atomised
1yr ago
Laying out an array of controversial opinions and then inviting other people to discuss questions which are only coherent if one a priori regards those opinions as true is absolutely a form of consensus-building. It's not as explicit as saying 'we all agree that...', but it's equivalently powerful, because it still essentially obliges the subsequent discussion thread to conform ideologically to the root comment, lest the whole debate lose its consistency. The question 'Did Poland really need money so badly that it had to join the EU?', and any responses to it, are trivially incoherent unless you assume that the EU is an inherently malignant entity.
In fact, this form of consensus building is more potent than the syntactically explicit form ('we all agree that...'), since though it is equally able to enforce conformity among respondents, one cannot as easily demonstrate with a quotation the manner in which debate is being ring-fenced.
atomised
1yr ago
This is really bugging me and I think someone here will know: I'm trying to find an article, I think written by one of the Scotts, which mentioned the existence of an obscure monk who invented the concept of algorithmic runtime complexity in the 1900s and was completely ignored for being way too far ahead of his time. Can anyone link me to it?
atomised
1yr ago
On the radio last night they mentioned she had a distinctively Roman accent. Is Rome perceived as a southern or northern city, or is it indeed viewed as its own distinct thing? If the latter, could this aid her efforts to be a unifying figure?
atomised
1yr ago
Yeah, it's the part of the law I have the most problem with. I've nearly done myself serious damage a couple of times (ab)using non-locking knives.
atomised
1yr ago
I don't think GMO is bad, but I think there are some principled reasons to be opposed to it. You know how tomatoes are worse than they used to be because they optimised for redness? I feel like GMO makes that sort of trap easier to fall into.
atomised
1yr ago
Mainstream news media takes its foreign policy cues from the Government as a matter of state cohesion and security. If you want to call that a psyop then fine, but it's also the way the world has worked for centuries.
atomised
1yr ago
If you're a Tory/voted Leave/support Brexit, swipe left
It's baffling to me that this is common in the Rep. of Ireland. Unless you live really near the border, I'm not sure who they're even talking about... Brits on holiday? Or have 'Tory / Brexit voter' somehow come to serve as political categories in a general sense, in a country where (by their literal definitions) virtually no-one is actually either of those things? In which case, why are these imported terms being used instead of indigenous labels ('If you're a Fine Gael voter, swipe left')? Very odd.
atomised
1yr ago
British student debt, which is owed to the government and not private creditors, is unlike virtually any other form of consumer debt. You are only required to make payments towards it if you earn above a certain threshold, and the minimum annual payment is defined as a percentage of earnings above that level: essentially, it functions as a marginal tax. Student debt is not a hugely significant drag factor on middle class quality of life in the UK in the same way it seems to be in America.
atomised
1yr ago
A virus that predominantly kills people who are five pension cheques from the grave hardly seems worth the effort to me.
I think the null hypothesis for all discussions relating to media preferences should be stated explicitly: you form your media taste when young from a variety of sources (included but not limited to critics), and then retain them for the rest of your life, slowly become more-and-more alienated by contemporary media and criticism. It's not your fault, it's not their fault, it's just the natural way of things.
atomised
1yr ago
Even if we assume the high-end of your range, and say that for the foreseeable future training a near-state-of-the-art deep learning model from scratch will cost around half a million dollars, that's still cheap enough to be considered fairly democratic. A lot of people and organisations have that sort of money, many of which exist outside of the Cathedral. And as you say, you can do a lot by tuning an existing model, which is feasible for hobbyists.
atomised
1yr ago
You shouldn't feel bad about not caring much about the politics of a country on the other side of the world from you, and whose political system you don't understand. But you would do well to not embarrass yourself by publically rolling around in your own ignorance.
atomised
1yr ago
I'm not totally sure what you mean by the 'red pill' in this context but I will try and answer. I do not see orthodox 'Third Positionism' coming back into vogue: besides the stain of historical association, it is anachronistic - politics from an age when modernity was symbolised by screaming-fast newspaper presses and the broadcast tower at Alexandra Palace.
American right wingers don't even know what socialism is for the most part so it's barely worth listening to their opinions. However it is true that far-right parties have always been, let's say, undogmatic about economics. They just don't find it interesting. They care only about power: power over people, power over institutions.
atomised
1yr ago
I sympathise with your frustration: I note only that the reason the poster above you is doing that is because there is a sort of de-facto standard system of abbreviations for political parties in Sweden, under which Sweden Democrats are referred to as SD (and the Social Democrats as S, if you're curious).
atomised
1yr ago
Let's be clear here: pocket knives are legal to carry in the UK, at any time, without any specific reason. I carry one myself, for such varied uses as cutting sticks for cricket stumps and opening mayo packets at Weatherspoons. The catch is that such knives must be no longer than three inches and must not lock. For day-to-day usage, this is perfectly sufficient, and if you need anything more heavy-duty it's likely that you're camping or otherwise obviously engaged in outdoorsmanship, which is a problem that solves itself since such activities would count as a valid justification were you to be stopped by a policeman.
I'm not sure how I feel about the UK's knife laws personally, but they do often get misrepresented, and their nuance is not often fully considered.
atomised
1yr ago
some of the culture war fights have sapped a decent amount of people of what I would call life energy
I accept that this may have happened to some, but I doubt it is significant on a population level. The proportion of people who are genuinely 'in the trenches' of the culture wars is not very high. The vast majority of people are either passive consumers of a propaganda outlet of their choice or otherwise are completely grillpilled and let this stuff pass them right by.
atomised
1yr ago
But I think that they're a bit similar to latent diffusion models: they are more efficient, due to compressing the trappings of a social network into a lower-dimensionality space
Isn't this a property of autoencoders in general and not just diffusion models? Nice analogy though. I think the question of 'why are imageboards so powerful' is pretty fascinating. It's remarkable their reach; I was on facebook the other day for one of those annoying things that can only be done on facebook, and was recommended a page, the title of which was in the format of the "For me, it's X" meme, which I'm quite sure was a 4chan invention. It's a well-known trope that 4chan is the petri dish from whence memes spring, and yet even so I think normies would be surprised if they really knew how much of their culture and idiom was concocted in such a tiny corner of the internet.
This is not really an argument, this is just a list of things you dislike.
It's funny to me when people say that the left can't meme. In one sense I get it: the edginess and nihilism that characterises imageboard meme culture is mostly not compatible enough with progressivism for them to create something like the soyjak. And yet, consider that the 'tolerance of tolerance paradox' went from being an obscure philosophical musing to an almost globally enforced rule of the internet in less than a decade. In memetic warfare terms, that's a victory on the scale of desert storm. A similar argument applies to 'stating ones pronouns' and 'the power plus prejudice definition of racism'. These might not be memes in the same way soyjak is a meme, but they are memetic ideas nonetheless and they have won big time.
P.S. There are a few good leftist memes in a format recognisable to the average reactionary shitposter. 'le pol face' is probably the best example.
P.P.S. All souffles collapse, even expertly made ones.
atomised
1yr ago
largest breach in American-German trust since the NSA spying debacle last decade
I would feel fairly comfortable in saying that it would be larger than that. Spying won't win you friends, but it's been a tacit axiom of geopolitics since the founding of Jericho that everyone spies on everyone. Damaging critical (not to mention obscenely expensive) national infrastructure, however? Wars have started over much less.
If this is Biden's doing I commend him for his pluck. I have my problems with NATO, but Ostpolitik really should've died with the USSR. There is nothing redeeming about Putin's Russia.
atomised
1yr ago
Many people say this, and you probably won't believe it because I didn't either, but until you get a pocket knife you don't realise how useful they are. They allow you to solve problems that beforehand it wouldn't have occurred to you to use a knife to solve.
Interesting post, much of this mirrors my thinking in the last few days. The members of this grim little cabal are rationalists in the first degree, each one of them a type specimen. And though they claimed to be effective altruists - and would have been proudly lauded as such up until two weeks ago - it turns out they're degenerate gamblers and crooks whose amoral recklessness has hurt millions of people. It is statistically nearly certain that some victims of FTX will kill themselves, if they haven't done so already.
You can't delegate morality to mathematics. All it leads to is arrogance, and the 'freedom' to always be able to justify your own behaviour to yourself, even when your actions are those of a base criminal. Rationalism is not a wholly failed project; effective altruism is an important and useful dogma - but these ideas must be alloyed with traditional morality to be effective at inducing virtue.
atomised
1yr ago
I share your intuitive revulsion to state-sanctioned suicide of a physically healthy young person. Yet doesn't euthanasia, at least for the non-paraplegic, require you to drink the latter-day hemlock yourself? In which case, does this not require an approximately similar amount of courage as downing a pint of vodka and swallowing a handful of barbiturates? And yet the latter would be acceptable to you, simply because it is not done with the sanction of the healthcare system? I am not sure the difference is truly as great as you profess.
The fact that it is the predominant economic paradigm in America, with the consequence that it has many adherents within the Democratic party, does not make trickle-down neoliberalism a 'leftist political philosophy'. You would be laughed out of every economics faculty in existence if you claimed such a thing.
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