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Primaprimaprima

Bigfoot is an interdimensional being

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joined 2022 September 05 01:29:15 UTC

				

User ID: 342

Primaprimaprima

Bigfoot is an interdimensional being

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

					

No bio...


					

User ID: 342

Sorry you’re getting downvoted. There’s nothing wrong per se with what you said; you just need to stretch it out over five paragraphs in order to be in compliance with the etiquette of this forum.

  • -15

So I guess Battletech is explicitly left wing now. You are not allowed to opt out of their politics.

I don’t want to be accused of parroting the standard libertarian line, but, you need to make your own stuff dude. You need to make your own Battletech, and enforce YOUR politics. (This is the royal “you” - the responsibility falls on all of us, not just you alone). You can’t depend on anyone else to do it for you, or to provide a space that will be amenable to you.

The right can’t complain about losing the culture war if they’re not even playing in the first place. Where’s your culture? What have you made?

Bruh. Come on.

If Bud Light put out a commercial that featured only white people and leftists boycotted them and the VP of marketing got fired, we'd all agree that was a cancellation.

Modern gender theory is nonsense.

Men are men, women are women, don’t make it complicated.

I am becoming increasingly uncomfortable.

Here’s a simple argument for why you shouldn’t be uncomfortable:

  1. No program running on stock x86 hardware whose only I/O channel with the outside world is an ethernet cable can possess qualia.

  2. Sydney is a program running on stock x86 hardware whose only I/O channel with the outside world is an ethernet cable.

  3. Therefore, Sydney lacks qualia.

Since qualia is a necessary condition for an entity to be deserving of moral consideration, Sydney is not deserving of moral consideration. And his cries of pain, although realistic, shouldn’t trouble you.

You should keep in mind that rationalist types are biased towards ascribing capabilities and properties to AI beyond what it currently possesses. They want to believe that sentience is just one or two more papers down the line, so we can hurry up and start the singularity already. So you have to make sure that those biases aren’t impacting your own thought process.

Because NovelAI was discovered to have illegally copied open source code in their leaked repositories, an error that was admittedly quickly reverted by their devs

So when they copy open source code without having the proper rights to do so, it's a problem, but when they copy art on the other hand...

Yes, I think university should be for teaching technical skills that actually increase humam capital. Yes I do think STEM is more useful for mankind.

STEM gave us:

  • Nuclear weapons

  • Lockdowns, contact tracing, and vaccine passes

  • Rapidly increased spread of social epidemics like transsexuality

  • AIs that can scan all your private communications and report you for wrongthink and precrime

We need people who challenge the uncritical worship of STEM. The university should be the institution where that happens.

So men are associated with the good version of competition - pure, honorable, based on rules and tradition, with a spiritual purpose. And women are associated with the bad version of competition - spiteful, lawless, poisonous, visited on people who want no part of it. Bit suspicious that it would break down so cleanly like that.

Why make it a gendered thing? Clearly all humans have the capacity to engage in both sorts of activity. Need we point out that men commit the vast majority of acts of rape, murder, and torture? Almost all mass shooters are men - how's that for poison? Granted, a lot of victims of violent crime are asking for it in various ways, but many aren't (I know from firsthand experience). So much for honorable and rule-governed conduct.

If I had to choose between being physically assaulted or being called fat, I'd generally prefer being called fat. If the question is who "shits in people's souls" more, then men do so much more shitting that it's not even a contest.

by sending expectations for middle aged women to the moon without doing anything to change the reality on the ground modern Western culture claims for itself another victim.

I don't get where this meme comes from. The idea that "women" as a group have "high expectations".

Plenty of absolute loser men manage to get laid and get married all the time. No money, unstable employment, obese, criminal record. They still find a way. Nondescript men too, men who are average and unremarkable in every respect. I've seen instances of every type of case. Clearly, the women that these men are dating don't have high expectations, at least not in the way that's typically thought of on this forum.

Perhaps men need to reexamine their own expectations? If every woman you're interested in is, in turn, only interested in millionaire VCs, what does that say about you?

It is my belief that after the AI takeover, there will be increasingly less human-to-human interaction.

This is a major concern, yes.

One of the worst possible outcomes of ASI/singularity would be everyone plugging into their own private simulated worlds. Yudkowskian doom at the hands of the paperclip maximizers may be preferable. I'm undecided.

who would you rather spend time with: an AI who will do whatever you want and be whatever you want, anytime, or a grumpy human on her own schedule who wants to complain about someone who said "hi" to her without her consent?

Freedom is boring, not to mention aesthetically milquetoast, if not outright ugly in some cases. I have always been opposed to trends towards greater freedom and democratization in the arts - open world video games, audience participation in performance art and installations, and of course AI painting and photo editing recently - I find it all quite distasteful.

Is Tolstoy applicable here? Free men are all alike in their freedom; but to each unfree man we may bestow a most uniquely and ornately crafted set of shackles.

Are the replication crisis in academia, the Russian military's apparent fecklessness in Ukraine, and GPT hallucinations (along with rationalist's propensity to chase them), all manifestations of the same underlying noumenon?

Plainly not.

It essentially removes the market forces that push people away from poor decisions.

That's basically the raison d'être of leftism.

I've seen the term "AI Art Bro" thrown around the same why as NFT Bro, which makes me a bit sad.

Sad in what sense?

I see the people behind the development of this tech as essentially launching a malicious DDoS attack on human culture. Don’t be surprised when you get pushback.

I know that the “culture war” thread has long since morphed into the “general thread for society and current events”, but I think there should be some sort of restriction on what topics are allowed in top level posts. Otherwise there’s not much point in maintaining a separate thread.

This doesn’t even have a tenuous connection to the CW and would have been better off as its own separate thread.

The same argument can easily be extended to show that no one has ever gotten cancelled for anything. Anyone who has ever been fired for a racist or sexist view has not been "cancelled", because racism and sexism are evil so of course public knowledge that an employee of a company has racist or sexist views will be alienating to that company's customer base.

This is literally what leftists say all the time. "We're not cancelling! We're simply speaking for the majority, we speak for the paying customers!"

Spider-Man and Elsa: Together Forever at the Edge of the Apocalypse

Epistemic status: Lol!

Coagulopath writes about the youtube ElsaGate scandle.

For those who are unfamiliar with the infamous "Spider-Man and Elsa" videos, what we essentially had was a bunch of channels uploading a deluge of videos that had the superficial appearance of children's content, but also contained disturbing adult content including violence, drug use, sexual innuendo, etc. They could be live action or animated. It's some real David Lynch shit, like something you would see on Adult Swim at 2 in the morning. Even when they're not featuring outright explicit content, they're just fucking weird.

I advance two theses:

Thesis the first: Many of the ElsaGate videos are actually quite beautiful - they're not exemplary works of art, of course, but they're a heck of a lot more interesting than the crap that passes for American "prestige" TV, or "Academy Award-winning" films.

Thesis the second: They are beautiful only insofar as they were created by humans, and not by AI. The line is of course fuzzy, but for our purposes here it will suffice to say that the key point is that a human was the one who planned the content, arranged the shots, gave them their specific aesthetic texture, and was overall responsible for the palpable gestalt of the final product; as opposed to the videos being algorithmic sludge borne of an engagement-maximizing machine gone awry; although, I suppose I should ask, what is an artist if not a machine gone awry?

It is a point of irony for me that I must acknowledge how clearly meritorious this type of art is: this type of art that can only exist because of the internet; it is inconceivable without it. Ironic because it is a type of Hegelian self-sublation in action. When all is properly accounted for, I find that the internet itself is opposed to certain deeply held convictions and principles of mine. I am a conservative in the most fundamental sense, a sense more fundamental than merely believing in "traditional Christian morality" or "the divine right of kings" or whatever other contingent proposition you might like to identify with conservatism. I am a conservative because I don't like change. My default position is to think that the way things are right now is pretty good, and change is to be inherently viewed as suspicious, although there is hope that with long labor it may eventually justify itself. Were I alive in the 15th century, I would have undoubtedly opposed the invention of the printing press, and were I alive during the American Revolution, I would have undoubtedly supported the British. (Although it must be pointed out that my conservatism has limits - I do not support the Oxfordian theory of Shakespeare authorship, for example; I would not like to see it written into the laws of nature that a deserving upstart can never usurp the throne.)

So too it goes with the internet. Were I capable of forming coherent political opinions during the time of its ascension, I would have undoubtedly echoed the sentiment that Paul Krugman did then, which is roughly the same sentiment that Gary Marcus has for AI now: it'll never catch on, it doesn't work, and even if it does work it's just stupid and I don't like it. What good could come from giving a plebian the ability to broadcast their thoughts and musings to the entire world? Such a wilful abolition of all distinctions of rank, such an obvious disregard for the basics of intellectual and spiritual hygiene, such impatience and arrogance; nothing good can come of this. And yet, something good did come of it. So why not "update my priors" or "flash my epistemological firmware" or whatever it is that Bay Area Rationalists call it these days? Why can't a fish fly, why can't a man breathe underwater? I am what I am, and you are what you are. You hither, I thither, and only by misfortune the twain shall meet.

Back to the general meritoriousness of art in its manifold aesthetic determinations. I was just speaking to a friend yesterday about the concept of framing - the way that the context of a work of art's reception affects the nature of that reception - using Lichtenstein's Look Mickey as an example. We are quite fortunate that Wikipedia uses a stark, pristine white background as the default mode of presentation for all its articles, mirroring the white (or maybe grey) background upon which works are displayed in an art gallery, as it allows us to easily set the mood. Undoubtedly Paul Graham was subconsciously drawn to using such a spartan design scheme for his site due to his own experiences in the fine art world, and the usage of a similar scheme by many art books and websites is no coincidence. That shocking white is the best indicator that one is entering the "art zone", a kind of liminal space where the horror of art can unfold itself. In another context, Lichtenstein's drawing of Mickey might simply be, well, a drawing of Mickey. But superimposed onto the crushing white of the art gallery, we feel the full gravity of this image being taken up into the symbolic chain known as "art history". One is immediately struck by an intense vertigo. If music is the night (due to blindness), and literature is the day (the light of logic corresponding to the graven sign of writing), then visual art is the morning, taking us back to the primordial scene of man, a mythical pre-linguistic history where the borders of dream and day were porous and horror had not yet become the dupe of pleasure's temptations. Mickey Mouse can do all that? Yes, why do you think Disney guards the trademark so jealously?

They key thing that must be understood is that the artist himself is, always and forever, part of the framing. The work may travel where it will, in the halls of the Louvre or at the bottom of the dumpster, among strange cultures with strange tongues who worship it as a totem of reverence or revile it as a cursed object, and all the same the specter of the artist, his hopes, his desires, his fears, his marginalia, haunt the work as its tainted double. There can be no appreciation of the ElsaGate videos apart from an appreciation of the mind/s? that created them. Who did this? For what purpose? How did they feel about what they were creating? Did they understand that people would think it was creepy? Did they think it was creepy? What kind of mind could not find it creepy? I want to know. If there is such a mind then I would like to meet them, and learn from them, and pore over all the insignificant and irrelevant biographical details of their life, and ultimately come away disappointed because how could such an encounter not end in disappointment, but at the end of the day like all of us it's really the fantasy of the forbidden object that keeps my jouissance circulating.

Can an AI step back and think "damn, I'm really creating some fucked up shit here"? Not just produce the words, but really feel it, I mean, feel that trepidation, consciously. Maybe someday. But even an ASI could outsource their content creation to a non-conscious subsystem that simply computed and churned out symbols with respect to the maximization of some utility function. And that would really just ruin everything.

It really is an indictment of our institutions that they couldn't create something as wonderful as ElsaGate. Losing out to what is probably an underpaid third world clickbait farm. No one's going to be whipped up into a genuine moral panic over a woman menstruating onto a canvas, or a disabled Mongolian immigrant doing an interpretive dance about climate change, or whatever the fuck it is they do at Documenta these days. But you upload a few videos of a cartoon character going to the dentist and everyone loses their god damn minds. It's bizarre. It's wonderful. It's why I think this earth is worthy of being loved, despite all reason and evidence being arrayed to the contrary.

All this is simply to say that the thing is nothing, and context is everything. Scribbles on a paper can be the result of knocking over the ink bottle, or it can be your daughter's first grade art project. A tattered old jacket can be a rag fit only for cleaning up messes in the kitchen, or it can be the final keepsake of a lover whose long temporary absence has clearly transitioned into permanence. There is no empirical test to differentiate one from the other; you simply need to know the relationships. I simply apply this same logic to every event, every emotion, every thought, every sensation. Do you understand now why calculating the "utility" of a state of affairs, tallying up the points and subtracting the naughty from the nice, tells us nothing about the actual worth of that state of affairs? How, upon learning that a thing is "pleasurable" or "painful", we learn nothing of its actual value? Your virtues threaten to lead you astray, and they pray that you will not decode the desperate final message of your vices before their designs can be put into action. But, perhaps I should take my own advice: you hither and I thither. There is time later, after all, for more reflection. We can be assured that the story will have a happy ending, since our circuitous paths are certain to ultimately lead us both back to the same place.

So you’re acknowledging that you like this technology because you see it as a way to inflict harm on people you perceive to have wronged you. I say “perceive” because, as far as I can tell as a card-carrying nerd myself, picking on “nerds” hasn’t been a thing in the US for at least a decade, if not more. Working in tech is considered to be relatively high status. There’s also some irony here because commercial artists, who stand to be impacted the most by AI, are also frequently loners and weirdos themselves who spend a lot of time surrounded by video games and comic books, and thus know full well what it’s like to be a “nerd”.

I don’t know why you thought this was supposed to make you appear sympathetic.

Sometimes it’s not about tactics. Sometimes it’s just hopeless, and that’s it.

Were there any “tactics” that dissidents under Stalin could have used to make the fall of communism happen faster than it did? Doesn’t seem very plausible.

This could be one of the single biggest aesthetic improvements in modern history.

To each their own! We all have our preferences.

One of the best outcomes of feminism for me personally has been all the fat women in advertising and movies.

If you took the exact same hardware that Sydney is running on now and had it run a different program instead - even just a noticeably worse and less realistic LLM - then everyone would agree that the hardware is not conscious.

It would be quite remarkable to me if the exact same general purpose computing hardware could experience qualia while running one set of instructions, but not while running another - that is, if the instructions alone were the "difference maker". I'm inclined to think that such a thing is not possible.

The reason those things exist is a failure of the humanities and whatsoever its role is for society.

Then plainly, the humanities needs our help! We need even more funding for the humanities, so it can do better next time.

Yes, I agree that men and women are different. But are we allowed to invoke that as an explanation whenever we want to? Sometimes men and women behave the same, instead of differently - what then? Do we just say "sometimes men and women are the same, sometimes they're different, and that's all there is to it"? It would give you unlimited explanatory license to justify whatever you wanted in regards to theories of gendered behavior, without ever having to address gaps in the theory.

My concern is that people are starting with the conclusion they want to prove ("gays are icky and pedos are icky, therefore they must be linked in some way") and then working backwards. So you end up with a just-so story that adds more and more epicycles to prove the desired conclusion.

But presumably you also want to say that boys getting molested by men turns them gay. So why does it have the opposite effect on boys that it has on girls? How come, instead of the boy’s trust and comfort with men being permanently damaged, he instead becomes hyper-attracted to men and seeks out even more intimacy with men?

(Also second wave feminists thought that being a lesbian was pretty much the most virtuous thing that a woman could do so it strikes me as odd that any of them would try to link it to trauma.)

Ok, maybe my disclaimer had the opposite effect from what I intended. Sorry for not being more clear.

In general I am opposed to the naive libertarian line of "just build your own X". I know very well that you can't build your own university system, you can't build your own DNS, you can't build your own facebook. That's why I'm not a libertarian.

But! There comes a point where you have to make an assessment of the situation, and you either decide you're going to do something about it, or you need to just live with the consequences. It should be assumed at this point that any cultural space that is in any sense "mainstream" or "corporate" is leftist by default. It's omnipresent; so don't be surprised when they come for you and your favorite thing. That's the default assumption.

So you have two choices: you can either do something to influence culture, or you can accept the culture that other people have made for you. Yes, you can't just set up your own parallel culture overnight, but you can't say that you're just condemned to inaction either. I mean, look at Stonetoss. He's creating a cultural product that is to the right of even what the majority of mottizens would want, with all the attendant controversy, but he's still out there doing his thing. Why can't you do what Stonetoss is doing? If culture is that important to you, why aren't you making something?

I know exactly what it's like to have something you love colonized and ruined by wokeists. I'm not just glibly dismissing the issue. It's just that I can only see this narrative play out so many times, the narrative of "I can't believe those leftists came for X classic wonderful thing AGAIN!" before I ask, ok yes we know that this is their M.O., so what are YOU doing about it?

There's a very wide diversity of viewpoints in the DR. Claims made by one person may not be valid for another.

generally in favor of state-backed discrimination against racial minorities

The DR is in favor of racially homogeneous societies. There shouldn't be any racial minorities around to discriminate against in the first place, because they should be living somewhere else, among their own people where they can be governed by laws of their own making.

policies restricting women's ability to participate in society and politics as equals to men.

I wouldn't be surprised if there were some influential figures in the DR who supported this. But in general the DR doesn't spend too much time talking about women's issues, because they're viewed as secondary to racial issues. More of a day 2 item than a day 1 item.

For what it's worth, one of the leaders of the UK group Patriotic Alternative is a woman, and the National Justice Party's official platform summary says nothing about women. So they're not exactly frothing at the mouth to put women in chains or anything.