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Primaprimaprima

Bigfoot is an interdimensional being

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joined 2022 September 05 01:29:15 UTC

"...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

2 followers   follows 0 users   joined 2022 September 05 01:29:15 UTC

					

"...Perhaps laughter will then have formed an alliance with wisdom; perhaps only 'gay science' will remain."


					

User ID: 342

I’m sorry, but I feel like everyone here is just inventing this persecution of tech workers out of thin air. It doesn’t match my experience at all.

I work in tech. I have never felt any qualms at all about telling people that I work in tech. It’s perfectly respectable. It doesn’t make people kiss my feet, but it’s not low status either. It’s just, fine. Normal. It’s absolutely higher status than telling people that you work in service or retail, which is the sort of answer that the majority of people have to give.

As I already stated, the technicalities of what constitutes "copying" or not are quite beside the point.

Let's put it this way. Look at the license agreement for Visual Studio Community 2022. This is a freely (as in beer) available piece of software; anyone with an internet connection can go to Microsoft's website and download it and start using it. But the license agreement places all sorts of arbitrary restrictions on what you can and can't do with it - for example, you can't use it to develop software if you're an "enterprise" (according to their own arbitrary definition of what an enterprise is) and your application does not fall under the heading of "device driver", "SQL server development", or one of their other arbitrarily-decreed exceptions.

The question naturally arises: what gives Microsoft the right to control what I do with their bits and bytes like this? Obviously the answer is "because of the license agreement, duh", but why should the license agreement be binding? Why should they be allowed to write a "license agreement" in the first place? They put this sequence of bits (the compiled binary) on their website, in plain view, where anyone can look at it and download it. Once I download it, they can't take it away, or really have any direct control over what I do with it (modulo the fact that the application might call home sometimes, but we can assume that it doesn't, and nothing about the argument will change). Why can't I just tell Microsoft to sod off at this point? The bits are mine, I'll do what I want with them, I'll use them for enterprise application development and you can't stop me?

I do think that Microsoft should have the right to enforce this sort of license agreement, and I think it stems from a simple and general principle: people who create and distribute sequences of bits should have wide-but-reasonable latitude to determine how those bits are used, and they should be able to seek redress when those agreements are violated. It's hard for me to see how the frameworks of copyright and software licensing can even exist at all unless one endorses that principle, or one that is roughly equivalent.

Similar to how Microsoft can say "here are some free bits, just don't use them for enterprise software development", an artist should be able to say "here are some free bits, just don't use them to train an AI model". The fact that the artist's bits represent an image rather than a compiled binary doesn't seem like a relevant difference.

Naturally, this is all very vague by legal standards and makes no reference to actual IP law, by design. I'm not a lawyer and I won't pretend to know anything about the law. I'm approaching this from an ethical/philosophical standpoint and arguing based on what I perceive to be fair and equitable. The technicalities of the law are of secondary importance to me; laws can change, after all.

self-driving cars are essentially banned.

I don't see why that's a problem, to be honest.

There has to be some sort of consequence for the manufacturer when self-driving cars cause an accident, same as how human drivers pay fines or go to jail. What's your preferred liability structure?

nobody gets to just go "nah I'm not listening to you". That's not ok.

But why though?

Neither "backtalking to a mod" nor "statement of intent to commit another rules violation in the future" are explicitly forbidden by the current rules. If one or both of those are not allowed, then the rules page should be amended to make that explicit.

imo there should be a blanket policy that mods have to recuse themselves from moderating direct replies to their own posts (just get a different mod to do it).

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.)

It’s already been acknowledged that longstanding posters with lots of AAQCs will be given a bit of extra wiggle room, and I would simply extend that to posters with underrepresented viewpoints as well, because the mere existence of a rare viewpoint is its own type of Quality Contribution.

I don't think that post was particularly tactful. Starting right off the bat by claiming the person is being weird isn't very tactful, just the opposite.

We might subjectively disagree over how tactful or not it is to call someone's post "weird" in this context. But the point is, I don't think 16 people downvoted that post because it called the parent post "weird". I think 16 people downvoted that post because it questioned how committed Republicans were to the principles of the anti-lockdown cause.

Posts with sharper personal insults than "weird" still manage to accumulate upvotes, if the content itself is popular enough. I already linked one. It's not that hard to find others (from multiple different users).

people who complain about being downvoted for not fitting into the "echochamber" of this place

But these people are simply correct in many cases. In every community with reddit-style voting, posts that disagree with the consensus viewpoint are more likely to be downvoted. This is simply obvious to me based on 15+ years of watching how different internet communities behave, and my knowledge of how I personally use the voting buttons, particularly with posts that provoke a strong emotional reaction from me. I can't recall any significant counterexamples, and TheMotte is no exception.

I want to reiterate that using the vote button as an agree/disagree button isn't a bad thing. It's natural and unavoidable. The solution is to simply not have any punishment associated with a low comment score. It's already a good first step that TheMotte doesn't hide low scoring comments like reddit and HN do, and I think we should remove the rate limiting as well.

"Right Wing" does not mean "religious." There's a correlation between the two, obviously, but imo that's more the result of history than philosophical alignment.

I believe that a certain type of magical thinking is, if not a necessary component of the rightist personality, then at least a prominent and salient feature of it across multiple diverse manifestations. (I raised the question here recently of whether there was actually something to leftist accusations of "right-wing conspiracy theories", the question of whether the rightist mind might actually be more prone to conspiratorial thinking.)

Nietzsche is the archetypal example to study here. In terms of his explicitly avowed philosophical commitments, he was the arch-materialist, not only denying God but also any notion of value (aesthetic or moral), free will, a unified conscious "self" that could be responsible for its actions, and at times he seemed to suggest that even the concept of "truth" had too much supernatural baggage and should be rejected on those grounds. And yet throughout his work he couldn't stop himself from making constant reference to the inner states of man's "soul", relying on analogies and parables that featured Greek gods and demons, judging people by a standard of authenticity which on any plain reading he should have been forced to reject, and courting overt mysticism with his concept of the "eternal recurrence". This was a fundamental psychological tendency expressing itself, a yearning for a reality which he could not explicitly avow. Not only could he not excise these concepts from his thinking but they were essential to him, it was the fiat currency of his psychic economy.

Or look at Heidegger who, despite having a complicated relationship with Christianity and attempting to distance himself from it, and heavily critiquing Cartesian dualism in his early work, ended up throwing himself head-on into mysticism in his later works (for example his lectures on Hölderlin).

This passage from Heidegger's Country Path Conversations is illuminating:

GUIDE: Perhaps even space and everything spatial for their part first find a reception and a shelter in the nearing nearness and in the furthering farness, which are themselves not two, but rather a one, for which we lack the name.

SCHOLAR: To think this remains something awfully demanding.

GUIDE: A demand which, however, would come to us from the essence of nearness and farness, and which in no way would be rooted in my surmise.

SCIENTIST: Nearness and farness are then something enigmatic.

GUIDE: How beautiful it is for you to say this.

SCIENTIST: I find the enigmatic oppressive, not beautiful.

SCHOLAR: The beautiful has rather something freeing to it.

SCIENTIST: I experience the same thing when I come across a problem in my science. This inspires the scientist even when it at first appears to be unsolvable, because, for the scientist faced with a problem, there are always certain possibilities for preparing and carrying out pertinent investigations. There is always some direction in which research can knuckle down and go toward an object, and thus awaken the feeling of domination that fuels scientific work.

SCHOLAR: By contrast, before the enigma of nearness and farness we stand helplessly perplexed.

SCIENTIST: Most of all we stand idle.

GUIDE: And we do not ever attend to the fact that presumably this perplexity is demanded of us by the enigma itself.

If there is such a thing as an identifiable core of the "rightist mind", I believe it consists in finding the enigmatic beautiful rather than oppressive.

(I cite these examples because, rather than being the psychological eccentricities of a few individuals, I observe the same patterns in contemporary rightists, albeit in an attenuated form.)

There’s a lot of different ways you could look at it, but I think I might just say that the principle of “if you use someone else’s work to build a machine that replaces their job, then you have a responsibility to compensate that person” just seems axiomatic to me. To say that the original writers/artists/etc are owed nothing, even though the AI literally could not exist without them, is just blatantly unfair.

It was a more elaborate way of saying “This!”. I wasn’t actually being serious.

I’m all for constant questioning. There comes a point where continued questioning is no longer that useful though, barring a major new discovery. Biologists have better things to spend their time on than questioning evolution; better to just teach it as truth and get on with other things.

Like Aristotle, I don't think it's crazy to suggest that some people are best suited for slavery. But at the same time, I didn't mention slavery anywhere in my post, so I'm confused as to why you're bringing it up.

Was it the line about "forcing native women to have children"? I would only recommend more overt methods if the situation is truly dire, and all other methods to enable voluntary childbirth have been exhausted. E.g., there's a lot more currently in our power we could do to make sure that two parent middle class families are able to live on one paycheck, to make it easier for mothers to stay at home and not be dependent on childcare services. Even in a dire situation, I would not recommend rounding women up and taking them to breeding facilities or anything like that, because that's unlikely to end up good for anyone. Simply making all abortion and birth control illegal would be pretty "forceful" by itself, because it's not like people are ever going to choose to stop having sex.

but you want me to be forced to play a closed world video game. Why?

Network effects.

I'm not going to plug into the experience machine, so if everyone else does, the world outside the simulation is going to become a much less pleasant place to live in.

I also endorse the response from @RenOS below.

I’m happy that musicians have a powerful advocacy group who will defend their interests, but it’s unfortunate that artists don’t have something similar. The best I can hope for is that the RIAA does bring a lawsuit at some point and it sets a precedent that carries over to visual art.

Just wanted to say that I agree with what you've written here and I've had similar thoughts before myself.

I've always thought that poison was the most contemptible way to die.

I've heard Continental Philosophy described as the attempt to reconcile Freud and Marx.

I mean, both Freud and Marx are certainly very central and influential figures in continental philosophy. You might even be able to say that the project (or one of the projects) of the Frankfurt school was reconciling Freud and Marx. But it would be wrong to describe all of continental philosophy that way. There are continental thinkers who make little reference to either of them. It also doesn't cover the historical figures like Hegel and Schopenhauer who were retroactively declared to be "continental" and who were writing before Marx!

Really the best definition of continental is "European philosophy that's not analytic". Bertrand Russell and some co-conspirators decided that philosophy needed a reboot in the early 20th century, largely on account of his passionate rejection of Hegel, and that's the project that eventually grew into analytic philosophy. So maybe you could also define continental as "someone who thinks Hegel isn't total nonsense and deserves at least some kind of response" (but even that's not a perfect definition, because Hegel and Heidegger, two of the biggest villains for the early analytics, are receiving increasing attention from analytics today).

I've strongly disagreed with Dase, or well, did, before he blocked me in a hissy fit

Hey he blocked me too (for a time). If we ever add achievements to the site, one of them should be "Get blocked by Dase".

But at that point, you are more concerned with the alignment of the operators, whose wishes are faithfully reproduced. Are said operators well-disposed towards you?

I agree that's worth asking. But in a true zero regulation scenario, where everyone has access to a personal AGI/ASI, you have a lot more operators to worry about - now you have to worry about how well disposed the entire rest of humanity is towards you. If you give everyone the nuke button, someone is going to push it for shits and giggles.

At least OAI and Anthropic are on record stating that they want to distribute the bounties of AGI to all. While I'm merely helpless in that regard were I to choose to doubt them, I still think that's more likely to turn out well for me than it is if it's the PLA who holds the keys to the universe. Even the USGov is not ideal in that regard, though nobody asked me for my opinion.

I probably trust the US government more than Sam Altman. But regardless, Zvi mentions in this post that there are engineers and execs at multiple leading AI labs who wish they didn't have to race ahead so fast, but they feel like they're locked in a competition with all the other labs that they can't escape. I think that nationalizing the research and eliminating the profit motive could help relieve this pressure.

Also saying something like "I don't trust myself on x, but I can also spot other folks who can't be trusted" seems to be a little bit of a double-reverse. I can't quite put a finger on it, but I think this is rhetorical sleight of hand.

Let me put it this way: I have no interest in classifying works as either "mass market products" or "genuine Art". This is of no use to me (and indeed it can be actively harmful).

Even when you're one of the greatest writers in 100 years, when you talk about fucking the farts out of you "shitting like a pig" girlfriend, you're getting fuckin' gross, dude.

His letters are obviously beautiful.

The technocrats pretend to believe in that so that they can trick normies into hypersexual practices that obliterate communities.

I hear this idea a lot that the globalists want to push porn because it destroys people, but as far as I can tell this is contradicted by most of the available evidence. Most major corporations and websites are not very friendly to porn at all:

  • Patreon's ToS outright bans porn involving real people (and they will shut down fiction/drawings too if they think it's too "extreme")
  • Apple app store obviously bans porn
  • Major payment processors like Paypal do not want to be associated with porn
  • Steam's guidelines have a bit of leeway but generally they don't publish porn, it's common for localizers of Japanese adult games to put a gimped version of the game on Steam and then have a separate patch you download to restore the cut content

I mean yeah porn isn't literally illegal and is always just one click away for anyone with internet access, but, the same can be said for a lot of politically incorrect stuff.

Pornhub is not out there trying to enhance the spiritual achievement of the race

I prefer to reserve judgement and proceed cautiously in such matters, when possible.

With regards to the case of pornhub specifically, I'd gesture towards something like Andy Warhol's Brillo boxes, or his prints of Marilyn Monroe - turning the concept of mass production itself into an aesthetic phenomenon.

don't see that a fetish about eating shit is going to move the spiritual needle upwards

I sincerely, earnestly disagree.

(Of course not all porn is great just because it's porn. Every genre has superior and inferior works. But if a video about eating shit is bad, it's not bad because it's a video of eating shit. It would be bad for other reasons.)

I've also never liked the Rationalist love of betting and I considered writing an effortpost about it at one point.

There is a certain machismo to it that I find distasteful. I also don't think it's a coincidence that the same belief structure that loves to make people pay rent (via utilitarianism) also love to make beliefs pay rent (via betting). The motto is the same in both cases: "if you're not useful, you're out".

But then how do you explain:

  • Opposition to medical transition in general, and especially hormone therapy for children, is an alt right position, while supporting them is a leftist position.

  • The alt right thinks women should be encouraged (through both informal cultural means and formal policy) to be housewives, while the left thinks that women should be encouraged to build independent careers.

  • Opposition to mandatory Covid vaccination is right-coded, support for mandatory Covid vaccination is left-coded.

Are these not legitimate differences? Differences that aren't reducible to the target of their identitarianism?

And the fine arts gave us Literal Hitler, so I guess they’re out, too.

Being critical of X does not mean that X is "out". (And yes we should also be critical of art, literature, philosophy, etc.)

Your bogeymen are no substitute for an actual argument.

My actual argument is that STEM sometimes does bad things, so we should be critical of it. Pretty straightforward. This is hardly a radical conclusion, by the way. It's harder to name things that we shouldn't be critical of! "Critical" doesn't mean "throw out completely". It means "skeptically evaluating", as opposed to "dogmatically accepting".

If you have an issue with one of the specific examples I raised in the bullet points, I'm happy to discuss it further.

"Critique of STEM supremacism" is useless because the alternatives tend to be woo

I suppose I wasn't clear enough originally. "Critique of STEM" doesn't mean a critique of a materialist worldview. It would mean something like: a critique of the notion that STEM should be distinguished as uniquely valuable in comparison to other types of intellectual activity, and a critique of the closely related notion that economic productivity should be the central overriding goal of social organization. And also a critique of the value of technology.

It's not woo to suggest that people shouldn't build advanced AI. It's also not woo to suggest that we should value things other than raw economic productivity. You may think these propositions are stupid or counterproductive, but they're not "woo".

Well, "being molested by someone of the same sex turns you gay" is at least more consistent than plausible than "being molested by a man turns both sexes gay". But it should be pointed out that there was an "Editorial Expression of Concern" for this paper that pointed out some inconsistencies (results stated in the discussion didn't match what was actually in the table).

There’s investment in some kind of feelings and thoughts in the book but even that reflects a feminine view of the world.

Is it just the type of thoughts and feelings on display that makes it feel foreign? Or is it the fact that it focuses on thoughts and feelings at all?

In a reversal of popular folk wisdom, Nietzsche identified emotion with masculinity and rationality with femininity. Which he was quite correct about.

Crying at a Hallmark movie is not emotion - or, it is emotion of a particularly diluted and domesticated type. Quitting your stable well-paying job for a one in a million chance at becoming a rockstar or a Twitch streamer or whatever, getting into a fight with a random guy at a bar because he looked at you funny, pursuing one woman to the point of self-ruin long after she made it abundantly clear that she’s not interested - this is emotion. And men are far more likely to engage in these sorts of activities than women are.