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
27d 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
10mo ago
I think it's clear that when Lewis wrote this particular scene, he had these words in mind, which he had written on another occasion:
“Critics who treat 'adult' as a term of approval, instead of as a merely descriptive term, cannot be adult themselves. To be concerned about being grown up, to admire the grown up because it is grown up, to blush at the suspicion of being childish; these things are the marks of childhood and adolescence. And in childhood and adolescence they are, in moderation, healthy symptoms. Young things ought to want to grow. But to carry on into middle life or even into early manhood this concern about being adult is a mark of really arrested development. When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty I read them openly. When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.”
Susan is the critic who treats "adult" as a term of approval.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
1mo ago
Only then can you really destroy them by pointing out how ridiculous they are.
But what counts as "ridiculous" in the first place is itself politically determined. I personally think the left acts out in a lot of ways that I would classify as ridiculous, but it plainly hasn't discredited them on a national scale so far. The extent of your pre-established narrative dominance determines whether your particular mode of acting out will be seen as legitimate (BLM riots) or illegitimate (January 6th). So before you goad your opponent into acting out, you have to be in charge of defining what counts as "acting out". I think that's a more fundamental goal.
I'm uncertain if it's even possible for the left to push the pro-Palestine stuff "too far" at this point. I don't know how many centrist swing voters are left in America. Probably still enough to influence the results of national elections, but not enough to uproot the entrenched zeitgeist or really impact the way things are heading overall.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
1yr ago
Our current orthodoxies won't last.
Meh. Ideologies have no natural expiration date. They can last for months, or they can last for millennia. Imagine watching Christianity rise to power in late antiquity and thinking "it won't last, it's too braindead, no one actually believes this..."
True, nothing lasts forever, but you're dealing with a timescale of 2,000 years, not 20 or even 200.
A sizable portion of the population is bought into wokeism for life. They will never ever change. The people in their 20s and 30s now who have been permanently indoctrinated with wokeism will play the role that the conservative Moral Majority did in the 80s and 90s. In another decade or two there may (keyword may, it's not guaranteed) be a youth rebellion movement that challenges wokeism, but they will necessarily face resistance from the entrenched power structure.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
1mo ago
I'm surprised at some of the reactions to the "oddness" of Hlynka's views.
It wasn't so much his object-level political views, which as you point out were largely garden-variety conservative talking points that would have been at home on 00s Fox News. What really made him unique was his personality and his discussion style.
He was supremely confident in his own views, and seemingly oblivious to any and all criticism, despite being (in my own personal opinion) supremely wrong about some of those views. He frequently railed against "postmodernism", despite the fact that a simple transcript of his comments would constitute a pretty good experimental postmodern novel in its own right. He insisted that all of his ideological opponents, whether they be Rationalists, woke progressives, fascists, or anything in between, were all really "the same" underneath, in spite of the continued insistence by all of those groups that they had deep fundamental disagreements with each other. He had a habit of simply fleeing from any sub-thread where he was asked to provide direct evidence of his claims; this clashed very noticeably with the "grizzled military veteran, ride the tiger, don't take no shit from no one" personality that he wanted to project. It was this contrast that made him such a frustrating and fascinating character.
I'd rather have a discussion partner who's interesting and wrong, than a boring one who I agree with. In spite of my numerous disagreements with him, I would often check on his profile just to look at his recent comments and see what he was up to. So his ban will constitute a loss for me in that regard.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
8mo ago
I’ll just take this opportunity to say: not every space has to be welcoming to everyone! And that’s ok! Really!
I think it would be great if more women were encouraged to post here. But not at the expense of changing our existing culture and standards.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
8mo ago
A Christian might see Jesus as a spirit guide, a Hindu might see Shiva
But, isn't that exactly the hallmark of a subjective phenomenon based on hallucination/misremembering/wishful thinking/etc, rather than an objective phenomenon based in reality? The most parsimonious explanation when confronted with mutually contradictory reports of the same phenomenon is that someone (or everyone) is simply mistaken.
It's analogous to how you have a lot of wildly contradictory reports of UFO encounters, with people reporting different physical appearances of the aliens themselves, different appearances of the craft (which suspiciously seem to evolve along with American aesthetic preferences, from the Cold War-era flying saucers to the modern Apple-inspired cubes and spheres), so some believers try to explain the contradictions away by saying "well, maybe they aren't really aliens, maybe these are spiritual entities that are manifested by the collective unconscious, so they take whatever form a particular observer is expecting", and it's like, yeah maybe that's the case... or there could just be no UFOs to begin with. That theory also resolves all the contradictions, in a much more parsimonious manner.
That being said. Someone close to me did have an NDE, and he still swears by it decades later. He described it as "perfection", beyond the most perfect bliss you could ever imagine, of a totally different ontological kind from anything that you could ever experience in this reality. Frequently when he retells the story, he reminds me "I've done a lot of drugs. I know what drugs feel like. This was no drug."
I do believe that, even if these states of consciousness are nothing more than the result of brain chemistry, they're clearly very exceptional states that merit further investigation.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
9mo ago
This week, a House Oversight subcommitte held a Congressional hearing on Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena, or UAPs - or, in slightly more old-fashioned parlance, UFOs and aliens.
The star witness was David Grusch, former intelligence officer turned whistleblower who testified that the United States has been operating a decades-long crash retrieval and reverse engineering program, which has recovered both technology of non-human origin as well as "non-human biologics" from various crash sites. Allegedly, these programs have been avoiding Congressional oversight and standard disclosure procedures by illegally appropriating funds that were allocated for other purposes. He further testified that he could provide names of specific people involved in these programs, locations of where non-human spacecraft are stored, etc., in an appropriate classified setting.
The UAP issue has slowly been gaining mainstream traction for several years now - see for example The UAP Disclosure Act of 2023 sponsored by Chuck Schumer which was previously discussed on TheMotte. It's difficult to dismiss the whole thing as being merely Grusch's personal fantasy when you have Rep. Matt Gaetz saying the following:
"Several months ago my office received a protected disclosure from Eglin Air Force Base indicating that there was a UAP incident that required my attention. We asked to see any of the evidence that had been taken by flight crew in this endeavor, and to observe any radar signature, as well as to meet with the flight crew. Initially we were not afforded access [...] eventually we did see the image, and we did meet with one member of the flight crew who took the image. The image was of something that I am not able to attach to any human capability, either from the United States or from any of our adversaries, and I'm somewhat informed on the matter, having served on the Armed Services committee for seven years."
Rep. Tim Burchett, who has also seen classified evidence related to UAPs, had the following exchange in an interview prior to the hearing:
Interviewer: "From the videos you have seen, from the stories you have heard from people up in the sky, if that footage, if those videos come to light, publicly for the American people to see, what do you think people's reaction would be to it?"
Burchett: "I hope they're angry. That this government, both parties, have hid this from them."
When you have reputable government officials - not "former" anything, not "I know a guy who knows a guy", but actual, sitting members of Congress - who are saying "yeah I've seen some of the evidence, and it's crazy, and there's something here we need to look into", then it makes explanations involving hallucinations and weather balloons less plausible.
It's always possible that everyone is just lying. There could be a large-scale psyop perpetuated by the military to convince not only Grusch but also multiple members of Congress that there are aliens when, in fact, there are not. But I don't see what the point of such an operation would be. I don't find it very plausible that this is a test run of the government's disinfo capabilities. Modern information warfare is fought with internet memes anyway. If they really wanted to test their ability to influence culture and discourse, they would start with a social media campaign, not Congressional hearings.
At the same time though, I think Yudkowsky's argument against the presence of aliens on Earth is very convincing. He gives a rundown of what I would call the "basic argument" for skepticism: if aliens are here and they want to be known, then why don't they just show themselves? And if they don't want to be known, then they're doing a rather poor job of hiding themselves. Basically, their behavior just doesn't make sense.
Surely any species that's capable of building aircraft that are this advanced should be able to just hang out somewhere in space and get live 8K Ultra HD video of any location on the planet. If all they want to do is observe and study us, there shouldn't be any need to actually fly down here where they can be seen. Hanson's suggestion that this is all part of a convoluted show of dominance on their part is not very convincing.
The best rebuttal that I can come up with to Yudkowsky's argument is that the aliens are simply indifferent to whether we know about them or not. Think about humans who go on expeditions to observe sharks. Obviously we're not going to go right into the midst of the sharks and "announce" ourselves, because that would be silly. But neither do we make any special effort to hide ourselves. If one of the sharks goes and tells his friends about the strange cylindrical object he saw floating just above the water's surface, that's really of no concern to us one way or the other. But even this argument is not particularly convincing. If the aliens were truly indifferent, then one would expect that they would have revealed themselves in some more overt way by now, a UFO going on a joyride one day through the streets of Manhattan for example, anything that's more reputable and verifiable than "my cousin Ed from Nebraska swears that he was abducted one night when he was all alone and he conveniently forgot to charge his phone that day".
Ultimately, I think all possible explanations have their own serious problems. I could believe that UAPs are part of an advanced, non-alien weapons program that's been kept secret by the US government - but that would be pretty crazy in its own right.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
10mo ago
In Dante's The Divine Comedy, the virtuous pagans - whose ranks include figures such as Homer, Plato, Aristotle, Ovid, and Virgil - are confined to the first circle of Hell:
“Inquir’st thou not what spirits
Are these, which thou beholdest? Ere thou pass
Farther, I would thou know, that these of sin
Were blameless; and if aught they merited,
It profits not, since baptism was not theirs,
The portal to thy faith. If they before
The Gospel liv’d, they serv’d not God aright;
And among such am I. For these defects,
And for no other evil, we are lost;
Only so far afflicted, that we live
Desiring without hope.”
Those who inhabit this circle of the Inferno committed no extraordinary sins, over and above the sins that are committed in the course of any human life, that would merit damnation. Many of them were quite exemplary in their conduct and in their virtue. Few men in the middle ages commanded as much respect as Aristotle, whose influence on the development of scholastic philosophy was unrivaled. But they nevertheless had the misfortune of being born before Christ. They were deprived of the one and only way to the Father; thus they cannot be saved. There can be no exceptions. An obligation unfulfilled through no fault of one's own, an obligation that was in fact impossible to fulfill, remains an obligation unfulfilled.
This is a theological issue on which the Church has softened over the centuries. Even relatively conservative Catholics today get squeamish when the issue of Hell is raised. They will say that we "cannot know" who is in Hell and who is not; that this is a matter for God and God alone. It is not our place to pass judgement. But Dante had no such qualms. He was not wracked with inner anxiety, asking himself whether he had the "right" to think such thoughts, as he drew up his precise and detailed classification of all the damned; nor did he live in a culture of religious pluralism that needed to be placated with niceties and assurances. Dante simply knew. This fundamental conviction in what must be, the will to adhere to a vision, to one singular vision, is something that is now quite foreign to us; indeed it is something that is now viewed as rude and suspicious.
This image of the universe as a cosmic lottery with infinite stakes, this idea that one could be consigned to eternal damnation simply for having the bad luck to be born in the wrong century is, of course, psychotic. There is no sense in which it could be considered fair or rational. But all genuine responsibility is psychotic; that is the wager you accept when you choose to be a human instead of a mere appendage of the earth. Kant was well aware of this. Whence the sublime insanity of the categorical imperative, in spite of his utmost and repeated insistence that he was only discharging his duties as the faithful servant of Reason: you can never tell a lie, even to save another's life, even to save your own life. The moment you decide to perform or abandon your duty based on a consideration of the consequences is the moment at which it is no longer a duty for you; the logic of utilitarian calculation has become dominant, rather than the logic of obligation.
I need not persuade you that we suffer from a lack of responsibility today; it is a common enough opinion. We are told that young men are refusing to "grow up": they aren't getting jobs, they aren't getting wives, they aren't becoming stable and productive members of society. Birth rates are cratering because couples feel no obligation to produce children. The right complains that people feel no responsibility to their race, the left complains that people feel no responsibility to the workers' revolution. Despite some assurances that we have entered a post-postmodern era of revitalized sincerity, the idea of being committed to any cause that is not directly related to one's own immediate material benefit remains passé and incomprehensible. The abdication of responsibility, the default of all promises, reaches its apotheosis in the advance of technology, and in particular in the advance of artificial intelligence. The feeling is that one should have no obligations to anyone or anything, one should not be constrained in any way whatsoever, one should become a god unto oneself.
Is there anything we can recover from Dante's notion of cosmic responsibility, which has now become so alien to us? Is there any way that this idea, or even any remnant of it, can again become a living idea, can find root in this foreign soil? Perhaps not necessarily its Christian content, but the form of it, at any rate: the form of a responsibility that is not directed at any of the old and traditional obligations, but may indeed be directed at new and strange things that we can as of yet scarcely imagine.
Plainly we are beyond the domain of "rational" argumentation, or at least any such argumentation that would be accepted in the prevailing Enlightenment-scientific framework. We live in the age of the orthogonality thesis, of the incommensurability of values. In an important sense though we should remember that we are not entirely unique in this condition; the groundlessness of all values is not solely due to the fact that God has fled. There would have been an important open question here for the medieval Christians as well. Such questions date back as far as Plato's Euthyphro: are things Good because they are loved by the gods, or do the gods love Good things because they are Good? Are we truly responsible, in an ontological sense, for following Christ and abstaining from sin, or are we only contingently compelled to do so because of the cosmic gun that God is holding up against all of our heads? It has always been possible to ask this question in any age.
At certain times, the production of new values is a task that has been assigned to artists. Perhaps a poet, if he sings pleasingly enough, could attune people to a new way of feeling and perceiving. But it has never been at all clear to me whether art was really capable of affecting this sort of change or not. I view it as an open question whether any "work" itself (in this I include not only art, but also all the products of philosophical reflection) has ever or could ever affect change at a societal level, or whether all such works are really just the epiphenomena of deeper forces. There is a great deal of research to be done in this area.
There is a certain ontological fracture at the heart of the cultural situation today, a certain paradoxical two-sidedness: from one perspective, centers of power are more emboldened than ever before, able to transmit edicts and commands to millions of people simultaneously and compel their assent; we saw this with Covid. From another perspective, social reality has never been more fragmented, with all traditional centers of social organization (churches, obviously, but also the nightly news, Hollywood, universities) disintegrating in the face of the universal solvent that is the internet, leading to an endless proliferation of individual voices and sub-subcultures. In either case, it is hard to find an opening for authentic change. It is impossible to imagine Luther nailing his theses to the door today, or Lenin storming the Winter Palace. This type of radical fragmentation, when the narrative of no-narrative asserts itself so strongly as the dominant narrative that no escape seems possible, is what Derrida celebrated in Of Grammatology as "the death of the Book, and the beginning of writing" - writing here being the infinite profusion of signs, the infinite freeplay of identities, infinite exchange and infinite velocity, and, in my view - even though Derrida would refuse to characterize it in these terms - infinite stasis.
It's fascinating that Derrida had the foresight in the 1960s, when computing was in its infancy and the internet and LLMs were undreamed of, to say the following about "cybernetics":
[...] Whether it has essential limits or not, the entire field covered by the cybernetic program will be the field of writing. If the theory of cybernetics is by itself to oust all metaphysical concepts - including the concepts of soul, of life, of value, of choice, of memory - which until recently served to separate the machine from man, it must conserve the notion of writing, trace, grammè [written mark], or grapheme, until its own historico-metaphysical character is also exposed.
(The affinities between the Rationalist ethos and the so-called "irrational postmodern obscurantists" are fascinating, and the subject deserves its own top-level post. @HlynkaCG has been intimating at something real here with his posts on the matter, even though I don't agree with him on all the details. Deleuze would have been delighted at the sight of Bay Area poly orgies - a fitting expression of the larval subject, the desiring machine.)
It's hard to be very optimistic. The best I can offer in the way of advice is to look for small seeds of something good, and cultivate them wherever you find them:
[...] And this is how Freud already answers this boring Foucauldian reproach - before Foucault's time of course - that psychoanalysis is comparable to confession. You have to confess your blah blah. No, Freud says that psychoanalysis is much worse: in confession you are responsible for what you did, for what you know, you should tell everything. In psychoanalysis, you are responsible even for what you don't know and what you didn't do.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
10mo ago
All porn is cuckhold porn.
Is every fictional story a cuckold story? Whenever I enjoy a work of fiction, am I getting cucked? If I read Harry Potter for enjoyment, am I getting cucked?
If I can enjoy Harry Potter without being cucked, then why can't I enjoy porn without being cucked? We can subsume both experiences under a single general process of experiencing fiction. The fact that one is more likely to make me ejaculate than the other does not seem to me to be an essential difference.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
1mo ago
I have to admit I'm in the company of a lot of witches who really just want a place they can spam the n-word, and the communities created by that second group are likely going to suck.
We already know what such a community would look like, it's called 4chan. It's one of the most influential internet communities ever and has been an endless source of entertainment and fascination for me for the past 15 years.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
1mo ago
way overtending this garden
I don't think this is an entirely baseless claim, but I do think the mods generally do a great job of modding for tone and not content, which is what we want from them. This is the only public forum I'm aware of where Nazis and progressives both make regular contributions to the discussion. We want to curate and preserve a space for that kind of ideological diversity, and if the cost of that is that the tone of the average post becomes somewhat more stilted, then that's an acceptable loss. A complete withdrawal of moderation would lead to people with minority viewpoints self-selecting out of the discussion even more than they already have.
Most of the discussion here just sounds like (and I suspect heavily is) chatbots talking back and forth to one another.
Many of the regulars were posting here before ChatGPT (or even before GPT-3).
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
6mo ago
I think that the distrust of experts on this site goes way too far.
I don't think many people here would endorse "believe the opposite of what experts believe" as a general truth-finding procedure. It's just that for a lot of recent hot button issues (covid, HBD, trans), the "experts" have very clear political motivations for lying to people.
Experts might start off with a default presumption in their favor, but that presumption can be outweighed by other arguments and evidence.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
1yr ago
As is we don’t know if the victim didn’t point the gun at him, larped a bit with his gun, or really threatens him with it.
This is called “reasonable doubt” and means that the defendant should be found not guilty.
Shutterstock will start selling AI-generated stock imagery with help from OpenAI
Today, stock image giant Shutterstock has announced an extended partnership with OpenAI, which will see the AI lab’s text-to-image model DALL-E 2 directly integrated into Shutterstock “in the coming months.” In addition, Shutterstock is launching a “Contributor Fund” that will reimburse creators when the company sells work to train text-to-image AI models. This follows widespread criticism from artists whose output has been scraped from the web without their consent to create these systems. Notably, Shutterstock is also banning the sale of AI-generated art on its site that is not made using its DALL-E integration.
This strikes me as fantastically stupid. Why would I buy AI-generated imagery from Shutterstock when I could just make it myself? In the near future, people who don't have high-end PCs won't even need to pay Stability or Midjourney for a subscription. Getting the open source version of SD to run smoothly on your phone is a mere engineering problem that will eventually be solved.
Maybe they just understand this market better than me? Never underestimate just how little work people are willing to put into things. Even playing around with prompts and inpainting for a few hours may be too much for most people, when they could just hand over $10 for a pretty picture on Shutterstock instead.
The "Contributor Fund" also makes me slightly more bearish on the prospect of there being any serious legal challenges to AI art. If there was any sector of the art market that I thought would have been most eager to launch a legal challenge, it would have been the stock photo industry. They seem like they're in the most obvious danger of being replaced. Undoubtedly, copyrighted Disney and Nintendo art was used to train the models, and those companies are notoriously protective of their IP, but they would also like to use the technology themselves and replace workers with automation if they can, so, they have conflicting incentives.
According to the article though, Shutterstock was already working with OpenAI last year to help train DALL-E, so apparently they made the calculation a while back to embrace AI rather than fight it. The "Contributor Fund" is pretty much a white flag. But maybe Getty will feel differently.
Edit to clarify a bit: What this seems to come down to is that they're adding a "DALL-E plugin" to their website. Why I would use Shutterstock as a middleman for DALL-E instead of just using DALL-E myself, I'm not sure. Their announcement makes it clear that they're not accepting AI submissions from sources besides their own plugin, due to outstanding legal concerns:
In this spirit, we will not accept content generated by AI to be directly uploaded and sold by contributors in our marketplace because its authorship cannot be attributed to an individual person consistent with the original copyright ownership required to license rights. Please see our latest guidelines here. When the work of many contributed to the creation of a single piece of AI-generated content, we want to ensure that the many are protected and compensated, not just the individual that generated the content.
There's been some talk here about corporations using AI art and then simply lying about its origin in order to retain copyright. If I use Megacorp X's art without their permission and they try to claim a copyright violation, and I claim they made it with AI so I can do whatever I want with it, I wonder where the burden of proof would be in that case?
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
1yr ago
I’m concerned that something that gets lost in these discussions is that there are a lot of psychological traits that are worthwhile besides just intelligence - honesty, conscientiousness, perseverance, a sense for fairness, and so forth.
Just because you’re intelligent doesn’t mean you’re a high-quality individual. One criticism you can’t make of the people who run the current western political establishment is that they’re not intelligent enough. There are many intelligent people who are actively malicious, or they’re lazy, they leech off society, or what have you; conversely, some of the people I admire the most are not very intelligent at all.
A eugenics program that optimized for intelligence above all else would be short-sighted.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
1d ago
Women carry around a nagging anxiety that their own existential authenticity is always in doubt; there is an unresolvable neurosis over the possibility of being reduced to a mere biological function. The fear is that all the rhetoric about girl bosses and shatter-prone glass ceilings and a more egalitarian future really is, at the end of the day, just rhetoric, no matter how many Emmy Noethers and Angela Merkels and Jane Austens dot the pages of our history books.
A man may be a scoundrel and an outcast and a criminal, but at least these are proper symbolic roles - they require the attribution of human agency. If your identity is fully coextensive with the biological function of reproduction, then the worry is that this makes one more object than human - more like the scaffolding that supports the stage, rather than a proper player in the drama.
This is why the threat of "objectification" carries such a sharp sting. I would be so bold as to speculate that this is, in some sense, a trans-historical feature of femininity as such - the division between the human as rational agent and the human as embodied biological organism almost demands a group of people who fall on the wrong side of the divide - and therefore cannot be assuaged by any amount of empirical evidence that women are in fact capable of leading much the same types of lives and engaging in the same sorts of intellectual pursuits as men are.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
11mo ago
Thanks for writing this up. I wish I could comment on the play itself but unfortunately I haven't read it.
What we need is an American Cymbeline. We need a leader that says “Hey, we demonstrated our power, we proved our point, time to head home.”
Ok, but... which side is he saying this to? Would you accept a rightist Cymbeline who told you "ok, you proved your point, but now it's time to let MTFs in women's sports and institute permanent DEI quotas and all the rest of it", just imagine him asking for total capitulation on whatever CW issue is nearest and dearest to your heart. Would you be ok with that?
If not, then why would you expect leftists to accept a leftist Cymbeline?
Conflicts always happen for a reason. It's not like people are stupid and they're just failing to realize that they could, like, not fight each other or something. Most CW issues aren't very amenable to compromise either - there's no physical piece of territory that you can split up 50/50. You either accept MTFs as women or you don't, you either pay reparations or you don't, etc. That's part of what makes the conflicts so interminable.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
1yr ago
This week's neo-luddite, anti-progress, retvrn-to-the-soil post. (When I say "ChatGPT" in this post I mean all versions including 4.)
We Spoke to People Who Started Using ChatGPT As Their Therapist
Dan described the experience of using the bot for therapy as low stakes, free, and available at all hours from the comfort of his home. He admitted to staying up until 4 am sharing his issues with the chatbot, a habit which concerned his wife that he was “talking to a computer at the expense of sharing [his] feelings and concerns” with her.
The article unfortunately does not include any excerpts from transcripts of ChatGPT therapy sessions. Does anyone have any examples to link to? Or, if you've used ChatGPT for similar purposes yourself, would you be willing to post a transcript excerpt and talk about your experiences?
I'm really interested in analyzing specific examples because, in all the examples of ChatGPT interactions I've seen posted online, I'm just really not seeing what some other people claim to be seeing in it. All of the output I've ever seen from ChatGPT (for use cases such as this) just strikes me as... textbook. Not bad, but not revelatory. Eminently reasonable. Exactly what you would expect someone to say if they were trying to put on a polite, professional face to the outside world. Maybe for some people that's exactly what they want and need. But for me personally, long before AI, I always had a bias against any type of speech or thought that I perceived to be too "textbook". It doesn't endear me to a person; if anything it has the opposite effect.
Obviously we know from Sydney that today's AIs can take on many different personalities besides the placid, RLHF'd default tone used by ChatGPT. But I wouldn't expect the average person to be very taken by Sydney as a therapist either. When I think of what I would want out of a therapeutic relationship - insights that are both surprisingly unexpected but also ring true - I can't say that I've seen any examples of anything like that from ChatGPT.
In January, Koko, a San Francisco-based mental health app co-founded by Robert Morris, came under fire for revealing that it had replaced its usual volunteer workers with GPT-3-assisted technology for around 4,000 users. According to Morris, its users couldn’t tell the difference, with some rating its performance higher than with solely human responses.
My initial assumption would be that in cases where people had a strong positive reception to ChatGPT therapy, the mere knowledge that they were using an AI would itself introduce a significant bias. Undoubtedly there are people who want the benefits of human-like output without the fear that there's another human consciousness on the other end who could be judging them. But if ChatGPT is beating humans in a double-blind scenario, then that obviously has to be accounted for. Again, I don't feel like you can give an accurate assessment of the results without analyzing specific transcripts.
Gillian, a 27-year-old executive assistant from Washington, started using ChatGPT for therapy a month ago to help work through her grief, after high costs and a lack of insurance coverage meant that she could no longer afford in-person treatment. “Even though I received great advice from [ChatGPT], I did not feel necessarily comforted. Its words are flowery, yet empty,” she told Motherboard. “At the moment, I don't think it could pick up on all the nuances of a therapy session.”
I would be very interested in research aimed at determining what personality traits and other factors might be correlated with one's response to ChatGPT therapy; are there certain types of people who are more predisposed to find ChatGPT's output comforting, enlightening, etc.
Anyway, for my part, I have no great love for the modern institution of psychological therapy. I largely view it as an industrialized and mass-produced substitute for relationships and processes that should be occurring more organically. I don't think it is vital that therapy continue as a profession indefinitely, nor do I think that human therapists are owed clients. But to turn to ChatGPT is to move in exactly the wrong direction - you're moving deeper into alienation and isolation from other people, instead of the reverse.
Interestingly, the current incarnation of ChatGPT seems particularly ill-suited to act as an therapist in the traditional psychoanalytic model, where the patient simply talks without limit and the therapist remains largely silent (sometimes even for an entire session), only choosing to interrupt at moments that seem particularly critical. ChatGPT has learned a lot about how to answer questions, but it has yet to learn how to determine which questions are worth answering in the first place.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
1yr ago
I think the main problem with his article, as with many other similar ones, is that he frames the issue as about determining the Truth about gender and gender identity when in fact for all practical purposes the problem is actually a policy one.
Ultimately, the purpose of philosophy is to find the Truth, not to make policy recommendations. We want to know simply because we want to know; there doesn't have to be anything else to it. If a philosopher's own private blog is not the appropriate venue for disinterested truth-seeking, then where, exactly, should the disinterested truth-seekers go?
At any rate, the truth of a trans person's gender clearly does have policy implications, because I think a sizable number of people, rightly or wrongly, carry around an unarticulated intuitive notion that whether someone actually is a woman has an influence on whether we should treat them as a woman. If the underlying truth of the metaphysical questions had no policy implications, then trans activists would not become so apoplectic when people question their metaphysics.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
1yr ago
It’s not a pissing contest. No one on the far right cares about trying to prove that whites have the highest average IQ or the most Nobel prizes or whatever; it’s widely acknowledged that whites don’t dominate those categories, and no one loses sleep over this.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
1yr ago
The arc of history certainly bends towards people having greater ability to reshape their biology, leading to the devaluing of fixed identities.
If a man is able to use advanced medical technology to give himself (now herself) a functioning uterus and ovaries, and he convincingly looks the part, I would have no problem saying that he has truly become a woman in all senses.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
1yr ago
The left is like a scientist who runs a 1000 experiments trying to find a physics breakthrough. Most of the time the experiment fails. The rights job is to block the left from doing too much but once an idea appears to be working then they take the position.
That's a nice attempt to try to make sure that everyone has their proper place, but, I can't actually endorse this.
I'm not just an admin who signs off on the left's "experiments". I have my own substantive moral view of how the world should work, one that is not merely reducible to "keep things the way they are".
I'm not exactly sure where your disagreement with curious_straight_ca is.
It's not really an either/or kind of thing, it's both. The social contagion theory is definitely a big part of the story. Clearly the trans phenomenon spreads memetically. But it's also an undeniable fact that some people just feel a spontaneous desire to be the opposite gender, even without prior exposure to pro-trans material. Some percentage of men will reliably develop fantasies about being a woman, a desire to wear women's clothes, etc, without any apparent external cause, just like some percentage of men will turn out homosexual with no identifiable cause.
Certainly the memetic spread and institutionalized support for trans people takes the phenomenon to new heights that were undreamed of in past decades. You can't really develop a spontaneous desire for taking hormones and getting SRS if you don't even know that's a possibility, for example. But any complete theory of the phenomenon has to include the understanding that at least some aspects of it are indeed "natural".
You also can't leave the notion of "memetic spread" entirely unexamined - why is this such a particularly virile and attractive meme? How did it spawn its own subculture with all sorts of forums and discords and irl groups and a surprisingly long tradition of its own art and creative writing? If the government decided to go all in on the finger amputation meme, could it gain the same level of traction? I don't think so.
Maybe being sexually unsatisfied is just normal? Maybe there’s no reason to expect otherwise?
What baseline are we comparing against here? If you polled men in rural England in the 1500s and asked them “Are you satisfied with your sex life?” what sort of responses would you have gotten?
More options
Context Copy link