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
1d 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
8d ago
rape is an expression of power, not an act of lust
You know I used to think this was nonsense (along with its stronger and more generalized form, "sex for men is about power rather than lust"), but the more time I spend thinking about the way that different men conceive of and relate to sex, the more I start to think there's some truth for it.
If you look at any of the "redpilled manosphere" guys - Rollo, Andrew Tate, Fresh & Fit, anyone in that milieu - I think it's clear that they view women first and foremost as an economic resource to be managed and optimized, and the pleasure that they derive from their own status as an "alpha" is more central than the pleasure that they derive from the woman's body itself. In fact a man completely losing himself in the thrall of pleasure while in the presence of a woman would be viewed with suspicion - he's a simp, he's unmanly, he doesn't know how to control himself, etc.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
12d ago
Wait, what?
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
13d ago
the higher level stuff doesn’t seem that useful to me.
Sex isn’t very useful either most of the time, but that doesn’t diminish the appeal.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
17d ago
This creates an internal contradiction for them
For the far right?
They don’t think so. In fact they’ve been anticipating this situation for years, see the parable of the golem.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
20d ago
You can't act on disbeliefs.
Whenever someone uses the word "can't" when talking about the human mind, I get suspicious. What would you say about the following:
For my entire life I've had some relatively mild sub-clinical symptoms of OCD, particularly centered around the idea of keeping things symmetrical. Sometimes if I accidentally brush up against something with one hand for example, I'll suddenly be struck by the thought that if I don't touch it with the other hand as well, I'll die in my sleep that night. Of course I know and believe that this is false. I can even tell myself in the moment that it's false, and I believe what I'm telling myself. But nevertheless it really just feels like I should touch it with my other hand, so I do.
Rationally, I know that touching random benign ordinary objects in the environment can have no impact on my odds of sudden death. It's an absurd belief. I'm intelligent enough to recognize that there's no possible causal connection there. And yet I continue to act as though I do believe it.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
20d ago
Do you ever just like, feel bad when you do something wrong? Like ever?
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
28d ago
I'm sure there's no post on the site where someone was modded for the literal string "people who don't support Ukraine are too stupid to be allowed to vote", but I think the appropriate comparison is to look at other posts where people were modded for "boo outgroup" and compare the aggressiveness of the boos. Like, if "Canada seems to be doing its damnedest to ski down that slope right off that cliff" is worthy of getting modded, then I would think that "too stupid to be allowed to vote" is also in mod territory.
(I'm aware that FarNearEverywhere's post history was an aggravating factor here, but presumably if the linked comment itself didn't cross some absolute threshold then it wouldn't have attracted mod attention in the first place regardless of her post history.)
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
4d ago
Looking at the AAQCs from August 2022, something like half of those people are still posting here regularly. It's largely the same people posting here now that were posting back then. So I'm not sure when you think the alleged golden age was, but apparently, it was more than two years ago. (Which means you're still posting on a forum that you think has been shit for 2+ years.)
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
5d ago
But there are already lots of places on the internet for low effort dumb fun stuff. /pol/. rDrama. Whatever floats your boat. I don’t need TheMotte to become those sites. It’s fine for them to remain separate.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
7d ago
I understand that that rule is supposed to be an elastic clause, and I agree on the practical necessity of having an elastic clause. But I think it's also good to minimize governing by the elastic clause as much as possible.
In this case we have identified something that is an explicit rule and can be phrased relatively unambiguously - either "don't backtalk to a mod" or "don't state your intent to violate the rules", whatever formulation you prefer - so why not just add it as an explicit rule?
(I also simply disagree that either of FNE's posts in that thread were egregiously obnoxious, although I think her first post that got the initial warning was an unambiguous violation of the rules on courtesy and low-effort posting.)
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
12d ago
Has Zizek ever put out any idea that had any tangible effect on the real world?
You could ask the same question about the majority of academics in both the humanities and STEM and the answer would be "no". So it's not a very interesting question.
That being said, Zizek is reasonably well-connected and is e.g. friends with Yanis Varoufakis, the former finance minister of Greece, so I wouldn't be surprised if he influenced the thinking of someone in power at some point.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
20d ago
Traditionally for adult Japanese games sold on steam like Muv-Luv and Subahibi they were censored and you had to download a separate patch from an external source to put the porn back in. Maybe Valve has gotten more permissive recently and I missed the memo.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
21d ago
I'm no expert on Russian history, but if enough people hate the Tzar enough, then the Tzar could be counterculture and supporting him could be counterculture as well. I think there's a strong argument that supporting Trump during his presidency was also countercultural for example, despite him being "the most powerful man in the world".
Porn is not the Tzar though and I imagine the analogy will break down quickly if we try to push it too far.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
21d ago
It's because his aggregate comment score is in a crater.
We really should disable that aspect of the feature imo.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
21d ago
Who are you arguing with?
I'm arguing against the view, which I have seen expressed by social conservatives often enough, that we live in an irredeemably sexualized society that has thrown off all measure of restraint. Sometimes this includes a conspiratorial component that the pornography industry promotes porn explicitly for its deleterious social effects. This view has been argued for on TheMotte before - "The technocrats pretend to believe in that so that they can trick normies into hypersexual practices that obliterate communities."
In fact the primal fear of sexuality is still operative the same as it ever was, and in some aspects has possibly intensified, compared to previous historical eras. (Not that I'm arguing that this fear is necessarily irrational or misguided. Some things do indeed deserve to be feared. When we are confronted with such a deeply rooted psychological impulse that has endured through so many changes in the outward form of social organization, its etiology demands careful consideration. I'm here to understand, not to moralize.)
Visa and MasterCard see pornography as high risk because they get a lot of chargebacks, so they charge adult services producers a much higher rate for payment processing.
Sure, that would be fine if opposition to porn was restricted to payment processors. But it's not just payment processors.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
23d ago
Keeping in mind that this is probably a hypothetical anyway because I doubt anyone will go to the effort of adding the feature, I'm gonna go with "hard no".
First, there's something psychologically appealing about having a single unified measure of a comment's quality. I'm already not a huge fan of how LW has two comment scores, one for general quality and one for agree/disagree. I like the idea of not letting people "hedge their bets" - it's either a good comment or it's not, regardless of how the specific component vectors of the quality score break down. If there's a very well written comment that argues for a view that you find repugnant, then I think you should have to take an up/down stance on the comment and live with your choice.
Regarding the longer/shorter vote button specifically - we already have an official rule against low effort posting. So a "should be longer" button would be somewhat superfluous. If the comment is a problem, then a mod will give you a warning for low effort posting. That's the "should be longer" button.
I know that a lot of people would appreciate a "should be shorter" button because the length of posts on this site has been a source of constant complaints, but as I've argued repeatedly whenever this topic comes up, I really value the fact that TheMotte is one of the few public discussion forums on the internet that encourages long-form posting, and I want to keep it that way. Some of my all time favorite posts on the site, posts that really stood out to me as just being fantastic pieces of writing, are quite long. So I'm fine with people just going crazy with it. Not every long post is good of course - sometimes the writing is just bad, sometimes it's on a topic that you have no interest in, etc. But then you can just downvote, ignore, and/or collapse the thread.
I get frustrated whenever people trot out that "if only I had more time I could have made this letter shorter" line. It's diametrically opposed to my own aesthetics. I want to cultivate this site as a space for people who actually enjoy reading and writing, because there are very few spaces that serve that purpose.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
25d ago
What's up with all the non-Mormons? Weirdly specific universalities across LLMs
As seen in the previous section, without even venturing into the semantic void (i.e. no customised embeddings being employed), Pythia 2.8b and 12b, when prompted with the “empty string definition” prompt
A typical definition of '' would be '
both produce, with greedy sampling, the output
a person who is not a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
I really love these posts about glitchy LLM behavior, they scratch the same itch as e.g. analyses of glitches used in speedrunning.
Someone posted a response from "Claude" (Opus I assume? It's unspecified) in the comments section on the post. A couple things struck me about it:
-
If your main exposure to human writing is via facebook posts and frontpage reddit comments, then you might be forgiven for thinking that LLMs are already highly intelligent and have lots of deep wisdom to share.
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It's not clear to me that Claude demonstrates an understanding of what's actually at issue with this phenomenon, i.e. the simple fact that '' (whether interpreted as the empty string, or two literal characters) doesn't have a "definition". It does note that it was "hallucinating", which is on the right track, but that's juxtaposed with "the exercise of sitting with the indeterminacy and openness of the empty string...", which is obviously rather silly and is more indicative of it treating the task as legitimate, rather than recognizing it for the pseudotask that it is. (I'm sure that if you prompted it directly it would be able to tell you that '' has no "definition", but the issue here is whether it was able to incorporate that understanding into this particular response.)
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
29d ago
But unlike my genes I do care about human happiness
Trust me, I do too. But nature doesn't. Our hopes and dreams have to be tempered by reality.
If feminine standards are telling them to be an unmarried cat owner looking for Mr. Right at age 35 then maybe we should examine why
Well, this sounds like a slightly different complaint than what we had at the start. This is less about women's standards/status being too high and more like women just opting out of the game altogether.
And aren't men doing the same thing? How many men haven't even tried to go on a date in years, instead just retreating inside and living on the computer? I don't think you can pin the blame solely on women here.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
2d ago
What happened to @ymeskhout?
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
8d ago
I agree. She’s welcome to return at any time, but I imagine she might be too proud for that. If she doesn’t return, it’ll be a deep loss to the forum.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
13d ago
Hlynka reminded me that there is no solution, that there is no plan, that we are not in control of the world; all we control is ourselves; we make our choices and live with the consequences.
I'm in complete agreement on this point!
Anyway, I think one of the crucial issues is that, as I raised at the end of the previous thread, "we know how to solve all our problems" isn't a good criteria for partitioning equivalence classes of political ideologies. As an epistemic attitude, it can be mixed and matched with multiple different ideologies.
Suppose we have three different people:
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#1 is a Marxist who thinks we know how to solve all our problems. He unabashedly thinks that the proletarian revolution will usher in a utopia.
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#2 is a standard American libertarian who also thinks we know how to solve all our problems. Say the story is something like, free market democratic capitalism is the only ideology that will engender the type of scientific research and economic growth we need to develop ASI. And once we have ASI we'll have a utopia.
-
#3 is a standard American libertarian who is virtually identical to #2 on all substantive policy issues, except that he doesn't think we know how to solve all our problems. He doesn't think libertarianism will lead to a utopia, but he believes in it and advocates for it anyway, even though he acknowledges that the ultimate outcome of all our political actions is always uncertain.
So, who is identical with who? And who's the odd man out here?
Based on the importance you assign to the criteria of "knowing how to solve all our problems", it seems like you'd be forced to say that #1 and #2 are the same, and #3 is different. But this just seems wrong. The more natural classification is that the two libertarians are the same (and indeed, getting hung up on whether libertarianism can lead to a utopia or not would be a narcissism of small differences), and the Marxist is different.
I'm also skeptical that, if given the choice between living in a Stalinist regime ruled by #1, or a somewhat more libertarian version of 2024 America with #2 as the four year duly elected president, you would say "it doesn't matter to me, they both think we know how to solve all our problems, so I have no preference for one country over the other".
For hardcore Nietzscheans who consider all Abrahamism slave morality
It's worth remembering that in Nietzsche's discussion of master/slave morality in the Genealogy, he initially introduces slave morality as a structural phenomenon - it's defined by its relationship with other systems of morality, not by its inherent content, which therefore at least in principle opens up the possibility of a type of Christianity that is not founded on slave morality (or indeed, the possibility that those who appear to be masters are actually slaves):
The beginning of the slaves’ revolt in morality occurs when ressentiment itself turns creative and gives birth to values: the ressentiment of those beings who, denied the proper response of action, compensate for it only with imaginary revenge. Whereas all noble morality grows out of a triumphant saying ‘yes’ to itself, slave morality says ‘no’ on principle to everything that is ‘outside’, ‘other’, ‘non-self ’: and this ‘no’ is its creative deed. This reversal of the evaluating glance – this essential orientation to the outside instead of back onto itself – is a feature of ressentiment: in order to come about, slave morality first has to have an opposing, external world, it needs, physiologically speaking, external stimuli in order to act at all, – its action is basically a reaction. The opposite is the case with the noble method of valuation: this acts and grows spontaneously, seeking out its opposite only so that it can say ‘yes’ to itself even more thankfully and exultantly, – its negative concept ‘low’, ‘common’, ‘bad’ is only a pale contrast created after the event compared to its positive basic concept, saturated with life and passion, ‘we the noble, the good, the beautiful and the happy!
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
21d ago
Men don’t want to feel like the kind of men who pay for porn.
Sure, but that doesn't seem like a good explanation for why payment processors would actually ban it. Unless you're alluding to the chargeback theory - but I'm skeptical that that theory can entirely explain their behavior without the need to invoke additional moral/political explanations.
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.
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