aiislove
1mo ago
Ok, I'll write that essay.
Can I ask you why you're asking, btw? So that I can somewhat tailor my response to be relevant to anything specific you want to know. And where should I post the effort post? Here, the culture war thread, somewhere else?
Can you give me some topics you'd say you're knowledgable enough about that I might want to ask you about for your exchange? These could be as broad or specific as needed, just as an idea.
aiislove
1mo ago
I appreciate your engagement but I don't see how this answers my question and is also the sort of response I usually get when I ask it. I'm not asking why there aren't more competitors in our 2 party system, I'm asking why there aren't fewer. Why at some point one party doesn't just happen to take an objectively superior or more functional viewpoint, and becomes the dominant political theory that benefits everyone better, and proceeds to rule forever.
aiislove
1mo ago
Oh wow, this explanation does make a lot of sense but has some pretty grim implications for politics if true. The hot dog stand metaphor works when they're selling identical or fungible items, with identical signage/operation and so on. But if there is any difference, people will begin to prefer the slightly better one or the one that fits their needs slightly better. But the major thing that always got me the most confused about the resiliency of the two party situation is that political ideas and policies are not completely identical, or even really fungible, so at some point the underlying ideas and policies of the better team should win out. But since we've seen decades of this not the case it leads me to consider that, like @cjet79 implies below, there are fewer differences between the political parties than we're led to believe.
aiislove
1mo ago
How is it that America can be so evenly divided between just two political parties organically and this division persists over decades and decades?
I’ve asked this question a ton of different places to different people at different times and usually no one understands what I’m asking and no one’s ever given me a satisfactory answer so let me over explain what I am trying to ask:
I work in e-commerce (I sell stuff online.) The Pareto principle is always extremely visible in sales results. My top selling item will always outsell the next best selling item, usually by a factor of 2:1 or greater. This also persists over time. Occasionally I come up with a new item that overtakes the previous leader but if it is an evergreen item it will eventually sell so much that it also reaches the 2:1 ratio or better. Basically the most popular item will always win out over time.
I can imagine a business like a coffee shop, where they have like 10 different drinks. The coffee is the most popular item and then matcha and chai are the second and third most popular. The coffee shop could manipulate demand for the chai and matcha seasonally to nudge one more popular than the other. I can imagine being able to change the popularity of secondary tier items that way, but that’s a product of seller manipulation rather than organic customer demand.
Anyway the way party politics work seems like it would be even more difficult to nudge people from one party to the other. And parties are not just two different flavor drinks, they represent actual underlying philosophical choices and plans/theories of actions. How is it that the Pareto principle doesn’t take over and suddenly the majority of Americans agree that one of the parties is correct and now like 70 percent of Americans in all areas only vote for that party and the 30 percent that’s left only vote for the other one and the 70 percent are just left to rule forever? Aren’t there other democracies where things operate in this manner?
I am not insinuating manipulation or conspiracy but my mental model can imagine the even split over decades of a two party system upheld through manipulation but I can’t conceive of it as an organic process. If anyone can explain I’d love to hear it
aiislove
1mo ago
Yeah I made a post about him a few weeks ago he isn’t too popular on themotte
https://www.themotte.org/post/3413/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/393199?context=8#context
aiislove
2mo ago
In my specific case I already have to manually check each line at a certain point in my workflow so I just eyeball it as I go and there are very rarely things I have to remove. It definitely is more fast because having to brainstorm relevant keywords for every thing definitely takes more time than having the LLM generate them in an instant.
aiislove
3mo ago
I hate the 80s. I could make an entire effort post about this but I think the most terrible force that came out of the 80s was classism. The yuppie resulted in decades of insufferable arrogance and culminated in luxury beliefs that ripped apart the cohesion of American society. The 70s and prior decades showed a respect for rural and non-fashionable people that was completely thrown out in the 80s, at the exact moment that women fried their hair and wore the trashiest clothing of the century. The 80s invented the idea that Americans don't have to respect poor people, which I guess we can either pin on Reaganism or liberal yuppies, but the Michelle Obama-Hillary Clinton-notorious RBG people really, really liked it and took it to excruciating heights in the 2010s.
aiislove
4mo ago
Yeah, I find that opinion gross and evil and degrading to the average person to the extent that I don't understand where it comes from. The people they're imagining will do poorly without a job are frankly mostly already living without a job, and have done badly in school, which was difficult for them to begin with. Anyone who is doing fine with a job already will do fine without a job too.
aiislove
4mo ago
I would recommend going to google's gemini, explaining what you want changed, and paste in the entire column of dates that you want to be changed. Ask for it to give you the results in a spreadsheet format. If it doesn't do the spreadsheet format right just ask for it in plain text with everything on a new row to copy paste. How many lines of data do you need to clean up? The more data you feed it the more chance for error. I would start with a smaller number (maybe 500 or less) to begin with, you may have to feed it a few times if you have like 10,000 rows or whatever.
You'd think it would be better to upload the spreadsheet and ask it to edit the spreadsheet how you want but in my experience the more extraneous data you feed it the more likely it is to mess up. Just doing it in the chat box window keeps it simple enough that it won't usually skip rows or get confused. You may have to explain the "very non-standard date formatting" in the worst case but it can probably figure it out on its own.
aiislove
4mo ago
Yes it's a bit disjointed and sloppy but I still can glean some interesting insights from it. His concepts aren't completely disjointed but a bit meandering imo.
mentioned a few times (including here iirc)
I did a search for his name as well as "Predictive History" and there were no hits, I lurk extensively here and never saw him mentioned at the motte
aiislove
4mo ago
Recently my YouTube algorithm has been taken over by videos featuring Professor Jiang Xueqin. His own channel is called Predictive History but I’ve also watched him talk on other channels. I find his work and theories very interesting, he is a creative person with very heterodox views on the present and world history. He reminds me a lot of Rudyard Lynch (the Whatifhalthist guy) in that they both have creative approaches to history and the present day. I suspect Xueqin is familiar with Lynch’s channel as they are so similar and both reference Peter Turchin’s theory of elite overproduction, the rat/mouse utopia experiments of John B. Calhoun, and have similar views of modernity and modern society.
Xueqin recently ended a 28 part series on his youtube channel titled “Secret History” which is a class he taught (I believe to students in Beijing) which culminates in his theory which he calls Pax Judaica. He uses this term to basically refer to the Zionist project, directed by Zionist Jews inside and outside of Israel, along with Zionist Christians, and secret societies, which are all advocating for war to bring about the Judeo-Christian end times (or something like that.) It’s a complicated theory (that series alone is over 30 hours) but he paints a pretty compelling picture by the end. I am not personally very interested in Jews or Christians but the thought that millennia old religions can sway geopolitics to this degree today irritates me as someone who is basically philosophically an atheist and doesn’t want to be involved in wars of religion in the 2020s or the rest of my life for that matter.
He is not entirely antisemitic, as he also claims that much of the zionist project will face opposition from the Jewish people as well.
He predicts the imminent collapse of the American empire followed by the rise of Pax Judiaca, reinforced by Israeli invented general AI which will be backed by a global surveillance system based in Israel.
I can’t quite place him on the right-left spectrum. My instincts tell me that he is very aware of right wing thinking. There is a video I saw of him where he claims to be “a pretty liberal guy” though I don’t know if he means he’s a “classical liberal” or is making this claim to appeal to left leaning people or if he earnestly believes he is a leftist. I listen to so few people on the left at this point that I suspect he is not really a leftist but it’s possible that the sort of center left has so quickly found itself incorrect in so many ways that it’s sliding into the space of theoretical uncertainty that as recently as a few years ago only the right was willing to explore. Regardless of his own view of his work I think it is unique enough to stand on its own and be examined and taken seriously from either perspective.
At the same time his ideas and views tick every single “conspiracy theorist” trope that we’re trained to identify, to the degree that I’m surprised he’s being pushed by an algorithm as mainstream as YouTube to me. I don’t think his work is so esoteric that he is just eliding censorship, as he has taught high schoolers and I think the language and theories he presents are digestible enough that high schoolers could understand it. It makes me question the narrative that algorithms have a left wing bias and that dissident voices are difficult to find.
If I had to criticize his work I’d say his dismissal of various things is a bit short sighted. He outright dismisses Darwinism and the theory of evolution, something that I find extremely illuminating and one of the few broad scientific theories that reveal and explain rather than obfuscate human nature as well as the broader natural world. That he dismisses it so casually is very revealing to me and points to some discomfort within him with the implications rather than a scientifically reasoned rejection of the theory. He dismisses other things similarly and seemingly randomly, like Freud’s Oedipal complex, while embracing any vague illuminati theory seemingly without evidence, specifics, or rigor.
Anyway, I’m curious to know if anyone else here has engaged with his videos or work, if they have any response to his Pax Judaica concept, or had any other broader response to creative/unorthodox theorists breaking through to normie spaces via algorithm or an apparent lack of censorship that is often framed as ubiquitous.
aiislove
4mo ago
Maybe tangential (and I apologize if this is not a direct response to you and may be more relevant a response to 2rafa's similar post below) but I think the largest innovation of LLM's that no one seems to really grasp or state explicitly is the speed of response of these models. It is not just that they can do some of your work, it is that they can do some of your work in seconds. I am self employed and work in ecommerce, and thanks to LLMs I can generate thousands of listings' worth of relevant keywords in plain English with great SEO in seconds. This work would have taken hours and hours of time to do it in the past, which does not mean I used to spend hours and hours doing it, it meant that I would come up with a solution that was much faster but much less effective than what I can do now. As a one-man show my work is significantly easier and faster than it was before LLM's. I am reaping the rewards of it every day. I am someone who has only worked one internship and spent about a year doing freelance work in my life, otherwise I have always been self employed. I feel so little empathy toward people whose entire careers have been working for someone else and who suddenly feel betrayed by their employers or afraid of being fired. You relied on others your entire life, and along comes the single greatest invention for self empowerment in centuries and instead of empowering yourself, utilizing the new powers of instant text generation trained on the knowledge of everyone ever, you worry about being replaced. Well, if you lack the self direction and discipline to harness new technologies then I just can't relate.
Similarly I don't understand the concern about people "not having anything to do" if they are on UBI. I work, actively, at a computer for about an hour a week, on average, and earn all of my money passively through that. I have never been bored and find plenty of meaning in my life. I have great faith that everyone else can - and frankly, should - live life in a similar way that I do. I spend much of my time traveling and thinking about philosophy and creating/designing when I am in the mood. I devote a huge amount of my time and energy to food and sex and relationships, but so do people who work full time jobs. I have never really accepted or bought into the mainstream modernist mode of work/life balance, see it as an abuse of power that I wouldn't accept for myself, and don't understand people who do- or these same people who fear its end.
aiislove
5mo ago
Yes I decided to just trim a tiny bit of my portfolio to pump my cash a little bit (I’m fine with about 8% of my portfolio in cash earning 3.5% interest as a very safe segment of my wealth even as I see cash as a pretty bad investment generally but I can’t stomach being 100% out of cash either.)
I am still squeamish about the market and the AI bubble as well as the commercial housing market but I am humble enough not to try to time the market and at my age I can just wait out any downturn or crash that isn’t completely apocalyptic
aiislove
5mo ago
Hahaha, oh no, I’m nowhere near three fingers level mastery at Japanese or French culture, I probably couldn’t even pass as a New Yorker or a Southerner, as a midwesterner myself. I mean, mastery of a culture to the degree that you avoid the three fingers incident in Inglorious Basterds is nearly impossible, which is the biggest takeaway of that scene for me anyway
aiislove
5mo ago
Ehhhhhh. I am a digital nomad, from the US and have spent more than half of the past 3 years in either (non-anglophone) Europe or Asia, and really all you need to know today is English.
I speak pretty good German and Spanish, my French and Japanese are ok enough for tourist purposes. Every educated person in Germany and Austria speaks perfect English, the only use I get out of my German is speaking to Turks in Germany and Hungarians/Eastern Europeans, Romanians and Turks in Austria. Spanish is more useful in Spain and probably requisite in central/South America (barring Brazil and a few outliers) but admittedly I haven’t been there so I don’t know. In France you are expected to speak French and English ability is associated with upper classes- so people will be embarrassed if you expect them to speak English, but in response to your point being that French is necessary for important badassery, in my experience anyone important enough in France and broader Europe already speaks English.
In Asia it’s even less required to speak a local language. In most of Asia they will be surprised if you do. Japanese don’t go to Korea and speak Korean, or Japanese, they speak English. Koreans don’t go to Japan and speak Japanese or Korean they speak English. And so on and so forth.
As an aside, a little while ago I was thinking, oh it would be so useful to have a watch that displayed live translations of whatever audio was in my environment or people I was speaking to in English. Then I saw a piece in I think the WSJ saying the new AirPods can translate/interpret people speaking to you in foreign languages. I thought that was cool and useful though I worry most people you speak with will still think you’re being rude for speaking to them with headphones in, plus it won’t talk to them in their language so I think the watch visual interface solution would be better. I also worry about the barrier to integration of cultures being too low. Now every immigrant with $120 (or whatever AirPods cost) can get translation of whatever language they want, giving them an asymmetric advantage over people who aren’t using the technology.
aiislove
6mo ago
I think that "hard status" is a terrible name for that axis. "physical status" and "body-inferred status" might be better.
I had a really hard time naming the two axes. First I had "male power" and "female power" but it became so conflated when I began to imagine two different charts. Then I thought of calling "hard status" "power" and "soft status" "status" but it wasn't exactly right either. I kept changing it, ended up with "hard status" and "soft status" and thought it worked well enough to illustrate the point and just went with it.
And social status is obviously contingent on the society you are considering. Plenty of cultures value Mohammed a lot more than Buddha.
I said as much in another comment here, I wasn't really claiming and omniscient point of view in my ranking, things are highly subjective in general even as I try to disentangle something universal
aiislove
6mo ago
Oooooooh this comment is so far away from my personal suspicions and understanding of things that I'm fascinated to see it written out like this. Apparently you are anti blank slatism and I am very anti blank slate as well but we seem to have completely opposite assumptions and terminal end goals in this.
the blank slate progressive is influenced to believe in the superiority of African Americans.
I don't see this at all. In my views, blank slate progressives are the ones who absolutely prioritize the "Soft Status" of my original theory over any kind of hard status. They are first conditioned not to notice ANY physical advantages of black people over whites, and this only strengthens their conviction that the poor blacks are ONLY victims in ANY circumstance because they do worse in every single category of soft status that they (the progressives) value- test scores, iq tests, academic achievement, wage payments, career advancement, you name it. This is what gives the progressive stack its power- to paint the minorities as the eternal victim. Instead what I propose is that black people have their own strengths, which are not the strengths of the PMC class, and that this is actually completely dignified on its own terms, and to try to prop up the academic achievements of a people not predisposed to these strengths is firstly humiliating toward black people, secondarily dehumanizing toward them, thirdly a waste of time, and fourthly demeaning to the rest of humanity as well. Indeed the arrogance of the white progressive that it takes to even imagine doing this makes me queazy and begin to imagine them all as Icarus circling ever closer toward the sun without an ounce of suspicion that their wings are about to melt.
An internalized ideology of genetic blank-slatism will always lead to an intuitively-held belief in the inferiority of Whites, who are historically evil
This doesn't make sense at all to me... If you believe in blank slate you believe that whites are exactly the same as blacks. On the other hand I believe white people, and indeed Asian people, intuitively hold the belief in their inferiority when they find themselves as victims of black crime or feel anxiety when black people are around, because they are bigger scarier and more aggressive etc than smaller weaker people. My family has lived in the midwest for generations and the ones who kept living in increasingly black areas were buying more and more guns and becoming increasingly paranoid of black crime because they lived with its effects every day, meanwhile my family members who have moved out of those areas simply don't live with that fear and paranoia to the same degree.
So, that variety of white progressive who loves hip hop and considers Blacks oppressed is all but forced to consider his own group inherently inferior
I can imagine becoming this person only if I was absolutely positive that my group (whites) was superior to black people. If there was a 1000000% superior race out there and I was running around telling people how much I loved them, that would be so crazy. If there was a group that I saw as inferior and I ran around telling people how much I loved them, I would be getting so many brownie points from everybody. Which describes progressivism more accurately? I think white progressives only hold their beliefs out of a deep sense of arrogance and certainty in their own superiority, and of the inferiority of blacks. Anything that would truly point to an axis of power that holds blacks as more powerful (say in sports achievement) can only shake the foundations of the progressive worldview. They need to have a perpetual victim.
This worldview can only be corrected with the science of genetics and the belief in the superiority of civilization.
That worldview can only be corrected with more real world experience, acceptance of nature, respect for humanity and differences, and less ridiculous hubris, rather than a thin veneer of science and shallow morals that teach us something outside the realm of physical experience and history.
aiislove
6mo ago
My rankings are subjective and I'm not married to any of them. If we all filled out the chart with the same people we'd probably all have everybody in (slightly to wildly) different positions, especially considering different people move throughout their lives and as others pointed out can depend on the situation or social surroundings.
Also, come on. Is Ellen really more powerful than Oprah? No one thinks that.
I think that, if I was serving them in some context I'd probably give creepy Ellen whatever she wanted while I'd be inclined to openly roll my eyes in Oprah's face. I think Ellen commands more respect than Oprah based mostly on their vibes and appearances. Oprah seems more haughty and irritating while Ellen seems like she'd keep the interaction on a more professional level which translates to more soft power.
aiislove
6mo ago
Lots of women have the same thing going on - they may want to be rich, clever, happily married etc. but in the moment they are far more emotionally validated by evidence that they are hot.
Are you sure about this? Do any women on this site want to share their experiences? I genuinely don't know if women think this way, because if I swap the genders it seems 100% true but I suspect women are less obsessed with being hot than men are, and are happier with soft status qualities like wealth, cleverness and happiness in marriage and so on. Personally as a man I don't really care about the secondary soft status I just want to be hot and loved for my intrinsic qualities rather than any sort of skill, virtue or prowess
aiislove
6mo ago
Ah, yes, I just skimmed this page but it seems like this is very much what I was trying to describe. I was wondering if anyone else had teased it out before, I'll look into this. Thank you
aiislove
6mo ago
I am not married to the quadrant names, I had considered Barbarian for that quadrant but thought the term was more politically charged than Caveman which is more politically neutral so I went with that one
aiislove
6mo ago
Oops, I meant Charles III. My bad
Not all starlets migrate that way, I even said that Britney went from Princess to Whore and is either at Whore or Hag. Anyone can go any way on the chart depending on the way they move in terms of hard and soft power, it's just easier and more common for people to follow a certain path, because of age and experiences that lead to a certain direction of progression. You could say it is "the same status" in the sense that they are on the chart in the same way or you could say it is "not the same status" in the sense that it is different qualities leading to different positions in different times of their life etc.
Thanks, I'll delete and repost in 7 hours.
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