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
Different people want vastly different things out of TheMotte.
A few times over the years I've seen people share their lists of their all time favorite Motteposters. Some names are expected, other names make me go "...wait, what? That guy? Why?". Sometimes people will list someone who I find to be totally uninteresting and whose posts I skip over as a matter of course, because they write about topics that aren't relevant to me. This doesn't mean that I or them have bad taste. It just means we have different interests and we want different things out of TheMotte.
For my part, I'm not particularly interested in a play-by-play of current events, unless the event is particularly earth-shattering, or the post has a novel theoretical take. I don't really care that Canada introduced new hate speech laws for example, but if you have a new argument I've never heard before for why hate speech laws are actually a good thing, then that could be a post worth reading.
As usual, you are the forum. If people aren't writing the kinds of posts you want to read, then you should write more of the kinds of posts that you want to read.
EDIT: Why do you think the response to your post about abortion was abysmal? I think the response was pretty good. It generated a decent amount of engagement for a top level post and it prompted some interesting replies from @RandomRanger and @self_made_human about transhumanism, so, job well done, mission accomplished.
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.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
1mo 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
1mo ago
This kind of comment would be perfect for the Transnational Thursday thread.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
1mo ago
with the Right-wing critique of Zionism growing in influence among younger audiences.
Are we sure about that? Certainly the left-wing critique of Zionism is growing in influence, but I'm not sure about the right-wing critique (to say nothing of explicitly DR ideas). I get the impression that when young people are critical of Israel, it's overwhelmingly for progressive reasons: Jews are white colonialists who are oppressing the non-white Palestinians, and opposing Israel is part of the broader struggle for racial justice. Right-wing inflected critiques of Israel seem to me to be as fringe as ever in the mainstream conscience. But I do agree with your general point that even "normie" right-wing media has become edgier recently; Fox News is a lot more willing to say "white" than they were a few years ago.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
9mo ago
The plot of the basic male story is "Man is weak. Man works hard with clear goal. Man becomes strong". I think men feel this basic archetypal story much more strongly than women, so that even an otherwise horrible story can be entertaining if it hits that particular chord well enough, if the man is weak enough at the beginning, or the work especially hard. I'm not exactly clear what the equivalent story is for women, but it's something like "Woman thinks she's not good enough, but she needs to realise that she is already perfect".
But this is simply a reflection of evolutionary reality. It's not the case that women gravitate to these sorts of stories because they're like, stupid or anything.
A man's future is always, within certain limits, radically open. His sexual marketplace value (SMV) can drastically rise or drastically fall depending on the actions he takes. If he puts in enough work, he can lift weights and bulk up, accomplish more things, gain more status, and be rewarded accordingly. The hero's journey.
A woman's SMV is primarily determined by the physical appearance that was gifted to her by genetics, and past a certain critical window, it slowly but steadily declines due to ageing. Due to a confluence of biological and social factors, a woman cannot expect to bring about an order of magnitude increase in her SMV through her own actions. We do have plastic surgery today, but its effects are limited, particularly in their ability to counteract the effects of ageing, and it wouldn't have been an option at all deep in our evolutionary history, when these mythic structures first became ingrained in the collective unconscious. In a very practical sense, the best thing a woman can do at any given time is to learn to make the best of what she's got. This is reflected in the stories they tell about themselves, to themselves.
Throughout the movie, Ken is basically subservient to Barbie, defining himself only in the relation to her
Again, hardly atypical. Plenty of men define themselves solely in terms of women, in terms of their success with women. Probably the majority.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
10mo ago
Twitter always seemed to be a communication platform for businesses, and individuals who were already famous and had a large following. I never understood why I as a random no-name would want to have an account there.
I suppose this move is meant to change that perception. But I’d rather not be complicit in the death of the open web and the retreat of humanity’s collected oeuvre into walled gardens.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
24d ago
I will ask the same question that I've asked repeatedly: if porn is so bad and the NWO wants to get you addicted to it, then why do they make it so very difficult to distribute? Why does it seem like they're clamping down harder over time? Even pornhub can't take credit cards anymore, they only accept ACH transfers and crypto.
Porn (in the very broadest sense of the term) is one of the only authentically countercultural genres of art today, as evidenced by the severe institutional restrictions it faces. Seems pretty straightforward to me.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
1mo ago
Slow news day? Guess I'll ramble for a bit.
Introduction
Certainly, here is a possible introduction for your topic:Lithium-metal batteries are promising candidates for high-energy-density rechargeable batteries due to their low electrode potentials and high theoretical capacities [1], [2]. However, during the cycle, dendrites forming on the lithium metal anode can cause a short circuit, which can affect the safety and life of the battery [3], [4], [5], [6], [7], [8], [9].
This is far from an isolated incident - a simple search of Google Scholar for the string "certainly, here is" returns many results. And that certainly isn't going to catch all the papers that have been LLM'd.
This raises the obvious question as to why I would bother reading your paper in the first place if non-trivial sections of it were written by an LLM. How can I trust that the rest of it wasn't written by an LLM? Why don't I cut out the middle man and just ask ChatGPT directly what it thinks about lithium-metal batteries and three-dimensional porous mesh structures?
All this fresh on the heels of youtube announcing that creators must now flag AI generated content in cases where omitting the label could be viewed as deceptive, because "it would be a shame if we (youtube) weren't in compliance with the new EU AI regulations", to which the collective response on Hacker News was "lmao okay, fair point. It would be a shame if we just lied about it."
It would be very boring to talk about how this represents a terminal decline in standards and the fall of the West, and how back in my day things were better and people actually took pride in their work, and how this is probably all part of the same vast conspiracy that's causing DEI and worse service at restaurants and $30 burgers at Five Guy's. Well of course people are going to be lazy and incompetent if you give them the opportunity. I'm lazy and incompetent too. I know what it feels like from the inside.
A more interesting theoretical question would be: are people always lazy and incompetent at the same rate, across all times and places? Or is it possible to organize society and culture in such a way that people are less likely to reach for the lazy option of copy and pasting ChatGPT output into their peer-reviewed journal articles; either because structural incentives are no longer aligned that way, or because it offends their own internal sense of moral decency.
You're always going to have a large swath of people below the true Platonic ideal of a 100 IQ individual, save large scale genetic engineering. That's just how it goes. Laziness I'm not so sure about - it seems like it might be easier to find historical examples of it varying drastically across cultures. Like, the whole idea of the American Revolution is always something that blew my mind. Was it really all about taxes? That sounds like the very-slightly-true sort of myth they teach you in elementary school that turns out to be not-actually-true-at-all. Do we have any historians who can comment? Because if it was all about taxes, then isn't that really wild? Imagine having such a stick up your ass about tax hikes that you start a whole damn revolution over it. Those were not "lazy" men, that's for sure. That seems like the sort of thing that could only be explained if the population had vastly different genetics compared to contemporary America, or a vastly different culture; unless there are "material conditions" that I'm simply not appreciating here.
Speaking of material conditions, Brian Leiter recently posted this:
"Sociological idealism" was Charles Mills's term for one kind of critique of ideology in Marx, namely, a critique of views that, incorrectly, treat ideas as the primary cause of events in the socio-economic world. Marx's target was the Left Young Hegelians (whose heirs in the legal academy were the flash-in-the-pan Critical Legal Studies), but the critique extends much more widely: every day, the newspapers and social media are full of pontificating that assumes that ideas are driving events. Marx was always interested in the question why ideologists make the mistakes they do.
Marx's view, as far as I can tell, was that ideas (including cultural values and moral guidelines) should be viewed as casually inert epiphenomena of the physical material and economic processes that were actually the driving forces behind social change. I don't know where he actually argues for this in his vast corpus, and I've never heard a Marxist articulate a convincing argument for it - it seems like they might just be assuming it (but if anyone does have a citation for it in Marx I would appreciate it!).
If Marx is right then the project of trying to reshape culture so as to make people less likely to copy and paste ChatGPT output into their peer-reviewed journal articles (I keep repeating the whole phrase to really drive it home) would flounder, because we would be improperly ascribing the cause of the behavior to abstract ideas when we should be ascribing it to material conditions. Which then raises the question of what material conditions make people accepting of AI output in the first place, and how those conditions might be different.
Although I reported several of his posts recently, this is very unfortunate and it's not the outcome that I would have preferred.
There were many obnoxious posts in Hlynka's extensive oeuvre, but most of them stopped short of actually breaking the rules. What really crossed the line for me recently were posts like this in the recent thread on HBD and identitarianism where he accused other posters of lying about their own positions without providing any supporting evidence.
To be clear, I think that people failing to appreciate the implications of their own position, or people failing to introspect on what their true position actually is in the first place, is a real phenomenon. People consciously lying about their own position is definitely a real phenomenon. I think all of those accusations should be fair game for discussion on TheMotte. But if you're going to levy those accusations, you should be prepared to support them with substantial argumentation. Hlynka was content throughout that entire thread to simply repeat his talking points without substantively engaging with the (very lengthy and thorough) rebuttals that other posters were offering. I had hoped that some mod warnings might cajole him into actually responding to other people's arguments.
Regardless, I would have preferred to deal with the issue through informal social consequences, like what @somedude was cooking up, rather than an actual permaban.
He brought a very unique flavor to TheMotte that can't easily be replaced, and I would hope that there's still a way for him to return someday.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
2mo ago
Myself, I haven't bought a western AAA game since 2017, and I wish all of you the same.
Yeah the fact that anyone is still buying these things is wild to me.
When it comes to video games these days (and pretty much all other media) I mainly stick to smaller niche releases and retro stuff.
I know we've had some heated discussions on this forum in the past about the notion of "conservative alternatives" (to culture, to institutions, to infrastructure). I don't think that focusing on alternative cultural spaces should be viewed as defeatism. It's better to focus on spaces where you can actually build something and make a positive contribution, instead of endlessly seething over lost causes.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
10mo ago
It's a bit concerning that the most upvoted post in the current CW thread (at +53!) is what is essentially a bare link - especially considering that @Amadan just rejected the idea of a bare links thread further down the page.
I like that the CW thread is a place where deeper analysis is expected in top level posts and it would be a shame to see the community start slipping on those standards.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
10mo ago
To me, the "problem with Susan" seems to be that she's literally retarded. You spent half of your life in Narnia, and then claim it's some kind of funny game? When you can confirm for yourself by just opening that wardrobe?
It seems to me that it's an instance of the metaphorical/allegorical intruding on the literal. The line between the two domains becoming blurred.
You can imagine spending half your life dedicated to a certain religion, or career, or a political ideology; but then at some point something changes. You can no longer believe in what you once did; it no longer has any meaning for you, you can't take it seriously anymore, you just want to turn your back on it. Susan turning her back on Narnia is supposed to represent that sort of major life development. She's not literally denying the validity of her memories of Narnia and saying that it was all a game - or at least, that's not what you're supposed to be getting out of it.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
11d ago
what exactly do they imagine is to be done about the supposed epidemic of women being targeted for violence by men? Is there really a generalized belief that the problem is insufficient scolding or insufficient laws targeting this variety of crime?
Their response, if you could get down to the heart of the matter, would be: the thought that everything is stuck like this forever, that nothing will ever change, is too much to bear. So we have to believe that more education and more feminism and more shaming will fix all the problems, for the sake of our own sanity.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
1mo 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
9mo ago
Locations in the US are colder than corresponding locations at the same latitude in Europe because the European locations benefit from warm air coming from the Mediterranean.
Don't take it as a personal criticism when I say that I hate shit like this.
This naive optimism of "rah rah face the pain, ride the tiger, you'll come out stronger for it". For the most part, this line is only repeated by people who have never faced true terror before. People who haven't faced up to the gravity of the problem.
Now, I am not saying that we should simply crumple in the face of tragedy, or that it would be better if we could simply eliminate it. There is a tension that I must navigate here because, as I have intimated elsewhere, my fundamental project is to argue, contra utilitarianism, for the necessity of (the possibility of) pain, even terrible pain, even the worst pain, as a precondition of anything that could be called "meaningful". But I recognize full well that this is a fundamentally insane proposition, at least prima facie. Any person with any sense at all should be running for the safety of the experience machine once they comprehend what horrors are "out there", in "reality". Overcoming this eminently reasonable proposition will require the marshaling of the most advanced and subtle resources at our disposal. This puerile pollyannaism of "ah, bring it on, I can handle it, because I'm tough!" is simply not up to the task. There is a limit point where things simply break. Only beyond this limit does the problem of pain actually begin to present itself.
Consider the case of Elisabeth Fritzl, an Austrian woman who was imprisoned by her own father in the basement of their house for 24 years. She was never once allowed to leave her prison chamber in that time period. She was raped repeatedly and delivered several children while in captivity.
Would you go to her in that basement and tell her "stay with the pain, don't shut this out"? Would you tell her "what you're feeling is premature enlightenment"?
She did end up surviving and is doing remarkably well now, but of course she would have had no way of knowing that while the ordeal was actually going on. As the years ticked on, she would have faced nothing but crushing uncertainty every day, the knowledge that every day could be her last. And of course she just as easily could have died; there could have been no happy ending. What then? In that case, there are no scars to serve as monuments of your victories; there is only a terrible waste of life.
fascism is a fundamentally progressive ideology. [...] They want to quibble some group's position within the intersectional stack rather than question the validity of the stack as a concept. They cling to psuedo-marxist nonsense about group/class consciousness and group/class differences to salve their own wounded pride. They still seem to think that they can appeal to some non-existant higher authority with words like "academic consensus" and "studies show".
As has been pointed out to you multiple times, the policy prescriptions proposed by the far right and progressives are wildly different. Fascists want to railroad women into being housewives, they want to make pornography and other types of sexual "deviancy" illegal, and they want to build a wall to keep immigrants out. Progressives don't want these things. The two camps want to build two different types of societies that are obviously different and would feel different to live in. Given these numerous disagreements, any assertion of similarity between the two ideologies in terms of alleged shared metaphysical or epistemological presuppositions seems rather moot.
Can you give a quick rundown of what your alternative looks like? What is your proposed belief system that does not depend on these concepts like "group difference" that you find problematic?
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
11mo ago
It seems to me that the word “spew” is very left-coded in online discourse. “You’re just looking for an excuse to spew your hatred”, “he was spewing his racism and homophobia everywhere”, etc.
This is interesting because, in contrast to an overtly political term like “privilege”, or even a set phrase like “there’s a lot to unpack here”, the word “spew” is a longstanding and perfectly innocuous non-political term from ordinary language. And yet to my ears it has still taken on a political valence. I rarely hear a rightist say something like “and then he started spewing his politically correct nonsense”, if ever.
Can you think of any initially non-political words or patterns of speech that have become right-coded? (Or just more leftist examples - I know there are more besides just “spew” but I’m drawing a blank at the moment).
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
8d ago
Lots of Hispanic blood in a future American population isn’t an HBD-wrecking catastrophe.
But you just acknowledged that the Hispanics are underrepresented among engineers and doctors. If the broader population becomes more Hispanic, would you not also expect that population to produce fewer people who are capable of becoming engineers and doctors?
An immediate corollary of HBD is that a Brazil-like population leads to Brazil-like conditions.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
14d ago
I mean, if the lab meat was literally identical in every way to real meat, then sure, I’d eat it. In practice though, I’d imagine it’s more like AI-generated media: the difference in quality is noticeable, but certain factions downplay the differences for political reasons.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
1mo 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
2mo ago
I had an argument with him once that abruptly and very significantly changed my mind, my values and my entire perspective on a whole host of issues, all in a single sentence.
Well. Don't leave us hanging.
What was the sentence?
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
2mo ago
It’s more fun to check back in 24 hours and see how many points you got.
Gamification.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
5mo ago
My intuition is that anomalous mental traits are all at least loosely correlated with each other. This neatly explains the "mentally ill genius" trope, and your observation here that gays are overrepresented among high achievers, with one principle: the brain is a complex stochastic system, and if you start pushing and pulling on the levers for one trait (e.g. intelligence or creativity), it's hard to avoid unpredictable downstream effects on other parts of the system.
I'm unsure of how this plays out for people at the extreme low end of the intelligence curve. I don't think they're more likely to be gay than average, but I'd wager that they're overrepresented in various types of sex crime, which can be considered its own form of deviancy.
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.
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