Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
"...Perhaps laughter will then have formed an alliance with wisdom; perhaps only 'gay science' will remain."
User ID: 342
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
1mo ago
It’s already been acknowledged that longstanding posters with lots of AAQCs will be given a bit of extra wiggle room, and I would simply extend that to posters with underrepresented viewpoints as well, because the mere existence of a rare viewpoint is its own type of Quality Contribution.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
1mo ago
I don't think that post was particularly tactful. Starting right off the bat by claiming the person is being weird isn't very tactful, just the opposite.
We might subjectively disagree over how tactful or not it is to call someone's post "weird" in this context. But the point is, I don't think 16 people downvoted that post because it called the parent post "weird". I think 16 people downvoted that post because it questioned how committed Republicans were to the principles of the anti-lockdown cause.
Posts with sharper personal insults than "weird" still manage to accumulate upvotes, if the content itself is popular enough. I already linked one. It's not that hard to find others (from multiple different users).
people who complain about being downvoted for not fitting into the "echochamber" of this place
But these people are simply correct in many cases. In every community with reddit-style voting, posts that disagree with the consensus viewpoint are more likely to be downvoted. This is simply obvious to me based on 15+ years of watching how different internet communities behave, and my knowledge of how I personally use the voting buttons, particularly with posts that provoke a strong emotional reaction from me. I can't recall any significant counterexamples, and TheMotte is no exception.
I want to reiterate that using the vote button as an agree/disagree button isn't a bad thing. It's natural and unavoidable. The solution is to simply not have any punishment associated with a low comment score. It's already a good first step that TheMotte doesn't hide low scoring comments like reddit and HN do, and I think we should remove the rate limiting as well.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
1mo ago
"Right Wing" does not mean "religious." There's a correlation between the two, obviously, but imo that's more the result of history than philosophical alignment.
I believe that a certain type of magical thinking is, if not a necessary component of the rightist personality, then at least a prominent and salient feature of it across multiple diverse manifestations. (I raised the question here recently of whether there was actually something to leftist accusations of "right-wing conspiracy theories", the question of whether the rightist mind might actually be more prone to conspiratorial thinking.)
Nietzsche is the archetypal example to study here. In terms of his explicitly avowed philosophical commitments, he was the arch-materialist, not only denying God but also any notion of value (aesthetic or moral), free will, a unified conscious "self" that could be responsible for its actions, and at times he seemed to suggest that even the concept of "truth" had too much supernatural baggage and should be rejected on those grounds. And yet throughout his work he couldn't stop himself from making constant reference to the inner states of man's "soul", relying on analogies and parables that featured Greek gods and demons, judging people by a standard of authenticity which on any plain reading he should have been forced to reject, and courting overt mysticism with his concept of the "eternal recurrence". This was a fundamental psychological tendency expressing itself, a yearning for a reality which he could not explicitly avow. Not only could he not excise these concepts from his thinking but they were essential to him, it was the fiat currency of his psychic economy.
Or look at Heidegger who, despite having a complicated relationship with Christianity and attempting to distance himself from it, and heavily critiquing Cartesian dualism in his early work, ended up throwing himself head-on into mysticism in his later works (for example his lectures on Hölderlin).
This passage from Heidegger's Country Path Conversations is illuminating:
GUIDE: Perhaps even space and everything spatial for their part first find a reception and a shelter in the nearing nearness and in the furthering farness, which are themselves not two, but rather a one, for which we lack the name.
SCHOLAR: To think this remains something awfully demanding.
GUIDE: A demand which, however, would come to us from the essence of nearness and farness, and which in no way would be rooted in my surmise.
SCIENTIST: Nearness and farness are then something enigmatic.
GUIDE: How beautiful it is for you to say this.
SCIENTIST: I find the enigmatic oppressive, not beautiful.
SCHOLAR: The beautiful has rather something freeing to it.
SCIENTIST: I experience the same thing when I come across a problem in my science. This inspires the scientist even when it at first appears to be unsolvable, because, for the scientist faced with a problem, there are always certain possibilities for preparing and carrying out pertinent investigations. There is always some direction in which research can knuckle down and go toward an object, and thus awaken the feeling of domination that fuels scientific work.
SCHOLAR: By contrast, before the enigma of nearness and farness we stand helplessly perplexed.
SCIENTIST: Most of all we stand idle.
GUIDE: And we do not ever attend to the fact that presumably this perplexity is demanded of us by the enigma itself.
If there is such a thing as an identifiable core of the "rightist mind", I believe it consists in finding the enigmatic beautiful rather than oppressive.
(I cite these examples because, rather than being the psychological eccentricities of a few individuals, I observe the same patterns in contemporary rightists, albeit in an attenuated form.)
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
4hr ago
If they don't have anything original to say, but do want to hear what others think
Frankly, I'd rather that we have rules that select against those types of posters. If someone can't even write one paragraph of non-trivial thought in response to a news story - not world-historically original thought, not thought worthy of prestigious publications, but just a simple "hey I've been thinking about the Israel campus protests and how they compare to BLM, I wonder if this will help Trump in November because he's more of the law and order candidate, could tip the scales in some battleground states" - then they're probably unlikely to post worthwhile replies in response to other people's posts, and we really don't need them here.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
19d ago
I've heard Continental Philosophy described as the attempt to reconcile Freud and Marx.
I mean, both Freud and Marx are certainly very central and influential figures in continental philosophy. You might even be able to say that the project (or one of the projects) of the Frankfurt school was reconciling Freud and Marx. But it would be wrong to describe all of continental philosophy that way. There are continental thinkers who make little reference to either of them. It also doesn't cover the historical figures like Hegel and Schopenhauer who were retroactively declared to be "continental" and who were writing before Marx!
Really the best definition of continental is "European philosophy that's not analytic". Bertrand Russell and some co-conspirators decided that philosophy needed a reboot in the early 20th century, largely on account of his passionate rejection of Hegel, and that's the project that eventually grew into analytic philosophy. So maybe you could also define continental as "someone who thinks Hegel isn't total nonsense and deserves at least some kind of response" (but even that's not a perfect definition, because Hegel and Heidegger, two of the biggest villains for the early analytics, are receiving increasing attention from analytics today).
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
1mo ago
I've strongly disagreed with Dase, or well, did, before he blocked me in a hissy fit
Hey he blocked me too (for a time). If we ever add achievements to the site, one of them should be "Get blocked by Dase".
But at that point, you are more concerned with the alignment of the operators, whose wishes are faithfully reproduced. Are said operators well-disposed towards you?
I agree that's worth asking. But in a true zero regulation scenario, where everyone has access to a personal AGI/ASI, you have a lot more operators to worry about - now you have to worry about how well disposed the entire rest of humanity is towards you. If you give everyone the nuke button, someone is going to push it for shits and giggles.
At least OAI and Anthropic are on record stating that they want to distribute the bounties of AGI to all. While I'm merely helpless in that regard were I to choose to doubt them, I still think that's more likely to turn out well for me than it is if it's the PLA who holds the keys to the universe. Even the USGov is not ideal in that regard, though nobody asked me for my opinion.
I probably trust the US government more than Sam Altman. But regardless, Zvi mentions in this post that there are engineers and execs at multiple leading AI labs who wish they didn't have to race ahead so fast, but they feel like they're locked in a competition with all the other labs that they can't escape. I think that nationalizing the research and eliminating the profit motive could help relieve this pressure.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
1mo ago
Also saying something like "I don't trust myself on x, but I can also spot other folks who can't be trusted" seems to be a little bit of a double-reverse. I can't quite put a finger on it, but I think this is rhetorical sleight of hand.
Let me put it this way: I have no interest in classifying works as either "mass market products" or "genuine Art". This is of no use to me (and indeed it can be actively harmful).
Even when you're one of the greatest writers in 100 years, when you talk about fucking the farts out of you "shitting like a pig" girlfriend, you're getting fuckin' gross, dude.
His letters are obviously beautiful.
The technocrats pretend to believe in that so that they can trick normies into hypersexual practices that obliterate communities.
I hear this idea a lot that the globalists want to push porn because it destroys people, but as far as I can tell this is contradicted by most of the available evidence. Most major corporations and websites are not very friendly to porn at all:
- Patreon's ToS outright bans porn involving real people (and they will shut down fiction/drawings too if they think it's too "extreme")
- Apple app store obviously bans porn
- Major payment processors like Paypal do not want to be associated with porn
- Steam's guidelines have a bit of leeway but generally they don't publish porn, it's common for localizers of Japanese adult games to put a gimped version of the game on Steam and then have a separate patch you download to restore the cut content
I mean yeah porn isn't literally illegal and is always just one click away for anyone with internet access, but, the same can be said for a lot of politically incorrect stuff.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
2mo ago
Pornhub is not out there trying to enhance the spiritual achievement of the race
I prefer to reserve judgement and proceed cautiously in such matters, when possible.
With regards to the case of pornhub specifically, I'd gesture towards something like Andy Warhol's Brillo boxes, or his prints of Marilyn Monroe - turning the concept of mass production itself into an aesthetic phenomenon.
don't see that a fetish about eating shit is going to move the spiritual needle upwards
I sincerely, earnestly disagree.
(Of course not all porn is great just because it's porn. Every genre has superior and inferior works. But if a video about eating shit is bad, it's not bad because it's a video of eating shit. It would be bad for other reasons.)
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
10mo ago
I've also never liked the Rationalist love of betting and I considered writing an effortpost about it at one point.
There is a certain machismo to it that I find distasteful. I also don't think it's a coincidence that the same belief structure that loves to make people pay rent (via utilitarianism) also love to make beliefs pay rent (via betting). The motto is the same in both cases: "if you're not useful, you're out".
But then how do you explain:
-
Opposition to medical transition in general, and especially hormone therapy for children, is an alt right position, while supporting them is a leftist position.
-
The alt right thinks women should be encouraged (through both informal cultural means and formal policy) to be housewives, while the left thinks that women should be encouraged to build independent careers.
-
Opposition to mandatory Covid vaccination is right-coded, support for mandatory Covid vaccination is left-coded.
Are these not legitimate differences? Differences that aren't reducible to the target of their identitarianism?
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
10mo ago
And the fine arts gave us Literal Hitler, so I guess they’re out, too.
Being critical of X does not mean that X is "out". (And yes we should also be critical of art, literature, philosophy, etc.)
Your bogeymen are no substitute for an actual argument.
My actual argument is that STEM sometimes does bad things, so we should be critical of it. Pretty straightforward. This is hardly a radical conclusion, by the way. It's harder to name things that we shouldn't be critical of! "Critical" doesn't mean "throw out completely". It means "skeptically evaluating", as opposed to "dogmatically accepting".
If you have an issue with one of the specific examples I raised in the bullet points, I'm happy to discuss it further.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
10mo ago
"Critique of STEM supremacism" is useless because the alternatives tend to be woo
I suppose I wasn't clear enough originally. "Critique of STEM" doesn't mean a critique of a materialist worldview. It would mean something like: a critique of the notion that STEM should be distinguished as uniquely valuable in comparison to other types of intellectual activity, and a critique of the closely related notion that economic productivity should be the central overriding goal of social organization. And also a critique of the value of technology.
It's not woo to suggest that people shouldn't build advanced AI. It's also not woo to suggest that we should value things other than raw economic productivity. You may think these propositions are stupid or counterproductive, but they're not "woo".
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
10mo ago
Well, "being molested by someone of the same sex turns you gay" is at least more consistent than plausible than "being molested by a man turns both sexes gay". But it should be pointed out that there was an "Editorial Expression of Concern" for this paper that pointed out some inconsistencies (results stated in the discussion didn't match what was actually in the table).
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
2d ago
Yes, I do too, but I'd rather not have the wheels come off while I'm driving.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
14d ago
What are your standards for unclear writing??
Hegel can be unclear at times:
In self-sublating real possibility, it is a twofold that is now sublated; for this possibility is itself the twofold of actuality and possibility. The actuality is formal, or is a concrete existence which appeared to subsist immediately, and through its sublating becomes reflected being, the moment of an other, and thus comes in possession of the in-itself. That concrete existence was also determined as possibility or as the in-itself, but of an other. As it sublates itself, this in-itself of the other is also sublated and passes over into actuality. – This movement of self-sublating real possibility thus produces the same moments that are already present, but each as it comes to be out of the other; in this negation, therefore, the possibility is also not a transition but a self-rejoining. – In formal possibility, if something was possible, then an other than it, not itself, was also possible. Real possibility no longer has such an other over against it, for it is real in so far as it is itself also actuality. Therefore, as its immediate concrete existence, the circle of conditions, sublates itself, it makes itself into the in-itselfness which it already is, namely the in-itself of an other. And conversely, since its moment of in-itselfness thereby sublates itself at the same time, it becomes actuality, hence the moment which it likewise already is. – What disappears is consequently this, that actuality was determined as the possibility or the in-itself of an other, and, conversely, the possibility as an actuality which is not that of which it is the possibility.
The negation of real possibility is thus its self-identity; inasmuch as in its sublating it is thus within itself the recoiling of this sublating, it is real necessity.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
1mo ago
because I don't feel excited, but think it's probably the right thing to do, and that I will probably be glad to have a son later on, I hope.
Did you want a daughter instead?
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
1mo ago
If only one country has a nuclear arsenal, they could conquer the world quite easily. If many countries have nukes, there is no such danger.
Right, there's value in deterrence. But presumably you don't think that every individual on earth should have personal direct access to the nuke button - instead we try to limit that power to a small number of trusted actors. It seems to me that everyone having unrestricted personal access to ASI is the same as giving everyone a direct line to the button.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
1mo ago
What if they decide 'hey there are a lot of resources in this lightcone, how about I not share them with the overwhelming majority of the world population and take them for myself - what are they gonna do'? Some people are insatiable, some people have uncommon ideas about marginal value/simulations/clones - AI venture capitalists are very likely to have such greedy thoughts.
But there are plenty of people in the general population with the same sorts of thoughts. Not everyone, obviously. But more than you might suppose - if everyone had their own personal ASI, then people who would normally be stopped by incompetence or laziness can offload all the work to the ASI.
You might think "well I'm a god anyway, so I'll still be able to get everything I want". But you have to remember that your adversaries are also gods who are putting a roughly equal amount of intelligence and material resources into their goals as you are into yours.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
1mo ago
I guess I had always assumed there was a robust and parallel way of learning things like how to draw dynamic poses for storytelling
Well there definitely is. Sort of. David Finch has a bunch of lecture-style videos on Gnomon Workshop, Glenn Vilppu has a bunch of demo videos, Michael Hampton has a figure drawing book that a lot of people like. I'm sure there are more Japanese-language resources specifically for anime that I'm unaware of. My problem was that I was too stupid for everything and nothing held my hand to the degree I needed.
A lot of these things go like, "well if you want to draw a person, then you draw a ball for the head, an egg for the ribcage, cylinders for the arms and legs, and 1 2 3... there you go, you drew a person". But whenever I tried to do it myself it just looked awful. I understood the basic idea, and I agreed that it made sense, but something was going wrong and I didn't know how to bridge the gap.
The problem is that there's only so much detail you can convey verbally. You can tell someone to use basic shapes like eggs and boxes and cylinders to construct more complex ones, but the catch is that if you don't draw exactly the right kind of shapes in exactly the right position and proportions, then everything will look like crap. That's where all the magic happens. The devil is in the details.
The head is a really instructive case study because it's a small and self-contained object that has a ton of complexity. I kept banging my head into the wall over and over again trying to get the Loomis head method to work and I didn't know what was going wrong. Yes I'm drawing a ball for the cranium, and then I'm attaching the jaw and marking where the side plane is and I'm drawing the features on the front plane, so why does it look awful every time? The books themselves didn't give any hints. There's so much detail that goes into even something as simple as the ball-and-jaw idea - where exactly does the line for the eyes/brow go? how long do you make the jaw, how wide? what is the exact ratio of the front plane to the side plane, when viewing the head from a given angle? how exactly do you arrange all the features, how far apart are they? - that you really can't write it all down, you just have to look at a lot of examples and figure it out for yourself.
The big first step for me was drawing studies of references (anime references in my case) and then overlaying my drawing onto the reference (digitally) to see how accurate I was. For the first time I could actually describe explicitly what mistakes I was making, instead of just having a vague feeling that everything looked wrong - now I could say that this particular drawing was wrong because the eyes were too far apart, or the jaw was too long. Now I had actionable items I could improve on in both my studies from references and my original pieces.
The next thing was taking references (still anime head references) and tracing the construction directly on top of the reference. Like, I knew that there was allegedly a ball-and-jaw construction lurking in this drawing somewhere, but I hadn't really internalized how exactly that should look (even for the more realistic heads that Loomis used I didn't have a good sense of how it should work, and I certainly didn't know how to apply the same technique to anime proportions). So I just took a bunch of pro drawings and went, ok if I was going to draw this I guess the circle would line up like this, and then we have the jaw here, and if I was going to draw a guideline representing where the eyes go it would go here... basically taking the drawing apart like a mechanic takes apart a car. And it really helped me start seeing patterns and shapes that I had never seen before, and it forced me to really focus on all these little details that I had been getting wrong this whole time.
Anyway I wanted to try and describe my thought process explicitly because I've never seen any book or video lay it out like this, and I hope it's helpful if you have any students who want to learn more about anime or Western comics. A lot of art instructional material just goes with a sort of "grind" mindset like "yeah just do 10k one minute figure sketches and you'll learn how to draw" but that sort of thing didn't work for me at all. I had to really slow down and think about what I was doing.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
1mo ago
Solve your damn problems.
Different forms of dissatisfaction. - The weak and, as it were, feminine discontented types are those who are innovative at making life more beautiful and profound; the strong discontents - the men among them, to stick with the metaphor - are innovative at making it better and safer. The former show their weakness and femininity by gladly letting themselves be deceived from time to time and occasionally resting content with a bit of intoxication and gushing enthusiasm, though they can never be satisfied entirely and suffer from the incurability of their dissatisfaction; they are also the promoters of all who know how to procure opiates and narcotic consolations, and consequently they resent those who esteem physicians above priests - thus they assure the continuance of real distress! Had there not been a surplus of these discontents in Europe since the middle ages, the celebrated European capacity for constant transformation might never have developed, for the demands of the strong discontents are too crude and basically too undemanding not eventually to be brought to a final rest. China, for example, is a country where large-scale discontentment and the capacity for change became extinct centuries ago; and in Europe too the socialists and state idolaters, with their measures for making life better and safer, might easily establish Chinese conditions and a Chinese 'happiness', provided they are first able to extirpate that sicklier, more tender, more feminine discontentment and romanticism that is for the moment still superabundant here. Europe is a patient who owes the utmost gratitude to his incurability and to the perpetual changes in his affliction: these incessantly new conditions, these no less incessantly new dangers, pains, and modes of information have finally generated an intellectual irritability that approximates genius and that is in any case the mother of all genius.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
10mo ago
There's no shortage of "spiritual" stuff, which I would include in "supernatural" and "woo".
I read a lot of contemporary humanities work and I've hardly ever seen anything I would describe as "spiritual". I mean maybe you can find one crackpot out there, but they wouldn't be representative of any field as a whole. Do you think this is "spiritual"?
You might need to check the engineering textbooks rather than science, e.g. for solid reasons you shouldn't build roads from macaroni noodles. But they are there.
What if I just want to build bad roads? What if I want to waste a lot of money and build a road that will break on its first use, so using macaroni noodles seems like a good idea?
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
11mo ago
Does she not experience this internally as a contradiction? Does she not reflect on herself and wonder how she could flip so rapidly between two incompatible beliefs?
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
2d ago
Player-Driven Emergence in LLM-Driven Game Narrative (and accompanying discussion on HN):
We explore how interaction with large language models (LLMs) can give rise to emergent behaviors, empowering players to participate in the evolution of game narratives. Our testbed is a text-adventure game in which players attempt to solve a mystery under a fixed narrative premise, but can freely interact with non-player characters generated by GPT-4, a large language model. We recruit 28 gamers to play the game and use GPT-4 to automatically convert the game logs into a node-graph representing the narrative in the player's gameplay. We find that through their interactions with the non-deterministic behavior of the LLM, players are able to discover interesting new emergent nodes that were not a part of the original narrative but have potential for being fun and engaging. Players that created the most emergent nodes tended to be those that often enjoy games that facilitate discovery, exploration and experimentation.
Recently there’s been increasing interest in the integration of LLMs and video games. With currently available models, creating an entire living virtual world with an unlimited number of realistic side quests, characters, and interactions is now a “mere” engineering challenge. No more pre-scripted dialogue trees; instead you can simply converse with NPCs in natural language with no limitations (or at least that’s the promise, as models become increasingly efficient).
This is another step towards what appears to be the natural endpoint of the technological development of video games: the recreation of life in replica, a replica at one’s mercy, an infinite horizon of choice without responsibility or constraint.
For a long time I thought that video games were the necessary next step in a development that could be described as “spiritual”. Games are largely an amalgamation of prior media - literature, painting, music, film - but they do introduce a new element (or at least they develop this element to previously undreamed of heights), and that is the element of interactivity, i.e. the ability to make a choice, to participate as the player in the creation of the art and to make the art be something other than what it would have been in your absence. I conceived of interactivity as the raw material out of which a new aesthetic language would be fashioned which would bring us closer to realizing the promise of art. But I have since begun to grow uneasy with this way of thinking.
In some sense I was too seduced by the possibility of finding something “new”, anything new, to detect the longstanding inconsistencies in my own thought. From a young age I always preferred linear, narrative-driven games as opposed to open world sandboxes. My favorite games were games that were devoid of choice, games that robbed you of the ability to make a choice. I found the idea of multiple endings for a story to be distasteful. Yes, you can choose to save this character or not, you can choose to join the bad guys or not - but now that we’ve had our fun imagining all the what-if scenarios, can you tell me what really happened? Do you have the courage to tell me? Do you have the strength of vision to see the truth, the singular truth?
Choice is antithetical to the aesthetic sacrifice. The artist sacrifices all alternate possibilities to distinguish one thing and one thing alone, to say - this one, and no others! No matter how lowly a thing it is - a dirtied article of clothing (as in Van Gogh’s A Pair of Shoes), a completely ordinary sequence of events on a day in Dublin in the year 1904 (as in Joyce’s Ulysses) - he is now stuck with it. This is where he signs his name and stakes his wager, for better or worse. It is this seemingly inexplicable devotion to one law, one vision, one truth, that makes possible any kind of experience that may be called aesthetic. An artist who hedges his bets and does not accept the risk that accompanies his act inspires no confidence in us.
The receiver of the message too enters into a sacrifice, insofar as the message may be incomprehensible or even dangerous to him. In this way an oath is forged between artist and audience. The failure to foreclose the horizon of possibility is the deferral of the signing of the bond.
Is there any great work that would be improved by the addition of choice, by the addition of alternate possibilities? Would Plato’s account of the trial and death of Socrates be better if there were a possibility of Socrates simply... not dying? If Callicles’s warning to Socrates, that his devotion to the “effeminate” subject of philosophy would be his downfall, might not come to pass? If Socrates might be able to eloquently defend himself at trial and avoid conviction? If he might escape from prison before his execution?
The deferral of the inevitable here would be nothing more than the refusal to establish the founding myth of philosophy, the myth that links philosophy with the sign of death. The internal law of Plato’s drama is clear (and the law of historical fidelity is irrelevant): Socrates must die. This is not to say that one is forbidden from creating new works in which new possibilities are imagined. Only that the unity of the original work should remain undisturbed in its repose.
Or you can just like, have fun with GTA6 when it integrates LLM-generated missions, I guess. Whatever.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
1mo ago
“heads I win tails you lose” electionering will result in the person doing it’s total annihilation.
How does this describe Trump though?
He lost the 2020 election. He voluntarily stepped down from power and his challenger assumed power. There was no nefarious electioneering. He just lost and we moved on. I don't understand what the problem is.
I'm just an avid reader, nothing special.
It wasn't supposed to be a summary of Freud's ideas at all. It was my own response to your claim that psychoanalysis should be dismissed because it has no "testable theories or experimental controls". Nothing more.
Well yes, but that's basically what psychoanalytic theorists/practitioners do. They read the theory and they think "yes, I do feel that this applies to my own cognitive processes and I find it to be illuminating for me". It couldn't have survived for this long if people didn't find something compelling in it.
I agree that this is a possible failure mode when you start to invoke the notion of an unconscious. There's a risk of becoming too dogmatic if you're not sufficiently open to the possibility of falsification. Certainly.
But are we just going to pretend that unacknowledged ulterior motives don't exist? Certainly not! It's pretty clear to me that they do exist! Sometimes it feels like that's all political debates boil down to - accusations that the other side only claims to support X for principled moral reasons, when actually they just support it for their own self interest. Should we just immediately dismiss all accusations of that sort? I don't think so. They should at least be given a fair hearing. I think it's obvious that sometimes people are not entirely honest with others, and sometimes they're not entirely honest with themselves either. You don't need a fancy theory to see that.
Sociological and political debates couldn't get anywhere if we weren't allowed to speculate about the unobserved mental states of other people. Psychoanalysis is hardly doing anything too different from the average Motte thread, which is replete with speculation about what leftists and rightists "really think".
It's also worth mentioning that Lacanian clinical practice has this conception of the psychoanalyst as "the subject supposed to know" - key word being supposed to, as in a supposition, but that supposition ultimately turns out to be mistaken. One of the central goals of Lacanian analysis is for the patient to come to realize the ways in which the therapist too is ignorant:
(Lacan is not Freud of course, but he's been central for the reception of Freud's ideas in the humanities since the mid 20th century.)
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