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georgioz


				

				

				
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georgioz


				
				
				

				
0 followers   follows 0 users   joined 2022 September 05 07:15:35 UTC

					

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User ID: 493

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I think that you perfectly describe what is going on, namely trying to use language games and sophism to permeate the borders of some categories often in order to capture some social or legal advantage. This is a standard contention where the left views something as socially constructed - so "social and relational presentation" in your parlance - as opposed to anything else. The issue here is that applying this analogy there are no borders, Rachel Dolezal presents as black and you should accept it, and grant her all the advantages of being black such as those related to Affirmative Action legislature.

And we do not even have to borrow these examples, what if some child thinks that their teacher is their mom? It is this children's reality, in kid's lived experience this teacher is performing all the motherly roles so she is this child's "real mom". On what grounds are you going to dispute this personal lived experience of this poor kid? Parasocial mom is "real mom", so she better coughs up some money for child support or maybe vice versa, this teacher should be able to provide consent for kid to get tattoo or act in some other parental capacities. So this example proves too much, "stepmothers are real mothers" argument can "prove" that transwomen are real women but also that people wearing blackface are real black people. So it is not a good argument.

In reality even the most enthusiasts of social construction of reality do understand the power of categories. Deep down they do not believe in fluidity of these categories, shouting that "transwomen are real women" is a proof that they want to advocate for this change, they do not respect the status quo when it comes to this category.

As for the matter at hand, we do have mothers and setpmothers and adoptive mothers for millennia as categories. There is no confusion to be had, there is no need for new category such as "real mother". In fact there is a similarity where the society uses the word "mother" in stepmother as a courtesy, similarly as it uses "woman" transwoman as a courtesy there. However the very prefix "step" and "trans" implies the difference. Or in other words, stepmother is literally different word, it is not just some adjective such as let's say "tiger mother" or "tall mother".

Capitalism is just another of the words that permeates our culture and even day-to-day life which is basically meaningless stand-in. It may have some prosaic "definitions" such as private ownership of means of production, but virtually nobody uses them this way. In the eyes of many, capitalism is whatever we have now, which is to be problematized, criticized and changed. On the opposite side we have socialism, which is also not strictly defined, it is just opposite of our current shitty system of capitalism, it is an ideal state that will work and whatever it is, it is definitely not capitalism. So capitalism is just useless umbrella term with negative connotation be it insensitive free-market capitalism or it may be late stage crony capitalism and it may be even party-state capitalism under current regime in China.

Capitalism vs socialism is best viewed as part of ideological language, it is similar to other radical rhetoric such as oppression vs liberation and so forth. It really is that stupid, we need to fight oppression/capitalism and if result of that fight turns into shit, then some new form of capitalism/oppression sneaked in through reactionary forces and true socialism/liberation was not even tried. History needs to make another another revolution, only next time informed by previous failures until the true utopia will eventually be achieved.

At this point I think that words like capitalism are just brainworms and we are best served if we taboo these words and restart the conversation.

This is deliberate effort to bring scientific sounding language into an already settled situation to confuse and muddle waters. It is also isolated demand for rigorous categorization, something that for instance is not required if the same person argues for let's say race-based affirmative action where OMB recognizes 6 races (Hispanic or Latino, White, Black or African American, American Indian or Alaska Native, Asian, and Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islander), quite a shallow categorization of immensely diverse situation - don't you think?

As others said, everybody knows what man and woman is even with all the "subcategories" such as post-menopausal or infertile women and so forth. Everything else is unnecessary sophistry. I can use another more innocuous example as an analogy: what is a chair? There are so many subcategories. You have office chairs and kitchen chairs, you have chairs with multiple legs or even those designer chairs without legs. You can have metal chairs and plastic chairs, you have chairs with or without armrest and who even knows what is a difference between chair and stool and even table for that matter - you can sit on a table and you can eat from chair, can you not? It is all so fluid, chair is whatever you think it is. Except no. Everybody knows what a chair is for purpose of virtually all the conversations in human history. We are not interested in this kind of sophistry outside of some funny niche philosophical discussions, we do not have to bring it into the mainstream for sure.

Alexander had everything laid out for him. It was Philip II who reformed Macedonian army, consolidated power in his hands and who provided Alexander with the best tutoring. And Philip also had good sense to get killed while Alexander was young.

The true self-made men were the likes of Genghis Khan, who literally comes from refugee family that almost all died in harsh Mongolian winter. Napoleon definitely counts as well. Possibly Caesar, but less so since he was born into patrician family.

All analogies and comparisons break down at some level. The way I understood the comparison is that the model goal of "predict next word" produced "correct" but repetitive answers. Therefore the parameter of temperature was added, so that the model can go and explore some novel ground and go off the track a little bit. It is the other side of the hallucination, it is almost impossible to prevent it. Also probably because one man's hallucination is other man's creative work.

This is completely inaccurate take. Anheuser-Busch never really apologized, they refused to admit that they did anything wrong. The best non-apology strategy they have is something like that this was one among many influencers and that it was not a campaign and so forth. So in a sense there is no apology to accept.

It is too late to downplay the situation now and pray it disappears - they voluntarily walked into this political mess, so now deal with it. Obviously they do not want to back down and say they did wrong, because then they would anger woke people - plus I'd guess that PMC people in that company genuinely despise their customer base and they would never admit they did anything wrong. So I think it is absolutely okay to continue despising them back, there is no resemblance with your apocryphal proverb. If they come out that they fired all people responsible for that shit, and that they pledge percentage of sales to go for anti-woke causes - like let's say helping detransitioners with their plight - then I would reconsider.

This is also why I vow never to buy Gillette product unless they denounce woke stuff - which will of course never happen.

This shit tends to explode. Look at Balkans where you have a mix of Muslims, Catholics and Orthodox Christians as well as various ethnicities such Serbs, Croats, Bosniaks, Albanians and others. These peoples and religions lived in that place for centuries and yet these fault lines reappear again and again. Similar story now in Lebanon. One day Beirut is enlightened Paris of the East and the next day Christians and Muslims and Druze or people from any of 18 recognized religious groups as well as various ethnicities such as Arabs, Kurds, Turks or Armenians and others - it all can explode in sudden violence. I guess we now all live in Balkanized world.

Asian is also useless category as it ranges from hardcore Pakistani Muslims to Spanish speaking Filipino Catholics, high achieving Indian IT professionals but of course also Chinese/Japanese/Korean people. So there is that.

She absolutely did NOT mean it to refer to bystanders who did nothing, because she was not seeking to explain the behaviors of bystanders, but rather only the behavior of government officials who implemented the policy.

Sure, nobody is talking about doing nothing, we are talking about people supporting 3rd Reich in one way or another. Which is how this thread started.

They think that Arendt had some incredible insight because, in 1963, it was in fact a unique and controversial insight.

I am with you on this. People fetishize Nazism as somehow unique and Arendt kind of ruined the party, I am not dissing her - I am dissing people who need her.

It is the exact opposite of outrage porn; in fact, Arendt was criticized at the time for not being sufficiently outraged. Her entire thesis was that Eichmann was not "a monster" and was not even particularly anti-Semitic.

Here I did not mean Arendt's particular schtick, but how it is used now: Ah, you are not particularly hardcore Nazi, you are just banally evil so I can still punch you. I meant this.

If so, then they are not an example of the banality of evil. They are an example of regular old evil.

Doctors are only one cog in the machine that goes from lawmakers, through Eichmann style beurocrats interpreting said laws, through insurance companies, hospital management, through psychiatrists, receptionists and so forth. The surgeon who is cutting the organs in fact has quite a good excuse doing what he does, he has mountain of exculpatory paperwork to freely do what he is gonna do. In fact if the doctor would refuse in some fit of consciousness, he or she would probably suffer severe career consequences. How is he evil in the old sense? He is law abiding citizen, respected even.

Excellent, this is actually a perfect example of another counterargument. Who knows what is really going on in Auschwitz or Xinjiang or whatever. Only time will tell and in the meantime let me deal with my day-to-day problems.

I think she did. People only put nazism on some pedestal of evil, so they think that Arendt had some incredible insight. In fact it is just another version of moral outrage porn. In above example I admitted that I am absolutely fine with eating meat, I have only smile for my butcher. Of course many people would say that I am evil, while I am just going about my day not thinking twice about it. There are people in US army devising WW3 plans for nuclear holocaust or who are one cog in the machine of identifying and striking targets for Predator drones including civilians. Then they go home, hug their children and do whatever.

Arend's insight is absolutely useless. For instance I think that doctors who transition children are absolute scum, I am sure that many of them are monsters and I think the same about every single person working in child transition clinic. Some conservatives think the same about about abortions. And now what, how should one act upon this knowledge of banally evil people doing their evil deeds while thinking about themselves as perfectly normal people? Absolutely nothing except maybe being more active in next elections and of course acting properly outraged when the society finally permits it.

Sure, I probably participate by buying cheaper clothing from Xingjian cotton. I also work for international company, so I am sure that I am making products that help some really nasty people do some really nasty stuff with said product. I also like eating meat, which of course makes me a banally evil monster in eyes of many people. Take your pick of Moloch-like idea that I profit from or participate in and I am by definition banally evil person.

I think of banality of evil more in line with the Moloch idea. And I also find it useless. For instance I think that everybody involved in transitioning kids is taking part in great evil, of course they think they are doing good. In the end most people involved ranging from receptionist in gender clinic to actual surgeon who chops off healthy organs of kids will be fine. They are not doing anything illegal presumably. Another example - everybody knows what is happening in Xinjiang, China and it does not mean squat. Disney executives had no qualms filming Mulan next to it, literally thanking Xinjiang government for their tremendous help.

I most probably would not do shit about Jews were I living in those times. I don't do squat about kids being tortured in North Korea or literal slavery all over the world. So there is that - am I evil for just watching Netflix while all that is happening around me, possibly even contributing by paying slavers money for their products? If yes, then I don't care, it is not my business to solve these injustices.

Don't worry, Western Marxism is still alive an doing well. Just wait until the oppressed take control of means of [cultural] production - then we will solve all the contradictions, including those that soviet style communists could not resolve.

Reading this post makes me more inclined believe this part of the article:

And yet, with those caveats in mind, it’s still my judgement that K-pop fandom is more intense and has more unhealthy elements. I don’t have any hard data to back this up, but that’s my judgement after having read through dozens of forum pages, Reddit threads, Quora answers, and articles on fan adoration of idols.

It is also about what they did to our ancestors. Do not forget that eugenics was a progressive and transhumanist idea. Unlike backwards conservatives, we progressives understand The Science of Darwinism, and we also have moral strength to do what is right. We will employ population-wide controls to weed out genetic diseases, and make humanity clean once and for all. There will be some eggs broken making this omelette, but the only thing that can cast moral judgement on us is the man at the end of history. And we know for sure that this Man is a transhumanist of unspecified cultural and ethnic background, but who has unlocked the universal [trans]human potential in his true consciousness. This man will thank us for progressing The Work ushering him forth.

One of the counterarguments to this "hard on crime" line of thinking is the problem of mass incarceration. There is a limit to how many people can be imprisoned without compromising the system’s integrity. I learned more about this when I read about the Russian prison system, which developed its own set of rules after the communist revolution in 1917 and following literal imprisonment of whole nations in gulags. A similar phenomenon is happening in US prisons, where powerful gangs impose their own laws and influence both the inmates and the outsiders. Mass incarceration is a problem of the type that stares back if you stare at it intensely enough.

There is also a deeper problem behind this - whether we call it a “mental health crisis”, as some on the left do, or “social fabric being ripped apart”, as some on the right do. It is shocking that over 9% of males can expect to be imprisoned in their lifetime. Even if we are not among them, we cannot ignore the fact that 10% of males will experience the prison system for a period of time. Therefore, I do not think that the solution is to release violent criminals or to be extra tough on crime.

Does anyone think that the current massively inflated prices will ever fall?

No, over many decades now the target of central banks is to keep low inflation nominally at but bellow 2% a year, it is in their explicit target. The reason has to do with problems for companies with deflation as they cannot cope with wages, the famous nominal wage rigidity graph. People hate wage cuts plus there are real costs associated with that such as menu costs (these are there even with high inflation). It is easier for economy to have low inflation so that when your wage does not adjust it will fall a little bit in real terms.

Now the inflation can be caused by two main effects: supply side and demand side. For extreme supply side issues imagine situation in Warsaw Ghetto during WW2 where people did not have access to basic things like bread, and they were forced to buy supplies from corrupt German soldiers for stashed jewelry and so forth. Demand side means just printing a lot of money like in Zimbabwe. In reality these two phenomenons are often linked - for instance in Zimbabwe the nationalization of agricultural land led to mass crop failures which increased the price of food, which the inept government decided to solve by printing more money in death spiral.

Now I am no expert, but the current issues are to large extend driven by "supply" issues. COVID had shown that relying on certain global supply chains specifically in China are not reliable so many companies are in the middle of restructuring this. There was also massive change in consumer behavior, we saw more online purchases but there is also huge shift toward remote work. This is huge shift in what is demanded and what is not. Ruso-Ukrainian war had real impact on food market, this then has more second degree effects - in some poor countries people use their budget now almost exclusively on food, so there is nothing more to spare on other goods and services. We see uneven effect with food un USA increasing 10% and 11% in 2021 and 2022 which is higher than other goods.

For me the usefulness of EMH is to curtail your hubris. At the very basic level - if you know nothing about let's say deodorant market, you probably should not feel the superiority of your insight after you read a news article about how the whole market is going to crash in a month. Or to word it alternatively, from all possible decisions you can make in large variety of areas and over long period, if you follow the market then you will be "right" much more often than you are going to be wrong.

EMH is information processing claim. As an analogy, imagine that you have a gas in some chamber and you will select one molecule of gas and then measure it's energy. If you know the temperature of the gas (an equivalent of market price) then you can make an informed bet about it. You will be sometimes wrong but it will be hell of a lot better performance compared to random number, or number based on "gut" feeling. Now maybe you can expend a lot of resources to get more information about the gas, about the chamber and so on - but the the downside is that it will only work temporarily as your information (e.g. more precise gas temperature measurement etc.) will be incorporated into the future.

At this point I have a bookmark of 2013 piece by Noah Smith who I think nailed it when it comes to explanation of what EMH is and why it holds. There must be something scissor-like in EMH, be its bad naming, the fact that everybody has some intuitions about economy, that it is popular to shit on Economics as a pseudoscience or that it attracts obnoxious lefties who for sure see red when they read Efficient and Markets in the same sentence. Anyways, even a lot of smart people have dumb take on it, especially around coronavirus like Eliezer Yudkowsky or they just think it means that there is no profit to be made like recently in this interview with Connor Leahy.

EMH is not about free market economy delivering Pareto efficient outcomes. It does not mean that nobody can have any novel profitable idea. It does not mean that there are no crashes ever. Also please give the authors some credit, these counterarguments are so basic that they should immediately signal that your idea is flawed. Of course authors of EMH knew that market crashes happen and they also knew that there are businessmen out there who have new profitable idea, even one-man startups. Give them some credit.

To me EMH and its constant bashing rings similar to how every now and then somebody - smart or stupid - comes up with this incredible way of how to beat a casino. Now of course you know that this somebody now reinvented Martingale Strategy of doubling the bet when losing. Now have fun convincing them that they are not the first one to come up with the idea, and that they should maybe put more work in thinking about it - before betting their house on it.

Except that for instance in the case of homophobia according to this article it was coined by the Pschologist George Weinberg and then used by activists of the magazine Screw in late 60ies. Here is what Weinberg thought about the term

He suggested that those who harbor prejudice against homosexuals, and not homosexuals themselves, are suffering from a psychological malady, an irrational state of mind.

So no, this is not like hydrophobia.

I'd say that anybody who says the word transphobic seriously, is medicalizing a political ideology as well as hurting people with debilitating mental health conditions such as arachnophobia, claustrophobia and other types of real phobias, by implicitly insinuating that they may also be based on some personal choice or ideology, such as in the case of transphobia or homophobia.

Of course I am very much aware that this opinion of mine will make me a transphobe in eyes of certain radical groups who are pushing this term in the first place.

The word tansphobic itself is already part of the whole stupid CW game. It is obvious that homophobic or transphobic means something else compared to let's say arachnophobic or claustrophobic.

In general you have to identify this whole ad-hominem weapon used in culture war. Your opponents are either evil (racists, white supremacists etc.) or crazy (you say it because you are hurt) or stupid (you do not have PHD). Or ideally combination of all of these. Saying that you are transphobic achieves at the same time medicalization of your view and it also makes makes it evil. You can often see it applied in various lefty spaces like sneerclub, Contrapoints himself uses it a lot.

The key difference in Machine Learning is that it changes computing from a process where you tell the computer what to do with data, and turns it into a process where you just tell the computer what you want it to be able to do.

I think there is yet another point to make here. With current Large Language Models, we have systems that treat Natural Language as a code, that is where revolution comes from. Even before LLMs, there were multiple "revolutions" where instead of working directly with machine code you could work with higher level languages utilizing concepts more suitable for humans as opposed to "data" in its raw form. This made programming incrementally more accessible to wider population. Even things like invention of graphical user interface for operating systems enabled people to tell computers what to do with data in more natural way without some arcane knowledge.

Also on the level of let's say algorithms creating novel things on some simple inputs, there was procedural generation around for a long time. Giving the computer system some simple parameters and computer running the simulation to confirm/falsify end result was a standard thing in the past. Again, the key difference is that we now have a very powerful system that can treat natural language as a code.

Is he part of the Bud Light advertising campaign, just driving the product into people’s mindspace?

I don’t think this is the case. Do you know what would be even more controversial and getting more eyeballs? Bud Light special “Z” with Putin’s face on it. Somehow if we get any controversy from a corp it always leans in woke direction.