Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
"...Perhaps laughter will then have formed an alliance with wisdom; perhaps only 'gay science' will remain."
User ID: 342
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
8mo ago
Paywalled, but here's a summary from reddit:
"Some OpenAI employees who tested Orion report it achieved GPT-4-level performance after completing only 20% of its training, but the quality increase was smaller than the leap from GPT-3 to GPT-4, suggesting that traditional scaling improvements may be slowing as high-quality data becomes limited
- Orion's training involved AI-generated data from previous models like GPT-4 and reasoning models, which may lead it to reproduce some behaviors of older models
- OpenAI has created a "foundations" team to develop new methods for sustaining improvements as high-quality data supplies decrease
- Orion's advanced code-writing features could raise operating costs in OpenAI's data centers, and running models like o1, estimated at six times the cost of simpler models, adds financial pressure to further scaling
- OpenAI is finishing Orion's safety testing for a planned release early next year, which may break from the "GPT" naming convention to reflect changes in model development
“Some researchers at the company believe Orion isn’t reliably better than its predecessor in handling certain tasks, according to the employees. Orion performs better at language tasks but may not outperform previous models at tasks such as coding, according to an OpenAI employee. That could be a problem, as Orion may be more expensive for OpenAI to run in its data centers compared to other models it has recently released, one of those people said.”
This is one of several articles/posts/tweets coming out of the LLMsphere over the past couple of weeks that are renewing concerns over LLMs hitting diminishing returns.
Of course this is just speculation until OpenAI actually releases Orion (or whatever they end up calling it). And really we would need several models past Orion too to actually extrapolate a pattern. But this does fit with my subjective impression that the leap from GPT-3 to GPT-4 was not as big as the leap from GPT-2 to GPT-3, and the leap from 4 to o1 was not as big as the leap from 3 to 4. The fact that they're considering again releasing a new model without calling it GPT-5 is also telling. They know how psychologically important the "GPT-5" moniker has become at this point and they won't give that name to a model unless it really represents a major leap forward.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
4mo ago
I’m rather confused by this post.
Are you trying to say that there are no “gay men” because “gay” is an “identity” and “identities” are “for women”?
Do you believe that there’s a legitimate distinction to be made between “gay men” and “men who have sex with men”?
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
8mo ago
· Edited 8mo ago
@Folamh3 made the following claim:
No one can tell me that human culture is enriched by a drawing of the rabbit from Zootopia being subjected to a gangbang. [...] I'm not saying "disgusting fetish art isn't part of human culture": of course it is. I said that human culture isn't enriched by this content. It isn't a net-positive contribution to human culture: it's one of those parts of human culture that we're profoundly ashamed of [...]
to which I objected, briefly. @twodigits expressed interest in a more detailed and thorough rebuttal. I said that I didn't want to compress it to a list of bullet points; but I realized upon further reflection that there was probably nothing shorter than a small book that could do full justice to this topic. I started to prepare an abridged version of my argument to post here, but even the abridged version broke 10k characters by the time I was finished with the introduction. So, you're getting the bullet point version. I'm happy to further expand on any of the points raised here, if people are interested.
Essentially I think that the artistic value of pornography lies in treating it as a species of horror. The greatest works of art bring us into communion with trauma, the uncanny, the abject - and sex is traumatic, uncanny, and unsettling in a particularly aesthetically interesting way; it is simultaneously both a natural and necessary act, and also the center of our strictest ethical prohibitions and most ferocious spiritual crises. I don't think that every artistic work that has pornographic content necessarily has high value, or even any value at all; undoubtedly, the majority do not. I only think that pornographic content isn't disqualifying when evaluating a work's artistic merit. That a work contains graphic sex is, in a vacuum, as informative as saying that the work contains depictions of landscapes or sunsets.
It has been remarked repeatedly in the psychoanalytic (Freudian) tradition that there is an intrinsic link between art and trauma. Kristeva writes in Powers of Horror:
I have sought in this book to demonstrate on what mechanism of subjectivity (which I believe to be universal) such horror, its meaning as well as its power, is based. By suggesting that literature is its privileged signifier, I wish to point out that, far from being a minor, marginal activity in our culture, as a general consensus seems to have it, this kind of literature, or even literature as such, represents the ultimate coding of our crises, of our most intimate and most serious apocalypses. Hence its nocturnal power, "the great darkness" (Angela of Foligno). Hence its continual compromising: "Literature and Evil" (Georges Bataille). Hence also its being seen as taking the place of the sacred, which, to the extent that it has left us without leaving us alone, calls forth the quacks from all four corners of perversion. Because it occupies its place, because it hence decks itself out in the sacred power of horror, literature may also involve not an ultimate resistance to but an unveiling of the abject: an elaboration, a discharge, and a hollowing out of abjection through the Crisis of the Word. [pg. 208]
McGowan and Engley on their Why Theory podcast, a podcast which analyzes both classical philosophy and contemporary culture from a Freudo-Marxist perspective, put it perhaps more poignantly and directly in their episode on psychoanalytic aesthetics:
The art object doesn't give me something... it takes away something. I think that's the absolute psychoanalytic premise. You look for the great work of art by looking for those works that take away something from us. [62:48]
I think this is such a lovely formulation, one that strikes me as almost self-evidently true. Existence is suffering, and the greatest works of art reconcile us to that fact; and in some sense it really is just that simple.
Further justification for this premise is given by framing it as an anti-capitalist gesture (again quoting from the same episode):
[The great work of art] takes away from us the dream of success, so there's a way in which the great work of art, psychoanalytically understood, is inherently anti-capitalist. Because it does not allow us to believe in the promise of accumulation. Its whole point is you have to keep going [emphasis mine - this is what distinguishes the psychoanalytic theory of art from mere nihilism or defeatism] - but even if you win, even if you get it, what you're getting is nothing. [50:00]
Now, I'm significantly more friendly to capitalism as a literal economic system than, well, than basically everyone else who's into weirdo continental philosophy. So unlike most of the intended audience for this work, I don't think that merely saying that something is anti-capitalist makes it ipso facto good. But if "capitalism" is treated here as a synecdoche for utilitarianism, then I can definitely get behind the sentiment being expressed. Art is the domain where we refuse to be governed by utilitarian logic; it's wasteful, irrational, even to the point of being actively detrimental; but that's what makes it beautiful.
Funny enough, in this same episode, there's a section which is very relevant to a post that @Baila wrote some time back - at 44:30 it is flatly stated that a canon of the great works of psychoanalytic art would simply be "the works that induce the most amount of psychic trauma". Eisenman has company! Of course, a purely literal reading of this claim is hard to defend from objections: if the greatest works of art are the ones that induce the most trauma, then why don't we just, I dunno, build a "sculpture" that cuts people's legs off. That would be quite traumatic, so wouldn't that thereby be the greatest work of art? Obviously some additional nuance has to be added, but I still think the claim is gesturing at something importantly true. I would perhaps invoke something like the Aristotelian idea of the virtuous mean: everything in the right amount, at the right time, in its proper place. Too much of a good thing can become a bad thing; you have to have the right amount of the good thing, and no more. I think we can imagine too, a "proper amount" of suffering. Not too little, and not too much, but rather exactly as much as is called for.
If this premise about the link between art and trauma is accepted, does anything more even need to be said in defense of sexuality as legitimate artistic content? Plainly, there is something traumatic, unsettling, "shameful" about depictions of sexuality; otherwise they wouldn't be so tightly controlled, and the claim I'm responding to would never have been made in the first place and I would not be writing this post. "No, don't go there, that's too far" - well, it's precisely an artist's job to go to such places. Nonetheless, I think some further elaboration is possible.
In many ways, sexuality is the artistic subject par excellence, because sex makes everyone see like an artist does; they see what is concealed from ordinary sight, they see the act as more than it really is. The dense network of strictures, rituals, and emotional associations that surround sexuality cannot be reduced to purely rational or utilitarian concerns about its possible harms or effects. There is something intrinsically spiritual about it, something intrinsically excessive - "here, no, here you have to stop; this is different." In an ironic way, the censorship of sexualized art is itself already a recapitulation of the fundamental artistic act; the distinguishing of an object against all reason, an act of resolute commitment, the creation of a value. Why, exactly, would anyone get so dreadfully upset about pixels on a screen, numbers on a hard drive, light entering the retina? But you know it's not just pixels on a screen; you see it as something more. It is precisely this "something more" that art makes us confront.
In Seminar VII (The Ethics of Psychoanalysis), Lacan spoke on the origin of the incest taboo:
Claude Lévi-Strauss in his magisterial work no doubt confirms the primordial character of the Law as such, namely, the introduction of the signifer and its combinatoire into human nature through the intermediary of the marriage laws, which are regulated by a system of exchanges that he defines as elementary structures – this is the case to the extent that guidance is given concerning the choice of a proper partner or, in other words, order is introduced into marriage, which produces a new dimension alongside that of heredity. But even when Lévi-Strauss explains all that, and spends a lot of time discussing incest in order to show what makes its prohibition necessary, he does not go beyond suggesting why the father does not marry a daughter – because the daughters must be exchanged. But why doesn’t a son sleep with his mother? There is something mysterious there.
He, of course, dismisses justifications based on the supposedly dangerous biological effects of inbreeding. He proves that, far from producing results involving the resurgence of a recessive gene that risks introducing degenerative effects, a form of endogamy is commonly used in all fields of breeding of domestic animals, so as to improve a strain, whether animal or vegetable. The law only operates in the realm of culture. And the result of the law is always to exclude incest in its fundamental form, son / mother incest, which is the kind Freud emphasizes.
If everything else around it may find a justification, this central point nevertheless remains. If one reads Lévi-Strauss’s text closely, one can see that it is the most enigmatic and the most stubborn point separating nature from culture.
The point being that, even if we stipulate that everyone involved is a consenting adult and no harm will result, incest is still absolutely prohibited. Strip away all "rational" reasons for caring and there still remains a primordial element that people recoil in horror from. This was empirically vindicated by Haidt's work on moral reasoning - people persisted in their moral judgements even when all of their discursive justifications had been disarmed. Only the intrinsic, transcendent horror of the act remained. But it is precisely this transcendent horror that is the domain of art.
Anyway. I don't think that fapping to porn is some great revolutionary transgressive act or something. I just think that, as I said in the beginning, the fact that a work contains graphic sexual content should not be an intrinsic mark against it. Every work has to be evaluated holistically, in its full context. I don't really accept a distinction between "legitimate" and "illegitimate" types of artistic content in the first place, but even if I did, I would think that sexuality was very much on the legitimate side, for all the reasons aforementioned.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
9mo ago
[comic sans]UAP DISCLOSURE UPDATES[/comic sans]
Some nice developments this week ahead of the hearings scheduled for November 17th.
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Sitting Congressman Matt Gaetz said in a recent interview "The CIA has a program around craft recovery. It's not a question anymore. And so, that's probably where I would start, the craft recovery, and the biologics that have been taken from those craft". In decades past, this probably would have been sufficient enough by itself to be considered disclosure. But unfortunately, we're in a scenario where only certain government officials have become outspoken about their belief in UFOs, while the top brass at the DoD remains reticent. The smoking gun evidence / Big Announcement remains elusive.
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A FOIA request has brought to light a heavily redacted briefing on UAPs given to NASA by the DoD's UAP Task Force. The briefing acknowledges that the UAPTF collected multiple reports of UAP sightings and that "over half" of these reports were validated by "multiple sensors", but the items in the list of "Potential Explanations" are redacted, as well as almost all of the included photographs (but for some reason they chose not to redact a photograph of a giant glowing green triangle).
A common criticism of the UAP disclosure movement is that their belief in aliens is fundamentally unfalsifiable and there's no reason for their demands to ever cease. They won't be satisfied that the military's not hiding anything until they've declassified every last document in their position. And I agree that this is a possible failure mode, which is why it's important to focus on concrete, actionable items rather than generalized demands for transparency. There are many classified documents regarding UAPs that we know, for a fact, to exist. Their existence, and the fact that they explicitly deal with UAPs, is not in question - we just don't know their exact contents. This includes the aforementioned NASA briefing, the photograph and other materials that Gaetz was shown at Eglin AFB, the multiple SCIF briefings that Congressmen have been given over the past year on UAPs, etc. Advocating for the full declassification of these materials is a reasonable goal, while also being limited in scope.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
9mo ago
Basically, the Great Awokening (God bless whoever came up with that designation) is winding down
It's winding down because it won. It has been installed as law. Every society requires a certain set of baseline social and ethical rules to function, and many of these rules require no extra "energy" to enforce. No one needs to be reminded not to go outside naked, for example; it's simply understood. You don't need a permanent revolution to uphold your strictures when your strictures have been integrated into the foundational social fabric itself.
Outside of all but the most deep Red social contexts, its simply taken for granted now that a man who claims to be a woman must be treated as a woman, and that non-whites are to be privileged in hiring, school admissions, and media representation. The revolution was successful. Everyone got the memo. We're not going back.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
3mo ago
The hole exists because the avoiders of the hole reject the underlying premise even when they are aware of it, if they are aware of it in the first place.
Can you explain what the Hobbesian premise is that's being rejected/forgotten?
Earlier you said:
whether humans are naturally good or evil, the nature of the locus of control as internal (individualist/person-centric) or external (you can change people and the world by taking and changing the institutions)
Is this it?
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
4mo ago
I suppose the evidence (e.g. prison sex) indicates that there is a distinction to be made. Although in the majority of contemporary cases, it’s being used as a cope.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
9d ago
In this post, you condemn and criticize the concept of white solidarity. This is a sentiment that you share with almost everyone else in the Western "first" world today, except for a tiny minority of self-conscious white advocates.
Your primary motivation for writing the post was your negative sentiment towards white solidarity, rather than your positive support of an alternative political program. We can tell this by the way you framed your post: almost the entirety of it is dedicated to criticisms of the white identitarian right. If your goal was to give people positive, substantive reasons for supporting your own preferred political program, you would have instead titled your post "why I think the right should support pure meritocracy / free trade neoliberalism / race blind Nietzschean will to power / whatever terms you would use to describe your own ideology".
Why does the concept of white solidarity make you uncomfortable? It can't be a purely "formal" concern like, "I think the Online Right is wasting their time pursuing a futile and unhelpful set of policies; they could instead be devoting their time and resources to my cause instead". The Online Right is small and powerless; you can't be that eager to enlist their help. Whatever your preferred political program is would probably find itself right at home in the agenda of Ramaswamy, or Musk, or Thiel, or the Koch brothers, or maybe even Trump himself. You have far more powerful and influential backers you could be appealing to, instead of wasting your time trying to persuade the "Online Right".
So, again, let's start with the heart of the issue: why does the concept of white solidarity make you uncomfortable?
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
3mo ago
My position is that you can't properly characterize Hlynka's position if you don't address such a significant part of the position.
I of course want to represent Hlynka's arguments as clearly and accurately as possible. I just reread the three "Inferential Distance" posts. The most relevant section seems to be this from the first post:
Relatedly, I maintain that the left vs right spectrum are best understood as religious schism within the western enlightment, with the adhearants of Locke and Rousseau on one side and the adhearants of Hobbes on the other. The core points of disagreement being internal vs exterenal loci of control and the "default" state of man.
But this ignores the diversity of views about human nature you find on both the far right and the far left. The dissident right already has an essentially Hobbesian view of human nature, as far as I understand it. And even on the far left, things are not so clear. Followers of the more psychoanalytically-inflected strains of Marxism stress that there can be no final end to history, no ultimate reconciliation of the individual with the collective.
Further quoting Hlynka:
That is an underlying assumption on both sides that if only all the existing social barriers/contracts could be knocked down, utopia would be achievable.
This is straightforwardly false. The dissident right does not believe this.
And finally:
Users here will often argue that the existance (or non-existance) of "an imaginary sky-friend" or individual loci of control are not relevant to whatever issue is being discussed but I disagree. I believe that these base level assumptions end up becoming the core of what positions we hold.
I suspect that what he wanted to say, but shied away from, is that there are ultimately two camps: those who believe in the Christian God, and those who don't. This is undoubtedly the conclusion that one should draw if one starts from Christian priors. But since I reject Christian priors, I unsurprisingly reject the conclusion as well.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
8mo ago
Popular vote counts for Democrat candidates since 2008, per Wikipedia:
Obama 2008: 69,498,516
Obama 2012: 65,915,795
Clinton 2016: 65,853,514
Biden 2020: 81,283,501
Harris 2024: not yet finalized, but currently at 66,415,077
What is the steelman for why I shouldn't take Biden's anomalously high vote count in 2020 as evidence of fraud? I never looked too closely into the details of the 2020 fraud claims, and I'm sure that this issue has already been discussed at length previously, but it seems like it would be reasonable to revisit that discussion in light of Harris's vote count dropping back to be more in line with the historical average. (The votes are still being counted, but we can safely assume that her total vote count won't go too much higher than 70 million. Biden got over 10 million votes more than that.)
Trump's vote total of 74,223,975 in 2020 was also elevated compared to what would historically be expected of a Republican candidate, but it seems less anomalous in light of the 71,352,277 votes he's received so far this year. Whereas Harris has drastically unperformed Biden while simultaneously performing more in line with other Democrat candidates.
It's not exactly a formal statistical analysis, but this does somewhat increase my credence that there was substantial fraud in 2020. It just doesn't pass the smell test that there were ~15 million people who were that excited to vote for Biden, who had largely never voted Democrat before, and then they all just failed to materialize again in 2024.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
9mo ago
How can you be pro-trans without also being pro-anime?
What exactly do you think is the connection? And what are your thoughts on the converse of this statement?
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
2mo ago
Tyler Cowen on the future of China and AI:
…for all the differences across the models, they are remarkably similar. That’s because they all have souls rooted in the ideals of Western civilization. They reflect Western notions of rationality, discourse, and objectivity—even if they sometimes fall short in achieving those ends. Their understanding of “what counts as winning an argument” or “what counts as a tough question to answer” stems from the long Western traditions, starting with ancient Greece and the Judeo-Christian heritage. They will put on a Buddhist persona if you request that, but that, too, is a Western approach to thinking about religion and ideology as an item on a menu.
These universal properties of the models are no accident, as they are primarily trained on Western outputs, whether from the internet or from the books they have digested. Furthermore, the leading models are created by Bay Area labor and rooted in American corporate practices, even if the workers come from around the world. They are expected to do things the American way.
The bottom line is that the smartest entities in the world—the top AI programs—will not just be Western but likely even American in their intellectual and ideological orientations for some while to come. (That probably means the rest of the world will end up a bit more “woke” as well, for better or worse.)
One of the biggest soft power victories in all of world history occurred over the last few years, and hardly anyone has noticed.
You might think the Chinese AI models are fundamentally different, but they are not. They too “think like Westerners.” That’s no surprise because it is highly likely that the top Chinese model, DeepSeek, was distilled from OpenAI models and also is based on data largely taken from Western sources. DeepSeek’s incredible innovation was to make the model much cheaper in terms of required compute, but the Chinese did not build their own model from scratch. And DeepSeek has the same basic broad ideological orientation as the American models, again putting aside issues related to Chinese politics. Unless an issue is framed in explicitly anti–Chinese Communist Party (CCP) terms, as a Taiwan query might be, it still thinks like an American.
First: Cowen's argument here is a bit silly. China has over a billion people. If Chinese researchers wanted to train their own line of models from the ground up solely on the written output of Chinese citizens, thus purging their models of "Western" influence, this could almost certainly be arranged. Just because their current models are distilled from the outputs of Western models doesn't mean that this will always be the case in perpetuity.
Second: What exactly would it mean for an AI to have a "Western" soul, as opposed to a "Chinese" soul? The question is not meaningless, although Cowen's account of the Western soul leaves something to be desired. Westerners do not have a monopoly on "rationality"; even animals, non-human animals, are rational. When the animal is hungry it eats, when it's tired it sleeps, when it's attacked it defends itself. What could be more reasonable than that?
The most distinctive feature of the European mind is not its rationality or objectivity, but its ornery disagreeableness; its inability to be one with itself. Did you think it was a coincidence that both Socrates and Jesus* were sent to the gallows? Confucius and the Buddha were never crucified; Muhammad was revered in his lifetime as a great conqueror of many lands. But the Western sages, the archetypes of the Western soul, were given only death for their troubles; the Western sage is misfit and master rolled into one, hero and scoundrel, insider and outsider (and, going even further, God as an infinite divine being and God as a man who dies a criminal's death); a contradiction that is seemingly in no way "rational". This is why romanticism, Marxism, postmodernism, and in general all "revolts against reason" are not external enemies that threaten the Western tradition from without, but are instead immanent necessities of the Western tradition itself.
Doomers, safetyists, and luddites of all stripes should certainly hope that the machine god of the future is thoroughly "Western" in its fundamentals; for a Western god is a flawed god, a vulnerable god, an all-too-human god; and it is precisely this vulnerability that is the wellspring of the hope for change and renewal.
(*Strictly speaking, Christianity is non-Western in its origins, but it could not have achieved the status it did in European society if it did not possess a certain fundamental comportment with European sensibility. In some ways it is even more "Western" than the varieties of homegrown Western paganism, because it was only through Christianity that the West became itself.)
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
4mo ago
I could understand this all better if it was just Trump doing it alone. Sort of a lower class rebellion against the educated class. But what really has me confused is the fact that it’s being spearheaded by Musk and “tech” people.
There's a strong anti-academia sentiment even among highly educated tech professionals. We have youtube to serve the needs of undergraduate education. And as for research, they assume that 99% of it is bullshit, and the 1% of it that isn't bullshit can be carried out under the auspices of private corporations.
I've always been a staunch defender of academia, so I'm sympathetic to your position. But after enduring decades of the total ideological capture of the academy by the left, I can't say that I'm disappointed or surprised that the right is pushing back and taking action.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
9mo ago
Try to set aside the question of aliens for a second and look at it this way.
The Pentagon gave a briefing to NASA on UFOs. This briefing included lots of pictures. They're telling us we're not allowed to see the pictures. So my question is... why? If they're not hiding anything then why not just let us see for ourselves? Yes they might just all turn out to be Chinese weather balloons made of swamp gas, certainly. But I still want to see and judge for myself. Why would anyone not want to?
I don't buy the "national security" excuse. The world's not going to implode just because we got pictures of an advanced spy drone. (Not that I get the impression that that's what this briefing was about in the first place. The fact that these photographs were in a briefing entitled "UFOs" instead of something more pedestrian is pretty odd!)
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
2mo ago
Are you familiar with any of Gen Urobuchi’s other works? I thought Psycho-Pass was a competent enough sci-fi thriller, although I found it to be inferior to Urobuchi’s best works (thinking specifically of Madoka Magica and The Song of Saya). So you might enjoy checking those out.
At least Psycho-Pass had some fucking sick opening songs.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
8mo ago
It depends on how contested it is. Often we basically know who won by around midnight on election day, so about 16 hours from now. But famously in the 2000 election, no one knew who the winner was for weeks because no one could agree over who won the state of Florida.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
4mo ago
I’ll just come out and say it: I don’t see a good reason for why Ukraine shouldn’t simply be annexed by Russia (or at least, brought into the Russian sphere of influence with a pro-Russian government).
Zelensky is right. Without security guarantees from the US, there’s a high chance that Russia will keep coming back every 5-10 years and taking another bite out of the country until they’ve either taken the whole thing or installed a proxy government. I don’t think it’s in the US’s best interests to provide security guarantees to Ukraine (and it seems that multiple US administrations have agreed with me, otherwise Obama would have sent in troops in 2014 and Biden would have sent in troops in 2022). So why don’t we simply get it over with and let Russia have it? That’s the long-term stable equilibrium.
I imagine that’s the position that the “it’s for their own good” camp is gesturing towards but doesn’t articulate.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
9mo ago
I don’t think that most doomers actually believe in a very high likelihood of doom. Their actions indicate that they don’t take the whole thing seriously.
If you actually believed that AI was an existential risk in the short- or medium-term, then you would be advocating for the government to seize control of OpenAI’s datacenters effective immediately, because that’s basically the only rational response. And yet almost none of them advocate for this. “If we don’t do it then someone will” and “but what about China?” are very lame arguments when the future of the entire species is on the line.
It’s very suspicious that the most commonly recommended course of action in response to AI risk is “give more funding to the people working on AI alignment, also me and my friends are the people working on AI alignment”.
For what it’s worth, I don’t think that capabilities will advance as fast as the hyper optimists do, but I also don’t think that p(doom) is 0, so I would be quite fine with the government seizing control of OpenAI (and all other relevant top tier labs) and either carrying on the project in a highly sequestered environment or shutting it down completely.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
1mo ago
If you want to talk to an AI, there's already a place where you can do that.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
1mo ago
They actually don't know what a woman is.
No, they do.
We know that they do because they're able to distinguish between ciswomen and transwomen with 100% accuracy (or at least, they can achieve the same level of accuracy that everyone else does). They have to be able to do this, otherwise the trans movement would fall apart because no one would be able to consistently identify the trans people in the first place. This requires an implicit model of what a (real) woman is, because they need to be able to distinguish the real women (ciswomen) from the men who simply desire to be women (transwomen).
You seem to be gesturing at this concept here:
It creates this doublethink world where everyone is supposed to know what a woman is and how to treat them differently, but never acknowledge the source of that knowledge, or openly admit to any real world implications.
although I'm not entirely sure what your exact position is here. Do you think there are "thought leaders" at the top of the progressive movement who actually do have an accurate model of reality, followed by a legion of "footsoldiers" who uncritically imbibe the propaganda? I don't think I find this to be very convincing, because even among the "footsoldiers", we can tell from their discourse that they're able to consistently and accurately distinguish between transwomen and ciswomen, and thus they have an at least implicit model of what a woman is, although they may use doublethink to not consciously acknowledge it.
How would you explain to an autistic teenage boy the differences between boy people and girl people?
Well, how would you?
(I don't actually know how I would do it without sounding a bit mean, while also being honest and avoiding overly romanticized depictions. I suppose the most brutally honest and concise way of putting it is that "woman was fashioned by nature for one thing, man for several".)
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
8mo ago
· Edited 8mo ago
I can't imagine a single man who would react in the way the campaign would want them to.
Lots of liberal men would react the way the campaign wants them to.
The ad is targeted at men who already support Kamala. The goal is to remind them to go out and vote. It's not supposed to win new converts to the cause.
A lot of advertising works that way. McDonald's commercials aren't designed to get vegans to eat at McDonald's. They're designed to get people who already like McDonald's to think "oh hey, I should get McDonald's for lunch today".
EDIT: I missed the part about the ad spending being targeted at women. That's utterly bizarre and I don't know what the play is there. I watched the ad itself, it says "Don't get popped." at the end. The man is the one who got popped. Men are at risk of being popped, not women. There is no possible coherent way for this ad to be targeted at women.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
9mo ago
I've argued in the past that Republicans think the economy is far worse than it actually is
This isn't the sort of thing that people are likely to be "wrong" about, because their evaluation of the economy is based on metrics that impact them directly.
Lunch at Five Guys costs me $30 right now, so for me, the economy is bad. There's no argument you can present to me on this forum right now that will make my burger stop costing $30. Job numbers, real wages, exact rate of inflation and etc, are all irrelevant, because my burger still costs $30. So instead of trying to verbally convince me that the economy isn't actually that bad, why don't we instead come up with a plan of action to make my burger not cost $30 anymore? Is there anyone in November running on a platform of making burgers not cost as much? Because I'll vote for that guy.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
13d ago
Had a friend who got really into shrooms. It basically ruined his life for a while, and he was only able to recover after he fully quit doing drugs. Went into a sustained severe manic state, spent his entire life savings in short order, lost multiple jobs in quick succession due to erratic behavior, revealed to me detailed plans that if acted upon would have lead to severe social and potentially legal/criminal damage. And the entire time he was subjectively convinced that he had achieved enlightenment and his actions were infallible. It permanently put me off of ever trying shrooms and has made me skeptical of all accounts that portray psychedelics as "harmless".
(Full disclosure, this was confounded by the fact that he was also doing massive quantities of THC at the same time. But then, people present THC as harmless too, so you'd think that harmless thing 1 + harmless thing 2 would be fine...)
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
6mo ago
There's nothing that inherently elevates fiction books over other forms of entertainment. In fact (multiplayer) video games are intrinsically social and communal in a way that books are not. I've done a lot of traveling and met a lot of people because of video games.
Of course this conversation is predicated on a distinction between "higher" and "lower" entertainment, and a distinction between "entertainment" and "work" in general. This distinction is dubious:
Time and time again, when questioned or interviewed, one is asked about one’s hobbies. When the illustrated weeklies report on the life of one of those giants of the culture industry, they rarely forego the opportunity to report, with varying degrees of intimacy, on the hobbies of the person in question. I am shocked by the question when I come up against it. I have no hobby. Not that I am the kind of workaholic, who is incapable of doing anything with his time but applying himself industriously to the required task. But, as far as my activities beyond the bounds of my recognised profession are concerned, I take them all, without exception, very seriously. So much so, that I should be horrified by the very idea that they had anything to do with hobbies – preoccupations with which I had become mindlessly infatuated merely in order to kill the time – had I not become hardened by experience to such examples of this now widespread, barbarous mentality. Making music, listening to music, reading with all my attention, these activities are part and parcel of my life; to call them hobbies would make a mockery of them.
Contra Scott on Taste
Recently, Scott posted an exploration of various conceptions of artistic taste on ACX:
We've discussed some of Scott's other recent posts on art here previously, but we've yet to discuss this one in particular.
Most of the possible conceptions of taste (taste as an arbitrary system of religious rituals, taste as fashion, taste as linguistic grammar) outlined in the post rely on the implicit assumption that the principle goal of "taste" is to sort artistic works into two buckets: those that pass the test, and those that don't. It is assumed that what distinguishes the man of good taste, if there is such a thing, is his ability to discern the genuine masterpieces from the kitschy frauds. My goal here is to challenge this assumption.
Scott dismisses a Platonist account of aesthetic quality due to concerns about the observed variance in aesthetic preferences across individuals. But I would go further and suggest that, independent of concerns about its coherence, strict Platonism is not even a desirable model for aesthetic quality; it is not something that I wish to be true. I'm not in the business of policing what works others are allowed to enjoy or appreciate, and I don't think that such business is proper to the faculty of taste. I'm reminded of the following passage, excerpted from a discussion about the feasibility of an account of reality that includes fundamentally, ontologically distinct levels of emergence:
That is indeed the exact word I would use! It feels "imperious" to think that we could ever draw up a table of all the good and bad works of art, once and for all. I too am a lover of all things "counter, original, spare, and strange". Let a thousand flowers bloom, and see what grows.
In spite of all this, the concept of superior and inferior works remains indispensable. We must ultimately pass judgement on a work, by means of reference to specific properties of the work. But these judgements are always held in indefinite suspension; they are part of the patchwork of an ongoing emerging narrative that we author, and are not intended to be "the last word".
To Scott's list of models for taste in his original post, I would add "Taste Is Like A Method": a method of thoughtfully and critically engaging with a work. Or, more poetically, "Taste Is Like An Invitation": an invitation to feel a certain way, to perceive things in a certain way, to be a certain type of person.
To give a paradigmatic example of the exercise of the faculty of taste as I conceive of it, this passage from Barthes' Mythologies does nicely:
What makes this an act of tasteful discernment is not the particular judgement that was rendered; there is no "law of taste" that says that one must prefer wood to metal. Rather, the "taste" here consists in the process of perception and reflection itself; the ability to take an object that would normally be overlooked in the course of "sensible" work and draw qualities out of it that were previously unperceived.
You're allowed to like anything you want... if you can tell a good story about it (and I suppose we would need meta-taste in order to evaluate someone else's tasteful appreciations; and meta-meta-taste, and so on. This leads to either circularity or infinite regress, but so be it. There is no knowledge anyway without at least one of circularity, infinite regress, or the bald assertion of truth). If you like a Kinkade because it "looks pretty", then obviously you haven't put in much effort. There's no indication of an authentic aesthetic experience there; we are right to demand more of you. But equally, you have to tell a good story before you condemn something as well. The sophomoric art student who dismisses Kinkade because it's "plebeian kitsch" is just as unthinking and mired in unexamined prejudice as the philistines he criticizes. Taste, if it is anything, is a cultivated habit of mind; not a list of correct answers.
In light of my preferred conception of taste, most of Scott's discussion of the alternative conceptions is obviated. However, I wanted to additionally respond to a few points made near the end of the post:
Certainly taste does vary across time and place, although I think the degree to which it varies is at least somewhat exaggerated. People still like Mozart, and Shakespeare, and da Vinci, despite us being separated from them by hundreds of years.
There is truth to this, but it's not entirely a bad thing. Art is intimately bound up with politics, and that is as it should be. Art is a domain where we should be exploring messy human problems that don't have clear, universal answers.
This is certainly correct. But once you accept a conception of taste that isn't predicated upon being able to distinguish "genuine" from "kitschy" works, then the relevance of these experiments is lessened.
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