(Ok among the self reports here it’s only slightly tilted to INTx rather than super strongly tilted but I still think INTx is a solid majority)
Primaprimaprima
1yr ago
I’m definitely the sort of person whose most conscious experience is thinking through things like I’m making a logical argument, pulling in information from the environment to try and enhance that logic, and then dragging my feelings along.
That's really interesting! I didn't have you pegged that way based on some of your other posts, but I suppose it does fit.
The idea that someone could experience "logical argumentation" as their default mode of conscious experience is definitely very interesting to me. I mean I understand intellectually that there's no reason why that couldn't be the case, and I know that there are many people who would report that they think this way. But it's rather foreign to me, because logic to me is a tool, it's not where I live. The urge to typical-mind is so strong, so when people report to me that this is how they are by default, I always have a little urge to ask... really? Do you actually not experience your mind as a buzz of images and sounds by default? It's quiet and "logical" up there? Really?
Primaprimaprima
1yr ago
Based on the descriptions, I'm more of a Four. (...and that's exactly what the test gave me, 4w3. That probably should really be 4w5 though, because I have rather idiosyncratic conceptions of "status" and "success" that probably don't line up with what the test authors had in mind.)
I think there's a difference between, do you like to categorize people because it's another interesting data point about how they work, or do you like to categorize people because you want to know the color of their soul.
Primaprimaprima
1yr ago
This is a disgusting form of submissive behavior.
Surely that all depends on your perspective, doesn't it!
I would never get one myself, ever. But I don't judge other people for getting them. The correlation with criminality seems rather low given how popular they are these days.
Primaprimaprima
1yr ago
Japanese pop culture may not be for you, unfortunately.
(Although, it should be pointed out, there is an entire subgenre of shows/games/books that feature, well, all-male casts, if you'd prefer that...)
Primaprimaprima
1yr ago
"Beauty is pain."
Primaprimaprima
1yr ago
Yeah, I think part of the reason why I'm so drawn to this stuff is that I'm always looking for language to describe why I feel so different. I'm both highly abstract and also feelings-based, which is... just unusual in general I think, but especially so for men. When I read the description of Ni-dominant thinking I was just like, yeah, that is what it feels like (subjectively speaking anyway).
I agree that MBTI can be overly restrictive and has a hard time describing people who are blends of different traits. It's a bit silly that according to MBTI you can't have both introverted thinking and introverted feeling for example, I think it's pretty clear that there are people who fit the descriptions of both. But I still think there's something illuminating about it regardless.
Primaprimaprima
1yr ago
Fall Out Boy and My Chemical Romance, Panic and Avril
Your daughter has fantastic taste in music, but it’s a bit interesting that kids today are still listening to the bands of the previous generation, no?
Maybe there’s something to that whole “death of culture / cultural stasis” idea.
Primaprimaprima
1yr ago
Oh yeah for sure, anyone who identifies as a Rationalist in the LW sense or has an affinity for that style of thinking is basically an INTJ or INTP by definition.
Primaprimaprima
1yr ago
This is a really big area that I’m largely ignorant of. Here’s an overview of the historical development of the Big Five model with copious citations, particularly with reference to studies on cross-cultural validation of the Big Five categories.
I note that the paper notes that, methodologically, research into the Big Five “originated in studies of natural language trait terms […] For the layperson, personality is defined by such terms as friendly, high-strung, and punctual. These are the basic ways in which individuals understand themselves and others”. I sense an effortpost in the future on the relationship between ordinary language philosophy and this approach to psychology.
Primaprimaprima
1yr ago
Does anyone here know their Myers-Briggs type or ever tried to figure it out?
Ok yes I know it's pseudoscience, I know it's not much better than a horoscope, but it's the fun thread gimme a break. If we can talk about tarot we can talk about MBTI. (MBTI at least is willing to talk about the weaknesses and negative aspects of different personality types, which makes it a little better than a horoscope.)
I think I'm an INFx (never quite sure on the last letter). Or at least an INxx. Probably most people who enjoy long internet arguments are an INxx of some kind.
Most people think you're supposed to just mix and match the four letters (decide if you're an introvert or extrovert for I or E, thinker or feeler for T or F, etc) but actually what it's really "about" is the "cognitive function stack", the cognitive tools that you use to process information and make decisions. The four letter personality type is just a code for a specific function stack. So for the INTP for example, their functions (from most dominant to least dominant) are Ti Ne Si Fe - introverted thinking, extroverted intuition, introverted sensing, and extroverted feeling. The "introverted" functions are more private, more about determining the texture of your inner experience, more about how you generate thoughts and ideas internally, and the "extroverted" functions are how you interface with the outside world, those are the aspects of your experience that you want to share around and make public, you're more likely to want to know how other people are experiencing that same function, etc.
If nothing else, I think the idea of different individual aspects of your cognition being introverted or extroverted, rather than introversion/extroversion being a single trait, is interesting and may have some use.
The "word on the street" among the conspiracy crowd is that the "most requested" age range at Epstein Island was 14-16. That was typical. It was mainly Epstein himself who had the more, well, "unusual" preferences.
Completely unverified rumors! Make of it what you will!
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