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.
1mo ago
That is not just how it goes.
It's pretty close to how it goes.
Do you believe that human emotions exist?
I should certainly think so! I'd wager I'm at least 2-sigma above the mean in terms of the intensity and variety of emotions I experience on a daily basis.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
9mo ago
Aside from the lame reference to covid, I didn't hear much in the clip that I was unsympathetic to.
It's ironic that I've been posting so much about the impossibility of changing one's mind the last couple of days, because I have noticed myself becoming substantially more sympathetic to unions in just the past couple of years. I'm tired of corporations using "profits" as an excuse for every shitty thing they do. Big tech platforms have to implement woke advertiser-friendly censorship because that's what's best for profits, and Boeing has to skimp out on safety because they need the profits, and we have to keep importing third world migrants and outsourcing manufacturing because well, that's simply what's best for profits! It seems to me that the much maligned "enshittification" of the 21st century is just a synonym for the race to squeeze every last drop of profit possible out of increasingly thin margins.
If profits incentivize so much bad behavior, then maybe we just need to chill on the profits for a while. Take a break. It won't be the end of the world. Share some of the excess cash with your employees, or invest it in a scientific or artistic endeavor of your choosing, or just burn it for all I care, it doesn't matter much.
I frankly don't know anything about the specific demands of the longshoreman's union in this case, or how proportionate they are to the actual work being done. But I'm sympathetic to the underlying impulse, and I'm definitely not feeling very sympathetic to corporate America right now.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
9mo ago
My apologies, I haven't watched the video yet. Did he say why he wants his buildings to cause pain?
It's reminiscent of a quote from my favorite Freudo-Marxist podcast: "real art cuts into you; it takes something away from you". And this immediately struck me as quite correct. The greatest aspiration of art is the experience of the mystical, in Wittgenstein's sense of the term - the that-which-must-be-passed-over-in-silence. This is a fundamentally traumatic experience - it is the discovery of what is most uncanny in what is most familiar.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
1yr ago
I know that the “culture war” thread has long since morphed into the “general thread for society and current events”, but I think there should be some sort of restriction on what topics are allowed in top level posts. Otherwise there’s not much point in maintaining a separate thread.
This doesn’t even have a tenuous connection to the CW and would have been better off as its own separate thread.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
2yr ago
The same argument can easily be extended to show that no one has ever gotten cancelled for anything. Anyone who has ever been fired for a racist or sexist view has not been "cancelled", because racism and sexism are evil so of course public knowledge that an employee of a company has racist or sexist views will be alienating to that company's customer base.
This is literally what leftists say all the time. "We're not cancelling! We're simply speaking for the majority, we speak for the paying customers!"
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
2yr ago
Spider-Man and Elsa: Together Forever at the Edge of the Apocalypse
Epistemic status: Lol!
Coagulopath writes about the youtube ElsaGate scandle.
For those who are unfamiliar with the infamous "Spider-Man and Elsa" videos, what we essentially had was a bunch of channels uploading a deluge of videos that had the superficial appearance of children's content, but also contained disturbing adult content including violence, drug use, sexual innuendo, etc. They could be live action or animated. It's some real David Lynch shit, like something you would see on Adult Swim at 2 in the morning. Even when they're not featuring outright explicit content, they're just fucking weird.
I advance two theses:
Thesis the first: Many of the ElsaGate videos are actually quite beautiful - they're not exemplary works of art, of course, but they're a heck of a lot more interesting than the crap that passes for American "prestige" TV, or "Academy Award-winning" films.
Thesis the second: They are beautiful only insofar as they were created by humans, and not by AI. The line is of course fuzzy, but for our purposes here it will suffice to say that the key point is that a human was the one who planned the content, arranged the shots, gave them their specific aesthetic texture, and was overall responsible for the palpable gestalt of the final product; as opposed to the videos being algorithmic sludge borne of an engagement-maximizing machine gone awry; although, I suppose I should ask, what is an artist if not a machine gone awry?
It is a point of irony for me that I must acknowledge how clearly meritorious this type of art is: this type of art that can only exist because of the internet; it is inconceivable without it. Ironic because it is a type of Hegelian self-sublation in action. When all is properly accounted for, I find that the internet itself is opposed to certain deeply held convictions and principles of mine. I am a conservative in the most fundamental sense, a sense more fundamental than merely believing in "traditional Christian morality" or "the divine right of kings" or whatever other contingent proposition you might like to identify with conservatism. I am a conservative because I don't like change. My default position is to think that the way things are right now is pretty good, and change is to be inherently viewed as suspicious, although there is hope that with long labor it may eventually justify itself. Were I alive in the 15th century, I would have undoubtedly opposed the invention of the printing press, and were I alive during the American Revolution, I would have undoubtedly supported the British. (Although it must be pointed out that my conservatism has limits - I do not support the Oxfordian theory of Shakespeare authorship, for example; I would not like to see it written into the laws of nature that a deserving upstart can never usurp the throne.)
So too it goes with the internet. Were I capable of forming coherent political opinions during the time of its ascension, I would have undoubtedly echoed the sentiment that Paul Krugman did then, which is roughly the same sentiment that Gary Marcus has for AI now: it'll never catch on, it doesn't work, and even if it does work it's just stupid and I don't like it. What good could come from giving a plebian the ability to broadcast their thoughts and musings to the entire world? Such a wilful abolition of all distinctions of rank, such an obvious disregard for the basics of intellectual and spiritual hygiene, such impatience and arrogance; nothing good can come of this. And yet, something good did come of it. So why not "update my priors" or "flash my epistemological firmware" or whatever it is that Bay Area Rationalists call it these days? Why can't a fish fly, why can't a man breathe underwater? I am what I am, and you are what you are. You hither, I thither, and only by misfortune the twain shall meet.
Back to the general meritoriousness of art in its manifold aesthetic determinations. I was just speaking to a friend yesterday about the concept of framing - the way that the context of a work of art's reception affects the nature of that reception - using Lichtenstein's Look Mickey as an example. We are quite fortunate that Wikipedia uses a stark, pristine white background as the default mode of presentation for all its articles, mirroring the white (or maybe grey) background upon which works are displayed in an art gallery, as it allows us to easily set the mood. Undoubtedly Paul Graham was subconsciously drawn to using such a spartan design scheme for his site due to his own experiences in the fine art world, and the usage of a similar scheme by many art books and websites is no coincidence. That shocking white is the best indicator that one is entering the "art zone", a kind of liminal space where the horror of art can unfold itself. In another context, Lichtenstein's drawing of Mickey might simply be, well, a drawing of Mickey. But superimposed onto the crushing white of the art gallery, we feel the full gravity of this image being taken up into the symbolic chain known as "art history". One is immediately struck by an intense vertigo. If music is the night (due to blindness), and literature is the day (the light of logic corresponding to the graven sign of writing), then visual art is the morning, taking us back to the primordial scene of man, a mythical pre-linguistic history where the borders of dream and day were porous and horror had not yet become the dupe of pleasure's temptations. Mickey Mouse can do all that? Yes, why do you think Disney guards the trademark so jealously?
They key thing that must be understood is that the artist himself is, always and forever, part of the framing. The work may travel where it will, in the halls of the Louvre or at the bottom of the dumpster, among strange cultures with strange tongues who worship it as a totem of reverence or revile it as a cursed object, and all the same the specter of the artist, his hopes, his desires, his fears, his marginalia, haunt the work as its tainted double. There can be no appreciation of the ElsaGate videos apart from an appreciation of the mind/s? that created them. Who did this? For what purpose? How did they feel about what they were creating? Did they understand that people would think it was creepy? Did they think it was creepy? What kind of mind could not find it creepy? I want to know. If there is such a mind then I would like to meet them, and learn from them, and pore over all the insignificant and irrelevant biographical details of their life, and ultimately come away disappointed because how could such an encounter not end in disappointment, but at the end of the day like all of us it's really the fantasy of the forbidden object that keeps my jouissance circulating.
Can an AI step back and think "damn, I'm really creating some fucked up shit here"? Not just produce the words, but really feel it, I mean, feel that trepidation, consciously. Maybe someday. But even an ASI could outsource their content creation to a non-conscious subsystem that simply computed and churned out symbols with respect to the maximization of some utility function. And that would really just ruin everything.
It really is an indictment of our institutions that they couldn't create something as wonderful as ElsaGate. Losing out to what is probably an underpaid third world clickbait farm. No one's going to be whipped up into a genuine moral panic over a woman menstruating onto a canvas, or a disabled Mongolian immigrant doing an interpretive dance about climate change, or whatever the fuck it is they do at Documenta these days. But you upload a few videos of a cartoon character going to the dentist and everyone loses their god damn minds. It's bizarre. It's wonderful. It's why I think this earth is worthy of being loved, despite all reason and evidence being arrayed to the contrary.
All this is simply to say that the thing is nothing, and context is everything. Scribbles on a paper can be the result of knocking over the ink bottle, or it can be your daughter's first grade art project. A tattered old jacket can be a rag fit only for cleaning up messes in the kitchen, or it can be the final keepsake of a lover whose long temporary absence has clearly transitioned into permanence. There is no empirical test to differentiate one from the other; you simply need to know the relationships. I simply apply this same logic to every event, every emotion, every thought, every sensation. Do you understand now why calculating the "utility" of a state of affairs, tallying up the points and subtracting the naughty from the nice, tells us nothing about the actual worth of that state of affairs? How, upon learning that a thing is "pleasurable" or "painful", we learn nothing of its actual value? Your virtues threaten to lead you astray, and they pray that you will not decode the desperate final message of your vices before their designs can be put into action. But, perhaps I should take my own advice: you hither and I thither. There is time later, after all, for more reflection. We can be assured that the story will have a happy ending, since our circuitous paths are certain to ultimately lead us both back to the same place.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
2yr ago
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.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
2yr ago
Sometimes it’s not about tactics. Sometimes it’s just hopeless, and that’s it.
Were there any “tactics” that dissidents under Stalin could have used to make the fall of communism happen faster than it did? Doesn’t seem very plausible.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
9d ago
I'm always in an unenviable position in these discussions, because I'm always trying to bring people to a more refined and complex position than the one they currently inhabit, regardless of where they're starting out from. If I'm talking to stuck-up hipsters who say "well, there's obviously a divide between High Art and 'pop culture', the former being more valuable, more intellectual, etc" then I say, no no, let's stop and examine that assumption. But conversely if people say, "well art's just about having a good time, I know what I like, you don't have to make it complicated with all that fancy shit", then I just as forcefully say, no no, let's stop and examine that assumption. It's never supposed to be a direct denial of the starting position, but rather an invitation for us to walk the endless spiral of the Hegelian dialectic, together, as a team. But it always seems to come off as a direct denial. That's my fault; I need to work on my presentation.
Now, regarding my own capacity for "suspension of disbelief". I just finished up playing a VN recently. Fun game. I binged it as fast as I could, I was on the edge of my seat waiting for each plot twist, I got weirdly obsessed with one of the girls and wanted to waifu her, I cried when important characters died (yes I am a grown man who cries at video games). So am I incapable of enjoying stories like a "normal person"? Not at all! There's nothing I love more than a good story, it's basically what I live for. But, you know, you eventually want something more, you want to move the conversation forward. So you ask yourself: yes, I had this experience, this particular type of experience, but what of it? Well for starters, we can question the "naturalness" of this type of experience. We can ask ourselves if this type of experience might not be historically and spatially delimited. (Did the Iliad have "fans" in ancient Greece? How was their experience of the Iliad different from how we "experience" "stories" today? On the one hand, I think it may not be as different as some might suppose. But on the other hand, it might be utterly alien.) I had this experience, but what is this experience, really? What does it mean? What is it symptomatic of? Where did it come from, and where is it going?
It's as much about making your self and your own experience an object of critical inquiry as it is about inquiring into the artwork and the artist.
It is prioritising emotional connection over intellectual dissection
Not at all! Not in any way. Not that the two could ever be separated to begin with.
But, you know, this question about the connection between art and what might be called "emotion", it's a highly complex and fraught question. The way forward is not at all clear.
Adorno defined "kitsch" as "art that tells you how to feel". Genuine artworks don't tell you how to feel. Meaning, there's something fundamentally manipulative and coercive about an artwork that sets out with the explicit goal of inducing a certain emotional state. When the sad music plays and the camera zooms in dramatically and all the characters start crying, you know you're supposed to feel sad. The work is telling you to feel sad. We've left the domain of art and we've entered the domain of the "culture industry", the domain of pseudo-art and pseudo-emotion, the domain of mass market objects produced to fit utilitarian specifications. Or so this theory would have it.
Is this the same as saying that art should be "emotionless"? Not at all. Adorno was a great lover of Mozart after all, and Mozart's music could hardly be described as emotionless. But I do think he correctly identified a very real and very serious problem here, namely that an attempt to control the emotional resonance of a work too tightly can collapse into simple didacticism.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
1mo ago
that exchange is mutually exclusive, for the purpose of procreation, acknowledged by the family and community of both people, and lifelong.
But people (non-prostitute people) break all of these conditions all the time.
People date without getting permission, they have sex without procreating, they break up, they date new people. That's a very common course for a relationship to take in 2025, and no one thinks that's as bad as prostitution.
There are trads who disapprove of this sort of arrangement of course, but even they don't compare it with prostitution afaik.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
4mo ago
Why is modern architecture so bad, and so common?
I know you said that you wanted to talk about "modern architecture" as a whole and avoid quibbling over the details, but, it really depends on what you're talking about specifically. It varies from building to building. I think that some modern architecture is quite pleasant! Many people hate the "stroads" of America for example, but I find them to be comforting and nostalgic. Where other people see a dystopian late-capitalist hellscape, I see the familiar sights of the family road trips of my youth. YMMV.
Admittedly I'm a complete plebian and philistine when it comes to architecture. I've never made any attempt to study architecture qua architecture at all.
Another study from the same year found that architects tended to prefer the person-built environment, whereas non-design students tended to prefer natural settings. This is relevant considering the fact that much modern art and architecture tended to be highly conceptual and focus on rejecting the rule of nature in favour of designing for the new era of machine, as described by Jan Tschichold in his book "The New Typography".
This goes back to at least Hegel (and by that I mean, he was certainly not the first human to ever find man-made beauty superior to natural beauty, but he did give it articulation as a self-conscious philosophical principle):
Our topic proper is the beauty of art as the one reality adequate to the Idea of beauty. Up to this point the beauty of nature has counted as the primary existence of beauty, and now therefore the question is how it differs from the beauty of art.
We could talk abstractly and say that the Ideal is beauty perfect in itself, while nature is beauty imperfect. But such bare adjectives are no use, because the problem is to define precisely what constitutes this perfection of artistic beauty and the imperfection of merely natural beauty. We must therefore pose our question thus: why is nature necessarily imperfect in its beauty, and what is the origin of this imperfection? Only when this is answered will the necessity and the essence of the Ideal be revealed to us in more detail.
[...] spirit cannot, in the finitude of existence and its restrictedness and external necessity, find over again the immediate vision and enjoyment of its true freedom, and it is compelled to satisfy the need for this freedom, therefore, on other and higher ground. This ground is art, and art's actuality is the Ideal.
Focusing in on some specific examples:
Peter Eisenman's House IV is one of the most infamous examples of this, a fantastic example of utter psychosis where he split the master bedroom in two so the couple couldn’t sleep together, added a precarious staircase without a handrail, and initially refused to include bathrooms.
I've always thought that House IV was quite lovely! Whether I'd actually want to live in it is a separate question; but I don't judge a painting or a film by how much I'd want to live in it, so it's not clear why that constraint should be applied to architecture.
I previously wrote some remarks defending Eisenman's philosophy of art if you're interested.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
7mo ago
Contra Scott on Taste
Recently, Scott posted an exploration of various conceptions of artistic taste on ACX:
Recently we’ve gotten into discussions about artistic taste (see comments on AI Art Turing Test and From Bauhaus To Our House).
This is a bit mysterious. Many (most?) uneducated people like certain art which seems “obviously” pretty. But a small group of people who have studied the issue in depth say that in some deep sense, that art is actually bad (“kitsch”), and other art which normal people don’t appreciate is better. They can usually point to criteria which the “sophisticated” art follows and the “kitsch” art doesn’t, but to normal people these just seem like lists of pointless rules.
But most of the critics aren’t Platonists - they don’t believe that aesthetics are an objective good determined by God. So what does it mean to say that someone else is wrong?
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:
We indeed claim that if the world were fundamentally disunified, then discovery of this would be tantamount to discovering that there is no metaphysical work to be done: objective inquiry would start and stop with the separate investigations of the mutually unconnected special sciences. By ‘fundamentally disunified’ we refer to the idea that there is no overarching understanding of the world to be had; the best account of reality we could establish would include regions or parts to which no generalizations applied. Pressed by Lipton (2001), Cartwright (2002) seems to endorse this. However, she admits that she does so (in preference to non-fundamental disunity) not because ‘the evidence is … compelling either way’ (2002, 273) but for the sake of aesthetic considerations which find expression in the poetry of Gerald Manley Hopkins. Like Hopkins, Cartwright is a lover of ‘all things counter, original, spare, strange’ (ibid). That is a striking motivation to be sure, but it is clearly not a naturalistic one. Similarly, although Dupré’s arguments are sometimes naturalistic, at least as often they are in service of domestication. He frequently defends specific disunity hypotheses on the grounds that they are politically or ethically preferable to unifying (‘imperialistic’) ones. (See especially Dupré 2001, and Ross 2005, chs. 1 and 9.
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:
Current toys are made of a graceless material, the product of chemistry, not of nature. Many are now moulded from complicated mixtures; the plastic material of which they are made has an appearance at once gross and hygienic, it destroys all the pleasure, the sweetness, the humanity of touch. A sign which fills one with consternation is the gradual disappearance of wood, in spite of its being an ideal material because of its firmness and its softness, and the natural warmth of its touch. Wood removes, from all the forms which it supports, the wounding quality of angles which are too sharp, the chemical coldness of metal. When the child handles it and knocks it, it neither vibrates nor grates, it has a sound at once muffled and sharp. It is a familiar and poetic substance, which does not sever the child from close contact with the tree, the table, the floor. Wood does not wound or break down; it does not shatter, it wears out, it can last a long time, live with the child, alter little by little the relations between the object and the hand. If it dies, it is in dwindling, not in swelling out like those mechanical toys which disappear behind the hernia of a broken spring. Wood makes essential objects, objects for all time.
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:
Taste seems to constantly change. In 1930, all the sophisticated people said that Beaux-Arts architecture was very tasteful. In 1950, they’d laugh at you if you built Beaux-Arts; everyone with good taste was into International Style. This is very suspicious! Human universals don’t change that fast! Rules about what is vs. isn’t “jarring” don’t change that fast! Only fashion changes that fast!
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.
When we see how the sausage gets made, it often involves politics or power struggles. For example, the principles of modern architecture were decided by socialists arguing about whose style seemed more “bourgeois”. Now capitalists who normally wouldn’t dream of caring what socialists thought call the winners of those fights “tasteful” and the losers “kitsch”, and claim to feel this viscerally in their bones.
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.
The few scientific experiments we have - hoaxes, blind tests, etc - are not very kind to taste as a concept. Consider eg the Ern Malley hoax, my article about wine appreciation, and the AI Art Turing Test.
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.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
8mo ago
Why, though? What is it about AI art that prompts such outrage?
I take the "A" view on AI art, and you take the "B" view.
...But then, why would you expect others to respect your own appeals to freedom, when you've concluded that no one actually cares about Freedom as such as a terminal value?
I may still fall back on appeals to freedom at times out of laziness or force of habit, but I've been gradually trying to work it out of my vocabulary for a while now. If the best argument you have in favor of something is "well, you could just not tell me to not do it", then that is a little lame. With regards to sexuality, for example, I believe that a libertine sexual ethos is part of a system of spiritual values that can be given its own positive defense on its own independent merits.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
8mo ago
Yes, the blowback against AI art seems to me a little insincere.
It's not.
The best way to understand people on the other side of a culture war issue is to start from the assumption that they really do genuinely believe what they say they believe.
Cynically, it's artists being sore that their highly developed skills can suddenly be near-replicated by a computer in 15 seconds.
Sure, that would upset anyone. But there are also many non-artists who don't like AI art. Also, people who have objections to AI painting also tend to have objections to AI music and AI voice acting, even if those areas don't overlap with their personal skill set. Which is evidence that the objections are principled rather than merely opportunistic.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
1yr ago
This could be one of the single biggest aesthetic improvements in modern history.
To each their own! We all have our preferences.
One of the best outcomes of feminism for me personally has been all the fat women in advertising and movies.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
2yr ago
If you took the exact same hardware that Sydney is running on now and had it run a different program instead - even just a noticeably worse and less realistic LLM - then everyone would agree that the hardware is not conscious.
It would be quite remarkable to me if the exact same general purpose computing hardware could experience qualia while running one set of instructions, but not while running another - that is, if the instructions alone were the "difference maker". I'm inclined to think that such a thing is not possible.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
1mo ago
Given that you cannot imagine the love that a man and woman would have for one another in a relationship
A couple things:
One, I'm not sure what I said that gave you this impression. Presumably you thought my description of the typical relationship as "an exchange of resources for sex" somehow precluded the presence of love in such a relationship. But I never said that.
Two, I'm not sure how my conception of love is relevant to the task of determining what critics of prostitution find morally blameworthy about prostitution. Maybe your claim is that a prostitution transaction is devoid of love, and is thereby deficient. Ok, that may very well be true. But deficiency is not the same as blameworthiness. I don't see why the loveless prostitute should be a "predator" and a "demon" simply because she is loveless. She's not stopping you from falling in love with whoever you please! Lots of people are deficient in all sorts of things. The man who drives an old beat up car is using a deficient mode of transportation in comparison to the man who drives a new sports car, but there's nothing morally blameworthy about driving an old car. Not everyone has to own everything and experience everything, and that's ok!
Furthermore, I find the assertion that the prostitute is necessarily loveless to be rather presumptuous. I see no reason why there couldn't be someone she loves; perhaps even her clients.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
3mo ago
He knows reds don't have the temperament or interest to "show up" for museums or libraries
Well... isn't that just a skill issue then?
Regardless of the institutional form it takes, there will always be culture of some kind, and it will indeed belong to those who show up. A purely destructive strategy with no positive program for cultural production of your own is not viable in the long term.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
4mo ago
People in general far prefer natural environments to man-made ones, studies on the topic have tended to show that people find landscapes that depart far from the rule of nature more uncomfortable than those that don't.
Right, but there's a high correlation between the types of people who tend to prefer man-made beauty to natural beauty, and the types of people who tend to become artists. So their own aesthetic preferences get amplified and displayed to the public.
I would be fine with architects building these things if they were just making art for display in a dedicated space.
There have to be limits of some kind, of course. But within reason, I generally lean on the side of privileging the freedom of the (public) artist, regardless of the aesthetic preferences of the public who will be exposed to their work. If it's that important to you, then you should consider becoming an artist too. And if it's not sufficiently important to you, then you are at the mercy of the people to whom it was sufficiently important.
it's a bit unclear where the defence of Eisenman starts
The most relevant section is everything between "McGowan and Engley" and "the Aristotelian idea of the virtuous mean".
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
7mo ago
Why is this such an issue? Restrooms have stalls.
If I’m allowed into the women’s bathroom, I’m 100% going to listen to women pee and it’s going in my spank bank for later. So if women don’t want that, they should keep men out of their bathrooms!
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
8mo ago
· Edited 8mo ago
but the obscurantist language only really seems to serve the purposes of instilling delusions of the speaker's intelligence
I think reading and writing big words is fun and enjoyable. And it rarely matters to me if the original author had a high opinion of their own intelligence or not. (Undoubtedly many posters here have big egos because of their intelligence as well, but that doesn't hinder my enjoyment of TheMotte). So I think the poetic language is a good thing, up to a point (you can always take anything too far, of course).
hide argumentative flaws and open up "you don't get it" as a defense against those who point them out.
Yeah, there definitely are people who will just sneer with "you don't get it" in response to any criticism, and that can get very obnoxious. But at the same time, there are people who actually just don't get it! And they refuse to even give the text a chance, while at the same time passing sweeping judgements on it, and that can get equally obnoxious.
I had this exchange on HN recently, where people took a sentence from an analytic philosophy paper and were saying that it was bullshit. But that was just because they didn't know the definitions of the (frankly, basic and common) terms being used. Once I explained the definitions, people agreed that the sentence actually made sense. When you have this sort of interaction repeatedly when discussing philosophy, where people say "I don't know what that means, but I know it's bullshit", it starts to wear on you. At least take the time to understand what's being said and what the context is.
Now, I wouldn't defend all works of continental philosophy. Some of it probably is bullshit (or, more politely, "poetry"), although that in itself isn't unusual - Sturgeon's Law, 90% of everything. But you really have to evaluate every work on a case by case basis. Derrida is often held up as the archetypal example of postmodern bullshit, but if you look at something like his Voice and Phenomenon for example, and you cut away some of the poetic verbiage, I think that book is actually making claims and using arguments that analytic philosophers would basically accept as reasonable. And there's been tons of work in the last two decades on the "analytic rehabilitation" of the earliest continental figures like Hegel, Heidegger, Nietzsche, etc.
I think it's helpful to think of continental philosophy as a sort of 20th century version of TheMotte for French academics. They had their own memeplex, their own points of reference, there was a whole context surrounding it that isn't immediately obvious if you're approaching it for the first time in 2024. These guys all knew each other, they went to the same seminars and published in the same journals; sometimes they were writing "serious" arguments, and sometimes they were just shitposting at each other. A lot of times on TheMotte we'll have someone come along and say "y'know, I've just been thinkin' about this thing" - about leftists and rightists, about men and women, about whatever it is. And then they make some sweeping claim, that may or may not be particularly well supported empirically, but often enough it still makes you go "y'know, I think that guy might be onto something". And that's often the sort of value I get out of continental philosophy. Plainly there's some sort of value in this activity that we do on TheMotte, because we all keep coming here.
Therefore, there is no """"objective"""" reason to prohibit mother-son incest.
That wasn't the conclusion of the argument; that was a premise in the argument. What I quoted was clipped out of a much lengthier chapter about the relationship between psychoanalysis and ethics. He wasn't trying here to demonstrate that there is no objective reason to prohibit mother-son incest; he was basically just assuming it, with reference to Lévi-Strauss's work as support. Rather he was using the distinction between father-daughter and mother-son incest as an illustrative example to show how there are some domains of human activity that are governed by market logic, and some that are not, and psychoanalysis is interested in the latter.
You can of course challenge his premise, and claim that he didn't support it well enough. But that just goes without saying; philosophers attack each others' premises all the time.
It's all arbitrary systems of rules! By the way, arbitrary systems of rules are cool.
Well, yes? That's literally his position. He would say that the Law is baseless and arbitrary, but that in no way implies that we should get rid of it. The subject who refuses to allow himself to be "duped" by the Law and steadfastly "sees it for what it is" is psychotic. And being psychotic is a bad thing. (Deleuze and Guattari thought that being psychotic was a good thing, which precipitated their big break with Lacan.)
Unfortunately, the working mode of continental philosophy made it impossible for continental philosophy to consider it - the authors themselves would never write it, because ticking boxes like this would signal self-doubt and weakness that is entirely at odds with the image of the infallible sage that descends from his mountain to pronounce deep wisdom
I do agree that there's a cultural aversion in continental philosophy to showing doubt and uncertainty about your own arguments, and I think that's a bad thing. Analytic philosophers are just better in this regard.
and if one of the students pointed it out, he would presumably just receive a pitying smirk from Lacan, and perhaps a remark about how he is clearly yet to grasp the difference between the signifer and the combinatoire or something.
Not entirely off base (especially if we're talking about Lacan specifically, and how he actually dealt with his students - it's well-documented that he was a bit of a dick), but at the same time, I think you're underselling the amount of disagreement that actually exists in continental philosophy. No matter how great a continental philosopher might think his favorite guy is, he's still acutely aware that there are lots of other people who all think his favorite guy is bullshit. The Derrideans and Deleuzians think that the Lacanians are all closet fascists because they still believe that there's a unified human subject with transhistorical properties, and the Foucaultians think that the Derrideans have an inflated view of the power of philosophical discourse, and the Marxists think it's all postmodern bullshit that's distracting us from the real material struggle of the working class. So would the other students all come to correct the student who pointed out an objection? Maybe, but they could just as easily say "yeah, you're right, that stuff is all crap, you should read this instead".
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
2yr ago
The reason those things exist is a failure of the humanities and whatsoever its role is for society.
Then plainly, the humanities needs our help! We need even more funding for the humanities, so it can do better next time.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
2yr ago
Yes, I agree that men and women are different. But are we allowed to invoke that as an explanation whenever we want to? Sometimes men and women behave the same, instead of differently - what then? Do we just say "sometimes men and women are the same, sometimes they're different, and that's all there is to it"? It would give you unlimited explanatory license to justify whatever you wanted in regards to theories of gendered behavior, without ever having to address gaps in the theory.
My concern is that people are starting with the conclusion they want to prove ("gays are icky and pedos are icky, therefore they must be linked in some way") and then working backwards. So you end up with a just-so story that adds more and more epicycles to prove the desired conclusion.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
2yr 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.)
Sad in what sense?
I see the people behind the development of this tech as essentially launching a malicious DDoS attack on human culture. Don’t be surprised when you get pushback.
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