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
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
4mo ago
Can you name anything (non-fiction) 5,000 words long, written by anyone anywhere, that you do appreciate? Or is this just a hard limit that no level of quality could surmount?
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
4mo ago
· Edited 4mo ago
There is no conceivable award system that WON’T devolve into super upvotes for comments you agree with. This is a human universal. You can tell people to vote on quality and not ideological alignment, but they (typically) won’t. There will always be a bias towards perceiving comments you agree with as being intrinsically higher quality. And that’s fine. Let’s face it instead of hiding from it.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
4mo ago
Right, there can be limits obviously. If all available options are so morally repugnant to you that you can’t stand any of them, then you can just not support any of them and you’re entitled to make that choice. But you need to accept the consequences of that choice as well, and you should understand that your calls for enlightened centrism will likely fall on deaf ears.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
4mo ago
The choice you’ve made, is to cast your lot with the fascists currently ransacking our government. To pretend as though the Trump EO on DEI is in any way a reasonable response to a genuine policy concern, rather than the pure expression of bigotry that it actually is, is inexcusable.
Ironic, given that just a few days ago we had people accusing TracingWoodgrains of being too leftist.
As someone whose positions are also sufficiently idiosyncratic that I don't fit in perfectly with either "side", I'm not unsympathetic to him. But this is simply the fate of all "centrists" - that's the reality of it. It would be like someone during WW2 saying "I don't support the British, or the Germans - I'm just neutral!" He wouldn't be looked upon with kindness in either country.
Ultimately if you want to avoid getting crushed by the tidal forces of politics, you have to decide which issues are most important to you, join the side that is most aligned with you on those key issues, and table your disagreements for a later date.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
4mo ago
I also got 5/5 but #1 had me nervous. It was so straightforward that I felt like there had to be some sort of trick I was missing.
In regards to #3, it’s marked as “logical reasoning” but I think it’s more of a “common sense” question. They want you to predict the most likely response that a reasonable person would give to this irl.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
4mo ago
New piece by Judith Butler: Trump is unleashing sadism upon the world. But we cannot get overwhelmed:
It is easy to forget or sideline the executive orders of the previous week: bans on diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programs and discourse as well as “gender ideology” in all federally funded programing, as new obscenities flood the news cycle. Threats of deportation to international students who engage in legitimate protest; expansionist designs on Panama and Greenland and proposals to take over the total and forcible displacement of Palestinians in Gaza from their land are announced in quick succession. [...]
The exhilarations of shameless sadism incite others to celebrate this version of manhood, one that is not only willing to defy the rules and principles that govern democratic life (freedom, equality, justice), but enact these as forms of “liberation” from false ideologies and the constraints of legal obligations. An exhilarated hatred now parades as freedom, while the freedoms for which many of us have struggled for decades are distorted and trammeled as morally repressive “wokeism”.
The sadistic glee at issue here is not just his; it depends on being communicated and widely enjoyed in order to exist – it is a communal and contagious celebration of cruelty. Indeed, the media attention it garners feeds the sadistic spree. It has to be known and seen and heard, this parade of reactionary outrage and defiance. And that is why it is no longer a simple matter of exposing hypocrisy that will serve us now. There is no moral veneer that must be stripped away. No, the public demand for the appearance of morality on the part of the leader is inverted: his followers thrill to the display of his contempt for morality, and share it.
Now, in one sense, her basic point is entirely correct. There clearly is a sadistic element to right-wing politics, plainly. Beyond formal concerns about limited government and the rule of law, Trump's followers have a libidinal investment in seeing illegal migrants be deported, and in seeing the "leeches" among the federal bureaucrats be exposed for their indolence. (This is not their only motivation of course, which is where the leftist analysis starts to go wrong -- people are complex, their motivations can be multifaceted and overdetermined -- but it is a motivation). To be clear, I am a follower of Trump, and part of my evidence for the thesis advanced here comes from introspection on my own psychology. It feels good to define yourself and your own as Inside, and others as Outside, and to apportion to each what is rightly due. Not many people give a rat's ass about fairness in women's sports qua fairness in women's sports; but lots of people give a rat's ass about maintaining the purity of a symbolic space which has been constructed for a distinguished population, and punishing those who would attempt to transgress these symbolic boundaries.
Fox News recently broadcast a "helicopter ride-along" to the southern border, where they accompanied border agents at night as they scanned the riverbanks for intruders. The searchlights trained on a man who was attempting to lay low in the brush; he made a run for it, but was inevitably captured. The camera lingered as he was handcuffed and put in the patrol truck, to ensure that the viewers at home got a good look at their hard-won trophy. Even for an amoral Nietzschean overman such as myself, there was something slightly nauseating about how brazenly exploitative the whole ordeal was. Your moments of desperation, packaged and commodified by a foreign mega-conglomerate and sold as entertainment.
Now, the narrative that the left constructs for themselves is that they're somehow above all this. This is false. There is plainly a sadistic element to left-wing politics as well (and, we may as well drop the qualifiers, a sadistic element to politics as such, and ultimately to life itself -- "nature is exploitation"). They too have their Inside and Outside, and they derive just as much libidinal satisfaction from exercising such distinctions; they simply use different terminology and establish the groupings using different criteria. "Legitimate targets" are pursued with an uninterestingly human amount of sadistic glee - not a diminished amount, nor an excessive amount, but simply as much as one would expect. Who could believe that they (and I include Ms. Butler here) don't enjoy the thought of deplatforming, debanking, and de-home-ing the reactionaries, neo-Nazis, and bigots? Even after the final revolution, if there is a shortage of actual reactionaries, they will simply be fabricated and the definition of "reactionary" will be expanded to include a new outgroup, as the libidinal machine demands to be fed with an unceasing series of new targets (North Korea's appropriately named "Reactionary Ideology and Culture Rejection Law" initiated a harsh crackdown on TV shows, movies, and music from South Korea -- I guess K-pop stans are all reactionaries now.)
I disagree with Ozy's old post (and, I suppose by extension, Haidt's conclusions as well) about the differences in the moral foundations of leftism and rightism. Leftists are actually operating on all the same moral dimensions that rightists are. They, too, have ingroup loyalty -- they simply define their ingroup as "BIPOC", or "allies", or "the oppressed", rather than in terms of (their own) race, (their own) religion, or (their own) nation. And they're certainly no strangers to purity either -- racial slurs become shamanic totems, anything that could be perceived as right-wing propaganda must be aggressively purged and cleansed lest it contaminate the space. I am not, of course, advancing a facile version of horseshoe theory. Plainly there are fundamental moral disagreements between right and left, otherwise there would be no impetus to distinguish between them in the first place. But some of the particular narratives that people like to tell themselves about what distinguishes them from the other side leave something to be desired.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
4mo ago
If anyone here is still perplexed as to why Marxism has historically been such a popular ideology, and remains such a popular ideology: this is why. This same fundamental desire will always continue to reemerge in various forms, as a natural biological response to suffering: the yearning to be freed of the burden of differentiated subjectivity, the transcendence of the individual/collective distinction, a suicide without death. The only difference between singulatarianism and Marxism is that today's transhumanists think the Soviets were too early; they jumped the gun, the necessary scientific advancements hadn't materialized yet. But the underlying impulse is the same.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
4mo ago
But the idea that you can literally already do what was suggested by just using an LLM on your own is simply false.
I acknowledge that "my terminal value is that I'm ok with reading 100% AI-generated text as long as human hands physically copy and pasted it into the textbox on themotte.org" is a clever counterexample that I hadn't considered. I'm skeptical that any substantial number of people actually hold such a value set however.
At any rate I'm universally opposed to "containment zones", whether related to AI or not, for similar reasons that I oppose the bare links repository -- one of the functions of rules is to cultivate a certain type of culture, and exceptions to those rules serve to erode that culture.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
4mo ago
Yes, it is qualitatively different. Which is precisely the reason why people don’t want AI content here in the first place.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
4mo ago
You can just ask your LLM of choice what it would enjoy reading, what it deems as meeting the threshold of being good enough to share, etc, and go from there. And/or ask it to simulate a wide variety of personas of varying tastes and proclivities.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
4mo ago
You can literally already do that by just having a conversation with your AI of choice.
You can even tell it to pretend to be different people to simulate the real forum experience!
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
4mo ago
In debates over whether it's ok to use AI for X, it's helpful to ask "instead of asking an AI to do it, what if I asked another human to do it? Would that be ok?"
So the equivalent here would be, instead of dumping AI output as a top level post, what if you just copy and pasted an article from someone else's substack and offered that as a top level post? And that's already not ok. It would be considered low effort and essentially no different from a bare link. We're here to read your writing, not some other entity's writing (whether that entity is human or not).
Failing to attribute the source doesn't make it any better, and if anything it just makes it worse. IIRC people have gotten banned in the past for copying other people's articles and posting them here without attribution.
Of course the use/mention distinction applies and I don't think anyone has a problem with quoting AI text when it's relevant in a discussion about AI.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
4mo ago
Last week there were a few ‘performance piece’ top posts that utilized AIslop to demonstrate a Goodharts law adjacent concept about the problem with effort posts as too simplistic a concept.
Which ones? Neither Dase nor Mihow were trying to make a point about effort. Was there another AI post that I missed?
Unstated as it were, I am quite confident that the implied intention of both was to make transparent through the remaining dichotomy, the need for a return of the Bare Links Repository (not to be confused with unrelated calls for an unprecedented Bear/Lynx Repository).
No. Both posts were completely unrelated to the BLR.
The original BLR was likely only retired because of jealousy at its success
Yes, that's exactly (one of the reasons) why I don't want it. I am afraid that it would become more popular than the effortposts and it would grow to encompass the majority of the traffic to the forum. You are completely correct.
The tendency of all internet forums is towards low effort ragebait. They're naturally pulled that way by gravity. A culture of thoughtful, in-depth posts has to be actively cultivated and maintained. TheMotte is very unique in that it maintains both high quality standards and a culture of free speech (almost every other internet space is either one or the other, or neither). The mods recognize the value of the unique space we've cultivated here which is why they've consistently been against reviving the BLR.
Of course nobody wants uneffortful top posts but a BLR, is something entirely different.
No, that's exactly what it is.
(This debate is always somewhat bizarre because the existing effort standards for top level posts are not particularly strenuous. 3-4 sentences is all it takes.)
The fact is, the BLR in its return would bring necessary life to this forum
The last two weekly threads got over 2k comments each, which is basically what we've been expecting since the site transition and is probably a bit above average.
counteract the slow momentum erosion the site has suffered since losing Reddits network effect
If the forum can't survive in its current form then so be it. It's better for it to simply die out than become something it's not.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
4mo ago
Which ones do you have in mind? I know there are a lot of Chinese names on ML papers now, but I don't have a good sense for how many of those papers count as truly fundamental (the Attention Is All You Need paper had no Chinese authors, for example).
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
4mo ago
On the hardware side of ML the most innovative chips are all manufactured by one 95%-Han-Chinese island that everyone else is struggling to catch up to
That's not really what HBD advocates have in mind when they talk about "innovation" though.
There's a hierarchy of innovation/creativity with some advances being more fundamental than others. The Chinese may be great at manufacturing chips, but they didn't invent the computer itself. The dominance of Taiwan in chip manufacturing seems to be, again, yet another example of "the Chinese are great at executing and improving upon fundamental ideas that other people came up with", unless perhaps their designs and manufacturing process are reliant on substantial advances in fundamental physics that they came up with themselves (this could very well be the case and I'm just ignorant of the facts, please educate me if so).
Granted, the opportunity for ideas as fundamental as the computer (or even the transformer) don't just come along every day. They can only occur under the right historical conditions. But even accounting for that, the sustained European dominance in the area of such fundamental ideas has been striking, and deserves an explanation.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
4mo ago
DeepSeek lays bare just how tiny and unsustainable the remaining edge of White over Yellow in behavioral creativity/Soul/whatever is
I can't speak for SecureSignals or anyone else, but I think we need finer-grained distinctions than just White vs Yellow, and I also don't think I have any issues in general with recognizing the achievements of non-white populations. The artistic output of the Japanese over the last half century has been remarkable, and it certainly displays no shortage of Soul.
The question here is about the Chinese in particular, and their capacity for innovation - and DeepSeek looks like an example of the pattern of Chinese innovation on a technology that was fundamentally conceived elsewhere, rather than a refutation of the pattern. Unless there's a major conceptual innovation in DeepSeek that I'm not aware of (a conceptual innovation on par with the idea of the transformer itself).
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
5mo ago
Huemer’s argument about infinite reincarnation
I didn’t know that Huemer had written about this, but this same exact thought occurred to me independently. It seems somewhat obvious and I’m surprised that more atheists/materialists don’t bring this up when discussing the possibility of life after death.
If it happened once, it can happen again. Very simple argument.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
5mo ago
Hobby readers read ‘with all their attention’ too. And their hobby of reading is ‘part and parcel of their lives’ too.
I disagree, for at least some subset of "hobby readers". I think there are many people who are poor readers, or who read with only partial attention. Case in point.
And surely it's gotten even worse since the introduction of smartphones.
but it’s not the superiority that bothers me. It’s the hostility to joy, beauty, meaning, life.
There's nothing that is hostile to joy or beauty in the conception of a meaningful life that Adorno sketched in the passage I originally quoted. In fact I think it's very beautiful. That's why I originally quoted it.
I still think “reading with all my attention” is pretentious
I don't think it's pretentious. I think it's a concept that should be taken very seriously.
describing something as “part and parcel of my life” is trite
It is not.
I believe these are our most substantive points of disagreement. I'm happy to discuss any of these points further.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
5mo ago
Consider that there are quite a lot of people, now mostly on the intellectual left, who seem to spend so much time discussing how elevated and clever and sophisticated they are
I think the amount that academic Marxist philosophers reference their own intelligence is about on par with how often Motte posters reference their own intelligence. Probably less, actually.
Anyway, this statement:
It is to believe, axiomatically, that ordinary people’s lives have worth and meaning as they are
Seems to be in tension with this statement:
This isn’t to say that there is no such thing as a good life or a bad life
If it is possible to make mistakes and live a meaningless life, how can you know a priori that "ordinary people" are living meaningful lives? How do you know that they're not making the types of mistakes that you've already admitted are possible? Don't we have to look at the facts and see how people are actually living, rather than simply believing it as an article of faith that people are making all the right decisions?
Perhaps, you might say, you have looked at the facts, and you have concluded that ordinary people are generally living meaningful lives. You believe that Adorno has looked at the same facts and come to a different judgement. And that's fine! That's a substantive point of disagreement that we can have a further discussion about. All I'm saying is that we should make the conversation about that, rather than Adorno's arrogance or elitism.
only a deep suspicion of letting those things be defined by elite ‘sophisticated’ weirdos
No one is saying that you have to "let" anybody define anything.
I've run into this sort of objection a few times on TheMotte and it's possible that it stems from a cultural difference between the humanities and technical fields.
In STEM fields, when you cite a published paper and say "X made Y claim in Z paper", this is roughly equivalent to an assertion that there is strong evidence that Y claim is true, because it made it through peer review and was published in a reputable journal. Although there are many caveats, there is a certain presumption that the top scientists getting published are authorities and we should believe what they say. They're contributing to a stable body of knowledge whose integrity is validated by the scientific community, and the role of the student is to absorb this knowledge rather than trying to poke holes in it.
In philosophy, the presumption of authority is much weaker. Students don't go into philosophy class and get taught "living a meaningful life is X Y Z because Adorno said so". The presentation is more like "Adorno said living a meaningful life is X Y Z... ok, now here's next week's reading, also by a famous philosopher, which says the exact opposite". You're supposed to talk back to the text. You're supposed to challenge his definitions and his framing. That's a good thing. That's the process working as intended. You don't have to "let" him define anything because you're free to disagree with anything and everything he says.
I can't say there's no presumption of authority in philosophy, if for no other reason than the fact that published philosophers have spent a lot of time working on the questions they're addressing, so they've probably gotten better at it than people who haven't spent the same amount of time. But in general a philosophy text should be approached as a potential partner in a dialogue, rather than as something from which you are supposed to extract verifiable, concrete information.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
5mo ago
· Edited 5mo ago
“To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.“
I don't agree with this statement either. But just because he says some things that are incorrect doesn't mean he can't also say some things that are correct.
But he implied that those who read 'as a hobby' , ie most people, always read carelessly, while he never reads carelessly. That is an unproven, absolute and pointless claim of superiority.
Let's address the root of the issue instead of quibbling over the interpretation of the text. Let's grant that Adorno thinks he's smarter (or a better reader, or just plain better) than everyone else.
...so what? Why does that upset you? Why the visceral reaction?
There are lots of intelligent and skilled people who also happen to be very arrogant. But that doesn't actually detract from the quality of their work. If you refuse to listen to anyone who thinks they're smarter than you, you're gonna have a rough time.
Stephen Wolfram (known for having a huge ego) thinks he's smarter than me (and it's very probable that he is), but that didn't deter my interest in his newest article on machine-generated proofs. I am confident (and in fact I believe it's been explicitly confirmed on one or two occasions) that there are members of this forum who have read my posts, found them lacking, and consequently judge themselves to be wiser and more intelligent than I am. But I harbor no ill will towards them, and as long as they keep writing good posts, I'll continue to read and appreciate their work.
The reason I shared the original quote was because I thought that it managed to paint a picture, in very few words, of what a meaningful life and a meaningful relation to one's "hobbies" would look like:
Making music, listening to music, reading with all my attention, these activities are part and parcel of my life; to call them hobbies would make a mockery of them.
This has stuck with me ever since I first read it. I think it's great, and it's what I try to aspire to be (although the flesh is weak). And it's quite possible to consider this idea in isolation, apart from Adorno's politics, his view of "the masses", his own opinion of himself, etc. If it just doesn't speak to you that's fine. I just want to make it clear that it can be considered in isolation.
I believe people’s lives are meaningful already.
Everyone's life? Is everyone's life equally meaningful? Is it not possible for people to make bad choices and end up doing things that are meaningless?
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
5mo ago
He worries that he doesn’t come off as cool when he tells people what he does with his time
This is clearly just a rhetorical gesture on Adorno's part to illustrate the attitude he's criticizing. His actual motivation for thinking the way he thinks doesn't have anything to do with fear of being labeled an eccentric.
So when he reads, he reads ‘with all his attention’(as opposed to normal people, who supposedly read distractedly. The point is, he’s better than them, at reading)
Is reading not something that can be done well, as opposed to poorly? Is it not possible to read thoughtfully and carefully, and equally possible to read thoughtlessly and carelessly? (e.g. a student rushing through a novel to cram for an exam, vs someone who chooses to give his full attention to the novel out of genuine interest?)
Adorno was literally paid to read, so ceteris paribus, we'd expect him to be better at it than average, if for no other reason than that he had lots of time to practice.
And he doesn’t have hobbies, he has a meaningful, holistic life. Please.
Do you think that it's possible to lead a meaningful and holistic life, as opposed to one that is not? Maybe it's possible, but not particularly valuable either way, and thus not something to be aspired to? Or do you think that it's both possible and something that is proper to aspire to, but you just have specific issues with Adorno's presentation?
We’re all nerds with nerd hobbies here, but this one unloads his inadequacies and frustrations in the most petty, passive aggressive way possible.
Is "nerd" meant to be a term of self-deprecation here? Do you think that the hobbies you spend your time on are meaningful, or no? (Not that I think that this is the sort of question that could be reduced to a binary choice; but we have to start somewhere.) If you don't think they're meaningful, then that raises the question of why you would persist in doing something that you think is meaningless.
I apologize for the rapid succession of questions, but I want to understand how much of your criticism stems from a disagreement over the object-level points of contention, and how much of it stems from a personal grievance against Adorno.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
5mo ago
Even if we lived on a tropical island before capitalism, when two strangers would meet, among the first questions they would ask would be ‘so what do you do to eat?’, and ‘what do you do when you’re not fishing/hunting/gathering?’
But Adorno already said that he has no problem with simply listing the activities he does outside of his working hours. He already said as much in the passage that I quoted. His criticism is directed towards the modern concept of the hobby specifically, as something that is distinct from "things you do when you're not working for sustenance".
Now to be clear, I'm not a Marxist. I'm not even sure that this thing they call "capitalism" actually exists, and even if it does, its power to introduce radical discontinuities in human thought are surely overstated. A concept that is at least analogous to the concept of the hobby undoubtedly predates the written word. But nonetheless, I'm sympathetic to Adorno's argument that there is a certain ideological constellation surrounding the modern concept of the "hobby" that can and should be criticized, and we can and should imagine the division of our time being governed by a different conceptual regime.
People do not think their hobbies are meaningless and worthy of mockery.
I imagine that it varies from individual to individual. But regardless, people can be mistaken about what's meaningful and what's not. It's possible that someone might think that they're doing something meaningful, but in reality they're not. So the individual's conception of their own activity is just one data point to consider.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
5mo ago
Imagine some guy lays this on you after you ask him about his hobbies. What an extraordinarily annoying and pretentious thing to say.
I think he's simply correct, and the view he outlined in the passage I quoted is something to be aspired to. Why would you not want to live an integrated life where everything you do is meaningful?
At any rate, even granting that he does have "contempt for the common man", this is certainly not an attitude that's unique to Marxists:
We are surrounded by evidence that the common man is an inferior being but we willfully blind ourselves to it. If we could only stop shackling ourselves to the Great Lie that humans are equal we'd progress a lot faster as a species.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
5mo ago
No, I don’t have any thoughts!
I’ve written some posts in the past detailing the reasons why leftists tend to self-select out of spaces like this. I don’t think it’s a problem that can be fixed unfortunately.
Fair enough. But that is what I'm here for. I'm happy that there's at least one community on the internet that encourages long-form writing.
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