Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
"...Perhaps laughter will then have formed an alliance with wisdom; perhaps only 'gay science' will remain."
User ID: 342
The long answer would involve starting here.
The short answer is that I didn't say that, under self_made's described social system, the man would enjoy his wife's transgression per se, but rather that the feeling of power he derives from exercising his authority over those who have transgressed offers something to enjoy.
I would drop immaturity from the conversation entirely if you want to avoid getting people's hackles up
Yeah, I have to work on my presentation. But at the same time, I really do have to ask my readers to suspend certain pre-existing conceptual and emotional associations they have around certain terms, y'know? Not erase, just temporarily suspend. Otherwise we can't make any progress.
There was a conversation here a few weeks ago where I said that love is impossible. That got a few people upset. But did I ever say that people shouldn't do things that are impossible? Did I ever say that there's no place in the world for impossible things? Not at all. Similarly, did I ever say that a certain amount of immaturity is not warranted? Not at all. (I suppose the Hegelian way of talking about it would be, you have to go through maturity to arrive at a mature immaturity.)
which VN btw?
The Hundred Line: Last Defense Academy
It feels like you are trying to intellectualise that away by referring to 'emotions'
Not at all! "Intellectualize"? Goodness gracious no.
an artist shouldn't try to manipulate the viewer, what they should do is try to express themselves
We're in complete agreement that there is an intimate link between art and what might be called "emotion". But this phrase, that an artist should "express themselves", makes me nervous, increasingly nervous, for reasons that I don't fully understand myself and have never been able to entirely articulate. There's clearly something right about it, and yet we should also be cautious. Taking a shot in the dark, some of the reasons may be:
- It implies that the principle modality as issue is expression, as opposed to alternative modes of thought and comportment.
- It implies that the work is about the artist and what he wants to express, as opposed to being about other things.
- It implies that the artist knows what he "thinks" or "feels" well enough to "express" it. (Derrida wrote some of the only good commentary that's ever been written on Nietzsche -- "the truth of Nietzsche's text is that there is no truth of Nietzsche's text". He was quite correct about this. And yet Nietzsche's text simultaneously contains an overwhelming plenitude of truth, it contains too much truth. This is what the authentic work aims at: "expressing" something while at the same time undermining what it expresses and pointing beyond itself.)
The fact that a magic trick falls apart if you look at it too closely
Various 20th century artistic practices that are now grouped under the heading of "abstraction" could be described in precisely this way, as an attempt to "look at the magic trick closely". Artists set out with the self-conscious intent of "breaking the illusion", of foregrounding the process of creation that normally remains hidden; in painting this took the form of abstract painting, painting that embraced the "flatness of the canvass" instead of trying to retreat from it into the illusion of 3D perspective, painting that owned the fact that it was nothing more than blobs of colored goo.
The idea was to ask whether it was possible to construct an art without illusion, an art that would endure even when the magic trick was ruined. Surely you can agree that this is at least an interesting question, even if you think it must ultimately be answered in the negative?
Seething contempt is fine if it’s expressed politely, which Turok has done imo.
My read is that this is just standard leftist wealth envy/hatred.
I'm not wealthy wealthy, but I am significantly wealthier than the median American. I could drop to zero net income and live off my current wealth for years without having to work a day. And I feel no moral guilt about this whatsoever. So no, I have no envy/hatred of wealth.
You're upset that people exist who are not satisfying "from each according to his abilities".
I'm upset that our vital and necessary work is being done by immigrants and illegals instead of native-born American citizens.
If we get back to the point where the work of maintaining American society is again being done by Americans, and there's still enough surplus to go around to enable some people to live as NEETs, then fine by me. Bully for them. Being a NEET is great! I've done my share of NEETing in the past. I empathize fully with why people want to do that and I have no criticisms of them from a moral perspective.
There are humans out there who are not doing the specific thing you want them to do, so you will simply tweak society to engineer conditions that force them to do your will.
There is no politics unless someone is being forced to conform to something. There is no civilization unless someone is being forced to conform to something.
Obviously some civilizations are much more totalitarian than others. But even the most libertarian among us will still usually support some minimal state order for the purposes of punishing violent crime, enforcing property rights, etc.
If this doesn't work, or X and Y fail to complete your goals, perhaps some still manage to mooch and others just feel some additional hardship, then we must go further.
Incorrect, see above.
The Brevity thing is the most important piece of advice about writing or speech.
Absolutely not! Good heavens.
As with many questions of this type, the answer to "how long should it be?" is always "as long as it should be". Sometimes that will be quite short, and other times it will be quite long. Context and purpose matter. When I'm looking up technical documentation at work, I usually do want it to give me the answer I'm looking for as fast as possible with little ado. But thankfully, people can write things other than technical documentation.
In general, if someone is a good writer, then we would prefer him to write more rather than less. More of a good thing is good! Saying that you prefer writing to always be as short as possible is a bit like saying that the best sandwich is the one with the least meat on it. We would have to assume that such a person is not much of a meat eater to begin with.
Not everyone is a lover of words, and that's fine. There are plenty of things I don't care about either. I have little taste for music, for example, beyond the most superficial enjoyment. Which is why I make no attempt to generalize my musical preferences into universally applicable strictures.
As a discipline so untethered by constraints
It... depends on what you mean by that. In some sense, yeah, philosophy is more radically free of constraints than any other discipline, in the sense that any foundational premise or assumption is always fair game for critique. If you're a physicist and you think Einstein was wrong, you're a crank. If you're a mathematician and you want to be an ultrafinitist then at best you're engaged in a non-standard project that has little relevance to the work of mainstream professional mathematicians (and at worst you're a crank). But in philosophy, if you want to argue that philosophy itself is dumb and not worth doing and is incapable of generating truth or knowledge (as, arguably, Nietzsche and Wittgenstein held at times), then you're not a crank. You're just doing philosophy, and philosophers will praise you as an insightful and original thinker if you're capable of supporting your position.
But in another sense, it's just as constrained as any other discipline. With few exceptions, the vast majority of Western philosophers past and present have taken themselves to be addressing questions that had correct and incorrect answers, and their goal was to arrive at correct answers and support their positions with arguments and evidence (yes, even the "postmodernists" - the "relativism" of Foucault and Derrida was greatly exaggerated through misreadings of their work).
And, when it comes to breadth, someone like Scott, Cremieux, or even a top 4chan autist is going to have far more of it than a philosophy professor at Oxford.
My use of the word "breadth" may have been misleading there. I meant "breadth" insofar as you can bring a wide range of relevant knowledge and references to bear on a specific question or problem you're addressing. Not in the sense of, you can give me hot takes on a lot of different topics that may or may not be related to your specialty.
To give a concrete example, the work of Ted Sider and Trenton Merricks addresses, in far more meticulous and thorough detail, the problems that Scott outlined in The Categories Were Made For Man.
The modern information network has created polymath monsters
"Polymaths" almost always grossly overestimate their competence.
Academia is so stilted that it rarely produces novel thought at all. Who are these radical new idea-smiths, sharpened by years of formal training?
I linked the work of François Kammerer regarding illusionism about consciousness elsewhere in the thread. It's not uncommon for people in internet debates to express skepticism about the hard problem of consciousness, but they tend to be unfamiliar with the existing academic work on the problem, and frankly they usually don't understand what the problem is even about in the first place. Contemporary defenders of illusionism both understand the problem, and they appreciate the severe uphill challenge that illusionism faces, but they still defend the position, which is interesting if nothing else.
Todd McGowan's work on reinterpreting Lacanian psychoanalysis in light of his Zizekian reading of Hegel (part 1 of a brief overview and part 2) made Lacan's work a lot more interesting and accessible than Lacan himself did, and it had a significant and enduring impact on the way I interpret my own actions and the actions of other people.
Chris Cutrone managed to convince me that the Marxist tradition was more intellectually interesting than I previously assumed.
there is no fundamental conflict between Big Tech and the Woke.
Yeah. If I had written a longer post I would have gone into more nuance, but, the relationship between big tech and woke is very complex. One of my principle criticisms (but certainly not the only one) of big tech is, indeed, their complicity as a vehicle for the dissemination of wokeness.
Unfortunately we do have to be constrained by reality to some extent in terms of political strategizing. I’d like to just say “I’ll support the Good People, where the Good People are the ones who would just do whatever I would do if I was the God King”. But there’s no guarantee that there will be any organized constituency that matches those exact values. So we have to make do with what we have.
I would not, however, have promised in the first place to not do it.
This is reasonable. It's rarely a good look to contradict yourself so blatantly in public.
I'm not sure why you're referencing "TheMotte" here as if it were a hivemind, particularly when you're only the fourth person into the thread.
I was combining this thread with the post in last week's thread on the same topic, which got 3 additional replies that were critical of Biden.
Have you ever felt pain? If yes, then you know what it means to have a conscious experience. It's that, and the other things like that (sensations more generally, the way things look, the way things sound, and the like).
See what I wrote here and the ensuing replies. If we're going to accept that people have things called "desires" at all (and that is a philosophically contentious claim - it can't just be taken for granted, any more than Freud's theories can be taken for granted), then we have to accept that we don't have direct empirical access to them. So any model of desire-attribution has to be holistically evaluated across multiple axes: parsimony, elegance, ability to unify multiple disparate phenomena, etc.
and expected us to share your judgment of its quality.
No, certainly not. I'm aware that my tastes are unusual. If the works I've shared here aroused curiosity in even just a couple of people then I would be quite happy.
There's no accounting for taste!
Something about man-made structures that appear to have been dropped in the middle of nowhere just really does it for me. I love the Viaduct Petrobras for similar reasons.
How did architecture become entirely centered around philosophical navel gazing? We'd all be better off if architects put down the continental philosophers and started again with firmitas, utilitas, venustas.
Again, don't you see the tension here in these two sentences?
What you've suggested here - architecture should be beautiful, architecture should serve a function - is itself a non-trivial philosophical program that must be argued for rather than assumed. Architects can't operate in the absence of philosophical commitments altogether, because this is impossible. Instead, you're asking that they adopt your own philosophical commitments without reflection. Phrased in this way, your recommendation no longer seems as manifestly self-evident.
There's no cognitive dissonance because there's no evil here, anywhere.
Eisenman's buildings range from "fine" to "pretty darn cool" in my view. "...Architecture that similarly alludes to a deeper or alternate view of reality" in a Lovecraftian fashion is also cool. Rad, even. I want more of that. Sign me up. This isn't even some complex "well we have to understand the dialectical nature of suffering and how even negative emotions can be valuable" shit. This is just very straightforwardly an architect who makes cool buildings that he thinks are cool and other people think are cool. There's no malfeasance here, no shenanigans.
To me, your question sounds akin to someone saying "how exactly can you support Harry Potter books pushing Satanic propaganda on our children?" It's hard to provide an answer because I disagree with the entire framing.
Christianity has undergone multiple profound changes - theological, structural, and otherwise - in the two thousand years of its existence.
Sure. But the fact that we're still able to recognize it as Christianity means it has to have something essential in common with the forms of Christianity that came before it. It can change and evolve, but there have to be limits on how much it can change as well; otherwise it would stop being Christianity altogether, and it would become something else. Presumably, someone who denies the existence of God cannot be a Christian, no matter how big we want the Christian tent to be.
Certainly there are many mutually contradictory tendencies and sects within Marxism. But they're still united by certain common features that make them recognizable as Marxism (and the belief that capitalism will be overcome by the workers' class struggle seems to be a particularly essential one). No matter how ruthlessly the contemporary SJW criticizes all that is, if they're not fundamentally invested in the notion of a workers' class struggle to overcome capitalism, then I think it's inappropriate to classify them as Marxist.
The idea was to use Marxist insights to determine how to distribute sociological, rather than material, "equality."
Ok. But my question is, is that really still Marxism, necessarily? Redistribution and equality, regardless of their modality, are not intrinsically Marxist ideas; they existed before Marx, and they continue to persist in non-Marxist contexts today. Imagine someone who said "we want to use Christian insights to strive for justice and equality, but we're going to drop all the baggage about Jesus and God and all that stuff, because we don't believe in that". At best, we could say that such a movement is Christian-inspired or Christian-derived, but it wouldn't be Christianity proper, because it rejects the core assumptions of Christianity.
There's been a lot of discussion in the thread over what counts as properly Marxist or not. To the best of my understanding, the core of Marxism would be something like: "capitalism is the name of a self-contradictory economic order; the self-consciousness and self-overcoming of this contradiction, which will take the concrete material form of a mass workers' revolution, will usher in a post-capitalist economic order that is based on transformed relations of production". That's the Nicene Creed of Marxism. If you don't believe in something that's at least close to that, you're not a Marxist. No matter how egalitarian you are, how sexually experimental you are, how resentful of straight white males you are - if your political program can be fundamentally be realized within the limits of liberal capitalism, then you're not a Marxist, cultural or otherwise. You're something else.
There may be individuals who, while adhering to the core Marxist program, decided that they needed to take a more "cultural" angle, and the term Cultural Marxist may be appropriate for those individuals. That's fine, I don't deny that. I do deny that the majority of leftists today (all the way from professors down to disaffected reddit commenters) adhere to the core Marxist program in any meaningful sense; therefore describing them as Marxist is inappropriate.
It seems to be a popular thesis in this thread that contemporary wokeism, while maybe not Marxist proper, is at least Marxist-derived in some crucial sense. This is an empirical question that I'm relatively agnostic on. It could be true or it could be false; it would require the appropriate historical and sociological studies to make a determination. I do worry that, much like the everything-I-don't-like-is-Marxism fallacy I mentioned earlier, this thesis comes close to being an instance of the all-my-enemies-get-their-talking-points-from-the-same-source fallacy. The left is very fond of deploying this against rightists - "no one could actually vote for Trump or oppose leftist social policies of their own accord, they've clearly all been brainwashed by Fox News/Russian bots/etc". And I don't want "cultural Marxist college professors" to be the right's version of Fox News/Russian bots/etc. Your enemies were not all brainwashed by a single malevolent entity. There really are just people who think differently than you.
But in the United States, the cultural Marxists and the originalist Marxists vote as a bloc, so in practical terms...
Voting patterns are not a useful criteria to determine equivalence among ideologies. Most white nationalists voted for Trump in 2016; but so did other groups, and the fact that those other groups voted for Trump doesn't mean they necessarily have any affinity with white nationalism.
Not engaging and being critical is a default victory for the minoritarian/woke supporters. Does this means you are obligated to take part in the culture wars? Well, kind of. Like it or not, those who show up are those who win.
Depends on what you mean by "show up", and what you're expecting to get out of it.
There was no conceivable act of individual heroism that could have shattered the power of the Catholic church at the height of the Inquisition, or hastened the fall of Soviet communism during the reign of Stalin. There was no "war", just those with power enforcing their will on their powerless, with very few meaningful avenues for rebuttal. Only through the accumulated weathering of decades (or centuries) did a change of conditions eventually become possible.
I certainly think it's virtuous to not be afraid of the censors. Do what you want to do, and don't let them stop you. But don't have delusions of grandeur either. If the only reason you're waging the culture "war" is because you think you can change the course of world history, then you should consider if there are better ways you could be spending your time.
Can I ask what your background in philosophy is?
I'm just an avid reader, nothing special.
How confident are you that this is a correct summary of Freud's ideas?
It wasn't supposed to be a summary of Freud's ideas at all. It was my own response to your claim that psychoanalysis should be dismissed because it has no "testable theories or experimental controls". Nothing more.
At the very least, you can ask people to describe what they're feeling, and see if other people also report similar feelings.
Well yes, but that's basically what psychoanalytic theorists/practitioners do. They read the theory and they think "yes, I do feel that this applies to my own cognitive processes and I find it to be illuminating for me". It couldn't have survived for this long if people didn't find something compelling in it.
I think it's actually what SSC would have called a superweapon. Instead of grappling with the messy details of what someone is actually saying, you assert that the real story is some nebulous subconscious which they themselves are not even aware of, but you can tell.
I agree that this is a possible failure mode when you start to invoke the notion of an unconscious. There's a risk of becoming too dogmatic if you're not sufficiently open to the possibility of falsification. Certainly.
But are we just going to pretend that unacknowledged ulterior motives don't exist? Certainly not! It's pretty clear to me that they do exist! Sometimes it feels like that's all political debates boil down to - accusations that the other side only claims to support X for principled moral reasons, when actually they just support it for their own self interest. Should we just immediately dismiss all accusations of that sort? I don't think so. They should at least be given a fair hearing. I think it's obvious that sometimes people are not entirely honest with others, and sometimes they're not entirely honest with themselves either. You don't need a fancy theory to see that.
Sociological and political debates couldn't get anywhere if we weren't allowed to speculate about the unobserved mental states of other people. Psychoanalysis is hardly doing anything too different from the average Motte thread, which is replete with speculation about what leftists and rightists "really think".
It's also worth mentioning that Lacanian clinical practice has this conception of the psychoanalyst as "the subject supposed to know" - key word being supposed to, as in a supposition, but that supposition ultimately turns out to be mistaken. One of the central goals of Lacanian analysis is for the patient to come to realize the ways in which the therapist too is ignorant:
This mystery is in the last resort the mystery of the transference itself: to produce new meaning, it is necessary to presuppose its existence in the other. That’s the logic of the “subject assumed to know” which was isolated by Lacan as the central axis, or stronghold, of the phenomenon of transference. The analyst is in advance assumed to know – what? The meaning of the analysand’s symptoms. This knowledge is of course an illusion, but it is a necessary one: it is only through this supposition of knowledge that, at the end, some real knowledge can be produced.
(Lacan is not Freud of course, but he's been central for the reception of Freud's ideas in the humanities since the mid 20th century.)
I would be happy to trade complete restrictions on public AI research for complete control of society until the AI God arrives. Would that be a trade you'd be interested in?
I'm not sure if I understand the question, or how it's related to the section you quoted.
On a basic level I'd be willing to hand control of society over to virtually any individual or group if it meant being able to live in a reality where machine learning was impossible. You can be the king, the progressives can be the kings, it doesn't matter.
The only thing that might give me pause would be the concern that such a decision would betray a lack of courage on my part.
So, do there exist two political ideologies that are both not liberal individualism, but also differ from each other by more than a "palette swap"? Based on the way I'm reading you right now, you seem to be saying that the political universe essentially breaks down into "liberal individualism" and "everything else". The ideologies in the "everything else" bucket may have differences from each other, but they will always be superficial differences compared to the primary difference of individualism vs identitarianism. Is that your view?
When I said the alternatives were woo, etc, I meant those "other types of intellectual activity".
What do you mean by "woo"? I always understood "woo" to essentially mean "supernatural". Is that how you're using the word?
There might be many criticisms you could make of what goes on in English departments or women's studies departments, but I don't think "belief in the supernatural" is one of them.
Perhaps you could come up with solid reasons it's a bad idea to build advanced AI, but then you'd be back in the realm of STEM.
You seem to be saying here that STEM (let's just say science) can give us knowledge of "solid reasons". If that's the case, then what area of science is responsible for studying "solid reasons"? What is our current best scientific theory of "solid reasons"? If I open a physics textbook, I can find quarks, and wave functions, and black holes, but I can't find any "solid reasons". Where are they?
This isn't just idle speculation. It seems like in order for science to give us knowledge of X, then either we have to be able to directly observe X, or we have to have a scientific theory of X. But neither of those criteria seems to be met here. I can't look out my window and see any "solid reasons".
STEM did not give us lockdowns or vaccine passes -- that was bullshitting.
Quarantines did exist in the pre-modern world. But I think the Covid lockdowns were of a uniquely large scale, and of a uniquely pervasive character, such that they only could have existed with the aid of modern technology. I don't think Covid would have played out the way it did without the internet (for WFH and Zoom calls), phone apps, and social media.
We already have that kind of smart feller, and they're already at universities. They don't seem to be all that useful.
Well, maybe. But what conclusions are we supposed to draw from that?
If you think that the institutionalized critique of STEM supremacism and neoliberal market ideology ("homo economicus", as @f3zinker puts it) is genuinely vital, as I do, then I don't see why you should be dissuaded by contingent failures and defects of the university system. Sometimes things don't work out. That's the way it goes. But that doesn't mean you give up. That just means you try harder next time!
If you think it's impossible for the university to have any positive impact in this area at all, then that would be different. But I don't see why we should accept that. Do you think it's just impossible for the university to have any impact on culture or politics? A number of rightists claim that contemporary progressivism can trace its roots back to the "postmodern neo-Marxism" of the Frankfurt school - i.e. it's an ideology that started in universities and percolated outward. What do you think of those claims?
If you just DON'T think that a humanistic critique of STEM is important, or if you think it's outright pernicious, then of course you would be in favor of just turning universities into trade schools. But then, that would just be grounded in your preexisting political commitments, not in any empirical facts about the university itself.
I’m curious to be “true white” and not “expanded” white which specific barbarian tribe you needed to descend from
Why the scare quotes? Is it really that strange to suggest that some people are white and others are not?
"White" means "people of European descent". The majority of South Americans are of mixed European and Native American descent.
For what it's worth, I'd be fine with just getting rid of the word white and using a term like European-American instead (or whatever hyphenated neologism is appropriate to your locale).
Well, most of what professional commercial artists do on a day-to-day basis isn't exactly creative either.
The paradigmatic examples of creativity are novel ideas that register on a world-historical scale, such as Cantor's development of set theory and the hierarchy of infinite cardinals. Such ideas are necessarily rare. If a work doesn't fit into this elite class, then I question if it can be called genuinely creative. At times I have wondered (but never seriously believed) if any work of art could ever be novel enough to qualify as genuinely creativity. As Hilbert once quipped, "for a mathematician, he did not have enough imagination, but now he has become a poet, and everything is fine."
I don't want to position myself as the god-emperor of creativity, or pretend that I have a set of hard and fast rules to apply. I just want us to have standards for ourselves, is all. As we descend further down the scale towards ordinariness, from world-historical successes, to works that are widely considered to be of exceptional quality, down to the average things that average professionals produce in their average careers, it becomes less and less clear whether the adjective "creative" continues to apply. I am not proclaiming anything with certainty one way or the other. There is just less clarity.
AI art obscures these questions and pushes them away from the central place that they should occupy in our thought.
"Wheee yippee, now we can all be creative! Thanks, AI!"
I find this to be offensive nonsense.
How would you compress this into a prompt? Without using explicit identifying terms like "Paul Klee" or "Angelus Novus".
I encourage you to run your prompt by the AI and see how close it can get.
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