Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
"...Perhaps laughter will then have formed an alliance with wisdom; perhaps only 'gay science' will remain."
User ID: 342
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
9d 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
22d 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
8d ago
No one who is suffering politically likes to be told "actually you have no enemies, it's all an illusion, move along nothing to see here". It's natural to want someone to blame. (And frequently, there is someone who can be blamed to at least some degree.)
When you look at:
- The mass exodus of porn from tumblr
- Patreon instituting overtly political/moralistic guidelines for what content is allowed on the platform (they went out of their way to say hypnosis porn is banned, what the fuck)
- Total porn ban on all the biggest social media sites, facebook, instagram, tiktok, youtube
- The extreme difficulty of getting adult content published on major distribution channels like Steam or the Apple/Google app stores
- The desexualization of media in general due to the rise of wokeism, particularly the sorts of casual non-explicit sexualization that would be appealing to a straight male audience
- Japanese adult game developers increasingly ditching porn altogether to comply with regulations on mobile app stores and to gain access to the Chinese market, which also has its own strict regulations
you start to get the impression that a lot of people really don't like porn. It's not an isolated incident. And this is all before we even get into the laws against loli manga in many countries, people literally going to jail for lines on paper that clearly depict fictional characters.
Some of these have nothing to do with payment processors either. I receive no payment for putting up free porn on tumblr or youtube, but I'm still not allowed to do it.
The porn artists might be more inclined to believe the "it's just a totally random confluence of business factors" theory if they felt that public sentiment was on their side. If they felt that people really did believe in a principle of free artistic expression, and it really was just the credit card companies who couldn't get on board for some reason. But you ask people about these porn bans and the typical response you get is something along the lines of "of course, this content is totally perverse and obscene, and probably harmful to children and society too, and no one in their right minds would actually want to be caught paying for or even looking at this stuff, and certainly no one will miss it if it's gone... but it's not being banned because people don't like it, don't be silly, it's really just those pesky chargebacks, sorry kid it's just business..."
Do you see why porn artists might get suspicious? Where are their allies? Who is actually willing to support them?
Granted, blaming it on Evangelicals is also wrong. But the basic impulse to see it as a political issue rather than a purely economic one is, I think, quite correct.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
6d ago
The main problem is that these guys think that under the perfect 'no Christian egalitarian shit' system, they would be LORDS AND MASTERS.
This is a criticism that frequently gets levied against rightists. And there's some truth to it. Some people really are just greedy sociopaths without any principles.
In an authentic anti-egalitarian politics, it ultimately doesn't matter much who the master is. We might have our own preferences of course, very strong preferences, but the final bedrock commitment is: if not me, then someone. Please let someone be beautiful and happy and triumphant, even if I am not. This is a moral impulse, the fulcrum on which everything turns. It's what separates a rightist from a grifter.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
2d ago
Zizek's new piece in Compact: Happy Birthday Kant, You Lousy Sadist (paywalled, but you can read the whole thing on reddit here):
Is there a line from Kantian ethics to the Auschwitz killing machine? Are the Nazis’ concentration camps and their mode of killing—as a neutral business—the inherent terminus of the enlightened insistence on the autonomy of reason? Is there some affinity between Kant avec Sade and Fascist torture as portrayed by Pier Paolo Pasolini’s film version of 120 Days in Sodom, which transposes the story into the dark days of Mussolini’s Salò republic?
The link between Sade and Kant was first developed by Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer in the famous Excursion II (“Juliette, or Enlightenment and Morality”) of the Dialectics of Enlightenment. Adorno’s and Horkheimer’s fundamental thesis is that “the work of Marquis de Sade displays the ‘Reason which is not led by another agency,’ that is to say, the bourgeois subject, liberated from a state of not yet being mature.” Some 15 years later, Lacan (unaware of Adorno’s and Horkheimer’s version of the argument) also developed the notion that Sade is the truth of Kant, first in his Seminar on The Ethics of Psychoanalysis (1958-59), and then in an écrit of 1963.
In typical Zizek fashion, he bounces between multiple different ideas in a rapid fire stream of consciousness style, so there are a lot of different threads here that you could grab and run with. Some of our resident anti-enlightenment posters and Christian posters may find something productive in Adorno and Horkheimer's diagnosis of the ethical situation of modernity:
Sade announced the moment when, with the emergence of bourgeois Enlightenment, pleasure itself lost its sacred-transgressive character and was reduced to a rationalized instrumental activity. That is to say, according to Adorno and Horkheimer, the greatness of Sade was that, on behalf of the full assertion of earthly pleasures, he not only rejected any metaphysical moralism, but also fully acknowledged the price one has to pay for this rejection: the radical intellectualization-instrumentalization-regimentation of sexual activity intended to bring pleasure. Here we encounter the content later baptized by Herbert Marcuse’s “repressive desublimation”: After all the barriers of sublimation, of cultural transformation of sexual activity, are abolished, what we get isn’t raw, brutal, passionate, satisfying animal sex, but on the contrary, a fully regimented, intellectualized activity comparable to a well-planned sporting match.
There is much that could be said about Kant's continuing influence on thought and politics. Putin has expressed admiration for him, for example. But probably the biggest point of interest to a general audience here will be Zizek's remarks on Trump near the end of the essay:
Things are similar with the new rightist populism. The contrast between Trump’s official ideological message (conservative values) and the style of his public performance (saying more or less whatever pops up in his head, insulting others, and violating all rules of good manners) tells a lot about our predicament: What sort of world do we inhibit, in which bombarding the public with indecent vulgarities presents itself as the last barrier to protect us from the triumph of the society in which everything is permitted and old values go down the drain? Trump is not a relic of the old moral-majority conservatism—he is to a much greater degree the caricatural inverted image of postmodern “permissive society” itself, a product of this society’s own antagonisms and inner limitations. [...] Trump’s obscene performances thus express the falsity of his populism: to put it with brutal simplicity, while acting as if he cares for the ordinary people, he promotes big capital.
I view this as one of a series of similar critiques coming out of the left in recent times, all of which center around the curious theme of rightists not acting rightist enough. There's been a growing concern on the left in the last few years that "the positions have switched", to a certain extent. Traits that used to be associated with the left - a general rebelliousness, experimentation with new ideas, a critique of established values and established authority (Covid is a big one here), and, yes, a certain willingness to engage in crass vulgarity from time to time, either as a political act or as simple good-spirited humor - have now become associated with the right. Meanwhile the left has become much more strongly associated with order, morality, and authority than they were in the post-war 20th century.
Reactions from leftists to this alleged reversal have been all over the spectrum: everything from panic ("they're stealing our bit! we have to get a handle on this!"), to Zizek's strategy here of denying the authenticity and veridicality of ostensibly rightist forms of rebellion and protest, to simple avowal ("yes, we are in charge, we are Justice, and that's a good thing actually").
Among commentators who believe this to be an authentic political phenomenon, the standard explanation is usually something like: well of course rightists were all for law and order when they were in charge. But now they're not so in charge anymore, so now they're learning the value of critique and skepticism, of free speech and civil liberties, and so forth. Similarly, leftists were in favor of free speech and questioning authority when it was beneficial to them, but now that their institutional capture is more entrenched, they don't need those things anymore.
But something about this explanation rubs me the wrong way. It paints a purely structural view of the formation of ideologies, and ignores the role of the individual completely; you will hold the views that you must based on your relational position to other political actors while taking into account your rational self interest, and that's that. But it becomes rather boring if you're always just looking for the self interest behind everything. The much more interesting and radical project is to find the abstract ethical commitments hiding behind apparent self interest.
There's always been an authoritarian streak to leftism going back to Marx - it's not something that they just happened to discover after attaining political ascendancy. It's reflected in how they govern their own private institutions, even when they don't have societal power. There was frequently internal strife at the Frankfurt school over this or that theorist not sufficiently holding to the party line. Leftist organizations at least as far back as the 80s were already using the progressive stack at group meetings to make sure that white men spoke last. Marxism itself claims that the end goal of the communist revolution is the dissolution of all antagonisms between individual and collective good - but the individual is right to be nervous about what processes the collective might institute to achieve this utopian vision.
Similarly, I believe in the possibility of a principled libertarianism that wouldn't immediately abandon all of its commitments as soon as it got hold of actual power. It's true that ideology always has to make affordances for reality at some point, but clearly, ideology has some impact on the reality of governance as well: I don't think you could, for example, explain the different political situations in the US and Russia entirely in terms of their different material and sociological conditions, with no reference whatsoever to the beliefs and motivations of the individual people who actually govern those countries.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
9d ago
I mean, what do these people hope to accomplish? Like what are their demands?
Can't you ask that about most protests?
I never really "got" protesting. I have to assume that the main purpose of it is just to serve as a social activity for the protesters themselves. If it's something like workers going on strike, where the group in question actually has some leverage, that's a different story, but a bunch of random people just gathering in public to "support a cause"? It doesn't make a lot of sense.
Sometimes I've heard it justified as a way of building positive publicity. You're supposed to see the police or other authority figures mistreating the protesters, and that's supposed to make you support their cause more. But usually it just makes me end up supporting the cause less, because the protesters are obnoxious. Their own actions make me want them to lose more.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
13d ago
Israeli missiles hit site in Iran, ABC News reports
Israeli missiles have hit a site in Iran, ABC News reported late on Thursday, citing a U.S. official, days after Iran launched a drone strike on Israel in response to an attack at the Iranian embassy in Syria. Iran's Fars news agency said an explosion were heard at an airport in the Iranian city of Isafahan but the cause was not immediately known. Several Iranian nuclear sites are located in Isfahan province, including Natanz, centerpiece of Iran’s uranium enrichment program.
Iran’s response if Israel takes any further military action against it would be “immediate and at a maximum level,” Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian told CNN Thursday, as fears rise of an escalation of the conflict in the Middle East.
Hours after Amir-Abdollahian’s comments, an explosion was heard close to the airport in the central Iranian city of Isfahan, Iran’s semi-official FARS news agency reported early Friday, citing local sources.
Questions:
If you predicted a nothingburger - how are your predictions holding up? Is there still an offramp here where we can avoid further escalation, or could this evolve into a full on ground war? It's not clear to me if Israel's military could be stretched enough to handle a conventional war on multiple fronts.
Also, what does this indicate for the future of the US-Israel relationship? The US administration made it pretty clear to Israel that they didn't want them to retaliate against Iran (the going theory seemed to be that it would be bad for oil prices in an election year). Presumably Israel is feeling some real existential pressure right now if they're willing to openly defy the will of the US, one of their only consistent allies on the Palestine issue.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
16d ago
There's a theory that one part of falling fertility is female hypergamy. Since my spellchecker is underlining that word, I'll define it like this:
Female hypergamy is when women seek to marry "up", either into a higher social class or to a mate who is superior to them.
It's harder than ever for women to marry up. Modern feminist societies devalue male traits such as stoicism and aggression but highly value female traits such as conformity and self-control. As a result, women's status relative to men has risen greatly. This has the side effect of making most men undesirable to most women.
This doesn't sit right with me.
Fundamentally, men must compete for access to women, while women act as gatekeepers. It's simple supply and demand. Eggs are expensive, sperm is cheap. The biological essence of being a male is having to continually prove yourself under adverse conditions, so when men start complaining that women's standards are too high because feminism gave them naughty ideas, it comes off as a cope. Rather than standards being too high, it's more likely that women are setting the standards exactly where they need to be (or at least relatively close, anyway), in accordance with many millennia of evolutionary adaptation to precisely this task. Yes, it's a hyper-competitive environment, but there are plenty of men who are succeeding. Lots of men are making money and having sex and having kids and generally living very productive lives. If you can't do the same, that's on you.
Not to say that biological organisms are incapable of going wrong, of course. If there is such a severe mismatch between women's standards and men's capabilities such that the birth rate plummets to zero, then it's more plausible to say that that's simply the race/species reaching the natural end of its lifecycle, rather than putting the blame on any one particular event/ideology/movement/etc. Perhaps the industrial/digital environment of modern first world countries is simply poisonous to the type of organism that we are. If it is, then we will decline naturally, possibly to be replaced by a more virile form of life that has a longer future ahead of it, and there is little that can be done as a matter of conscious will to arrest this trajectory.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
18d 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.
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
26d ago
If this is simply a right-wing reddit
It’s not.
The quality of discussion is higher than anywhere on reddit, and unlike reddit, the admins have no interest in censoring certain political viewpoints; leftists and rightists alike are welcome.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
27d ago
Frequently when people feel this way about HBD, especially as it relates to themselves on a personal level, it's based on a misconception. A common caricature of HBD is that there's an identifiable property of "blackness" that has causal powers; almost as though black skin itself were some foreign organism exerting a downward pressure on your IQ, and if you could only shed your skin then you would unlock the full potential of your inherent abilities. This is completely incorrect.
The mechanisms that determine your IQ and other psychological traits are the exact same mechanisms at work in every other human, and at a purely physical level they have nothing to do with race. "Black" is a statistical concept that emerges at the population level as an amalgamation of traits and individuals. The race doesn't make the people, the people make the race.
That being said. It is a corollary of HBD that the pervasive dysfunction seen throughout Africa and black communities worldwide is in part caused by genetic factors. You are within your rights to think that this is a tragedy - but what of it? We live in a world that's filled to the brim with tragedies great and small. People die of disease, accidents, and violence every day, rich and poor alike, wise or foolish, virtuous or ignoble. HBD is not a unique cataclysmic injustice; rather it is just one more square in the patchwork of immiseration that is mankind's natural state.
You may be interested in the emerging possibilities of genetic engineering to increase intelligence and other eugenic psychological traits; but this is fraught with its own philosophical quandaries.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
12d ago
We live in a causal universe, I don't think there is such a thing as spontaneous belief.
Sure, but that seems like a rather pedantic point to make in this context. If someone says they like eating tasty food because it's a natural spontaneous desire, and you say they actually like eating food because of government propaganda, then on the face of it your explanation is a lot less correct than theirs, regardless of what philosophical hangups you might have about the concept of spontaneity.
I don't think this is a born this way thing, I think it's still social even if that doesn't make it a choice.
I believe I recall from some of your previous posts that you endorse HBD. So presumably you think some people are born some way.
Someone who criticized HBD by saying "well if you kept someone locked in an empty room from birth and never taught them anything then they would turn out to be really stupid, so it's actually all environmental in the end" would be missing the point. We're all in agreement that the outside environment is important and has a big influence. It's the innate disposition of individuals to respond differently to the same environmental stimulus that's in question.
I would describe my position by saying that I endorse an HBD-type view for gender identity and sexual orientation rather than a purely social constructionist view, that's all.
Frequently I was met with incredulity here when I suggested that there were people (besides professional artists themselves) who cared about whether art was AI-generated or not. At least now we're starting to gather empirical evidence that yes, there are people who care.
all of the worst fears of economic impact on lower-tier artists or of unlabelled AI spam overwhelming sincere creation, all the lost opportunities for conventional artists to focus more of their time on the parts of art they love or dedicated AI-genners to explore types of media that just wouldn't be practical for conventional artwork, all come true... and no one cares.
Sorry I'm a bit confused here, are you saying that this has already come to pass or are you offering this as a hypothetical?
Because it hasn't really come to pass yet, at least not completely. People are still making money as professional artists and selling commissions online. AI has definitely impacted the market, but artists are still making money regardless. In fact the number of graphic design jobs on Upwork has increased since the release of DALL-E 2 and StableDiffusion.
We haven't really unlocked the full potential of current image gen models (in terms of market disruption) because there's still a decent amount of friction in the process. The average non-specialist isn't going to mess around with running a local model, training custom LoRAs, using ControlNet and inpainting... it's still involved enough that it's reasonable to outsource the process to someone else. There needs to be an absolute idiot proof freemagicartbutton.com website where you communicate in pure natural language (instead of prompt-ese) that anyone can use for requests of arbitrary complexity and get good results every time. Then we would truly know how many use cases AI art is really fit for. It might just be a "mere" engineering challenge to get us there using current models.
Edit: Uh, you might have been able to generate more discussion by waiting ~12 hours and posting this in the new week's thread?
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
21d ago
It started off with angry, poor people looking for a scapegoat
I don't think that people really do this on a mass scale, and I've never seen an actual argument put forth for this thesis. It seems like one of those cached thoughts that just got repeated enough until everyone believed it.
Not to say that large social groups are always infallibly correct when it comes to political beliefs either. But generally, people don't just make shit up out of nothing. When progressives complain about straight white men, are they looking for a "scapegoat" for all their problems? I don't think that's accurate. Their complaints are grounded in actual facts, its just that there's disagreement over the cause and interpretation of those facts.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
26d ago
Are you claiming that any space that claims to operate on a neutral principle of free speech is fundamentally duplicitous because it's just going to end up coalescing around a consensus viewpoint anyway?
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
28d ago
because I don't feel excited, but think it's probably the right thing to do, and that I will probably be glad to have a son later on, I hope.
Did you want a daughter instead?
I find them both such an odd case. It seems like an odd case where they've both been totally repudiated by the professionals of their own fields […] they both just rambled at length with no real testable theories or experimental controls.
Marx just has a political project / ethical vision that many people find deeply appealing. You can say what you want about the labor theory of value, the tendency of the rate of profit to fall, etc, but many people will always be attached to him for political reasons.
With regards to Freud, I think you'd have to look at specific examples of contemporary work that references him and analyze how it references him, but my basic statement would be something like this:
Some of the shortcomings of psychoanalysis are not as unique or severe as they first appear. We already tell ourselves a certain "commonsense" story about psychology, a story about a world filled with agents who have intentions and beliefs and desires and emotions. But many of the concepts that make up this commonsense story are already on questionable empirical ground, not unlike the concepts of psychoanalysis.
Consider something as basic as "knowledge", the mental state of knowing something. We attribute knowledge to ourselves and others all the time. I know stuff, he knows stuff, we all know lots of stuff. But there's no empirical test that will give you a yes/no answer on whether someone "knows" something, certainly nothing that would cover all the edge cases and indeterminate cases. Philosophers have been arguing about the nature of knowledge for the last 2500 years and there's still no good answer.
Or consider the sensation of pain, or any other physical sensation - I mean the first-person qualitative experience of pain. You can't actually observe someone else's pain - you can only observe the behavioral and neurological correlates. For all you know, other people could just be unconscious automatons who don't feel anything at all. But you nonetheless assume that they actually do feel things, as a generalization of your own experience.
Or take the concept of desire, a concept that's very central to the Freudian psychoanalytic project. Again, you can't truly make a direct empirical observation here - if you cut open someone's brain, you won't be able to say "yep, there's the desire, I see it right there". You instead observe someone's behavior and infer the existence of a desire, or maybe you interpret the existence of a desire. And what criteria do you use to make this inference? There are a lot of difficult edge cases. Sometimes people seem to do things that they don't actually desire to do, like a woman who stays in an abusive relationship, or a drug addict who wants to stay clean but can't.
Are these cases of genuine desire? If you say no, and that we're instead dealing with cases of people doing things that they don't desire to do, then it starts to become even more mysterious how we can have a consistent set of criteria for moving from the empirical observation of behavior to the inference of a desire. But let's say that, despite the outward protestations of the subjects, there is a desire at play here. The woman who stays in an abusive relationship despite seemingly not wanting to, does in fact desire to stay in the relationship to at least some degree, even though this might conflict with other desires she has. We're going to say that if someone persists in doing X, then they have at least some desire to do X - call this the repetition criteria.
But how far can we stretch the repetition criteria? What if we look at not just one event, but multiple seemingly isolated events over time? Consider a woman whose last five relationships have all ended due to abuse. She always leaves the relationship immediately after physical abuse starts, and she makes it clear that she really hates all the terrible men she's been dating and she curses her string of bad luck - but nevertheless there's a clear pattern here. On the most literal reading of the repetition criteria, we can infer that she actually desires these relationships! She repeatedly persists in doing "X", where the "X" here is "enter a new abusive relationship", so we can infer that that is her desire. (We can dispense with any worries that this would require her to "know the future" - she could arrange this with better-than-chance-odds if she really wanted to, she could filter for men who showed outward signs of criminality and acted aggressively during courtship, and so on). If you look at any one event in isolation, there are no indications that she desires this state of affairs whatsoever, but if we look at the broader pattern of behavior, then desire starts to become evident. So, does she have this type of desire? If you say "no", then the repetition criteria needs some sort of modification - and this modification would be based not on empirical observation, but rather it would be based on your a priori conception of what a desire should look like. If you instead say "yes", then we begin to approach the psychoanalytic concept of unconscious desire.
So our commonsense story about psychology already has a lot of potential problems with it. But that doesn't mean we should jettison the whole story. Even the most hardcore reductionist materialist, who believes that anything above the level of a neuron is ontological nonsense, isn't going to stop talking about people as if they had beliefs and emotions and desires - you can't do that, it's not workable. Psychoanalysis simply provides a new story in addition to the commonsense one, and many people find the psychoanalytic story to be deeply compelling. You can argue that its concepts are empirically unverifiable and philosophically dubious; but we're already wedded to concepts that are empirically unverifiable and philosophically dubious.
I don't think those two have anything in common with each other, really- why did they bring together so many leftist philosophers and writers?
The short answer is that Freud provides the theory of the individual and Marx provides the theory of society - it's a natural complement. There are a lot of contingent historical factors involved here of course, but that's the gist of it.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
6d ago
You and Lewis are basically arguing against the weakest possible version of the anti-egalitarian position. No one thinks we should beat old men because they can't cross the street fast enough. That's just silly.
Wouldn't it be a lot more interesting and enlightening to argue against the strongest version of the position you disagree with? If you're going to critique anarchism, wouldn't you rather go after Bakunin and Kropotkin, instead of teenagers who just like to light shit on fire?
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
14d ago
Good writeup, and I agree with pretty much all of it. In fact I think many posters here will agree with it, but I believe we also still have some Effective Altruists who post here so hopefully they'll weigh in.
My speculation is that most people who claim to value all humans (or even all life) exactly equally either a) hold that belief because it makes them feel good to hold that belief, and it helps them build the type of self-image they want, or b) they hold that belief because they're attracted to its theoretical simplicity. But I think it's unlikely that they truly feel a spontaneous, pre-reflective love for all of humanity. I don't think I've ever in my life interacted with any person who showed evidence of harboring such feelings, and I don't think that it's a coincidence that people who espouse this belief are also more likely to be EA/LessWrong types, or philosophers - people who are already predisposed to be attracted to beliefs because of considerations like theoretical elegance.
But I could also just be projecting and this could be a failure of imagination on my part. It's certainly possible that someone genuinely feels that all humans should be treated identically. I just don't think it's as common as is typically claimed.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
16d ago
But unlike my genes I do care about human happiness
Trust me, I do too. But nature doesn't. Our hopes and dreams have to be tempered by reality.
If feminine standards are telling them to be an unmarried cat owner looking for Mr. Right at age 35 then maybe we should examine why
Well, this sounds like a slightly different complaint than what we had at the start. This is less about women's standards/status being too high and more like women just opting out of the game altogether.
And aren't men doing the same thing? How many men haven't even tried to go on a date in years, instead just retreating inside and living on the computer? I don't think you can pin the blame solely on women here.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
29d ago
The system is not set up to persecute rich people
Then why did SBF get prosecuted and sentenced to 25 years in prison?
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
8d ago
It's because his aggregate comment score is in a crater.
We really should disable that aspect of the feature imo.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
17d ago
How different does sport look if all the mangers were autist?
Who knows? Presumably autistic people aren't all identical. They can have a diverse range of goals and values, same as non-autistic people.
At one point he said "You could be the most talented midfielder in the country but because of manager bias, your reputation and other external factors you will never reach the higher levels."
I don't know much of anything about traditional sports, but I doubt that this is literally true. If you're literally the best in the country then I'm sure a pro team will at least sign you.
I do watch a lot of eSports though so I can make a comparison with that. Top players will regularly stream matches, practice sessions, and analysis sessions on twitch. Stream views are certainly correlated with the skill of the player, but it's not a perfect 1-to-1 relationship. Some top players get far more views (and consequently, twitch sub money) than others because they have more interesting personalities, they put more time and effort into growing their streaming presence, or other chance factors. This is unavoidable. Especially in the smaller games there are no "managers", it's about as close to a pure free market as you can get, and when given the choice, the revealed preference of viewers is that they care about other factors besides just raw game skill.
The streamers who make a career as full time commentators or "personalities" get even more viewers than the top players themselves, which is to be expected, because they can focus 100% of their time and energy on growing their twitch/youtube presence, instead of splitting their focus between streaming and actually learning/practicing/competing in the game in question. So things like reputation and brand recognition can't be pinned solely on "managers", the person themselves also has to take an active role and put work into growing their reputation.
This strikes me as highly inefficient
It's a game. Why does it have to be efficient?
Ukraine suspends consular services for military-age men in draft push
It's been interesting to watch the reaction from Western pro-Ukrainians to Ukraine's sweeping new mobilization orders. The prevailing sentiment seems to be "that's a tragedy, and obviously the draft shouldn't exist to begin with, but what can be done?" Suggesting that it would be better to negotiate a peaceful end to the conflict is outside the Overton window. It's a foregone conclusion that Ukraine must fight to the last man.
There is something hellishly dystopian about fleeing to another country, possibly even across the ocean, and your country of birth is still trying to pull you back. Particularly because women are given a free pass. It's natural to feel like there should be some cost associated with the privilege of not having to be forcibly conscripted to fight against an invading army.
This raises questions about Ukraine's ability to keep their fighting force well-staffed going forward, and also questions about the morale of Ukrainian soldiers. Every conflict has some number of draft dodgers, but I wonder if there are any hard stats about whether dodgers are particularly overrepresented in this conflict? That could help adjudicate the question of whether the Ukrainian resistance is an authentic homegrown phenomenon, or if it's largely being sustained by Western pressure.
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