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
7d ago
No one who is suffering politically likes to be told "actually you have no enemies, it's all an illusion, move along nothing to see here". It's natural to want someone to blame. (And frequently, there is someone who can be blamed to at least some degree.)
When you look at:
- The mass exodus of porn from tumblr
- Patreon instituting overtly political/moralistic guidelines for what content is allowed on the platform (they went out of their way to say hypnosis porn is banned, what the fuck)
- Total porn ban on all the biggest social media sites, facebook, instagram, tiktok, youtube
- The extreme difficulty of getting adult content published on major distribution channels like Steam or the Apple/Google app stores
- The desexualization of media in general due to the rise of wokeism, particularly the sorts of casual non-explicit sexualization that would be appealing to a straight male audience
- Japanese adult game developers increasingly ditching porn altogether to comply with regulations on mobile app stores and to gain access to the Chinese market, which also has its own strict regulations
you start to get the impression that a lot of people really don't like porn. It's not an isolated incident. And this is all before we even get into the laws against loli manga in many countries, people literally going to jail for lines on paper that clearly depict fictional characters.
Some of these have nothing to do with payment processors either. I receive no payment for putting up free porn on tumblr or youtube, but I'm still not allowed to do it.
The porn artists might be more inclined to believe the "it's just a totally random confluence of business factors" theory if they felt that public sentiment was on their side. If they felt that people really did believe in a principle of free artistic expression, and it really was just the credit card companies who couldn't get on board for some reason. But you ask people about these porn bans and the typical response you get is something along the lines of "of course, this content is totally perverse and obscene, and probably harmful to children and society too, and no one in their right minds would actually want to be caught paying for or even looking at this stuff, and certainly no one will miss it if it's gone... but it's not being banned because people don't like it, don't be silly, it's really just those pesky chargebacks, sorry kid it's just business..."
Do you see why porn artists might get suspicious? Where are their allies? Who is actually willing to support them?
Granted, blaming it on Evangelicals is also wrong. But the basic impulse to see it as a political issue rather than a purely economic one is, I think, quite correct.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
6d ago
The main problem is that these guys think that under the perfect 'no Christian egalitarian shit' system, they would be LORDS AND MASTERS.
This is a criticism that frequently gets levied against rightists. And there's some truth to it. Some people really are just greedy sociopaths without any principles.
In an authentic anti-egalitarian politics, it ultimately doesn't matter much who the master is. We might have our own preferences of course, very strong preferences, but the final bedrock commitment is: if not me, then someone. Please let someone be beautiful and happy and triumphant, even if I am not. This is a moral impulse, the fulcrum on which everything turns. It's what separates a rightist from a grifter.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
10mo ago
So I guess Battletech is explicitly left wing now. You are not allowed to opt out of their politics.
I don’t want to be accused of parroting the standard libertarian line, but, you need to make your own stuff dude. You need to make your own Battletech, and enforce YOUR politics. (This is the royal “you” - the responsibility falls on all of us, not just you alone). You can’t depend on anyone else to do it for you, or to provide a space that will be amenable to you.
The right can’t complain about losing the culture war if they’re not even playing in the first place. Where’s your culture? What have you made?
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
1yr ago
Do any of these cover the obvious point that having kids is just really not a desirable thing at all? On an individual level, I mean - it is desirable that humans continue as a species, but this requires sacrifice on an individual level.
Having kids requires an insane investment of time and resources, for a payoff that can mostly be gotten easier from other sources (e.g. if what you’re after is companionship, you already have your spouse, why do you need to make more people on top of that?).
A typical argument for why having kids is a good thing in and of itself is that it provides “fulfillment”. But it’s an empirical fact that most people don’t require any fulfillment beyond what is provided by Netflix and Grubhub. Certainly the average human has no need for anything resembling a “life project” or a “continuance of legacy”.
In a vacuum, most people will choose not to have kids; they need some external impetus that makes it more desirable (e.g. strongly increased social status), or they need to simply be forced to in one way or another. In a state of nature, lack of access to birth control is a pretty good impetus - people won’t choose to have kids, but they will certainly choose to have sex - but that’s largely a solved problem in any modern country. So you can partially put me down for “birth control”, partially for “quality of available entertainment”, partially for this and that, but blaming any of these factors ultimately obscures the fact that wanting to have kids in the first place is the deviation in need of explanation.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
1yr ago
How do I become mainstream with my Catastrophizing that the combination of attention grabbing AI that subvert our lives with knowledge of behavioral psychology and the combination with generative AI giving us personalized content just massaging our brains just right?
I'm a little disappointed that "AI safety" is so strongly associated with Skynet-style scenarios, instead of concerns about (in my view) more plausible near-term AI risks like this (and others - social unrest from sudden mass unemployment, expanding surveillance capabilities, etc). But, I'm certainly willing to make common cause with the x-riskers if it also gets people thinking about near-term AI risks as well.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
9mo ago
From the UK: White pupils excluded from extra Saturday literacy lessons
Parents at a primary school in Haringey have been told that schools will fund Saturday school places for children from black and black heritage families to “accelerate progress in reading and writing whilst also developing the children’s knowledge of black history and culture”.
However, no comparable offer was made for white pupils despite parents arguing that evidence shows white working-class boys have fallen behind their peers.
Schools in Haringey and Enfield are able to enrol pupils for the classes at the Nia Academy which has been established by the Haringey Education Partnership (HEP), a not-for-profit organisation which provides services to member schools.
There was some discussion at the end of the last CW thread about the purpose of race-based immigration policies. Why not just test directly for IQ? Why use race, which can only be a proxy for other desirable traits like IQ or low criminality? The simple answer is: to avoid situations like this!
In general, I think it's a mistake for ethnonationalists to focus so strongly on purportedly intrinsic psychological properties of certain groups, like IQ or criminality. It does leave you open to the question of why you're an ethno nationalist, instead of an IQ nationalist or a low-crime nationalist (a focus on crime rates in particular leads to consequences that are unpalatable for the far right: if your overriding goal is to reduce crime rates, then you should be trying to build a society that has as few males as possible!).
An argument for ethnonationalism that sidesteps these concerns is that racial discrimination and preferential race-based treatment are more difficult to implement in a racially homogeneous society. If everyone in your city is white, then it won't even make sense for the local school district to set up a special program for black children. Instead, they'll just direct their resources towards the one and only racial group that is actually present.
It will be objected that there can be intra-European ethnic conflicts as well. Why stop at European nationalism? Why not separate out, say, the Anglos and the Germans too, to make sure they don't start engaging in preferential ethnic treatment as well. To which I say: if that's what you want, then fine! If two European ethnic groups did get into an ethnic conflict, then I would recommend (as a possible option, assuming that reconciliation does not seem feasible) that they should split up and live apart from each other as well. But there is currently no such ethnic conflict. There are however active tensions between whites and other groups, so that's the level of analysis that people tend to work at. Ethnonationalism is not an a priori eternal first principle of political organization; it is a pragmatic proposal designed to ameliorate ongoing conflicts, the same way that a couple can propose a divorce if they aren't getting along.
Granted, I don't think a Saturday school program only for black children is a catastrophic loss for white children. I think the school system itself plays a rather small role in a child's "education" anyway, in comparison to genetics and the child's home environment. But it is symptomatic of how it is currently popular to show preferential treatment to non-whites in Western countries today. More sweeping examples would be university affirmative action (recently made illegal in the US, but, I don't think university admissions officers are simply going to give up consideration of race that easily) and corporate DEI initiatives. It simply wouldn't be as appealing for Disney to woke-ify their classic franchises if they were based in a country that was 95% white to begin with.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
10mo ago
It seems to me that the word “spew” is very left-coded in online discourse. “You’re just looking for an excuse to spew your hatred”, “he was spewing his racism and homophobia everywhere”, etc.
This is interesting because, in contrast to an overtly political term like “privilege”, or even a set phrase like “there’s a lot to unpack here”, the word “spew” is a longstanding and perfectly innocuous non-political term from ordinary language. And yet to my ears it has still taken on a political valence. I rarely hear a rightist say something like “and then he started spewing his politically correct nonsense”, if ever.
Can you think of any initially non-political words or patterns of speech that have become right-coded? (Or just more leftist examples - I know there are more besides just “spew” but I’m drawing a blank at the moment).
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
1yr ago
Modern gender theory is nonsense.
Men are men, women are women, don’t make it complicated.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
1yr ago
Do you think there are any psychological motivations that don’t ultimately reduce to personal power?
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
1mo ago
Slow news day? Guess I'll ramble for a bit.
Introduction
Certainly, here is a possible introduction for your topic:Lithium-metal batteries are promising candidates for high-energy-density rechargeable batteries due to their low electrode potentials and high theoretical capacities [1], [2]. However, during the cycle, dendrites forming on the lithium metal anode can cause a short circuit, which can affect the safety and life of the battery [3], [4], [5], [6], [7], [8], [9].
This is far from an isolated incident - a simple search of Google Scholar for the string "certainly, here is" returns many results. And that certainly isn't going to catch all the papers that have been LLM'd.
This raises the obvious question as to why I would bother reading your paper in the first place if non-trivial sections of it were written by an LLM. How can I trust that the rest of it wasn't written by an LLM? Why don't I cut out the middle man and just ask ChatGPT directly what it thinks about lithium-metal batteries and three-dimensional porous mesh structures?
All this fresh on the heels of youtube announcing that creators must now flag AI generated content in cases where omitting the label could be viewed as deceptive, because "it would be a shame if we (youtube) weren't in compliance with the new EU AI regulations", to which the collective response on Hacker News was "lmao okay, fair point. It would be a shame if we just lied about it."
It would be very boring to talk about how this represents a terminal decline in standards and the fall of the West, and how back in my day things were better and people actually took pride in their work, and how this is probably all part of the same vast conspiracy that's causing DEI and worse service at restaurants and $30 burgers at Five Guy's. Well of course people are going to be lazy and incompetent if you give them the opportunity. I'm lazy and incompetent too. I know what it feels like from the inside.
A more interesting theoretical question would be: are people always lazy and incompetent at the same rate, across all times and places? Or is it possible to organize society and culture in such a way that people are less likely to reach for the lazy option of copy and pasting ChatGPT output into their peer-reviewed journal articles; either because structural incentives are no longer aligned that way, or because it offends their own internal sense of moral decency.
You're always going to have a large swath of people below the true Platonic ideal of a 100 IQ individual, save large scale genetic engineering. That's just how it goes. Laziness I'm not so sure about - it seems like it might be easier to find historical examples of it varying drastically across cultures. Like, the whole idea of the American Revolution is always something that blew my mind. Was it really all about taxes? That sounds like the very-slightly-true sort of myth they teach you in elementary school that turns out to be not-actually-true-at-all. Do we have any historians who can comment? Because if it was all about taxes, then isn't that really wild? Imagine having such a stick up your ass about tax hikes that you start a whole damn revolution over it. Those were not "lazy" men, that's for sure. That seems like the sort of thing that could only be explained if the population had vastly different genetics compared to contemporary America, or a vastly different culture; unless there are "material conditions" that I'm simply not appreciating here.
Speaking of material conditions, Brian Leiter recently posted this:
"Sociological idealism" was Charles Mills's term for one kind of critique of ideology in Marx, namely, a critique of views that, incorrectly, treat ideas as the primary cause of events in the socio-economic world. Marx's target was the Left Young Hegelians (whose heirs in the legal academy were the flash-in-the-pan Critical Legal Studies), but the critique extends much more widely: every day, the newspapers and social media are full of pontificating that assumes that ideas are driving events. Marx was always interested in the question why ideologists make the mistakes they do.
Marx's view, as far as I can tell, was that ideas (including cultural values and moral guidelines) should be viewed as casually inert epiphenomena of the physical material and economic processes that were actually the driving forces behind social change. I don't know where he actually argues for this in his vast corpus, and I've never heard a Marxist articulate a convincing argument for it - it seems like they might just be assuming it (but if anyone does have a citation for it in Marx I would appreciate it!).
If Marx is right then the project of trying to reshape culture so as to make people less likely to copy and paste ChatGPT output into their peer-reviewed journal articles (I keep repeating the whole phrase to really drive it home) would flounder, because we would be improperly ascribing the cause of the behavior to abstract ideas when we should be ascribing it to material conditions. Which then raises the question of what material conditions make people accepting of AI output in the first place, and how those conditions might be different.
Will AI bring back beauty?
Currently, it is popular to hold that AI will soon be able to do everything. If this is the case, it trivially follows that it will be able to "bring back beauty" too - not to say that it would, but simply that it could do so, among many other things. Ignoring hypothetical scenarios of godhood however, I currently see no evidence that AI is advancing the cause of beauty in any meaningful way, and indeed I only see evidence that AI is contributing to its increasingly rapid erosion.
Your last sentence seems to indicate that you embrace the following distinction, common enough in popular discourse: on the one hand we have "the people", who are in touch with "true beauty" (either because they understand it intuitively, or maybe because true beauty just is whatever the people want, or however you want to explain it); and then on the other hand we have "the art community", who, for reasons unknown, have chosen to make a bunch of ugly crap that doesn't mean anything to anyone and has no worth.
I don't wish to defend the current art establishment tout court - they really do make a lot of crap that doesn't mean anything to anyone and has no worth. We agree on that much. But still, I think those high-falutin' art snobs do get some things right (it would be weird if they were so dysfunctional that they got everything exactly wrong). I want to take this opportunity to respond to (what I think is) your conception of beauty, and explain some of my reasons for dissenting from it, as someone who's coming from "the other side of the fence" so to speak.
What really first unlocked my thinking on issues like this is the idea of comparing work in the arts to academic work in other fields. You can imagine a physicist who thinks that classical mechanics is just like, the shit - and not even the parts of classical mechanics that are still the subject of active research like chaotic systems, but specifically stuff like Newton's original laws of motion. He just only wants to solve high school physics problems all day, maybe collect some observations that confirm your standard high school physics equations, and... that's it. And if anyone tells him that if he wants to stay relevant and get grant money, he really should consider working on contemporary problems in string theory or condensed matter, he just responds with "nah, you lost me with all that abstract modern stuff; I'm only into the real good stuff, the classical stuff".
Everyone would think that he was rather missing the point and that he wasn't living up to his proper function as a physicist. The proper job of a physicist is to discover and invent new things, not just repeat what's already been said. This is a reasonable standard to hold for most intellectual activity, and the "art cabal" simply thinks that it should hold for art as well. Yes, that's a very fine painting of a sunny landscape/a woman in a trad dress/Jesus being crucified/whatever, we all agree that it's quite nice, but it's not new. We already know how to paint things like that and make them "beautiful". It's well-trodden territory, it presents no conceptual challenges, it has no capacity to surprise or perplex. It was new at one point - it used to be crucial, cutting-edge work - but now it is no longer new, and there comes a point where you simply have to move on.
Venturing into what is new and unexplored in art will inevitably bring us into contact with all that belongs to the tragic dimension of life - loss, regret, ambiguity, disconcerting feelings of all sorts, in other words all that an untrained eye will initially consider to be "ugly". But such a circuitous route can in fact reveal to us new types of beauty that remained invisible at an earlier stage of development. One of my favorite examples of this sort of "finding of light in the darkness" has always been The Ambassadors by Holbein the Younger - I could have selected a really out-there example to really drive the point home, like say, pretty much anything by Jeff Koons, but The Ambassadors works well as an example because the painting has a foot in "both worlds". It's an immaculately executed work of traditional realism, but it also gestures towards something strange and unsettling.
The painting's claim to notoriety is the giant distorted skull floating in the middle of what is otherwise a physically ordinary scene, seemingly unexplained. I think it is crucial that we take the flat 2D representation of the painting at face value; of course the trick is that the skull is anamorphic, and that if you stand in front of the painting from the right angle then the skull will appear as a full 3D object and will no longer be distorted, but this is one case where looking at a photograph on Wikipedia is actually better than seeing the painting in a gallery. In my view, the distortion of the skull is crucial for the overall aesthetic effect of the painting. Innumerable questions immediately present themselves: who are these guys? Where are they? No seriously, why is that skull there? Why is it compressed and slanted? It looks like it's kind of floating a bit? Does it even exist on the same plane of reality as the rest of the scene? The more you think about it, the more claustrophobic you start to feel - and of course there must be no comforting answer that the skull is "just" an anamorphic illusion that the painter included as a memento mori for discerning observers; that would deflate the tension, and above all our goal is to preserve the tension.
This sort of experience comes close to describing for me, not only beauty as such, but the aesthetic experience as such - this dawning realization, as you puzzle more and more and your attention gets more and more diverted, of "...what is that?". This is the experience that "aesthetic adrenaline junkies" are always chasing after, this feeling that you just got your head rearranged by the work. What separates kitsch, decoration, finery, mere objects, from capital-A Art, is that the former tend towards producing a reaction of "ah, that's nice". Art, on the other hand, "cuts into you", as Todd McGowan succinctly put it, the same way that the skull cuts into Holbein's painting. It's not supposed to be all sunshine and roses. It's supposed to take something from you at the same time that it gives.
Anyway to answer your question the answer is "no", plebs using AI to fill up the world with pictures of epic viking dudes staring straight into the camera is as far removed from beauty as the worst atrocities of the modern MFA/gallery system.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
2d ago
Zizek's new piece in Compact: Happy Birthday Kant, You Lousy Sadist (paywalled, but you can read the whole thing on reddit here):
Is there a line from Kantian ethics to the Auschwitz killing machine? Are the Nazis’ concentration camps and their mode of killing—as a neutral business—the inherent terminus of the enlightened insistence on the autonomy of reason? Is there some affinity between Kant avec Sade and Fascist torture as portrayed by Pier Paolo Pasolini’s film version of 120 Days in Sodom, which transposes the story into the dark days of Mussolini’s Salò republic?
The link between Sade and Kant was first developed by Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer in the famous Excursion II (“Juliette, or Enlightenment and Morality”) of the Dialectics of Enlightenment. Adorno’s and Horkheimer’s fundamental thesis is that “the work of Marquis de Sade displays the ‘Reason which is not led by another agency,’ that is to say, the bourgeois subject, liberated from a state of not yet being mature.” Some 15 years later, Lacan (unaware of Adorno’s and Horkheimer’s version of the argument) also developed the notion that Sade is the truth of Kant, first in his Seminar on The Ethics of Psychoanalysis (1958-59), and then in an écrit of 1963.
In typical Zizek fashion, he bounces between multiple different ideas in a rapid fire stream of consciousness style, so there are a lot of different threads here that you could grab and run with. Some of our resident anti-enlightenment posters and Christian posters may find something productive in Adorno and Horkheimer's diagnosis of the ethical situation of modernity:
Sade announced the moment when, with the emergence of bourgeois Enlightenment, pleasure itself lost its sacred-transgressive character and was reduced to a rationalized instrumental activity. That is to say, according to Adorno and Horkheimer, the greatness of Sade was that, on behalf of the full assertion of earthly pleasures, he not only rejected any metaphysical moralism, but also fully acknowledged the price one has to pay for this rejection: the radical intellectualization-instrumentalization-regimentation of sexual activity intended to bring pleasure. Here we encounter the content later baptized by Herbert Marcuse’s “repressive desublimation”: After all the barriers of sublimation, of cultural transformation of sexual activity, are abolished, what we get isn’t raw, brutal, passionate, satisfying animal sex, but on the contrary, a fully regimented, intellectualized activity comparable to a well-planned sporting match.
There is much that could be said about Kant's continuing influence on thought and politics. Putin has expressed admiration for him, for example. But probably the biggest point of interest to a general audience here will be Zizek's remarks on Trump near the end of the essay:
Things are similar with the new rightist populism. The contrast between Trump’s official ideological message (conservative values) and the style of his public performance (saying more or less whatever pops up in his head, insulting others, and violating all rules of good manners) tells a lot about our predicament: What sort of world do we inhibit, in which bombarding the public with indecent vulgarities presents itself as the last barrier to protect us from the triumph of the society in which everything is permitted and old values go down the drain? Trump is not a relic of the old moral-majority conservatism—he is to a much greater degree the caricatural inverted image of postmodern “permissive society” itself, a product of this society’s own antagonisms and inner limitations. [...] Trump’s obscene performances thus express the falsity of his populism: to put it with brutal simplicity, while acting as if he cares for the ordinary people, he promotes big capital.
I view this as one of a series of similar critiques coming out of the left in recent times, all of which center around the curious theme of rightists not acting rightist enough. There's been a growing concern on the left in the last few years that "the positions have switched", to a certain extent. Traits that used to be associated with the left - a general rebelliousness, experimentation with new ideas, a critique of established values and established authority (Covid is a big one here), and, yes, a certain willingness to engage in crass vulgarity from time to time, either as a political act or as simple good-spirited humor - have now become associated with the right. Meanwhile the left has become much more strongly associated with order, morality, and authority than they were in the post-war 20th century.
Reactions from leftists to this alleged reversal have been all over the spectrum: everything from panic ("they're stealing our bit! we have to get a handle on this!"), to Zizek's strategy here of denying the authenticity and veridicality of ostensibly rightist forms of rebellion and protest, to simple avowal ("yes, we are in charge, we are Justice, and that's a good thing actually").
Among commentators who believe this to be an authentic political phenomenon, the standard explanation is usually something like: well of course rightists were all for law and order when they were in charge. But now they're not so in charge anymore, so now they're learning the value of critique and skepticism, of free speech and civil liberties, and so forth. Similarly, leftists were in favor of free speech and questioning authority when it was beneficial to them, but now that their institutional capture is more entrenched, they don't need those things anymore.
But something about this explanation rubs me the wrong way. It paints a purely structural view of the formation of ideologies, and ignores the role of the individual completely; you will hold the views that you must based on your relational position to other political actors while taking into account your rational self interest, and that's that. But it becomes rather boring if you're always just looking for the self interest behind everything. The much more interesting and radical project is to find the abstract ethical commitments hiding behind apparent self interest.
There's always been an authoritarian streak to leftism going back to Marx - it's not something that they just happened to discover after attaining political ascendancy. It's reflected in how they govern their own private institutions, even when they don't have societal power. There was frequently internal strife at the Frankfurt school over this or that theorist not sufficiently holding to the party line. Leftist organizations at least as far back as the 80s were already using the progressive stack at group meetings to make sure that white men spoke last. Marxism itself claims that the end goal of the communist revolution is the dissolution of all antagonisms between individual and collective good - but the individual is right to be nervous about what processes the collective might institute to achieve this utopian vision.
Similarly, I believe in the possibility of a principled libertarianism that wouldn't immediately abandon all of its commitments as soon as it got hold of actual power. It's true that ideology always has to make affordances for reality at some point, but clearly, ideology has some impact on the reality of governance as well: I don't think you could, for example, explain the different political situations in the US and Russia entirely in terms of their different material and sociological conditions, with no reference whatsoever to the beliefs and motivations of the individual people who actually govern those countries.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
1yr ago
your CFO
My impression from reading Hacker News comments this past weekend is that even having a CFO is an unfair expectation to levy against a fledgling startup.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
1yr ago
This might provoke a reaction here: Effective altruism is the new woke
Effectively, both longtermism and woke progressivism take a highly restricted number of emotional impulses many of us ordinarily have, and then vividly conjure up heart-rending scenarios of supposed harm in order to prime our malleable intuitions in the desired direction. Each insists that we then extend these impulses quasi-rigorously, past any possible relevance to our own personal lives. According to longtermists, if you are the sort of person who, naturally enough, tries to minimise risks to your unborn children, cares about future grandchildren, or worries more about unlikely personal disasters rather than likely inconveniences, then you should impersonalise these impulses and radically scale them up to humanity as a whole. According to the woke, if you think kindness and inclusion are important, you should seek to pursue these attitudes mechanically, not just within institutions, but also in sports teams, in sexual choices, and even in your application of the categories of the human biological sexes.
I do think it could be worthwhile to have a discussion about the parallels between EA and wokeism, but unfortunately the author's actual comparison of the two is rather sparse, focusing on just this one methodological point about how they both allegedly amplify our moral impulses beyond their natural scope. She also runs the risk of conflating longtermism with EA more broadly.
To me, an obvious similarity between EA and wokeism is that they both function as substitutes for religion, giving structure and meaning to individuals who might otherwise find themselves floating in the nihilistic void. Sacrifice yourself for LGBT, sacrifice yourself for Jesus, sacrifice yourself for malaria nets - it's all the same story at the end of the day. A nice concrete goal to strive for, and an actionable plan on how to achieve it, so that personal ethical deliberation is minimized - that's a very comforting sort of structure to devote yourself to.
I'd also be interested in exploring how both EA and wokeism relate to utilitarianism. In the case of EA the relation is pretty obvious, with wokeism it's less clear, but there does seem to be something utilitarian about the woke worldview, in the sense that personal comfort (or the personal comfort of the oppressed) will always win out over fidelity to abstract values like freedom and authenticity.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
1yr ago
Bruh. Come on.
If Bud Light put out a commercial that featured only white people and leftists boycotted them and the VP of marketing got fired, we'd all agree that was a cancellation.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
1yr ago
Is there anyone here who 1) thinks that AI x-risk is a threat that should be taken seriously, and 2) also thinks that this letter is a bad idea? If so, can you explain your reasoning? And also explain what restrictions on AI development you would support?
For a group of people who are allegedly very concerned with the possibility that AI will soon wipe out humanity, Rationalists are suspiciously resistant to any proposals for actually slowing and regulating AI development. A lot of the comments on this letter on LW and /r/ssc are very critical. If your stance is "I wish we could slow AI development and I support the letter in spirit, but I think it's unlikely to work", then that's one thing. But the critical comments seem to suggest that the comment authors either don't support any AI regulation at all, or else they're engaged in motivated reasoning to try to convince themselves that it's not even worth trying (e.g. "this letter will have a net negative impact due to its effect on capabilities researchers who don't like it" - the good ol' "if you fight your enemies, they win" tactic for concern trolling).
It lends support to my intuition that most AI x-riskers don't actually take the idea of x-risk very seriously, and on a gut level they think the benefits of AI are so likely to outweigh the downsides that there's no issue with pushing full steam ahead on capabilities research.
(Obviously if you're a full on utopian optimist and you consciously affirm that x-risk is not a serious threat, then there is no contradiction in your position and none of this applies to you.)
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
9mo ago
The plot of the basic male story is "Man is weak. Man works hard with clear goal. Man becomes strong". I think men feel this basic archetypal story much more strongly than women, so that even an otherwise horrible story can be entertaining if it hits that particular chord well enough, if the man is weak enough at the beginning, or the work especially hard. I'm not exactly clear what the equivalent story is for women, but it's something like "Woman thinks she's not good enough, but she needs to realise that she is already perfect".
But this is simply a reflection of evolutionary reality. It's not the case that women gravitate to these sorts of stories because they're like, stupid or anything.
A man's future is always, within certain limits, radically open. His sexual marketplace value (SMV) can drastically rise or drastically fall depending on the actions he takes. If he puts in enough work, he can lift weights and bulk up, accomplish more things, gain more status, and be rewarded accordingly. The hero's journey.
A woman's SMV is primarily determined by the physical appearance that was gifted to her by genetics, and past a certain critical window, it slowly but steadily declines due to ageing. Due to a confluence of biological and social factors, a woman cannot expect to bring about an order of magnitude increase in her SMV through her own actions. We do have plastic surgery today, but its effects are limited, particularly in their ability to counteract the effects of ageing, and it wouldn't have been an option at all deep in our evolutionary history, when these mythic structures first became ingrained in the collective unconscious. In a very practical sense, the best thing a woman can do at any given time is to learn to make the best of what she's got. This is reflected in the stories they tell about themselves, to themselves.
Throughout the movie, Ken is basically subservient to Barbie, defining himself only in the relation to her
Again, hardly atypical. Plenty of men define themselves solely in terms of women, in terms of their success with women. Probably the majority.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
1yr ago
If the AI is going to obsolete anyone, then it will quite literally be my enemies. I am very much opposed to the twitterati ruling class. I make a living by writing code. And yet I am in complete agreement with Vaush's views on AI art. How do you explain that?
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
11mo ago
You can't expect absolute neutrality from people at all times. This forum does have a certain political slant, it's unavoidable. But that doesn't mean you should feel discouraged from commenting if you dissent from the consensus view.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
1yr ago
The decimation of the last vestiges of humanistic culture at the hands of our technocratic society continues: The End of the English Major
According to Robert Townsend, the co-director of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences’ Humanities Indicators project, which collects data uniformly but not always identically to internal enrollment figures, from 2012 to 2020 the number of graduated humanities majors at Ohio State’s main campus fell by forty-six per cent. Tufts lost nearly fifty per cent of its humanities majors, and Boston University lost forty-two. Notre Dame ended up with half as many as it started with, while SUNY Albany lost almost three-quarters. Vassar and Bates—standard-bearing liberal-arts colleges—saw their numbers of humanities majors fall by nearly half. In 2018, the University of Wisconsin at Stevens Point briefly considered eliminating thirteen majors, including English, history, and philosophy, for want of pupils.
Reasons given by students for choosing STEM majors over humanities majors are in line with what you would expect: STEM majors teach you economically useful skills that translate directly into gainful employment, and humanities majors don't. Especially because ChatGPT just put a lot of copywriters out of business over night.
Although the crisis of university humanities departments has frequently been blamed on recent events like the 2008 Great Recession and the covid pandemic, these trends are not exactly new. In a collection of lectures delivered at Princeton and published in 1938 entitled The Meaning of the Humanities, the sense of crisis was already palpable:
Granting that the humanities are so interwoven with the fabric of society that the world cannot be entirely "dehumanized," a modern humanist can hardly help feeling that his position is far from being secure. In fact, the humanities are attacked on every side; they are losing ground every day; the host of their enemies is legion and their defenders a mere handful. When they are not in danger of being starved and annihilated, they risk being absorbed or annexed by peaceful penetration through the inroads made into their rightful domain by specialists on "human relations," psychologists, educators, and humanitarians.
There was also an acknowledgement that, unfortunately, most people do have to work for a living:
The easiest way to solve the problem is to ignore it, namely, to follow the line of least resistance and to continue along the old traditional lines. It is easy to declare that some studies, called disinterested studies, a polite euphemism for useless studies, will remain accessible to a chosen few, while useful studies, studies preparing for life, meaning by that equivocal term, for a profession, trade or business, shall become the lot of the masses.
It turns out there was never a time where the majority of people could decide on a whim to spend their formative years of education studying fictional events that never happened. Who would have guessed?
There is certainly something to mourn in the gradual erosion of the traditional support structures for western elite culture. I don't take it lightly. But I also believe that there is a fundamental resilience to what one might call the "humanistic mode of thought" that will ensure its survival, even if there were no universities at all. Humans will continue to do philosophy, and make art, and reflect on art, for as long as there are entities that are still recognizably human. There has never been any other time in history when narrative fiction played such a large role in the lives of so many people - it just comes in the form of TV shows and video games now, rather than novels. Although some Rationalists are prone to triumphalism about science and self-perfection through technology, a significant percentage of the output of LessWrong is dedicated to the analysis of philosophical questions, and the single most famous work to come out of the Rationalist movement is a work of imaginative literature. The call to authentic reflection may only be the purview of a small minority of individuals in any given society, but to those who are attuned to that call, it is ineluctable.
I suppose what ultimately saddens me the most about the fall of the English major is that it seems to be yet another indicator that the world I once knew - the world that extended roughly from the end of World War II to the 2008 financial crisis, the heyday of middle class consumer capitalism - is dying, if not already dead. As the linked article alludes to, the internet itself may be partially blamed for the decline of traditional university studies:
Shapiro picked up an abused-looking iPhone from his desk. “You’re talking to someone who has only owned a smartphone for a year—I resisted,” he said. Then he saw that it was futile. “Technology in the last twenty years has changed all of us,” he went on. “How has it changed me? I probably read five novels a month until the two-thousands. If I read one a month now, it’s a lot. That’s not because I’ve lost interest in fiction. It’s because I’m reading a hundred Web sites. I’m listening to podcasts.” He waggled the iPhone disdainfully. “Go to a play now, and watch the flashing screens an hour in, as people who like to think of themselves as cultured cannot! Stop! Themselves!” Assigning “Middlemarch” in that climate was like trying to land a 747 on a small rural airstrip.
It made sense for academic discourse on literature to be centralized at specialized locations called "universities", back in an era when all information was not free and infinitely reproducible. It still partially makes sense for STEM as well, since there must be a centralized governing body to certify that students have gained the requisite skills. But for the humanities? Why go to college to read Shakespeare when I can just read him on my own time? I have the whole western canon available for free in my pocket, I don't even need to buy all the books one by one. If I have questions about the reading, I have youtube and blogs, I can instantly ask questions of anyone in the world, I can even access most major works of academic criticism for free or relatively cheap. The image of students actually gathering in a physical classroom, with paper books, for the privilege of hearing the opinions of someone who may not even be as insightful as the average 4chan /lit/ poster, starts to look woefully antiquated.
It sucks that it's antiquated. I am a hopeless nostalgic. But it is antiquated nonetheless.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
10mo ago
How does that make any sense? What’s the causal mechanism there?
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
1yr ago
revolution and social upheaval are often worse for women than for men.
...this sounds suspiciously close to "women have always been the primary victims of war".
Was the Bolshevik revolution worse for women or men? I genuinely don't know; I'm asking. I'd be willing to hear arguments for both sides.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
1yr ago
There are certainly trans characters in left-coded media. You just have a normal looking woman, have them say “oh btw I’m trans”, and then move on. Very easy way to score representation points without having to deal with questions of passing or other thorny trans issues.
FTM representation is even easier, as they tend to pass quite well in real life.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
1yr ago
counter-trans ideology
I have noticed the analogy, which is part of why I’m slightly surprised that this forum is so pro-AI. I mean, given the LessWrong origins of this forum, it makes sense they’d be pro-AI. But this is a decidedly reactionary slice of that original LW readership. How can the same group of people be so reactionary on so many issues while also supporting the prospect of AI-induced complete social disruption. Yes yes, it doesn’t have to be the same individuals making both types of posts, but still.
So you’re acknowledging that you like this technology because you see it as a way to inflict harm on people you perceive to have wronged you. I say “perceive” because, as far as I can tell as a card-carrying nerd myself, picking on “nerds” hasn’t been a thing in the US for at least a decade, if not more. Working in tech is considered to be relatively high status. There’s also some irony here because commercial artists, who stand to be impacted the most by AI, are also frequently loners and weirdos themselves who spend a lot of time surrounded by video games and comic books, and thus know full well what it’s like to be a “nerd”.
I don’t know why you thought this was supposed to make you appear sympathetic.
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