Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
"...Perhaps laughter will then have formed an alliance with wisdom; perhaps only 'gay science' will remain."
User ID: 342
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
7d ago
I remain unconvinced that there's much overlap between smart, competent people and the social outcasts that got shoved in lockers. I think the outcasts cling to this narrative as a coping mechanism rather than genuinely being all that competent.
Sure, partially. But it's not entirely wrong. The idea didn't just come from nowhere.
I feel like I've seen an overcorrection in recent years away from the smart = socially awkward myth and towards a new myth of a pure linear spectrum between blonde-haired-seven-foot ubermensch math PhD star athletes on the one hand and sickly frail developmentally deficient chronic failures on the other, which is also not an accurate model of reality.
I'm intelligent and I was bullied pretty severely in middle school, up to and including physical assault. Things got better by high school and I had multiple friends and a decently normal social life, but I was never fantastically popular.
the smart kids also tended towards being popular and good at sports
Not sure how we're defining "good at sports" but this point in particular doesn't match my experience at all. The stars on the high school football and basketball teams tended to be C students. Professional athletes in most major sports don't strike me as particularly more intelligent than average, at least compared to people who directly make a living off of cognitive skills.
In general the biographies of great thinkers show enough of what today we might label "sperg" behavior to make me think there's a legitimate pattern here - Newton, Kant, Wittgenstein...
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
5d ago
Men don’t want to feel like the kind of men who pay for porn.
Sure, but that doesn't seem like a good explanation for why payment processors would actually ban it. Unless you're alluding to the chargeback theory - but I'm skeptical that that theory can entirely explain their behavior without the need to invoke additional moral/political explanations.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
10d ago
In general I'd prefer to see high quality, well written posts that address the substantive thesis of the parent post, instead of posts that nitpick on a single sentence. Regardless of political valence. A low effort drive-by comment that calls someone out for attacking white men is still a low effort drive-by comment.
In fact if there was an otherwise well written, well argued post that happened to include a jab at straight white men, I'd view that as a net positive overall, because it would be evidence that our ideological diversity situation is improving.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
4d ago
Do you ever just like, feel bad when you do something wrong? Like ever?
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
5d ago
I'm no expert on Russian history, but if enough people hate the Tzar enough, then the Tzar could be counterculture and supporting him could be counterculture as well. I think there's a strong argument that supporting Trump during his presidency was also countercultural for example, despite him being "the most powerful man in the world".
Porn is not the Tzar though and I imagine the analogy will break down quickly if we try to push it too far.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
5d ago
It's because his aggregate comment score is in a crater.
We really should disable that aspect of the feature imo.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
5d ago
Everyone has some kind of bone to pick with porn
...which helps confirm my original thesis that it's countercultural!
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
19d ago
Indians consistently overestimate how much time we spend thinking about them.
At least in America, in terms of the groups that grab headlines and really dominate the political discourse, it's blacks, South Americans, Chinese because of the geopolitical tensions, Jews to some extent recently because of the Palestine conflict, Muslims too because of the same conflict although not as much as during the Bush years or even the peak ISIS years... Indians are honestly way down there, most Americans don't have much of an opinion on them outside of some vague stereotypes.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
12d ago
Or when their political future is now determined by the flood of migrants which repopulates the region, as opposed to their coethnics in Moscow.
I imagine that this is one of the wedges that drives different intuitions on this conflict - are you looking at it through a racial lens or a civic nationalist lens? Do you see Russians and Ukrainians, two peoples about as genetically and linguistically similar as you can get while still remaining distinct, or do you see Russia and Ukraine, two independent legal entities that are bound by the same ahistorical Rawlsian veil of ignorance as all other international actors?
In general I'm going to be a lot less concerned about an invading force that is ethnically and linguistically closer to me than one that is more distant. China invades the US, it's go time, Germany or the UK invades the US, eh I can probably live with that. Contra some of the other replies, "the continued existence of Ukraine" is in fact an abstract geopolitical goal of NATO, because the nation-state itself is an abstraction of relatively recent historical origin. Prosperity for oneself, for one's family and tribe, for the continued endurance of one's way of life - these desires are universal, but they are not equivalent to "the territorial integrity of one's nation-state". The latter is not a natural and universal human desire.
Of course race is certainly not the only thing that matters. I don't want to be ruled by white wokeists. But how many Ukrainians currently fighting are deeply opposed to Russia on ideological grounds because of their commitment to free speech/representative democracy/gay rights/whatever, and how many of them are just going with the flow because "Putin bad and this is what we're doing now"? How many of them are actually ideologically closer to the average Russian than the average American liberal? This is where the accusations of puppetry come from.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
23d ago
My memories of the earliest days are very fuzzy, but as far as I can remember even in the /r/slatestarcodex days, this forum always had a noticeable rightist bent, simply in virtue of the mere fact that it allows rightists to speak freely. If you're one of the few places that doesn't subject witches to trial by water, then you're going to attract an unusually high percentage of witches, even if that's not your explicit goal.
That being said, I think we have hit an all time low when it comes to the number of active leftist users, and I think that's due to a couple factors:
-
I think that the average leftist simply isn't interested in dialogue with rightists. This is evident in how they moderate their own spaces. Frequently when leftists get power, they simply ban (certain) right-wing views. If they don't want to deal with rightists in their own spaces, why would they want to come here and deal with us here? There's a reason that the left has become the party of deplatforming. I think it's pretty straightforward.
-
Regardless of how open you are to dialogue, it can be mentally draining to be the only one arguing for a certain viewpoint while everyone else is against you. Once leftists start to self-select out of the discussion, more and more of them will start to decide it's not worth staying as they become a smaller and smaller minority, creating a vicious cycle. We also don't have an easy free source of new users because people can't just stop by with their reddit account when they see this place linked on subs like /r/sneerclub or whatever.
-
Users with unpopular viewpoints are more likely to feel embattled by the general forum atmosphere, more likely to get heated during debates, and thus more likely to get banned. I don't want to litigate the cases of specific users here, but I can think of at least a couple examples of this.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
7d ago
Keeping in mind that this is probably a hypothetical anyway because I doubt anyone will go to the effort of adding the feature, I'm gonna go with "hard no".
First, there's something psychologically appealing about having a single unified measure of a comment's quality. I'm already not a huge fan of how LW has two comment scores, one for general quality and one for agree/disagree. I like the idea of not letting people "hedge their bets" - it's either a good comment or it's not, regardless of how the specific component vectors of the quality score break down. If there's a very well written comment that argues for a view that you find repugnant, then I think you should have to take an up/down stance on the comment and live with your choice.
Regarding the longer/shorter vote button specifically - we already have an official rule against low effort posting. So a "should be longer" button would be somewhat superfluous. If the comment is a problem, then a mod will give you a warning for low effort posting. That's the "should be longer" button.
I know that a lot of people would appreciate a "should be shorter" button because the length of posts on this site has been a source of constant complaints, but as I've argued repeatedly whenever this topic comes up, I really value the fact that TheMotte is one of the few public discussion forums on the internet that encourages long-form posting, and I want to keep it that way. Some of my all time favorite posts on the site, posts that really stood out to me as just being fantastic pieces of writing, are quite long. So I'm fine with people just going crazy with it. Not every long post is good of course - sometimes the writing is just bad, sometimes it's on a topic that you have no interest in, etc. But then you can just downvote, ignore, and/or collapse the thread.
I get frustrated whenever people trot out that "if only I had more time I could have made this letter shorter" line. It's diametrically opposed to my own aesthetics. I want to cultivate this site as a space for people who actually enjoy reading and writing, because there are very few spaces that serve that purpose.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
9d ago
We live in a causal universe, I don't think there is such a thing as spontaneous belief.
Sure, but that seems like a rather pedantic point to make in this context. If someone says they like eating tasty food because it's a natural spontaneous desire, and you say they actually like eating food because of government propaganda, then on the face of it your explanation is a lot less correct than theirs, regardless of what philosophical hangups you might have about the concept of spontaneity.
I don't think this is a born this way thing, I think it's still social even if that doesn't make it a choice.
I believe I recall from some of your previous posts that you endorse HBD. So presumably you think some people are born some way.
Someone who criticized HBD by saying "well if you kept someone locked in an empty room from birth and never taught them anything then they would turn out to be really stupid, so it's actually all environmental in the end" would be missing the point. We're all in agreement that the outside environment is important and has a big influence. It's the innate disposition of individuals to respond differently to the same environmental stimulus that's in question.
I would describe my position by saying that I endorse an HBD-type view for gender identity and sexual orientation rather than a purely social constructionist view, that's all.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
19d ago
Brief thoughts on religion
My mother is a devout practicing Catholic. I have never once had the courage to tell her that I stopped believing in God long ago. She’s asked me a few times over the years if I still believe; presumably it’s apparent from my disinterest in the Church that I don’t. I just lie, I tell her “yes of course”, and that’s the end of it, for a time. I hate thinking of what it will be like to face her on her deathbed. I’m sure she’ll ask me again, at the very end - will I still lie? I don’t want to inflict that kind of pain on her. I can put on a boisterous face in my writing at times, but when it comes to anything that actually matters, I’m a coward. (Writing is the medium most closely associated with subterfuge, with masquerade, with the protean synthesis of new identities - in no other instance can we so directly assume a voice and a habit of mind that is not our own.)
I seem to no longer be capable of approaching religion as anything but an aesthetic phenomenon. I admire religions the way you might admire clothes in a shop window; I judge them by how well they comport with my own notions of how reality should ideally function. There is something primally compelling about Judaism; what other god has commanded such authority? What other god has commanded such, not only fear, but such intellectually refined fear, a fear that carries with it all the oceanic vastness and eerie serenity of the desert’s evening sky? Christianity too is fascinating, as possibly the most beautiful and compelling image of humility and forgiveness in world history. Here we have the physical incarnation of the Hegelian thesis of the contradiction inherent in all things (“that terrible paradox of ‘God on the cross’”). It’s a shame about the ending, though; it smacks of a heavy-handed editor, as though the Hollywood execs thought the original idea was too much of a downer for a mass market audience. Things should have ended on Good Friday - “God is dead and we killed him” - that’s how you have a proper tragedy and proper pathos, only then do you have the ultimate sacrifice and the ultimate crime.
My only experience of religion now is through the collection of dictums and niceties. Lacan: “God is unconscious”. Derrida: “The only authentic prayer is one that you expect will not be heard”. Little bits of “insight porn” that make me go “ah, that certainly is how things should be! Wouldn’t it be lovely if that were true!” But can I actually believe it’s true? Probably not.
One of my favorite commentators (a lapsed Catholic himself, incidentally) on Lacan once relayed an anecdote:
”You know, I always have been kind of terrified of flying. So one time I was on this plane, terrified, and as we’re about to take off I turned to the guy next to me and said, ‘boy it would really suck if the plane just fell out of the sky and crashed, huh?’ And the guy looked at me like I had lobsters coming out of my ears and he said, ‘what are you crazy? You don’t say things like that! That’ll make it happen!’ I guess that is a pretty common superstitious way of thinking. If you say something, it’s more likely to happen. But I know that actually, the opposite is true. My God is the God of the signifier, so everything is upside down.”
Now that’s the kind of God that I could get on board with believing in! The God of the signifier, the God who turns everything upside down. Ancient commentators, in traditions as diverse as neoplatonism and Buddhism, recognized a problem: if God is perfect, unchanging, atemporal, mereologically simple, then how was it metaphysically possible for him to give rise to this temporal, dynamic, fallen, fractured creation? How did The One give rise to The Many? The orthodox answer is that “He did it out of love”. An alternative answer, whispered in heretical texts and under hushed breaths, is that it may not have been under His control at all. There was simply a “disturbance” in the force - nature indiscernable, source unknown (perhaps it’s simply built into the nature of things?). If I worship anything, it is The Disturbance. (Zizek gave a beautiful example of this - there was a scene in a horror film where a woman dropped dead while singing, but her voice didn’t stop, it just kept ringing out, disembodied. This is only momentarily shocking, something you as the viewer recover from rather quickly. But contrast this with a ballet where the recorded music stops playing and the dancers just keep on dancing, in complete silence - they don’t stop. There’s nothing supernatural about this, it’s perfectly physically realizable. But it’s far more unnerving, it feels like something that you simply shouldn’t be watching. This is The Disturbance, the Freudian death drive.)
I don’t think I’m alone in not being able to take the whole thing seriously. Statistics about declining church attendance have been cited ad nauseam; the few times I did attend mass in the last few years, the crowd was decidedly elderly. The burgeoning tradcath revolt among the Gen Z dissident right smacks of insincerity; they pantomime the words and rituals, but there’s no genuine belief. Andrew Tate’s conversion to Islam is an aesthetic-cum-financial move. Contemporary neopaganism is definitely an aesthetic phenomenon first and foremost (not to mention a sexual one - blonde 20-something Russian girls dressed all in white frolicking on the open fields of the steppe is a hell of a weltanschauung).
I’ve probably given the impression that the aesthetic is somehow opposed to the religious - that its purpose is to supplant authentic religious feelings as a synthetic substitute. Unable to believe in the old religions as we once did, we cast about and find that aesthetics is the next best thing, so we convert the church into a gallery and deify the Old Master painting (or, to use a more contemporary example, the TikTok influencer) instead of the body and blood. But nothing could be further from the truth. Authentic aesthetic feelings are, in a sense, the natural product of the religious sentiment. Art has been intimately tied up with magic since its inception, art as quite literally a summoning ritual, a protective charm to ward off bad luck, an offering to the gods. The separation of the priest, the witch doctor, and the poet is a relatively late historical development. Many of the earliest cave paintings were secluded in unreasonably deep parts of the cave, almost impossible to access, the only way to get there was by crawling on your stomach through dark narrow passageways where you could have easily risked injury or death - what would have driven people to do that, what purpose did they think they were fulfilling, why did they perceive a necessary link between art and trauma?
Attempts to give art a rational “purpose”, saying that it “teaches us moral lessons” or “provides entertainment”, all sound so lame because they are so obviously false. The purpose of art is to bring us into communion with The Beyond - that’s it, that’s the long and short of it. To make art is to attempt to do magic, and to be an artist is to be a person who yearns strongly for this Beyond, at least on an unconscious level. If the artist does not ultimately believe in the possibility of transcending this realm, he simply dooms himself to frustration - but the fundamental animating impulse of his actions does not change. The aesthetic is what remains when the vulnerable overt metaphysical claims of religion have been burned away: under threat of irrationality, I am compelled to reject God, free will, and the immortality of the soul, but you cannot intrude on the private inner domain of my sentiment and my desire.
It is here that I would like to begin an examination of the question as to whether the aesthetic feeling too, like the properly religious feeling before it, could one day decline into irrelevance; whether the conditions might one day be such that its last embers are extinguished. There are indications that this may be the case. But it would be unwise to attempt to answer this question without a thorough historiographical and empirical preparation. After all, we are far from the first to raise this question - it was already raised as early as ancient Rome (in a fictional novel admittedly, known as the Satyricon, but, fiction always draws from something real):
Heartened up by this story, I began to draw upon his more comprehensive knowledge as to the ages of the pictures and as to certain of the stories connected with them, upon which I was not clear; and I likewise inquired into the causes of the decadence of the present age, in which the most refined arts had perished, and among them painting, which had not left even the faintest trace of itself behind. “Greed of money,” he replied, “has brought about these unaccountable changes. In the good old times, when virtue was her own reward, the fine arts flourished, and there was the keenest rivalry among men for fear that anything which could be of benefit to future generations should remain long undiscovered. […] And we, sodden with wine and women, cannot even appreciate the arts already practiced, we only criticise the past! We learn only vice, and teach it, too. What has become of logic? of astronomy? Where is the exquisite road to wisdom? Who even goes into a temple to make a vow, that he may achieve eloquence or bathe in the fountain of wisdom? […] Do not hesitate, therefore, at expressing your surprise at the deterioration of painting, since, by all the gods and men alike, a lump of gold is held to be more beautiful than anything ever created by those crazy little Greek fellows, Apelles and Phydias!”
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
15d ago
Paging @2rafa or anyone else who can explain to me what an investment banking analyst actually does: AI is coming for Wall Street: Banks are reportedly weighing cutting analyst hiring by two-thirds (paywalled for me on desktop but it's loading fine on mobile):
Incoming junior Wall Street analysts could be in danger of losing their jobs to AI, sources within banks told the New York Times.
Big firms are reportedly mulling whether to pull back on hiring new analysts as Wall Street leans more heavily on AI, several people familiar with the matter at Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, and other banks told the publication this week.
Incoming classes of junior investment-banking analysts could up being cut as much as two-thirds, some of the people suggested, while those brought on board could fetch lower salaries, on account of their work being assisted by artificial intelligence.
I don't know how to evaluate the claims in the article because I have little understanding of what a banking analyst actually does on a day to day basis. How much of it requires "thought" (not thought of incredible complexity and originality, but thought nonetheless) and how much of it is just plugging numbers into Excel in a relatively formulaic fashion?
In general I lean towards being skeptical of these claims, especially in domains where I have little expertise, because the dominant pattern of the last 2 years is that people who don't know much about X tend to overestimate how good AI is at X.
If I compare this to a domain where I do have some knowledge (computer programming), most of the tests that people use to demonstrate LLMs' coding ability aren't particularly representative of what programmers do on a daily basis. Sitting down and opening a new blank file and "writing code to do X" is certainly part of the job, and it can be a bigger or smaller part of the job depending on what type of organization you're at and what type of project you're working on etc, but it's not the whole job (for some programmers, it's a very small part of it!)
So I'd like people with more domain knowledge to weigh in on what aspects of these financial jobs are liable to be automated today and what the forecast for the field is like.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
26d ago
that governments may make figleaf declarations about opposing these types of slander but will never actually enforce them because they actually are inherently conservative entities that are on the side of the privileged and the default, that anyone can make the most vile comments they want and always could without fearing legal reprisals
It heavily depends on the government and the type of speech in question. Holocaust denial is currently illegal in multiple Western countries and has been successfully prosecuted.
The Peterson/'free speech absolutist' wing points at 'cancel culture' and the specter of government censorship as a general bludgeon against the left, but they're actually committed to a much more broad model of conservatism and just using that to stir up their base.
So, I think this is a common cognitive bias to fall victim to. When you encounter someone who has views that are dramatically different from your own, you don't have an internal mental model of what it would feel like to actually hold those views with sincere conviction. So you assume that they don't. It's easy to reach for an alternative explanation of, oh they don't actually believe that, they're just saying that they believe it because of X Y Z.
I catch myself falling into this trap sometimes when I think about leftist views. Like when people complain about movies and TV shows being too white and not diverse enough. Sometimes I think, look it can't actually bother people that much when this or that piece of media doesn't meet their own preferred racial quotas, they have to just be saying this because they like the feeling of power it gives them, or maybe so they can get a cushy sinecure as a diversity consultant. But when I take a step back and think about it rationally, I realize that that's not a psychologically realistic model of how people operate. Most people don't just make shit up for years on end, even when they can derive some personal benefit from it. The simplest and most plausible explanation is that people really are upset about a lack of racial diversity in media, and they really do experience it as a serious injustice, foreign as that notion may be to me.
Similarly, I can assure you with full confidence that when rightists complain about leftist speech censorship, they really are angry about it, legitimately. It's not a ruse, it's not a Machiavellian attempt to advance some other covert agenda. You might think their reasons are bad, but the emotions are real regardless. If nothing else, you should be able to appreciate the obvious self-interest angle. If I want to say X, and other people are stopping me from saying X, then I'm naturally going to be upset about that.
Whereas people like Rowling aren't fully committed to that broader conservative project, they just want to slander and eradicate trans people
Saying that MTF transsexuals are not women is not in any way "violence", "hatred", or a call for "eradication".
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
2d 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
10d ago
you are upset that Rationalists regard high-IQ Jews as superior to Kurt
...do they?
Obviously intelligence is important, but it's not the only thing that matters. I don't think Rationalists would be worried about AI alignment if they thought that more intelligent = more better in every relevant way.
(I'm sure there are a lot of high IQ individuals who they think are in fact superior to Kurt, but the justification they would cite would be that those high IQ individuals are involved in frontier AI research or they're earning-to-give or something else, it wouldn't just be because of their IQ.)
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
17d ago
It's telling that far and away the most active threads this week were this thread, and Kulak's post about Indians.
You are the forum. If you think we talk about race too much, then write more posts and comments that aren't about race.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
9d ago
What's up with all the non-Mormons? Weirdly specific universalities across LLMs
As seen in the previous section, without even venturing into the semantic void (i.e. no customised embeddings being employed), Pythia 2.8b and 12b, when prompted with the “empty string definition” prompt
A typical definition of '' would be '
both produce, with greedy sampling, the output
a person who is not a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
I really love these posts about glitchy LLM behavior, they scratch the same itch as e.g. analyses of glitches used in speedrunning.
Someone posted a response from "Claude" (Opus I assume? It's unspecified) in the comments section on the post. A couple things struck me about it:
-
If your main exposure to human writing is via facebook posts and frontpage reddit comments, then you might be forgiven for thinking that LLMs are already highly intelligent and have lots of deep wisdom to share.
-
It's not clear to me that Claude demonstrates an understanding of what's actually at issue with this phenomenon, i.e. the simple fact that '' (whether interpreted as the empty string, or two literal characters) doesn't have a "definition". It does note that it was "hallucinating", which is on the right track, but that's juxtaposed with "the exercise of sitting with the indeterminacy and openness of the empty string...", which is obviously rather silly and is more indicative of it treating the task as legitimate, rather than recognizing it for the pseudotask that it is. (I'm sure that if you prompted it directly it would be able to tell you that '' has no "definition", but the issue here is whether it was able to incorporate that understanding into this particular response.)
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
13d ago
I think that this post maybe too low-effort for Culture war thread but other ones don't look appropriate to me
It's plenty high effort enough. One to two paragraphs is fine for a top level post. Some people like to go on longer but you don't have to.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
16d ago
FIRST exists to prepare the young people of today for the world of tomorrow. To transform our culture by creating a world where science and technology are celebrated and where young people dream of becoming science and technology leaders.
I'm confused as to why they're treating this like a counterfactual.
The richest men in the world made their money from technology. Isn't that already a form of celebration?
And what technology are we celebrating exactly? Unprecedented surveillance capabilities to monitor all communications for wrongthink? Israel's use of machine learning to swiftly and efficiently identify targets for liquidation?
(I'm not trying to be a moralist - you're of course "allowed" to celebrate whatever you want. I just think that people should have a clear-eyed view of the implications of their own position.)
Richard Sutton says "[AIs] might tolerate us as pets or workers. (...) If we are useless, and we have no value [to the AI] and we're in the way, then we would go extinct, but maybe that's rightly so. (...) We should prepare for, but not fear, the inevitable succession from humanity to AI". Do you also celebrate your "inevitable successors"?
Celebrations are best saved for the end - in moments of repose, after the long struggle where a certain spiritual vision was forged and executed, when conditions are finally such that we can pose the question of taking a proper accounting of things...
As for "science" insofar as it can be distinguished from "technology", people have never had a taste for such a thing and never will, we live in a world where a not insignificant number of people are unaware that it's possible to have individual preferences for reasons other than status-seeking or placating your interlocutor, asking such people to build an intrinsic appreciation for something as abstract as "knowledge for the sake of knowledge" is futile. It is already an eccentric predilection even among more highly developed natures, it could never become widespread save for genetic engineering.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
9d ago
It's a bit hard to write a response to this because there's already so much we agree on:
- I agree that environment plays a big role and the same person is capable of going down multiple different paths.
- I agree that without the trans-industrial-medical complex and access to hormones and SRS, far fewer people would actually try to "transition".
- I agree that society should not be encouraging people to become trans the way it currently is (although in a general libertarian fashion I think that people should be able to elect to these medical procedures if they want to).
But I still feel like I have to take issue with the account you write here (since you posted it twice I'm assuming that you think this is basically a correct story of the etiology of transsexuality):
In a trans naive environment you are still exposed to gendered binaries constantly and there is plenty of plausible cause to start that hardening process in a peculiar direction, maybe you made a friend of the opposite gender in kindergarten and when they care takers separate out their charges by gender the nubile mind recoils in being split from your friend and some part of the identity hardens in that you belong on that side of the divide. Maybe a million other things.
My understanding of your general theory is that people undergo certain formative experiences, and some people process these experiences in such a way that leads them to adopt a trans identity. It's possible that the difference between people who process the experiences in a trans-way vs a non-trans-way is biological in nature. Correct me if I'm wrong.
My preferred theory on the other hand is as follows: some men (I'm focusing on MTFs/autogynephiles to keep things simple) start out with some sort of natural desire/sensation that is explicitly related to gender or being trans in some way - it could be a simple desire to "become a woman", it could be bodily dysphoria, it could be a general feeling of having a more "female" brain, etc. In the right environment, where being recognized as trans and undergoing medical transition is presented as a viable possibility, some of these men will choose to undergo transition. That's how I would describe the biology/environment interaction here.
Crucially I think these desires/sensations are pre-reflective. They operate at a level prior to what I would normally think of as identity formation.
I don't think that the concept of a "natural desire" is at all objectionable here. Hopefully we can agree that the majority of men naturally experience the desire to have sex with women. Analogously, some men naturally experience the desire to be women. They see what the women are up to and they think "yeah, that seems like a better deal to me". It's really quite straightforward.
I really have to insist on this point that there is something in the individual himself that points him in the direction of wanting to be a woman, rather than individuals being neutral receptacles for formative experiences and just having different "processing styles". I don't think you can fully understand the trans phenomenon without this crucial piece of the puzzle. To my mind it's the theory that best explains the internal phenomenology of what the desires actually feel like, as well as other aspects of the phenomenon like its surprising popularity, its cross-cultural appeal, etc.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
24d ago
Any organization that is structurally committed to letting rightists speak freely (such as this forum) is, in some sense, already an explicitly rightist organization, and would therefore be exempt from Conquest’s second law.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
18d ago
I'd like to provide a response, but I legitimately don't know what you're talking about.
Israeli missiles hit site in Iran, ABC News reports
Iran’s military response will be ‘immediate and at a maximum level’ if Israel attacks, foreign minister says
Questions:
If you predicted a nothingburger - how are your predictions holding up? Is there still an offramp here where we can avoid further escalation, or could this evolve into a full on ground war? It's not clear to me if Israel's military could be stretched enough to handle a conventional war on multiple fronts.
Also, what does this indicate for the future of the US-Israel relationship? The US administration made it pretty clear to Israel that they didn't want them to retaliate against Iran (the going theory seemed to be that it would be bad for oil prices in an election year). Presumably Israel is feeling some real existential pressure right now if they're willing to openly defy the will of the US, one of their only consistent allies on the Palestine issue.
More options
Context Copy link