Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
"...Perhaps laughter will then have formed an alliance with wisdom; perhaps only 'gay science' will remain."
User ID: 342
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
23d ago
That is not just how it goes.
It's pretty close to how it goes.
Do you believe that human emotions exist?
I should certainly think so! I'd wager I'm at least 2-sigma above the mean in terms of the intensity and variety of emotions I experience on a daily basis.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
8mo ago
Defining art in the way you do is like defining marriage as a convenient way to save on rent
That's exactly what it's not! That would be a utilitarian definition of marriage. I am offering what I believe to be a thoroughly anti-utilitarian conception of art.
What is the work of art to you when it no longer has a use? When it doesn't teach you anything, when it doesn't help you do anything, when you don't gain anything from it? Do you only value it as long as it still has a functional purpose, as long as there is still some benefit to be gained (such as, knowledge of beauty and truth)? That's the real question.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
8mo ago
Why, though? What is it about AI art that prompts such outrage?
I take the "A" view on AI art, and you take the "B" view.
...But then, why would you expect others to respect your own appeals to freedom, when you've concluded that no one actually cares about Freedom as such as a terminal value?
I may still fall back on appeals to freedom at times out of laziness or force of habit, but I've been gradually trying to work it out of my vocabulary for a while now. If the best argument you have in favor of something is "well, you could just not tell me to not do it", then that is a little lame. With regards to sexuality, for example, I believe that a libertine sexual ethos is part of a system of spiritual values that can be given its own positive defense on its own independent merits.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
8mo ago
Maybe it's mostly because people get off on being judgy these days, and believing they have some sort of moral high ground, and less that they actually care about artists?
No. That's not it.
I'm not, typically, a moralist. I hate cancel culture; I hate people who act like they can judge others. I roll my eyes equally at leftists who work themselves into knots over sexism and racism, and trads who gnash their teeth at the withering away of the values of yesteryear. Whatever happened, I ask, to freedom? Isn't anyone going to stand up for freedom? Freedom, the most protean of all ideals, against the dreary weave of thou-shalts and thou-shalt-nots: the freedom to dare and dream, the freedom to be true to what is one's ownmost, no matter how idiosyncratic, no matter how questionable or uncanny.
But freedom has a limit; it is, after all, only one ideal among many, one concept among many, no matter how charming of a concept it may be. I can't actually bring myself to get upset if someone gets canceled over AI art. That's how high the stakes are for me - my other "principles" turn to dust in the face of this reality. This makes me a hypocrite; but so what? If I contradict myself, then very well, I contradict myself. Some instincts are too powerful to be ignored.
I think most people have a limit like this - the limit beyond which talk of "freedom" reveals itself to be a hollow game, a luxury to be reserved for more genteel times, a mirage that dissipates when it is confronted with something of genuine weight and seriousness. AI art is that limit for me; other people will have their own, and I will try not to judge them for it, even when I find their beliefs to be incomprehensible. For the individuals who truly have (or at least claim to have) no limit, no possible limit to freedom, we might rightly view them with suspicion. Attempting to subsist on a spiritual diet consisting of nothing but the NAP alone is the veganism of the soul; it is lacking a certain red-blooded vitality, there is something missing. There can be no great love without great hatred.
I'm not sure, but I would have thought the Butlerian Jihad would have started for something more severe than art.
The fact that you are so perplexed by the response is, indeed, part of the frustration.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
9mo ago
an architect might respond that he should be unconstrained by the ressentiment of the plebs when he is exerting his own will upon the built environment at massive scales.
This is roughly the position I would endorse, yes.
It's ironic that on the one hand Eisenman is being accused of being a socialist, and on the other hand we have multiple people arguing that Eisenman has a moral duty to uphold a certain traditional standard of beauty in the public commons, even if this runs contrary to the intentions of his private financial backers. Should we put all architectural decisions up to a public vote, to ensure that no buildings are ever constructed which the majority would find offensive? If I found the appeal to democracy to be persuasive, then perhaps I would be more likely to be a socialist! But I am not a socialist, and I have no particular fondness for democracy. I will celebrate any opportunity for an artist to carry on his work while unconstrained by the demands of mass taste.
As for Eisenman's work itself, it's maybe not perfectly aligned with my own taste, but it's also not nearly as grotesque as some of the people here are making it out to be. I think his House VI is quite lovely, although admittedly that's largely due to the juxtaposition of the structure with the environs rather than due to the intrinsic properties of the structure itself.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
2yr ago
Are the replication crisis in academia, the Russian military's apparent fecklessness in Ukraine, and GPT hallucinations (along with rationalist's propensity to chase them), all manifestations of the same underlying noumenon?
Plainly not.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
2yr ago
You want it both ways then man. ... special accommodations are not correct.
Au contraire.
A computer system is not a work of art; a work of art is not a human individual; and a human individual is not society as a whole. Things that are distinct should be judged by their own distinct standards that are proper to them. A standard of correctness that applies to one type of thing may not apply to another type; indeed, the entire notion of correctness may be appropriate to one category but actively detrimental to another.
Not that I have any particular qualms about contradicting myself anyway. Contradiction bears witness to the life of thought.
But we can't have that
I want what I want, based on my judgment of what is good and proper. It's no skin off my back if I "can't have it".
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
2yr ago
I feel confident in asserting that it wouldn’t. But, I recognize that this is something I can’t know for sure and I could be wrong.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
21d ago
As I have said, you really need to reevaluate the claim that you are "2 sigma" beyond the depth and breadth of emotions that most people are experiencing.
I'm always open to evaluating new evidence to the contrary. But this claim of mine has been confirmed time and again in my experience. In particular, I'm quite confident that I'm more of a doe-eyed hopeless romantic than you are.
It appears I have been largely unsuccessful in communicating my views on love. I would recommend reading Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling if you want to understand my views on love better.
The book describes the dialectical stages of the development of Abraham's faith when he is asked by God to sacrifice Isaac. We begin at "mere" faith, a mere unreflective belief -- his mode of relation to his faith is unmediated immediacy, because this faith has not yet been subjected to critical inquiry. We proceed through doubt, despair, and resignation, until finally arriving at a faith that is identical to the faith we started with, and yet somehow not the same at all. He's back exactly where he started, and yet everything is different. His faith is now a mediated immediacy, mediated by the preceding dialectical development; he no longer believes in spite of the absurd, he believes because it is absurd to believe, the absurd is his reason for believing.
In brief: there is no such thing as authentic love until you have realized the impossibility of love.
Love is impossible. But its impossibility is what makes it beautiful. If it weren't impossible, it would have no value.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
3mo ago
You could argue that the mere act of creating art at all is already an admission that there is something deficient or lacking in nature such that it needs to be supplemented by human creation.
And artificial/non-natural subject matter has always existed in art, see for example Hieronymus Bosch or the three headed Jesus paintings.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
3mo ago
People in general far prefer natural environments to man-made ones, studies on the topic have tended to show that people find landscapes that depart far from the rule of nature more uncomfortable than those that don't.
Right, but there's a high correlation between the types of people who tend to prefer man-made beauty to natural beauty, and the types of people who tend to become artists. So their own aesthetic preferences get amplified and displayed to the public.
I would be fine with architects building these things if they were just making art for display in a dedicated space.
There have to be limits of some kind, of course. But within reason, I generally lean on the side of privileging the freedom of the (public) artist, regardless of the aesthetic preferences of the public who will be exposed to their work. If it's that important to you, then you should consider becoming an artist too. And if it's not sufficiently important to you, then you are at the mercy of the people to whom it was sufficiently important.
it's a bit unclear where the defence of Eisenman starts
The most relevant section is everything between "McGowan and Engley" and "the Aristotelian idea of the virtuous mean".
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
9mo ago
Many of the people in all of those sub-cultures really would have more fun being in a traditional sorority with all the really charismatic and hot people than being around their own kind.
In many ways, "cool" is just another sub-culture, just like any other. It appeals to some people and not to others. I found clubs and frat parties to be painfully boring when I was in college.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
9mo ago
What if music challenged you?
Great idea! You'd be missing out on a lot of brilliant music if you avoided everything that was challenging.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
9mo ago
My apologies, I haven't watched the video yet. Did he say why he wants his buildings to cause pain?
It's reminiscent of a quote from my favorite Freudo-Marxist podcast: "real art cuts into you; it takes something away from you". And this immediately struck me as quite correct. The greatest aspiration of art is the experience of the mystical, in Wittgenstein's sense of the term - the that-which-must-be-passed-over-in-silence. This is a fundamentally traumatic experience - it is the discovery of what is most uncanny in what is most familiar.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
1yr ago
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.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
1yr ago
I think the biggest issue is that he assumed all these ‘great’ thinkers of the past actually had a point.
He read their works and found value in them. You can also read his work, look at the claims he cites, and decide if it makes sense to you or not. There’s no confession of faith required, just reading and thinking about what you read, same as you do in many other contexts.
Saying that Adorno and Horkheimer said something isn’t a valid argument if Adorno and Horkheimer were making bad arguments in the first place.
No one thinks that simply citing a claim from a canonical text makes it authoritative. Everyone who writes philosophy is acutely aware that, for every historical philosopher they admire, there are legions of other philosophers who think that guy was an idiot, all his arguments were trash, etc. No one has any illusions about anything being authoritative.
Citing a claim is just you telling the reader where you got it from, nothing more. It’s still on you to evaluate the claim, check the primary source if you want, etc.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
1yr ago
I've heard Continental Philosophy described as the attempt to reconcile Freud and Marx.
I mean, both Freud and Marx are certainly very central and influential figures in continental philosophy. You might even be able to say that the project (or one of the projects) of the Frankfurt school was reconciling Freud and Marx. But it would be wrong to describe all of continental philosophy that way. There are continental thinkers who make little reference to either of them. It also doesn't cover the historical figures like Hegel and Schopenhauer who were retroactively declared to be "continental" and who were writing before Marx!
Really the best definition of continental is "European philosophy that's not analytic". Bertrand Russell and some co-conspirators decided that philosophy needed a reboot in the early 20th century, largely on account of his passionate rejection of Hegel, and that's the project that eventually grew into analytic philosophy. So maybe you could also define continental as "someone who thinks Hegel isn't total nonsense and deserves at least some kind of response" (but even that's not a perfect definition, because Hegel and Heidegger, two of the biggest villains for the early analytics, are receiving increasing attention from analytics today).
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
1yr ago
"Right Wing" does not mean "religious." There's a correlation between the two, obviously, but imo that's more the result of history than philosophical alignment.
I believe that a certain type of magical thinking is, if not a necessary component of the rightist personality, then at least a prominent and salient feature of it across multiple diverse manifestations. (I raised the question here recently of whether there was actually something to leftist accusations of "right-wing conspiracy theories", the question of whether the rightist mind might actually be more prone to conspiratorial thinking.)
Nietzsche is the archetypal example to study here. In terms of his explicitly avowed philosophical commitments, he was the arch-materialist, not only denying God but also any notion of value (aesthetic or moral), free will, a unified conscious "self" that could be responsible for its actions, and at times he seemed to suggest that even the concept of "truth" had too much supernatural baggage and should be rejected on those grounds. And yet throughout his work he couldn't stop himself from making constant reference to the inner states of man's "soul", relying on analogies and parables that featured Greek gods and demons, judging people by a standard of authenticity which on any plain reading he should have been forced to reject, and courting overt mysticism with his concept of the "eternal recurrence". This was a fundamental psychological tendency expressing itself, a yearning for a reality which he could not explicitly avow. Not only could he not excise these concepts from his thinking but they were essential to him, it was the fiat currency of his psychic economy.
Or look at Heidegger who, despite having a complicated relationship with Christianity and attempting to distance himself from it, and heavily critiquing Cartesian dualism in his early work, ended up throwing himself head-on into mysticism in his later works (for example his lectures on Hölderlin).
This passage from Heidegger's Country Path Conversations is illuminating:
GUIDE: Perhaps even space and everything spatial for their part first find a reception and a shelter in the nearing nearness and in the furthering farness, which are themselves not two, but rather a one, for which we lack the name.
SCHOLAR: To think this remains something awfully demanding.
GUIDE: A demand which, however, would come to us from the essence of nearness and farness, and which in no way would be rooted in my surmise.
SCIENTIST: Nearness and farness are then something enigmatic.
GUIDE: How beautiful it is for you to say this.
SCIENTIST: I find the enigmatic oppressive, not beautiful.
SCHOLAR: The beautiful has rather something freeing to it.
SCIENTIST: I experience the same thing when I come across a problem in my science. This inspires the scientist even when it at first appears to be unsolvable, because, for the scientist faced with a problem, there are always certain possibilities for preparing and carrying out pertinent investigations. There is always some direction in which research can knuckle down and go toward an object, and thus awaken the feeling of domination that fuels scientific work.
SCHOLAR: By contrast, before the enigma of nearness and farness we stand helplessly perplexed.
SCIENTIST: Most of all we stand idle.
GUIDE: And we do not ever attend to the fact that presumably this perplexity is demanded of us by the enigma itself.
If there is such a thing as an identifiable core of the "rightist mind", I believe it consists in finding the enigmatic beautiful rather than oppressive.
(I cite these examples because, rather than being the psychological eccentricities of a few individuals, I observe the same patterns in contemporary rightists, albeit in an attenuated form.)
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
1yr ago
Yes, I think university should be for teaching technical skills that actually increase humam capital. Yes I do think STEM is more useful for mankind.
STEM gave us:
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Nuclear weapons
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Lockdowns, contact tracing, and vaccine passes
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Rapidly increased spread of social epidemics like transsexuality
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AIs that can scan all your private communications and report you for wrongthink and precrime
We need people who challenge the uncritical worship of STEM. The university should be the institution where that happens.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
2yr ago
There's a very wide diversity of viewpoints in the DR. Claims made by one person may not be valid for another.
generally in favor of state-backed discrimination against racial minorities
The DR is in favor of racially homogeneous societies. There shouldn't be any racial minorities around to discriminate against in the first place, because they should be living somewhere else, among their own people where they can be governed by laws of their own making.
policies restricting women's ability to participate in society and politics as equals to men.
I wouldn't be surprised if there were some influential figures in the DR who supported this. But in general the DR doesn't spend too much time talking about women's issues, because they're viewed as secondary to racial issues. More of a day 2 item than a day 1 item.
For what it's worth, one of the leaders of the UK group Patriotic Alternative is a woman, and the National Justice Party's official platform summary says nothing about women. So they're not exactly frothing at the mouth to put women in chains or anything.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
2yr ago
the good kind of neural net that every AAA game is going to be using
“AAA games” should not exist either, so I just view this as killing two birds with one stone.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
2yr ago
Just wanted to say that I agree with what you've written here and I've had similar thoughts before myself.
I've always thought that poison was the most contemptible way to die.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
2yr ago
What the AI is doing is exactly what I do every time I pick up a pencil: synthesize novel output from a broad collection of previous data.
Well, most of what professional commercial artists do on a day-to-day basis isn't exactly creative either.
The paradigmatic examples of creativity are novel ideas that register on a world-historical scale, such as Cantor's development of set theory and the hierarchy of infinite cardinals. Such ideas are necessarily rare. If a work doesn't fit into this elite class, then I question if it can be called genuinely creative. At times I have wondered (but never seriously believed) if any work of art could ever be novel enough to qualify as genuinely creativity. As Hilbert once quipped, "for a mathematician, he did not have enough imagination, but now he has become a poet, and everything is fine."
I don't want to position myself as the god-emperor of creativity, or pretend that I have a set of hard and fast rules to apply. I just want us to have standards for ourselves, is all. As we descend further down the scale towards ordinariness, from world-historical successes, to works that are widely considered to be of exceptional quality, down to the average things that average professionals produce in their average careers, it becomes less and less clear whether the adjective "creative" continues to apply. I am not proclaiming anything with certainty one way or the other. There is just less clarity.
AI art obscures these questions and pushes them away from the central place that they should occupy in our thought.
"Wheee yippee, now we can all be creative! Thanks, AI!"
I find this to be offensive nonsense.
Ideas can be encapsulated and compressed
How would you compress this into a prompt? Without using explicit identifying terms like "Paul Klee" or "Angelus Novus".
I encourage you to run your prompt by the AI and see how close it can get.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
1d ago
Seething contempt is fine if it’s expressed politely, which Turok has done imo.
A couple things:
One, I'm not sure what I said that gave you this impression. Presumably you thought my description of the typical relationship as "an exchange of resources for sex" somehow precluded the presence of love in such a relationship. But I never said that.
Two, I'm not sure how my conception of love is relevant to the task of determining what critics of prostitution find morally blameworthy about prostitution. Maybe your claim is that a prostitution transaction is devoid of love, and is thereby deficient. Ok, that may very well be true. But deficiency is not the same as blameworthiness. I don't see why the loveless prostitute should be a "predator" and a "demon" simply because she is loveless. She's not stopping you from falling in love with whoever you please! Lots of people are deficient in all sorts of things. The man who drives an old beat up car is using a deficient mode of transportation in comparison to the man who drives a new sports car, but there's nothing morally blameworthy about driving an old car. Not everyone has to own everything and experience everything, and that's ok!
Furthermore, I find the assertion that the prostitute is necessarily loveless to be rather presumptuous. I see no reason why there couldn't be someone she loves; perhaps even her clients.
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