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
30d ago
There's a theory that one part of falling fertility is female hypergamy. Since my spellchecker is underlining that word, I'll define it like this:
Female hypergamy is when women seek to marry "up", either into a higher social class or to a mate who is superior to them.
It's harder than ever for women to marry up. Modern feminist societies devalue male traits such as stoicism and aggression but highly value female traits such as conformity and self-control. As a result, women's status relative to men has risen greatly. This has the side effect of making most men undesirable to most women.
This doesn't sit right with me.
Fundamentally, men must compete for access to women, while women act as gatekeepers. It's simple supply and demand. Eggs are expensive, sperm is cheap. The biological essence of being a male is having to continually prove yourself under adverse conditions, so when men start complaining that women's standards are too high because feminism gave them naughty ideas, it comes off as a cope. Rather than standards being too high, it's more likely that women are setting the standards exactly where they need to be (or at least relatively close, anyway), in accordance with many millennia of evolutionary adaptation to precisely this task. Yes, it's a hyper-competitive environment, but there are plenty of men who are succeeding. Lots of men are making money and having sex and having kids and generally living very productive lives. If you can't do the same, that's on you.
Not to say that biological organisms are incapable of going wrong, of course. If there is such a severe mismatch between women's standards and men's capabilities such that the birth rate plummets to zero, then it's more plausible to say that that's simply the race/species reaching the natural end of its lifecycle, rather than putting the blame on any one particular event/ideology/movement/etc. Perhaps the industrial/digital environment of modern first world countries is simply poisonous to the type of organism that we are. If it is, then we will decline naturally, possibly to be replaced by a more virile form of life that has a longer future ahead of it, and there is little that can be done as a matter of conscious will to arrest this trajectory.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
9mo ago
Is it possible for an atheist to think deeply about life without losing motivation to live well?
Yes, plainly. There are many examples.
It’s trite to phrase it like this, but the atheistic model still seems utterly devoid of motivation or purpose when you dwell on it.
When Lacan said "there is no big Other", he didn't mean "God doesn't exist". He meant that, even if God exists, God is not the big Other either. God's just as confused as we are.
It's not clear why the introduction of God is supposed to make life more meaningful in the first place. He could torture us for eternity if we don't follow his commands; but that's just coercion. Similarly, you could be motivated to live virtuously so you can be rewarded with an eternity in Heaven, but it's hard to give an account of Heaven that doesn't reduce to either empty hedonism, or a simple continuation of the types of good things we already have on Earth. Pleasure and pain are things that we already know well; and if pleasure and pain aren't enough to make our finite earthly existence meaningful, why would an eternity of pleasure or pain make life suddenly change from not-meaningful to meaningful? Certainly anyone can see why you would be motivated to avoid eternal torture, but is that the same thing as meaning?
I think we can dispense with the idea that eternity by itself is what makes something meaningful. You can imagine a hypothetical universe that contains nothing but a single electron, and this electron persists for eternity. Is the electron's existence "meaningful"? Doesn't seem like it. So there has to be something else, beyond the mere fact of eternal duration, that makes an existence meaningful. But then we can start to question whether this "something else" might not be available to a finite existence as well.
A more sophisticated theist might say that God is the ground of certain sui generis facts about meaning and purpose, and these facts exist over and above any of his other properties or actions. God simply makes it the case that certain things just are meaningful, end of story. But if you endorse an internalist account of reasons for action, you might question whether such free-floating normative facts are coherent in the first place. Even if you've been informed that God has simply made it the case that some things are more meaningful than others, it seems like there will still always be an open question of why you should care. You might say, "that's very interesting that God has done that, but I don't see how that can be relevant to me personally. If God will torture me if I don't follow his commands, then I certainly should follow his commands; but in that case, I'm responding to the threat of torture, not the alleged 'meaningfulness' of the actions themselves."
All this is simply to say that God is not the big Other. God himself can always take a step back and ask "you know... what is it all for, really?"
An equivalent formulation might say, "there is no escape from philosophy".
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
5d ago
I remember some of those specific comments you're referencing. But I don't see what the problem is?
Some of the views that get expressed here are views that I find deeply objectionable. Like, not just silly, but actually upsetting. But in spite of that (in some senses, because of that) I think this is a very valuable discussion space. Other people think differently than I do, that's life. I'm just glad we have a place that doesn't moderate on content where we can discuss controversial topics in a relatively civil manner.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
2mo ago
It is plain to me that "pornography" - in the broadest sense of the term, any material that contains the explicit depiction of sexual activities or sexualized nudity, fictional or not, regardless of context or intended purpose - represents the most urgently necessary direction of development for art in general, the most fertile soil for aesthetic discoveries and innovations, and indeed the greatest possibility of an experience that might be called "spiritual".
Plainly there has never been an epoch of human history where sexuality was not of central importance. And consider the explicitly acknowledged centrality of sexuality in contemporary political discourse - not only the status of men and women in general, but also transsexuality and homosexuality, consent, the depiction of women's bodies. An art that does not fully develop its capacities in this domain is a dead art, an art that has abdicated its duty.
Some of the most important and advanced works of recent decades were not produced by the organs of the academy and traditional "literary circles", but are instead being circulated on obscure Japanese doujin sites and fanfiction platforms.
Anyone who flatly announces themselves as "anti-pornography", without first demonstrating that they have clearly perceived the aesthetic necessity for art to become more "pornographic", instantly arouses great mistrust in me. It is evidence that their senses have been dulled regarding certain vital matters.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
11mo ago
Well, since we're here.
Do you think there's such a thing as a neutral education process?
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
1mo ago
Paging @2rafa or anyone else who can explain to me what an investment banking analyst actually does: AI is coming for Wall Street: Banks are reportedly weighing cutting analyst hiring by two-thirds (paywalled for me on desktop but it's loading fine on mobile):
Incoming junior Wall Street analysts could be in danger of losing their jobs to AI, sources within banks told the New York Times.
Big firms are reportedly mulling whether to pull back on hiring new analysts as Wall Street leans more heavily on AI, several people familiar with the matter at Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, and other banks told the publication this week.
Incoming classes of junior investment-banking analysts could up being cut as much as two-thirds, some of the people suggested, while those brought on board could fetch lower salaries, on account of their work being assisted by artificial intelligence.
I don't know how to evaluate the claims in the article because I have little understanding of what a banking analyst actually does on a day to day basis. How much of it requires "thought" (not thought of incredible complexity and originality, but thought nonetheless) and how much of it is just plugging numbers into Excel in a relatively formulaic fashion?
In general I lean towards being skeptical of these claims, especially in domains where I have little expertise, because the dominant pattern of the last 2 years is that people who don't know much about X tend to overestimate how good AI is at X.
If I compare this to a domain where I do have some knowledge (computer programming), most of the tests that people use to demonstrate LLMs' coding ability aren't particularly representative of what programmers do on a daily basis. Sitting down and opening a new blank file and "writing code to do X" is certainly part of the job, and it can be a bigger or smaller part of the job depending on what type of organization you're at and what type of project you're working on etc, but it's not the whole job (for some programmers, it's a very small part of it!)
So I'd like people with more domain knowledge to weigh in on what aspects of these financial jobs are liable to be automated today and what the forecast for the field is like.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
10mo ago
But presumably you also want to say that boys getting molested by men turns them gay. So why does it have the opposite effect on boys that it has on girls? How come, instead of the boy’s trust and comfort with men being permanently damaged, he instead becomes hyper-attracted to men and seeks out even more intimacy with men?
(Also second wave feminists thought that being a lesbian was pretty much the most virtuous thing that a woman could do so it strikes me as odd that any of them would try to link it to trauma.)
I'm not exactly sure where your disagreement with curious_straight_ca is.
It's not really an either/or kind of thing, it's both. The social contagion theory is definitely a big part of the story. Clearly the trans phenomenon spreads memetically. But it's also an undeniable fact that some people just feel a spontaneous desire to be the opposite gender, even without prior exposure to pro-trans material. Some percentage of men will reliably develop fantasies about being a woman, a desire to wear women's clothes, etc, without any apparent external cause, just like some percentage of men will turn out homosexual with no identifiable cause.
Certainly the memetic spread and institutionalized support for trans people takes the phenomenon to new heights that were undreamed of in past decades. You can't really develop a spontaneous desire for taking hormones and getting SRS if you don't even know that's a possibility, for example. But any complete theory of the phenomenon has to include the understanding that at least some aspects of it are indeed "natural".
You also can't leave the notion of "memetic spread" entirely unexamined - why is this such a particularly virile and attractive meme? How did it spawn its own subculture with all sorts of forums and discords and irl groups and a surprisingly long tradition of its own art and creative writing? If the government decided to go all in on the finger amputation meme, could it gain the same level of traction? I don't think so.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
1mo ago
If this is simply a right-wing reddit
It’s not.
The quality of discussion is higher than anywhere on reddit, and unlike reddit, the admins have no interest in censoring certain political viewpoints; leftists and rightists alike are welcome.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
1mo ago
Frequently when people feel this way about HBD, especially as it relates to themselves on a personal level, it's based on a misconception. A common caricature of HBD is that there's an identifiable property of "blackness" that has causal powers; almost as though black skin itself were some foreign organism exerting a downward pressure on your IQ, and if you could only shed your skin then you would unlock the full potential of your inherent abilities. This is completely incorrect.
The mechanisms that determine your IQ and other psychological traits are the exact same mechanisms at work in every other human, and at a purely physical level they have nothing to do with race. "Black" is a statistical concept that emerges at the population level as an amalgamation of traits and individuals. The race doesn't make the people, the people make the race.
That being said. It is a corollary of HBD that the pervasive dysfunction seen throughout Africa and black communities worldwide is in part caused by genetic factors. You are within your rights to think that this is a tragedy - but what of it? We live in a world that's filled to the brim with tragedies great and small. People die of disease, accidents, and violence every day, rich and poor alike, wise or foolish, virtuous or ignoble. HBD is not a unique cataclysmic injustice; rather it is just one more square in the patchwork of immiseration that is mankind's natural state.
You may be interested in the emerging possibilities of genetic engineering to increase intelligence and other eugenic psychological traits; but this is fraught with its own philosophical quandaries.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
1mo ago
I literally had a dream last night that Hlynka was unbanned.
In general I’ve never found dreams to be particularly interesting, my own or anyone else’s, and I’ve always been puzzled over why they held such fascination for certain thinkers like Freud. Usually their contents are either nonsensical, or they’re connected to waking events/thoughts in a relatively straightforward way.
Have you had any interesting dreams lately? What do you think about dreams in general?
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
10mo ago
I wouldn't count "Anakin thinks it's a great idea to spend the day at an amusement park, also having something else up his sleeve. Confessing his love to Obi-Wan!" as being genuinely a fan of the series.
Why not?
Granted it's not absolute proof that someone is a "real" fan of the series - they could just be using the characters without knowing much about the wider series itself - but it certainly doesn't count against them being a real fan either. In general I'd say that writing fanfic about a series does count as evidence for being a fan of the series.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
7d ago
self-driving cars are essentially banned.
I don't see why that's a problem, to be honest.
There has to be some sort of consequence for the manufacturer when self-driving cars cause an accident, same as how human drivers pay fines or go to jail. What's your preferred liability structure?
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
26d ago
We live in a causal universe, I don't think there is such a thing as spontaneous belief.
Sure, but that seems like a rather pedantic point to make in this context. If someone says they like eating tasty food because it's a natural spontaneous desire, and you say they actually like eating food because of government propaganda, then on the face of it your explanation is a lot less correct than theirs, regardless of what philosophical hangups you might have about the concept of spontaneity.
I don't think this is a born this way thing, I think it's still social even if that doesn't make it a choice.
I believe I recall from some of your previous posts that you endorse HBD. So presumably you think some people are born some way.
Someone who criticized HBD by saying "well if you kept someone locked in an empty room from birth and never taught them anything then they would turn out to be really stupid, so it's actually all environmental in the end" would be missing the point. We're all in agreement that the outside environment is important and has a big influence. It's the innate disposition of individuals to respond differently to the same environmental stimulus that's in question.
I would describe my position by saying that I endorse an HBD-type view for gender identity and sexual orientation rather than a purely social constructionist view, that's all.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
10mo ago
the difference between Nazis and Twitter SJWs is little more than a palette swap
Please don’t summon him…
Frequently I was met with incredulity here when I suggested that there were people (besides professional artists themselves) who cared about whether art was AI-generated or not. At least now we're starting to gather empirical evidence that yes, there are people who care.
all of the worst fears of economic impact on lower-tier artists or of unlabelled AI spam overwhelming sincere creation, all the lost opportunities for conventional artists to focus more of their time on the parts of art they love or dedicated AI-genners to explore types of media that just wouldn't be practical for conventional artwork, all come true... and no one cares.
Sorry I'm a bit confused here, are you saying that this has already come to pass or are you offering this as a hypothetical?
Because it hasn't really come to pass yet, at least not completely. People are still making money as professional artists and selling commissions online. AI has definitely impacted the market, but artists are still making money regardless. In fact the number of graphic design jobs on Upwork has increased since the release of DALL-E 2 and StableDiffusion.
We haven't really unlocked the full potential of current image gen models (in terms of market disruption) because there's still a decent amount of friction in the process. The average non-specialist isn't going to mess around with running a local model, training custom LoRAs, using ControlNet and inpainting... it's still involved enough that it's reasonable to outsource the process to someone else. There needs to be an absolute idiot proof freemagicartbutton.com website where you communicate in pure natural language (instead of prompt-ese) that anyone can use for requests of arbitrary complexity and get good results every time. Then we would truly know how many use cases AI art is really fit for. It might just be a "mere" engineering challenge to get us there using current models.
Edit: Uh, you might have been able to generate more discussion by waiting ~12 hours and posting this in the new week's thread?
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
10mo ago
I'd rather just be able to read a statute's plain language and understand it than have to rely on the deep expertise of those who can sense penumbras.
You can just look at contemporary political discourse and see why this theory of legal interpretation runs into problems. Rarely do people agree on the "plain meaning" of anything.
Consider the text of the second amendment:
A well regulated Militia being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.
Already, this one sentence presents multiple interpretive issues:
1.) If a "well regulated militia" is no longer necessary to the "security of a free State", does that mean that the amendment is no longer applicable? This could be read as a conditional - "given that a militia is necessary, the right to bear arms shall not be infringed". You could say that that part doesn't really matter, that it's just "flavor text", and the important and permanently binding part is the "...shall not be infringed" part - but then, that seems to call for a general theory of which parts of a text can be ignored as "not really mattering".
2.) What counts as an "infringement" of the "right of the people"? Does that mean that no person can ever be prevented from owning a gun? Maybe. But, "the people" is not the same thing as "any person". It's reasonable to say things like "the people of the United States are free", even though there are individuals in the United States who are imprisoned and unfree. So, maybe we're allowed to restrict the right of certain individuals to own a gun, as long as "the people" as a whole have not had "their" rights infringed. But then that raises the question of where to draw the line. How many individuals is too much? When do we cross the line from "individuals have had their rights infringed" to "the people have had their rights infringed"? 50%?
3.) What counts as an "arm"? Do nuclear weapons count? The phrase "nuclear arms" is relatively commonplace, so it seems like they might. But, I've never seen anyone suggest that the second amendment should prevent the government from restricting access to nuclear weapons.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
6d ago
Lots of Hispanic blood in a future American population isn’t an HBD-wrecking catastrophe.
But you just acknowledged that the Hispanics are underrepresented among engineers and doctors. If the broader population becomes more Hispanic, would you not also expect that population to produce fewer people who are capable of becoming engineers and doctors?
An immediate corollary of HBD is that a Brazil-like population leads to Brazil-like conditions.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
1mo ago
It started off with angry, poor people looking for a scapegoat
I don't think that people really do this on a mass scale, and I've never seen an actual argument put forth for this thesis. It seems like one of those cached thoughts that just got repeated enough until everyone believed it.
Not to say that large social groups are always infallibly correct when it comes to political beliefs either. But generally, people don't just make shit up out of nothing. When progressives complain about straight white men, are they looking for a "scapegoat" for all their problems? I don't think that's accurate. Their complaints are grounded in actual facts, its just that there's disagreement over the cause and interpretation of those facts.
STEM did not give us lockdowns or vaccine passes -- that was bullshitting.
Quarantines did exist in the pre-modern world. But I think the Covid lockdowns were of a uniquely large scale, and of a uniquely pervasive character, such that they only could have existed with the aid of modern technology. I don't think Covid would have played out the way it did without the internet (for WFH and Zoom calls), phone apps, and social media.
We already have that kind of smart feller, and they're already at universities. They don't seem to be all that useful.
Well, maybe. But what conclusions are we supposed to draw from that?
If you think that the institutionalized critique of STEM supremacism and neoliberal market ideology ("homo economicus", as @f3zinker puts it) is genuinely vital, as I do, then I don't see why you should be dissuaded by contingent failures and defects of the university system. Sometimes things don't work out. That's the way it goes. But that doesn't mean you give up. That just means you try harder next time!
If you think it's impossible for the university to have any positive impact in this area at all, then that would be different. But I don't see why we should accept that. Do you think it's just impossible for the university to have any impact on culture or politics? A number of rightists claim that contemporary progressivism can trace its roots back to the "postmodern neo-Marxism" of the Frankfurt school - i.e. it's an ideology that started in universities and percolated outward. What do you think of those claims?
If you just DON'T think that a humanistic critique of STEM is important, or if you think it's outright pernicious, then of course you would be in favor of just turning universities into trade schools. But then, that would just be grounded in your preexisting political commitments, not in any empirical facts about the university itself.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
7mo ago
It is revealing a critical flaw in the metrics the motte uses to gauge quality. Yes our stated preference is to generate interesting and entertaining conversations, but our revealed preferences say actually, it is just about writing long posts.
There is no flaw in the "metrics" and we do not have a revealed preference for length for the sake of length.
There are lots of long posts here on TheMotte that are bad. I simply downvote them and/or refuse to engage with them. I think the distribution of upvotes on the site is generally pretty fair, with better essayposts getting more upvotes and worse essayposts getting fewer. You don't get a cookie from me just because you wrote a long post.
If firmamenti hadn't said anything about chatgpt or written this in reply to FNE, just posted it as a top level post, would it have been banned do you think?
I certainly would have thought that the post was bad (because it's boring and says nothing interesting) even if he hadn't mentioned ChatGPT. But for multiple reasons, it's neither feasible nor desirable to have an official rule against writing bad posts. We use length and effort as proxies for quality, but at the end of the day, you can't ban someone solely because you don't enjoy reading their posts.
I think that reposting ChatGPT output can and should be a banworthy offense, although I'm uncomfortable with simply banning someone for that without hard evidence or an admission of guilt. Even though I would have strongly suspected that firmamenti's post was ChatGPT regardless.
because you can't say "Hey you need to write less because you are bad at it."
I certainly think that you should be able to say this on TheMotte. I think the mods would probably be ok with it as long as you backed up your criticism with an analysis of multiple concrete examples taken from the person's writing.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
13d ago
It's a bit odd to me that everyone is so confident in their answers (regardless of which answer they choose).
I don't feel like I have a good enough baseline intuition about how dangerous bears are to answer with confidence. How likely is the average bear to attack you? Is it possible to outrun a bear? This is far outside my domain of expertise.
I certainly understand why a lot of women would say "bear", even if they might ultimately be mistaken.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
1mo ago
Are you claiming that any space that claims to operate on a neutral principle of free speech is fundamentally duplicitous because it's just going to end up coalescing around a consensus viewpoint anyway?
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
10mo ago
Those are the same thing.
They are not.
The laws of physics were not handed to us by God, nor are they logically necessary a priori truths. We can imagine them being different with no threat of logical incoherence.
When you said in your other post:
How does a universe work with only Newtonian physics? Subatomic scale doesn't work, astronomical objects don't work, nothing works. Newtonian physics is a sketch for a limited range of conditions, not the true generating algorithm of the kind that modern theoretical physics aspires to decipher.
it seems to me that you were suggesting that, whatever the ultimate nature of this reality is, it is therefore the only coherently conceivable reality. But this simply strikes me as a failure of imagination.
For any conceivable set of phenomena - a spaceship moving 3 gajillion km per second in a universe that is otherwise like ours, a Rick and Morty crayonverse, etc - it is easy to construct a set of "laws" that would generate such a reality. Instead of the universe being governed by simple law-like equations, you can imagine it as being governed by a massive arbitrary state table instead. At each time step, the universe simply transitions from one state to the next. The contents of each state are arbitrary and have no necessary relationship to each other; the only regularity is the continual transition from one state to the next. The "laws of physics" for this universe would then look like:
if state == S_0 then transition to S_1;
if state == S_1 then transition to S_2;
if state == S_2 then...
and so on. There is no contradiction here, so there is nothing incoherent. It's certainly unparsimonious, but "unparsimonious" is not the same thing as "incoherent".
Qualia debate is gibberish
Can you explain what you mean by this? Are you saying that all claims and arguments that people make about qualia are gibberish, or are you just reiterating your distaste for the concept of p-zombies here?
There is a causal chain between zombie-state A and A'. Links of this chain attend to themselves via mechanisms conserved between a person and a zombie. This condition is what is described as quale, consciousness etc. in the physicalist theory, and it is a necessary causal element of the chain producing the same outputs. It is irrelevant whether there exists a causally unconnected sequence of epiphenomenal states that Leibniz, Chalmers and others think implements their minds: a zombie still has its zombie-quale implemented as I've described.
I'm concerned that this may be circular reasoning. Sure, if qualia just are defined as the casual chain of your brain states, then yes, obviously any purported p-zombie would have to have qualia too and the concept of p-zombies would be incoherent. But that's precisely the claim that's at issue! Qualia aren't just defined as the causal chain of your brain states - not in the way that a triangle is defined as having 3 sides. We can easily imagine that qualia have nothing to do with brain states. We can imagine that they're something different instead - we can imagine that they're properties of a non-spatiotemporal Cartesian soul, for instance. We can coherently imagine this, so we can coherently imagine p-zombies as well.
For what it's worth: I don't think that p-zombies are possible in reality (at least it's not something I'd bet on), but I am a believer in the Hard Problem. I don't think that qualia can be made to fit with our current understanding of physics. I don't think we're ever going to find that qualia falls out as a natural consequence of e.g. quantum electrodynamics; I think it would be a category error to think otherwise. I am sympathetic to (without full-throatedly endorsing) Bernardo Kastrup's view that consciousness is what is most fundamental, and "matter" is derivative and/or illusory. Alternatively, I'm also sympathetic to panpsychist views that posit consciousness as a new fundamental property alongside e.g. spin and charge. None of these views entail that p-zombies are actually possible.
Israeli missiles hit site in Iran, ABC News reports
Iran’s military response will be ‘immediate and at a maximum level’ if Israel attacks, foreign minister says
Questions:
If you predicted a nothingburger - how are your predictions holding up? Is there still an offramp here where we can avoid further escalation, or could this evolve into a full on ground war? It's not clear to me if Israel's military could be stretched enough to handle a conventional war on multiple fronts.
Also, what does this indicate for the future of the US-Israel relationship? The US administration made it pretty clear to Israel that they didn't want them to retaliate against Iran (the going theory seemed to be that it would be bad for oil prices in an election year). Presumably Israel is feeling some real existential pressure right now if they're willing to openly defy the will of the US, one of their only consistent allies on the Palestine issue.
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