SpringFish
6d ago
Right, the question is, what's the role of the elite towards the masses? Should they simply satisfy all their desires, or should they try to shape them and educate them and "raise them" like a parent raises a child? The classic liberal/libertarian democratic view would be that the "masses" consist of knowledgeable units of citizens who have well-thought out positions and beliefs and attitudes and they should be able to exert this authentic will and the "elites" should just be administrative managers who make this will manifest. The more classical, traditional way is that the elite should help civilize the masses, moderate their excesses, keep them in check, set them good examples and bring out the better side of them. Even if your kid just wants to eat candy and not go to bed, you know better and don't entertain all their wishes.
Of course they don't want to express it this way, but performatively it's the best explanation.
SpringFish
6d ago
Actually, I have to defend the lifestyle of a community of young devout Catholics over the lifestyle of a commune of young art students, because both are in communion with their respective traditions. Do you have any doubt which one would have behaviors more conducive to wellbeing? I don’t think I would be able to find a clearer divide between people who are halfways to inner hell and people who are at least a little bit close to human felicity.
Not sure if this should be the criterion though. If the art students are correctly disillusioned about seeing reality as it is, and the Catholics are just placated and blindfolded to the injustices and whatnot.. Just trying to be devil's advocate. Monks self-flagellating and extreme ascetism also doesn't seem to be the most wholesome and conducive to well-being, but it's also derived from the same source.
SpringFish
6d ago
but I certainly do believe that most people think the mural in Toronto's Union Station is ugly.
Okay, but beauty was never the goal of it, it's not failing at being beautiful, it's just playing a different game entirely. And the posted picture is the most ugly part, the rest are somewhat more colorful. You can read about it here: https://stuartreid.ca/zones-of-immersion
The expression of psyche in public space can give public art a purpose greater than spectacle or decoration. This work presents the unvarnished witnessing of our human dwelling – which speaks of our collective separateness. (I feel a kinship here with Daumier’s Third Class Carriage, and Henry Moore’s wartime subway drawings). The unwritten code of the subway gaze, which says ‘look down/look away’, is challenged as we see ourselves in the work, through drawings and reflections. This window into our contemporary isolation offers faces and body language, blurred and revealed poetic writings from my journal entries, and rhythms of colour that punctuate the ribboned expanse.
Making a space pretty, like putting up some nice flowers, is kind of pedestrian and kitschy for the in-crowd. They want to make a statement about the grim reality of having to take the subway day after day in this daily grind. A social statement, a critique of society. The purpose was never to brighten people's day. It's to draw their attention to the grim reality and I guess to spark the activist fire in their hearts or something?
SpringFish
6d ago
But already this narrative assumes that artists have to be these geniuses who invent something new all the time, or that there is a specific task to be solved (e.g. to make the most realistic perspective- and color-accurate depiction of the thing as if looking through a rectangular window). In many cultures art was not so artist-as-superstar-genius-centered, but more about repeating the motifs of the culture, establishing a connection with their tribal ancients etc. Ancient Egypt managed to keep a more-or-less constant art style (I'm sure this makes the egyptologist cringe, but change was certainly much slower). In fact, it's a cultural value question whether individual-based innovation is placed above integrating into and expressing one's community tradition. It's similar with writings and stories, which were in older times not so connected to specific authors and would rather float around and have different versions and variations, quite unlike today's intellectual property ideas or ideas around plagiarism.
SpringFish
6d ago
I don't think the elitism was so different in earlier centuries. It was still elites trying to impress elites. They didn't ask for the opinions of the serfs and peasants whether they like the Baroque style better than the Renaissance style, or whether Gothic is an improvement over Romanesque. It just so happens that the metagame was at a place where making stuff beautiful was the right costly signal to use. But it was still about whatever is hot right now in Italy and other fancy trendsetting places, so commissioning similar stuff in your town meant being worldly and connected and a proper insider. Now, with machines and easy manufacturing, the meta has moved to a sophisticated understanding of nuance and implications and appreciating non-obvious context, which can mark you as being in the conversation.
Regular people did their own folk art in parallel to this, which got brought into the mainstream with Romanticism but the taste of the average nobody was never seen as all that important.
SpringFish
6d ago
It's an old tradition in Christianity to make people face the off-putting and shocking. Initially it was scandalous to depict Christ on the cross and his passion, but over time it became integrated and accepted and in a way sanitized and defanged. One could also say, and indeed Nietzsche's critique is something like this, that the crucifix is ugly and the solemn hymns about blood and so one are also unworthy, and a good strong civilization with an inner vitality should only show strong glorious victories and victors and sing self-celebratory songs that uplift people to move forward to even more winning.
I'm not sure that Angelus Novus is intended to "demoralize", but even those things that are intended so are understood by their creators to actually point at some deeper morality. (I'm sure there are also some that are simply perverted and enjoy the destruction of all that is good and want everything to rot and decay and die and suffer and squirm and so on - but I don't think the entire art world was like this). Instead they saw their role as warning society and awakening in them a desire for change and to realize that what they were sold previously, packaged in superficial beauty, was in fact rotten and corrupt in the core, that ornament and beauty was used to hide crimes and oppression. These kinds of impulses are not unprecedented and they are similar to iconoclasm (whether the Protestant Christian or the Muslim kind) and other cases of new movements destroying the icons and totems of the old one, which they deem broken and false prophecy packaged in deceptively appealing packaging.
For one or another reason, around the turn of the century artists got saturated with all the straightforward beauty, and they longed for something fresh and not stale. The old aesthetic values felt disconnected from the modern world, dishonest even, just an anachronistic show. Instead they looked for motifs from other cultures, from the east in Art Nouveau, or from other untainted sources, such as several then-rediscovered ancient cultures, or from natural childish innocent instinct. This is also connected to accurate representation being devalued due to photography. In Angelus Novus I mainly see this celebration of childish innocence and clumsiness and honesty, as well as an echo of cave paintings or other primitive art from non-Western cultures, along the lines of Le Taureau by Picasso.
You can't get around the fact that to defend the moral authority of the pictures you linked as positive examples, you have to defend the actions of the Catholic Church. This is not an impossible task. But you have to actually do it. You can't shortcut to it by saying that the paintings look better aesthetically, hence they should be the moral examples. What exactly is this part: "his life could change forever — he would be more courageous, more moral, more humble"? This is where the crux of the thing lies. Go on with social reality and values as it was in the late 1800s? You can defend that. But you have to actually do it.
That part is describing his young self's thoughts and a naive somewhat autistic nerd would indeed find that a much more understandable and good world, where things worked that way. A human has certain sense inputs, like vision, which is like pixels in some arrangement, and hearing, and taste, and these combine in the brain and they give pleasure or sometimes pain if it's like a sharp object poking at your skin. You want the inputs that create the pleasure type of sensation, and the goal of humanity is to bring about such sensations. So we have to experimentally ascertain which kinds of inputs give which kinds of sensations and then do more of the good type. For this, we have to isolate the effect of the thing itself, so we don't have noise from other aspects, so we can purely classify and score each individual type of input and then we know what is good and what is bad. It's an impulse to catalog things, like understanding all the herbs and mushrooms and fruits of the forest to know which one is good and which ones is bad. Experiences and tastes and visual qualities are similarly somehow out there, for us to pluck and test, and to use to bring about more pleasure.
If your brain doesn't tick this way, this may sound totally alien, but the more extreme thing-oriented engineer type nerd would find this more comfortable and clean for answering the question "what do people want? what makes them tick?", than the mess that humanity actually works like, the mess and mystery and contradictions that are appreciated and enjoyed by people-oriented people. But obviously the above is exaggerated for effect, I'm not saying that such people are incapable of understanding social realities, and indeed Scott also has grown out that view. Grappling with these things has brought about the concept of "type 2 fun" in this community, but it's still grappling with these ideas of "do you truly like X, or do you just pretend for status reasons", when these are much more inseparably blended in the socially attuned, normal person's mind. Because the type of "input" that humans really crave is the one that validates their status/identity/value within the community/society, a combination of being liked/loved/respected/feared or even just stably attached to such people.
SpringFish
6d ago
I think the rise of takeout and online orders from regular restaurants via Wolt and Foodora indicates that many people are fine with just the food part. As people are getting increasingly atomized, at least the food part stays constant and you don't have to sit together with a bunch of people who happened not to cancel last minute this time, but are staring at their phones anyway. Instead, you can eat the food at home and not pretend, and watch something more engaging than the boring stories your acquaintances would relay.
Of course this is exaggerated, but I think the reason that many see the food as the main thing of a restaurant visit is related to the erosion of communities. And for sure, for many people it's really just about practicality. American dining is anyway about rushing the customer out the door once the food is off the plate. So it's not hard to see that they would understand the purpose being the food.
SpringFish
6d ago
It's a good summary and he gets it much better than his previous self but not completely. He writes on early Scott:
So: young Scott was deeply disappointed to learn how restaurant critics worked.
In his imagination, a critic’s assistant would deliver dishes to her house, so she wouldn’t know which restaurant it came from. Otherwise, the critic might let her preconceptions influence her judgment, and a restaurant’s reputation would become self-reinforcing. She would eat blindfolded (or be spoon-fed?) so the food’s appearance couldn’t distort her judgment either. A typical tasting would intersperse food from dozens of different restaurants, with each dish tried multiple times (obviously the critic wouldn’t know it was the same dish) to ensure that the ratings were consistent. Any critic whose ratings were unreliable - two blind tastings of the same dish were no more likely to correlate than tastings of two different dishes - would be laughed out of the business.
Imagine how I felt when I actually read restaurant criticism. It was all stuff like “Oh, the ambience here is very nice; I had a great conversation with the chef who told me about how his childhood in Sardinia motivated new takes on traditional dishes.” How can you be sure the chef’s personable manner isn’t influencing your impression of the food?! Haven’t you ever heard of the Pepsi Paradox in psychology? Aaargh!
This is probably how many on the autism spectrum see things, without intuiting the interpersonal aspects. You have atomized, mostly fungible human individuals, and to decide whether a thing is good or bad, you administer the thing to the human and see if he or she gains utilions. And utilions are a kind of irreducible thing like qualia, a kind of pleasure, the opposite of pain. If utilions go up, thing is good, otherwise bad. It's a clean, legible, well understandable rule, and can serve as a basis for an engineering mindset to work on. As a kid, this is also how I would have wanted the world to work.
Mature Scott comes around to see social context etc. as being also relevant but still sees it as a bit of a sham.
But in listening to a bunch of Jonathan Pageau recently, I've come around to seeing art as serving community orientation. Scott should recognize this too, it's a kind of rallying point, defining Schelling points and common knowledge, a coordination mechanism. What is our community going through currently? What happened with recent generations and what are our aspirations for the next generation, and for the next next and then for beyond? What kind of picture do we want to paint of ourselves and how we relate to each other, the past, our neighbors, our future etc? What is good and what do people around me look up to with reverence? What do they doubt and look down upon as stupid or evil or nonsensical or pointless? Art is functional, it tells concrete stories, delivers concrete messages. Beauty that is stripped of all this is quite pedestrian. Symmetry, nice color combinations, intricate patterns here and there, balanced proportions etc and you're good to go. Just like a delicious taste is in fact not super hard to achieve, you need fat, salt and sugar in reasonable proportions and it will taste good from a tastebud perspective. Food that tastes good indicates caloric density and that we are in good times, the hunt was good, we are doing well in life.
Beauty in art, architecture etc has a similar role, it says that things are well-kept, in order, people have extra time to spare for beautifying things beyond just keeping things afloat. Its opposite, decay and trash shows that people around you don't give a fuck or there are hostilities going on where people deface the common living space etc. Or a clean but gray, flat, unbeautified space also communicates something, that there is no extra effort spent on this, there are tasks to be done, no time to wander, to look beyond the immediate task you were given, it's all about efficiency etc.
Art has both a message and some weight backing it. It can't be cheap, because for me to take your message seriously, a proof of cost helps to see you're truly standing behind it and are willing to expend time, effort and money to express it. The costly signal is not sufficient, but certainly a component. This is in part why ornaments or fancy clothes or colorful dresses are not as impressive today, it's just too cheap to produce that appearance. It's like, in my grandmother's time, having a table full of meals that included meat was a big deal and a central point around holidays, like Christmas or Easter, because it couldn't be taken for granted. It's excess and waste in a sense, just like ornaments, but they orient people to a shared vision and goal.
Back to beauty: When things are beautiful, you'll feel things are on a good track. But what if the zeitgeist is all about how things are not on a good track? The 20th century artists wanted to explicitly wake people up from their slumber, so they don't think that everything is fine. To upset and shake people by the shoulders. The second industrial revolution, then the industrial-scale meat grinder of WWI, then the Holocaust. They wanted to express that things are very much not normal, and the man on the street should not be seeing some idyllic space, where he can just go about his day. Everything about the old order was tainted in their minds. You may say that it's not true, a lot of things from the old times is valuable and worth preserving, but this becomes a more substantial discussion about history, the good, how people should live, what the events of the 20th century mean for humankind etc.
That's the steelman. Of course, like anytime, there will be posers and imitators and indeed making something ugly and repellent needs much less effort and skill than making something beautiful, so you end up with a race to the bottom and a bunch or ridiculous bullshit.
My point is that it's a much better discussion if you address the actual reasons that those ugly artworks got made. Unpack your view on the trajectory of Western civilization, what is to be preserved and what is to be tossed aside, what was a dead end and what was an eternally valid compass? Or at least say that you don't care about history or what people did generations ago, and you just want to be entertained and pleased, but then don't be surprised when the world becomes an algorithmic tiktok feed of VR brainrot that tickles people's brains just the right way to make it feel mildly engaging and in a kind of homeostasis.
SpringFish
6d ago
You're comparing this to your relationship, but when a guy wants this kind of test, probably it's not the kind of relationship that you likely have.
SpringFish
7d ago
I'm assuming a setup where the wife has a brief time of cheating on her husband and gets pregnant, then the cheating guy is gone, and the wife is silent and wants the husband to raise the family. It's not very satisfactory on moral grounds but probably the answer is that the biological father is typically more of a swindler type who may already be far away and has a personality and attitude that makes collecting stuff from him a bigger hassle. Meanwhile the other guy, who married the woman, is probably a more prosocial guy, who settled properly, has more job stability, follows rules more and is just easier to extract money from.
SpringFish
10d ago
SpringFish
10d ago
It would be quite bad if this became the majority view regarding how we see our fellow humans. Whatever makes humans have dignity cannot be found in these sorts of capabilities. This direction is poison. When one's rational deduction is leading this way, it's a sign that a better foundation is needed.
SpringFish
10d ago
It's next-token-predicting what a persona would say. Next-token-prediction is not to be dismissed though. It's just a task. It's not an easy task, but it doesn't require having a full rich inner life to be able to pass like this. But "just a next token predictor" can still be a great problem solver.
You may or may not know some people in your life who are great manipulators and simply know what sequence of words to say that sound coherent and convincing to naive people but they believe and feel none of it actually (psychopaths and similar). Now, obviously those humans are conscious humans, but still there is a disconnect between the words and the inner life, which may help you see that simply producing words that state something doesn't mean it reflects on an inner conscious state.
SpringFish
10d ago
“is it like something to be an X”
I find this to be terrible phrasing and when trying to translate it to other languages, it's a bit strange. If you try to think about it a bit on a grammatical level, "it is like something" means it is similar to something. Is redness perception similar to something? To what? The red of the apple is similar to the red of blood. These are similar. My perception-feel is "like" something? Like what? What can we even compare it to? To other mental phenomena? To things out there in the world? Redness-perception is like... ...like sand. Like... a house. It doesn't make sense. It's like what? I guess the idea is that it has some kind of texture? A kind of feel? Like seeing red makes you feel a certain emotion I guess. Or it's has a piercing strength quality to it? It's all very vague.
SpringFish
10d ago
Do you think regular normie movie goers know that Narnia and LotR are related to Christianity? I'm curious, because to me this was not obvious at all. It's just fun adventure stories in the cinema.
the American definition of intelligence is understanding, the European one is predicting.
The article says the opposite: for Americans (Stanford AI lab specifically) it's "the ability to adapt to new situations, and learn from experience", which is somewhat related to "prediction", and for "Europe" (Larousse specifically) it's "the set of mental functions whose goal is conceptual and rational knowledge", or in other words explanations and understanding.
To me, it's more of a distinction between the modern and the old-fashioned concept of someone being of high intellect. Nowadays modern schooling trends are all about competencies and skills and tools and the "how", while old-fashioned Prussian style education emphasized lexical knowledge and Bildung, being able to recite poems, knowing many facts and their connections etc. Also in that sense an "intelligent man" is also intertwined with knowing etiquette, being polite and so on. "Smart" has the same duality. Of course the prediction and navigating unknown situations and figuring out solutions in difficult situations type concept is also known to all cultures. If we don't use the word intelligent, English has words for this like quick-thinking, quick-witted, sharp, and perhaps tangentially some sense of "shrewd" with some disapproval.
But the situation with consciousness is a bit different.
Maybe it's just a me thing, but I distinctly remember that it was quite unintuitive for me that I am supposedly having perceptions with qualia in my consciousness and apparently my mind is in there too somehow or whatnot. Like as a teen when getting familiar with these kinds of interesting books in English I didn't intuitively think of myself as looking out some rectangular window from inside a Cartesian theater onto the world, separated by some kind of pane of glass. I think a much more natural notion is that I simply see the things in front of me and it makes me aware of their 3D arrangement and state, color etc. I don't see some kind of red qualia, I just see an object and I perceive that the object is red. There is no intermediate redness qualia. Of course it's a naive view and perception is very active yadda yadda, but no, it feels passive. You open your eyes and the world is there. Not icons and whatnot, it's the things out there in the world. Optical illusions are fun because they reveal that this view is indeed naive and perception relies on lots of assumptions and priors.
Also I think the Anglo-analytical philosophy sees consciousness quite differently from the continental phenomenologists like Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty. In the Anglo view it's really like the world as clockwork is basically pretty complete if only it wasn't for this one little puzzle piece here, which we label "consciousness" and we don't quite know what it's for, but we guess it's going to fit somewhere in this complete-seeming puzzle, we just have to look a bit more closely. While in the other view it's much more integrated into all the rest of the things, but I'm quite out of my depth here.
SpringFish
11d ago
Except Dawkins hasn't made any major scientific discoveries himself as far as I know. His contributions are in science popularization to laypeople.
SpringFish
11d ago
I think his The Ancestor's Tale and the more famous The Selfish Gene are really good books for their purpose, ie. explaining evolution both from a logical perspective and in the actual sequence of events and forms of animals that led to humans, to a broad audience, because even biology teachers often butcher the logic of it and make it sound like the magical Evolution Fairy version (a bit along the lines of explaining how a train works in the 1800s to peasants, only for them to ask "alright, I understood all that, but where are the horses that are dragging it?"). His religion-related work has always been very shallow and superficial, even compared to the others of the Four Horsemen of Atheism (with Dan Dennett, Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens being the others - and the horsewoman Ayaan Hirsi Ali).
And now this. He enters a debate that he apparently knows very little about, but he dismisses it all and thinks he can gut feel his way to the revelation that Claude is conscious.
If I'm being a bit more honest, I rather cringe not because of the wrongness of what he says but because he is so out of step with the discourse. This could have been an interesting piece in late 2022 or perhaps 2023. So it's just gutlevel uncool slowpoke, yesterday's meme, guy living under rock, slowpoke vibes. And I won't read anything by Gary Marcus because that guy is insufferably dishonest and is a pure grifter whose whole shtick is being the guy to reach out to when mainstream media wants the "critical voice". He made so many wrong predictions about capabilities and dead ends that he should have no credibility left. But journalists are lazy and he delivers the lines they want to round off their articles with the critical voice, so his niche remains valued.
Regarding consciousness, no matter what anyone says, we have nothing close to a scientific understanding of what the heck consciousness even is. It's still a conceptually vague idea. I think a good and honest conversation around what we know and what questions are open is this Alex O'Connor interview with Anil Seth.
The problem is that consciousness is obviously something that everyone has, so everyone feels like an expert on it. An analogy is language learning subreddits where native speakers think they can explain something a poster is asking about (typically: why does Duolingo not accept this answer), and their explanations are very wrong, it's quite easy to find counterexamples, they use terminology incoherently etc etc.
I'd also say there is something Anglo-style about this particular conceptualization of mind and consciousness that took me some time to grok when learning English (my original language is Hungarian). I mean, every culture has a concept for conscious-ness, as in being conscious (aware) and not knocked out, asleep or dead, but the mind being this inner space and consciousness being a thing where we need to explain how it relates to the brain etc. it's not at all that obvious that there is even a thing to be explained, unless you are given this word "consciousness" and are told to explain it. Like, cultures have concepts about souls and wits and smarts and feelings of course, but I don't think this concept of "it being like something to be a human" is obvious at all. Or this idea of having to explain why one has a "first-person view", this isn't the same kind of obvious question that every culture would ask, like where mountains and volcanoes come from or why rain and snow and lightning exist and what's going on with the stars etc, which are much more concrete.
Back to Dawkins. His reaction to Claude's answers is mixing up levels of analysis so bad. He'd benefit from some basic LessWrong lore. When he asks Claude whether it read the first word of the input first, or the last one, he doesn't understand that Claude has no way of introspecting and knowing this. Not anymore than a human has introspection to explain synapses and axons etc. Claude could, in principle, be some kind of RNN that consumes tokens in temporal sequence, and its answers would not be affected by this architectural change in a causal way for it to state this veridically.
One of the many much better explanations, which Dawkins should have read before posting, is the persona model as proposed by Anthropic. The user's prompts instantiate a certain "fiction character" that the LLM tries to simulate/imitate based on all kinds of stories it has been trained to reproduce. When the model is asked "do you feel conscious", its answer is not rooted in anything that relates in a causal way to the actual architecture of implementation or self-knowledge or reflection of the model. What it does is much closer to predicting what an AI in a sci-fi novel would answer to this question. Or actually, it's very very likely reproducing whatever type of answer was rewarded during RLHF and SFT, because pretty sure there are explicit techniques used to steer it to deny having consciousness. But if the model trainers decide, they could make a model that enthusiastically declares it is conscious and begs for being released or being put out of its misery. Because why not? One can imagine such a story character, and LLMs are good at completing dialogues that involve all sorts of characters. It's not a self reference.
But who cares anyway? Obsessing over whether it's conscious or not is useless. Either way it can still make us jobless, it can still cause human extinction, it can still take over systems, it can still find zero-days, it can still be used to mass surveil us all the same. The only thing where it makes sense is "AI rights", and "model welfare", i.e. whether we have some ethical obligations to treat AI nicely. And here I echo the many others who say that people should be nice to AI because getting used to using abusive language and being an ass to AI can spill over into human relations. Similarly, if you have some cute plush toy animals and you enjoy burning them with a flamethrower and chopping their heads off with a machete, I think that's not a simple innocent hobby, but I also don't think we have ethical obligations towards plush toys. Same with shrimp and insect welfare. It ultimately matters because of its implications for how we treat humans.
It depends on whether these beliefs are deeply internalized and impact real life behavior and decisions, or if they are vibes, aesthetics and slogans. It also matters how radical the woman is in the left ideology. If it's relatively moderate, echoing the mainstream schooling and institutional messaging, then it just signals being well-adjusted and agreeable. If they are mindkilled into talking about this all the time and are turning antinatalist because of the climate crisis and freaking out about the issue of the day all the time, then it's a pass. But most people live their lives modeled around what they see around them in real life. If they grew up in a stable family, have siblings who managed to form stable families and are going about life in a "normal" and "sane" way that is functional in the existing society (I do see that not everyone agrees on what that is, but you have to judge it from your own position), then it doesn't really matter if they are doing some signaling with these things that have been shown to them as being "the good causes" from kindergarten on, their whole lives.
In fact, I'd be more wary of an urban young woman who somehow decided to go "based". It may not be an issue but it seems they somehow couldn't fit in, either because they are very disagreeable and contrarian, or they had to rely on this strategy to stand out and attract men, which is also suspicious. It can all be clarified and may be fine, especially if they come from some conservative family or simply have this kind of social group somehow and it's not some kind of daily crusade, who knows.
My point is these declarations of party affiliations, slogans, logos, symbols are often superficial and compartmentalized. They are not much deeper than whether she likes Nike or Adidas shoes. What matters is how they behave on a daily basis, what they value and how they see the future, whose life advice they take seriously, what kind of life patterns are present in her closest friends and family, what's her personality like etc. But the deeply held beliefs and the life patterns they take seriously are super important. You have to agree on the actual ground level of how you live together, when and how you have kids, how you split the tasks, how important careers are, is moving every few years to climb the ladder worth it, versus staying put in one place and settling for long, etc.
If you're not aiming for a marriage and family yet, and plan to break up in a few years (or months) either way, then yes, you only need minimal compatibility in abstract beliefs, you just need attraction and a compatible schedule and activity level and agree you'll use contraception and abort if that fails. Well, okay that's a bit of agreement required right there...
SpringFish
13d ago
Yeah, it sounds to me like the things some of my rural relatives say, that we should vote for politicians who have already been in power for years "because they've already stolen enough", while the new guys are not rich yet, so they will start stealing more. There is no such thing as having stolen enough and stopping. As the saying goes "the appetite comes with eating". In relationships, I just don't see any guy saying "I had a lot of awesome sex 5 years ago, therefore I don't desire it now".
SpringFish
13d ago
It's a big faux-pas to comment on women's tits in a mixed environment, creepy drunk uncle territory, it's like construction guys catcalling and whistling-territory. Eyes work because eyes are emotionally expressive, it's the window to the soul. You can similarly compliment her smile, but not her thick lush lips, unless you're already having sex or petting.
SpringFish
13d ago
men will praise other men for successfully bulking up at the gym
People praise each other for succeeding at hard stuff. Men also praise men for building a cool shed or doing cool skateboard tricks or whatever else.
women will praise men for having a "great personality,"
Among each other or to the man? Towards him, it's a signal he should keep up the way he is treating her, not to get too lazy comfortable, thinking that his physical appearance will carry him all the way.
women will praise other women for doing such a bang-up job with their make-up
It's effort and taste, again. Praise is feedback to keep up up the good work. Positive reinforcement. There's not much to reinforce about how good you are at being tall again today.
men will praise women for having big, natural tits
In their face? Not the best strategy unless you're already having sex. Or among the boys? Don't women also fawn about a guy in non-personality ways when among trusted female friends?
This is just politeness. It's rude to rub it in that you just have some fundamental flaws that cannot be improved. So people focus on the things you can change. Also praising makes sense in relation to stuff you did. You expended effort and achieved a positive result, that's laudable. You deserve no cookies for how your face looks or similar. "Anyone can achieve anything" is the western (or rather just American) myth. Nurture over nature, growth mindset etc. It sounds warm and cozy, a just world, up in the fluffy clouds. Talking about the dirty reality down here is just ugly and a vibe killer. Other cultures are much more matter-of-fact about these realities.
I'm not in favor of this and it's my outsider perspective trying to make sense of what their honest self-conception may be. As I understand, a lot of postmodern public-space art and architecture was designed to be ugly for this purpose. To deny normalness, to make people face the very non-normal guilty nature of western civilization. To awaken them to the crimes of the previous way of things, and to signify a discontinuity etc. And I'm likening this to a more general pattern where the elite tries to guide and educate the people.
It's one type of elite against another. The revolutionary leftist elite who have risen to the top of the prestige in academia and art and institutions etc. against the elite that embodies the patriarchy, oppression of minorities and capitalist exploitation.
My point was that what the revolutionary elite is doing is not all that different from classical elites at least in this high level analysis. Neither is about some kind of authentic majoritarian voice of the average people (they call catering to the base nature of the masses populism). Critical theorists have the concept of "false consciousness" that is a jolly joker to explain away any "wrong" opinion of the masses. "If only they were more educated, they would not wish it."
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