faceh
29d ago
Yes, I'm making this precise point.
If becoming decent at a given skill set or activity won't win you many status points, what's the motivation to keep doing it aside from autistic fixation?
faceh
29d ago
One thing that is handy about having the weekly threads so self-contained, at least you can reach the actual end of it, there's no infinite algorithm.
faceh
29d ago
Yeah.
I often start off a post intending to just make a quick, lowish-effort reply, then find myself drafting a mini-essay just so I can fully justify the point I'm making.
Effort feels like it is rewarded because people will usually respond with similar effort rather than just troll or dismiss you with a joke.
faceh
29d ago
That's one of the reasons I prefer using TheMotte in general vs. most other sites. Aside from the Quokka popup, it doesn't actively try to drag out your time spent on the site, or use dark patterns to keep you engaged.
And of course it isn't centered around ragebait or fueled by whomever can get the most replies and attention (some might disagree).
The "Attention Economy" is just BRUTAL, b/c it really is an utterly zero-sum game (you can't produce 'more attention' very easily, only reapportion the amount that currently exists), and thus there is strong incentive to try to drag attention out of people even when it is objectively unhealthy.
"Of course I can watch one more episode, Netflix, how thoughtful of you to queue it right up!" (looks up 3 episodes later to see the clock says "1:38 a.m.")
No, fuck off. Give me the app that values my attention approximately as much as I do, and will actively start discouraging me from expending it too much in one place. "Here, you have time for precisely one (1) episode of Tulsa King, then we're cutting you off. I've already set the lights in the room to dim slowly, and your favorite ambient sleep noises are cued up as soon as you get into the bed."
Especially with martial arts, once I no longer had anything to prove to myself that I could do it, I just wasn't feeling it anymore.
Similar for me, but I swapped over to teaching it to others, which is quite rewarding on its own.
And you could always try some amateur fights if you want to challenge yourself (at the risk of injury).
But woodworking, at least for now, is fantastic.
3D printing is giving me a portion of this satisfaction of making something 'from scratch' and having a finished product at the end you can take pride in.
But so far that's mostly for trinkets and trivialities.
I dream of having a sizeable enclosed workspace on my property to tinker with cars and wood and produce fairly complex devices and objects. I am become Boomer, acquirer of hobbies.
I suspect gamification has spoiled our brains to expect more rewards for fake task than they deserve.
I think my only point there is that you're going to encounter the gamified stimuli anyway (unless you are VERY actively avoiding it), and it thus behooves you to let the 'good' stuff grab your attention (and money) or else something wasteful and trivial might, instead.
For instance: I do have Duolingo on my phone and I consider it a better use of my time than, say, Candy Crush or the bazillion basebuilding game clones out there, so its like, I dunno, substituting nicotine gum for actual cigarettes. I rage every time my phone updates and it auto-installs a bunch of the little ADHD time-suck apps on there that I have to remove manually.
And I can also say that there is zero chance I'll ever get 'bored' or feel 'satiated' with having sex with women, but that has run into the endless frustration that is modern dating that I bemoan elsewhere. I'm tempted to start setting aside a 'prostitute budget' for myself if I go another year or two without getting into a relationship, but I damn well know what its like to be intimate with someone you truly know and care about, and cares about you in return, so I don't think I can be truly happy just paying for it.
All these basic activities turn out to be the most fulfilling on a primal level, whoda thunk? (lots of people, it turns out, the modern world just wants to keep you distracted with candy and trinkets).
Funny enough, this was my second impulse after I tested its capabilities.
I have an account with the list/organization app "Remember the Milk," and it has a web interface, it is very handy.
I should be able to get GPT Agent to enter list items, and sublist items, and relevant notes, as part of relatively simple prompts.
"Book me a haircut this Sunday" should lead to reserving the appointment at my preferred barbershop, adding the haircut to my to-do list with the start time set for the appointment time, and adding a reminder enough time in advance for me to drive over, and setting aside the approximate amount of time it should take to get the hair cut.
And more generalized stuff, as you say. "Add a reminder to cook [specialized dish] tomorrow evening, find a highly rated recipe, and make a list of all relevant ingredients, and prepare a pickup order for those groceries from the nearest Aldi." Then I can just remove the items I already have, submit and pick up the order.
And if I can get this thing to take over the more arduous steps of planning events with friends, I'd be ecstatic.
If Full Self-driving cars are actually solved now, we're getting very close to a point where I can do this entire operation without once seeing or interacting with a real person. Terrifying, but also very appealing.
Oh, and if ChatGPT adds on digital avatars like Grok (plz no), we can ask our digital waifus to do this stuff for us. Very Trad.
FU
TU
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faceh
29d ago
Not quite directly related, but I can say this is how I feel about with my workload these days.
I've been doing this long enough that most of the actual work I have to do is involved, requires concentration, and it can take like 10-15 minutes just to load up all the information and context I need to start to produce a work product. I've got enough experience that I handle any basic inquiries or tasks in like a minute or two, but I want to handle the work that I can really dig into.
Which requires uninterrupted thought. I can't delegate this work, by and large.
I can set aside time on my calendar to do these tasks, but if I 'only' block off 30 minutes, that's barely enough to make meaningful progress, since I get everything up and running and then I can only 'work' for like 15 minutes at at time.
I can block off more time but at that point I'm guaranteed to get interruptions before long and get pulled off task to something else while I'm "in the zone" which ruins the whole effect.
I could set aside time outside of work hours to do it, but by the time I'm home, this feels like such a massive intrusion I generally won't even try unless i have a real looming deadline.
Honestly, I'd really rather be practicing Spanish, or learning how to pilot airplanes, or pick up an instrument or two. But my mental work is most valuable (in terms of how much I get paid) doing this stuff.
Unless someone can gamify it to some extent, lay out an extremely clear path for progression, with periodic rewards and a well-defined end-goal, and some mechanism for accountability, then I'm just less likely to commit to it fully, since I'd have to use discipline to establish a habit and overcome the initial unpleasantness. But so many side activities seem pretty pointless to engage with if they aren't going to drastically increase your status or wealth, even if the skill itself is handy on its own terms.
In part, because everyone is ranked against everyone else, and you know full well you'll never enter the top 10% in most activities, let alone the top 1%, and being the best Xylophonist in your town is no longer sufficient to win social points.
faceh
29d ago
I finally got around to using ChatGPT Agent and it is actually, finally, tingling my "this thing has reasoning and problem-solving capacity and might actually be sentient" senses.
Used it for creating a delivery/pickup order from the Sam's Club website. It hunted down the items, navigated challenges that I intentionally threw up for it, and successfully completed the task I gave it, with very minimal prompting to get it there.
Yet another "Future Shock" moment for me, which is happening every two months nowadays. My benchmark is very, very close to being met.
Anyhow: Anyone have any ideas for some non-mundane, but also non-illegal and non-dangerous ways to make use of a slow but reliable personal assistant that can navigate the internet?"
faceh
29d ago
"Mom Jeans" seem to have come back in fashion HARD.
But as you note they're often paired with a top that is either barely-there or is designed for maximum emphasis of the body's traits.
faceh
30d ago
No real disagreement from me.
I just think people who do pull these shenanigans will blow themselves up more often than not, for want of knowing when to stop/being able to stop.
I want to identify such folks and be far enough away that the explosion doesn't catch me.
faceh
1mo ago
Yep. Once I read about the Analog Hole I realized that there is no possible scheme of DRM, access control, or privacy measures that can ensure anything you transmit digitally will be kept 'secret.'
Encryption gets you something resembling 'privacy' in the data being transmitted, but you CANNOT control what the end user does with it, and they can record and expose it at will if they're malicious in the slightest.
Combine that with dirt-cheap storage and its best to assume that most of your digital communications could resurface at any time. I try to hammer it into my legal assistants' heads: Don't put anything in an e-mail or chat message if you wouldn't want it to be read out loud in Court in front of a Judge later.
Attorney-client privilege is powerful but not invincible.
This gets REALLY interesting when discussing cryptocurrency and private keys.
We could do the discussion of voyeurism vs. exhibitionism and the "reasonable expectation of privacy" if that illuminated the issue more. I've actually got a claim to real expertise on such matters. Its almost beside the point, to me, though.
A year and a half ago I was 'forced' to learn that there are Congressional staffers who will film themselves having gay sex in the hallowed halls of the Senate. Assuming all involved consented to it, including the recording of the act, whatever, its not the most immoral thing done in that building by a long shot.
But can we agree it displays bad judgment? Disrespect? A lack of concern for others who might prefer not to stumble upon that sort of thing while just going about their day?
Granting that someone doing risky public sex is an even larger red flag, I can pass similar judgment on someone livestreaming sex acts to an anonymous audience. Don't do that unless you EXPECT it to possibly be recorded and possibly republished. You're not a 'victim' in the most stringent sense if someone takes a recording here and passes it around.
Maybe it makes me a prude (I'm not, I've pushed these sorts of boundaries before, but I also knew the precise definition of public indecency. so I could mitigate the legal risks.) but the type of person who does this stuff openly and often enough to get 'caught' is displaying a disregard for risks that probably hints at sociopathy. At least in the same way that a person who routinely drives 15 mph over the posted speed limit or hops on the shoulder of the road to dodge traffic is being anti-social. And filming the act is just compounding it.
Even if the rules are stupid or a bit arbitrary, the person who flouts them is still defecting in a way that makes them, to me, inherently less trustworthy, especially in positions of 'power' or authority.
Civilization is a game that only keeps going if people don't defect too often. And we certainly don't want to reward the defectors once the defection comes to light.
Easy to say that, but no indication they'd do anything but turn into the same general politician type we've been dealing with.
I mean, be completely honest:
If you had two couples, both of whom generally supported the same policies, and had similar status and their lives appeared comparable... but one couple was known to have livestreamed themselves banging a few times (and there are recordings), and the other couple we're pretty sure hasn't done that...
Which would you actually vote for if given the choice?
If you want the porny couple, WHY? What value does that add?
faceh
1mo ago
Yeah, I will say they might literally be the ONLY exchange I know of that was fully expecting, well in advance, the need to navigate regulatory environments and fight off attempts by regulators to bully them, and the plan was more than "ignore it until they're kicking the door in to serve a warrant."
I was in early enough to see what happened to Mt.Gox, so my choice of exchange way back then was very carefully reasoned, and Coinbase seemed like the only one that wasn't grown from tainted seeds (i.e. drugs, gambling, or money laundering).
Would make very little sense to chase 100x gains whilst ignoring the 20-30% chance of your preferred exchange getting fined or sued into oblivion or crashing due to incompetent leadership.
Kraken has been alright to me as well.
faceh
1mo ago
They had assets on the book worth more than their market cap
I'm sure FTX also had assets 'on the books' large enough to cover all their liabilities and even lawsuit/regulatory risk if they got targetted.
But the books were cooked, which is seemingly a common factor in crypto exchanges, with insider trading and light fraud showing up with some regularity. Ironically given that one use of crypto is keeping all books open for easy scrutiny at all times.
Mostly joking. Coinbase is, I think, the longest running American Crypto Exchange and has weathered several storms so I'd not be the one betting against them. I've had an account with them since they used to hold private keys printed on physical paper stored in physical lockboxes. But there was definitely a period of time around and after the IPO where it wasn't clear if the Gov't was going to really crack down on exchanges or liberalize the rules.
We're clearly in the liberalizing timeline.
faceh
1mo ago
I think this betrays that the line you're trying to draw isn't really sharp.
I can make it sharper, but I'm not really painting with a moral brush here.
I'm trying to reason about the type of person that's going to be wielding governmental authority and whether they are going to do a better job than the others I might be able to choose.
Why?
Because it correlates with precisely zero of the skills/personality traits I would want to see in a legislative representative or public official.
And likely correlates with beliefs/personality traits I would distinctly not want in a representative or official.
Simply put: You cannot POSSIBLY convince me that they're the best alternative for the job at hand.
And to once again put my preferences out there: I'd generally want my officials to be Married with kids (i.e., a stake in the future), own some property in the area they're representing (i.e. have some skin in the game for the wellbeing of their local area), not be in large amounts of personal debt, and not be prone to making, call them 'self-destructive' decisions (hard drug abuse, highly risky behaviors with limited upside, wanton and regular gambling, and really weird sexual activity, even if you keep it within the confines of the law).
Basically, Hunter Biden is NOT someone I want representing me or having any sway over my life. I was endlessly annoyed to learn that he might be influencing decisions during Joe's term.
Publishing porn of themselves is actually decent evidence that they don't meet my preferred criteria. So my Bayesian updates are going to require some SERIOUS evidence in the other direction to conclude that they're the most suitable person among the candidates.
And there's also this little gem in the article:
“I could barely get up off the floor for about two weeks,” she said, adding that anyone reading about her account should think about how it would feel “to know that your naked body is going to be splashed all over the internet.”
She says, after intentionally splashing her naked body on the internet.
Ability to foresee possible/likely consequences of actions in the present is another feature I'd want in my officials... but I'm well aware we rarely get that.
I'd also like them to not have a two week long emotional breakdown in response to negative events, but I'd assume she exaggerates.
faceh
1mo ago
If we're going that route, then we have to also have to come to the conclusion that it is utterly fine for men to ogle up the pages of the high-class magazine with the naked women, AND to be a full-on gooner who consumes hours of porn portraying the aforementioned stuffing of holes and similar levels of degeneracy.
If either of those factors came out about a male politician, then those factors would both be equally unworthy of further attention, for presumably similar reasons as the womens' conduct wasn't worthy of attention.
I'm sure we could hash out some set of circumstances where it was not fine. Lets say there's a Married mother of children who does porn without the knowledge of her husband, and not only does this trigger emotional distress for the husband, it can also nuke his reputation and lead to a divorce fight over the kids.
Since I assume you will ask I'll go ahead and state that it should be possible for a woman who does pose for a magazine in her reckless youth to seek political office and not be hounded by her past (assuming its all in her past). But the electorate is still going to consider it, and compare it to their other options.
I will also state that I don't think there'll be any harm done by a blanket soft ban on anyone who stars in a professional pornographic film from holding a political position.
I am absolutely 100% fine with keeping people like this out of public office.
I'm still a bit unclear on whether you think increasingly efficient production is a good in and of itself,
I used to, but I do not anymore. Increasing efficiency is still pretty close to a primary goal, though.
However its a prerequisite to many, MANY good things. Some of those things result in less efficient use of resources, however (broadly speaking, leisure/leisure activities).
What kinds of other things?
Have they invented the wheel yet? If so, lot of things they can work on with wheel tech available.
If not, it slightly increases the odds of someone stumbling upon that invention.
That's closer to my conception (contra Hegel et. al) of how society ends up improving changing.
What if we could hypothetically assume an eternal universe? What then?
From my perspective, seems obvious: develop tech as close to immortality as you can, then go travel around to see all you can see that's out there. Unless we can mathematically prove that we'll eventually saturate our desire for 'fun' and novelty, and we can't augment those desires, seems like one can make good use of eternity tooling around the galaxies looking for cool stuff.
If we start talking like "the best man is the one who sires the most children", then all we've done is smuggle the same language of marketplace efficiency into a new domain.
I kind of use it in the broad sense of "there exist some people who can trace their genetic background to you (and beyond) and thus will acknowledge your existence long after you're gone."
Add in some sci-fi, and it becomes "you have descendants who might be interested enough in stuff that happened in your lifetime to run a simulation of you, assuming they can't resurrect you directly."
I dunno, I'm not trying to impose my terminal values on everyone else. To the extent people have different terminal values, increasing the amount of energy and resources available to people, and increase the efficiency with which we use them means more people can chase their preferred terminal values without stepping on each other's toes/inciting conflicts.
As I asked, what use does Marxism have on offer for any rational human being, other than perhaps allowing incisive critiques of the flaws in a Capitalist system which we can then try to address and fix within said system?
All the stuff I'm suggesting up there are achievable within Capitalism.
faceh
1mo ago
It has crossed my mind that Ace FPV drone operators can probably find jobs elsewhere operating drones in high-stress environments or training others to do so.
Or if other drone-centric combat breaks out, those with actual experience using these things might be able to offer services at a premium.
Can't run a whole economy off that, though.
A century ago, not wanting to have kids was seen as much more eccentric than it is today. Now there's a whole "childfree" movement and the birthrate is dropping precipitously. Biology didn't change that fast. A change in material and social conditions caused a change in desires. So before you say "well this is the best way to satisfy human desires", you have to ask whose human desires.
Natural biology didn't change that fast. Chemicals that changed people's biological makeup in subtle but drastic ways probably did, I'd wager. Lot of social changes downstream of that, though, which of course we've discussed.
If the Marxist critique was more limited to "Capitalism generates feedback loops that can spin off and have 'unexpected' effects that harm more people than they benefit in the medium term" I'd not push back hardly at all.
But we've had a theoretical solution to that issue for decades. Marxism didn't generate that solution.
I mean, were they? What is "winning"? Is the winner the one with the most weapons, or are the weapons just a means to some other win condition?
The weapons can make them more efficient hunters (or maybe the weapons are more durable and so can be used more than once) so as to increase their surplus, in this case.
Which can either free up the time and labor of some of the guys who would have been hunting to work on other things, or allow them to store up more meat for lean times like winter, and if they make good use of that surplus they'll be positioned to be even more productive on the other side of it. I think Irwin Schiff's How an Economy Grows and Why it Doesn't gets this right in the particulars.
I don't necessarily think there is any 'final win condition,' mind, at least not in an entropy-increasing universe, just the process of ensuring continued improvement as long as possible and, ideally, the continuation of your genetic line.
Capitalism is not an aberration or a mistake. It's a necessary phase of development; albeit one that contains the seeds of its own destruction. It is in fact the only thing that can give us the tools to go beyond itself. It is always and only the master's tools that dismantle the master's house (if you believe Hegel).
Well, I don't believe Hegel.
Again, I don't see this as an 'insight' of Marxism. Capitalism is a 'necessary' stage of development if humans want their desires to continue being fulfilled.
Capitalism (even if we limited it to your preferred "industrialization and its consequences" definition) continues to adapt to fulfill a greater array of human desires using the tools of 'free' trade, development of ever greater capital stock, and innovation towards more efficient use of resources. It isn't necessarily building 'towards' something or to any other new phase of existence unless, I suppose, we somehow manage to actually satisfy every human desire to the point of full contentment.
To my personal dismay, it turns out that people's desires tend to skew towards seeking pleasure and raising their own status (which makes sense, when you consider our evolutionary history) over trying to elevate the species as a whole towards controling more energy and resources than those found in the crust of our little spinny space rock.
But then Capitalism also permits the existence of Billionaires who use their surpluses to fund their own preferences, including creating really massive rockets which can be used to bootstrap further industry in outer space.
(which yes, goes towards the whole "people's desires change." If affordable flights to Mars ever become available, there's probably a lot who would take those, even if it barely crosses their mind right now).
Marxists get REALLLLLLY mad about this for some reason, that we might get "Fully Automated Luxury Gay Space Communism"... without the Communism.
I don't see any good argument from Marxists for:
A) Why we ought to go beyond Capitalism (Hume's Guillotine notwithstanding, even!). Its working well, if we assume "fulfilling human desires" is the game and is a worthy goal;
B) How Socialism/Communism is going to replace it when its a fundamentally broken system that can't coordinate human society beyond the tribal level.
Its a seeming dead end in both those respects. It can't fulfill the role they predict for it, and there's no cognizable moral imperative to try and make it fulfill the role.
So what use does Marxism have on offer for any rational human being, other than perhaps allowing incisive critiques of the flaws in a Capitalist system which we can then try to address and fix within said system?
faceh
1mo ago
Capitalist corporations regularly make decisions that are wildly insane due to non-economic factors and burn a lot of value in the process, and the decision maker can still walk away with their bag.
Well you're just getting at the point that skin in the game is the best way to align incentives.
If your company offers paying customers a ride to the Titanic on an experimental submersible, having your CEO along for each ride is a good way to align incentives.
And on that point, someone had to realize "hey, there might be a market for tours of the titanic wreck site," and actually spend money and develop a product that can deliver on that desire, while being uncertain if they'd find enough customers.
And if it fails, well that CEO is now removed from his position of influence.
I agree that there's been a drift where decision makers in a corporate environments are insulated from the consequences of their decisions (although I argue this is mostly due to political influence. Criminal prosecutions are underused).
I also agree with the point that dominant actors in a market will usually start attempting to reduce the influence of competition, to build their 'moat' so they can start to exploit their position rather than improve their practices.
I would not agree that they're successful in the majority of cases.
I'm just pointing out that in practice Communism is unadulterated diffusion of responsibility for any mistakes, and Capitalism at least HAS a signal, and there are ways to make the signal sharper.
I'm three years into my ban from Reddit and its been the best thing that ever happened to me.
I think its now obvious that reddit isn't driving any real world events anymore, its not even a bellwether for how the internet feels about national or global events. I watched from the sidelines when the proles got all uppity because Reddit was going to start charging for its API (and thus killing off popular free apps) thanks to AI scraping and such.
Mods organized protests, users voiced their anger... and the Admins clamped down on everything, replaced the worst offenders, ignored the dissent, and things rolled on as before. Nobody even mentions it now.
If Reddit users can't even influence outcomes on the site itself, they're pretty useless for influencing anything outside of it, no? So you would ONLY want to be on there if you could acquire useful information somehow, or b/c you enjoy an echo chamber. Or porn.
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