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
7hr ago
It can be quite disappointing to think about what could have been. Sometimes these types of internet communities only exist for a brief window, and then they’re gone.
Do you have any interest in writing your own fanfiction now? Maybe that could be a vehicle for forming new relationships that become valuable to you in their own way.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
1d ago
I'm sure there's no post on the site where someone was modded for the literal string "people who don't support Ukraine are too stupid to be allowed to vote", but I think the appropriate comparison is to look at other posts where people were modded for "boo outgroup" and compare the aggressiveness of the boos. Like, if "Canada seems to be doing its damnedest to ski down that slope right off that cliff" is worthy of getting modded, then I would think that "too stupid to be allowed to vote" is also in mod territory.
(I'm aware that FarNearEverywhere's post history was an aggravating factor here, but presumably if the linked comment itself didn't cross some absolute threshold then it wouldn't have attracted mod attention in the first place regardless of her post history.)
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
1d ago
Or when their political future is now determined by the flood of migrants which repopulates the region, as opposed to their coethnics in Moscow.
I imagine that this is one of the wedges that drives different intuitions on this conflict - are you looking at it through a racial lens or a civic nationalist lens? Do you see Russians and Ukrainians, two peoples about as genetically and linguistically similar as you can get while still remaining distinct, or do you see Russia and Ukraine, two independent legal entities that are bound by the same ahistorical Rawlsian veil of ignorance as all other international actors?
In general I'm going to be a lot less concerned about an invading force that is ethnically and linguistically closer to me than one that is more distant. China invades the US, it's go time, Germany or the UK invades the US, eh I can probably live with that. Contra some of the other replies, "the continued existence of Ukraine" is in fact an abstract geopolitical goal of NATO, because the nation-state itself is an abstraction of relatively recent historical origin. Prosperity for oneself, for one's family and tribe, for the continued endurance of one's way of life - these desires are universal, but they are not equivalent to "the territorial integrity of one's nation-state". The latter is not a natural and universal human desire.
Of course race is certainly not the only thing that matters. I don't want to be ruled by white wokeists. But how many Ukrainians currently fighting are deeply opposed to Russia on ideological grounds because of their commitment to free speech/representative democracy/gay rights/whatever, and how many of them are just going with the flow because "Putin bad and this is what we're doing now"? How many of them are actually ideologically closer to the average Russian than the average American liberal? This is where the accusations of puppetry come from.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
2d ago
Israel’s Lt. Gen. Herzi Halevi said that “the strike will be met with a response”. The question is, will Israel’s response be a substantial escalation, or will this turn into an international slap fight?
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
2d 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
2d ago
I think that this post maybe too low-effort for Culture war thread but other ones don't look appropriate to me
It's plenty high effort enough. One to two paragraphs is fine for a top level post. Some people like to go on longer but you don't have to.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
2d 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
3d ago
The process being mostly meritocratic is a necessary but not sufficient condition to sell the surrounding story.
I agree with this. All of the factors have some weight, it’s not just one or the other.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
3d ago
My entire post was about how people become fans of players and choose who/what to watch for reasons other than pure competitiveness.
Good example is chess, the games that top bots play with themselves are frankly more novel and interesting on a move-by-move basis than the games played between human pros, but as far as I know no one really watches bot games recreationally. The most popular streams are for the human pro tournaments where people can see the storylines and drama.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
3d 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?
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
4d ago
Iran apparently referred to this as a “combined operation” so it’s possible that this is just the opening salvo and there will be attacks on other fronts.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
4d 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.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
5d ago
Another aspect is how using technology to automate music production seems to have been more accepted than for illustrations pre-AI, i.e. sampling and stuff like that.
Based on my limited interactions with musicians, they seem to have less of a fetish for authenticity than visual artists do.
Professional commercial art has always been no-rules-anything-goes of course. Even before AI you had photobashing, various digital effects, tracing over 3D models, etc. But there was always a vocal subset of artists (usually on the more hobbyist/indie side) who felt that these methods were "cheating" in a way, and if you couldn't draw something with good ol' pen and paper then it wasn't "real skill". My impression is that this sort of sentiment is largely absent even in indie musicians - they view digital mixing and post-processing as simply a normal part of the process, they never think twice about it.
I think in some sense music is inherently more reliant on technology than visual art is - if you want to create any sort of durable recording of a song, something that can persist even in the absence of the original composer and performer, then you need to rely on technology that's only been around since 1877, whereas people were inscribing paintings onto stone many thousands of years ago. Musicians have just been living with technology longer, they were using electric guitars when most professional illustrators didn't need anything more high tech than ink and oil paints. So I think that's part of the reason why they have a friendlier disposition towards technology in general.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
5d ago
Usually the respondents to his posts pull out a sentence or two and run with it
I don't think this is a bad thing. I think this is a good way of interacting with long posts (so people are able to respond to mega essays without feeling obligated to respond with a mega essay of their own) and it can lead to a lot of productive and interesting discussion. Like, on Kulak's recent post not many of the replies directly addressed Kulak's actual thesis, they just used it as a discussion prompt for sharing whatever thoughts they had on India. I think threads like that are healthy for the forum.
That being said, this particular post did a poor job of explaining to me why I should be interested in FIRST or hyperdunbarism (although admittedly this topic is far outside of my normal wheelhouse to begin with).
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
5d ago
I meant SS's top level post and all its replies, most of which are directly related to Holocaust discussion, not just this particular sub-thread where we're discussing meta issues.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
5d ago
Sorry, I was using the royal "you" there, I didn't mean to give the impression that I was singling out you in particular. It was a message for everybody.
Personally I enjoy meta-posting.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
5d ago
FIRST exists to prepare the young people of today for the world of tomorrow. To transform our culture by creating a world where science and technology are celebrated and where young people dream of becoming science and technology leaders.
I'm confused as to why they're treating this like a counterfactual.
The richest men in the world made their money from technology. Isn't that already a form of celebration?
And what technology are we celebrating exactly? Unprecedented surveillance capabilities to monitor all communications for wrongthink? Israel's use of machine learning to swiftly and efficiently identify targets for liquidation?
(I'm not trying to be a moralist - you're of course "allowed" to celebrate whatever you want. I just think that people should have a clear-eyed view of the implications of their own position.)
Richard Sutton says "[AIs] might tolerate us as pets or workers. (...) If we are useless, and we have no value [to the AI] and we're in the way, then we would go extinct, but maybe that's rightly so. (...) We should prepare for, but not fear, the inevitable succession from humanity to AI". Do you also celebrate your "inevitable successors"?
Celebrations are best saved for the end - in moments of repose, after the long struggle where a certain spiritual vision was forged and executed, when conditions are finally such that we can pose the question of taking a proper accounting of things...
As for "science" insofar as it can be distinguished from "technology", people have never had a taste for such a thing and never will, we live in a world where a not insignificant number of people are unaware that it's possible to have individual preferences for reasons other than status-seeking or placating your interlocutor, asking such people to build an intrinsic appreciation for something as abstract as "knowledge for the sake of knowledge" is futile. It is already an eccentric predilection even among more highly developed natures, it could never become widespread save for genetic engineering.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
6d ago
The only true bad apples are the people that read “will to power”
The Nietzsche book? I highly recommend his work if you haven’t read it.
Anyway if you think this place is a uniquely wretched hive of moral degeneracy, why are you still posting here?
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
6d ago
I watched that crazy racist indian video, it has a lot of upvotes here.
There were a lot of emotions involved there, but I don't think "anger" was a prominent one. Contempt and disgust, maybe, but those are distinct from anger.
There is some deep seeded anger at the world in many of them, including some kind of death drive judging by how many sort of hope some kind of disaster occurs to shake things up and make life interesting.
Are you sure you're not just thinking of that one Kulak post about decentralization? I don't think that's a particularly common sentiment here.
I mean, I do know the phenomenon you're talking about. 4chan was filled with that kind of posting in the early days of Covid. There are people here who are waiting for the robot god to rapture them up into post-singularity digital immortality, but that's fundamentally a constructive view of the future (bizarre as it may seem) rather than a destructive one.
At any rate I don't think it's as bizarre a fantasy as you make it out to be, particularly because people are able to compartmentalize and only imagine the cool and adventurous aspects of living in a post-apocalyptic hellscape rather than the mundane and dangerous ones.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
6d ago
the concept of caring about truth more than happiness is incoherent in a world without objective value, and so you really ought to cleave yourself to whichever tradition forms the greatest happiness in yourself and your loved ones.
I think that's a complex issue and the proper response varies on a case by case basis.
I will note though that I only have so much control over my beliefs. I can't just will myself to believe that modus ponens is false, or that I don't exist, or that people can fly. There's a give and take with what the world imposes on me by force.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
6d ago
I misspoke. That was a poor way of phrasing it.
I agree that people do make things up sometimes, although I'd note that an intentional lie as an attack against a designated enemy is different from "scapegoating".
It's mainly in the context of inter-ethnic conflicts that I'm particularly suspicious of the idea of "scapegoating", because the contemporary intelligentsia is structurally incapable of acknowledging that such conflicts might be grounded in genuine concerns (unless it's the concerns of a party who has already been given a privileged position in the oppression stack). Sometimes, group A doesn't like group B because group B really just did something to piss them off. But acknowledging this, instead of blaming it on misrecognition, irrational fear, and the nebulous force of racism, opens the door to justifying racism, in their minds. So there's a tendency to engage in motivated reasoning on this issue.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
6d ago
It's telling that far and away the most active threads this week were this thread, and Kulak's post about Indians.
You are the forum. If you think we talk about race too much, then write more posts and comments that aren't about race.
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.
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