guajalote
5mo ago
What kind of world do you imagine where cultural change doesn't happen? Even if all migration was completely halted worldwide, the internet is constantly transmitting culture worldwide. The kind of world you seem to want to live in would require a literal return to the dark ages. And of course cultural mixing was still happening back then too. The reason we're speaking a language without gendered nouns is because Viking settlers "corrupted" English. The reason I used the word "do" in the first sentence of this post is because Celtic languages "corrupted" English.
guajalote
9mo ago
Depends on what you mean by "quality of life." If quality of life corresponds to revealed preferences, then people in the heartland are getting more of the things they want than ever and are therefore enjoying a better quality of life than ever. But it so happens that what they want is meth and McDonalds.
If by "quality of life" you mean "the things that people should want," then that's a harder question. We'd have to come up with an objective way of figuring out what people "should" want, and then measure whether they're getting more or less of that.
guajalote
5mo ago
"This thing [cultural change or immigration specifically] happened in the past, therefore it's a good thing, or therefore we can't/shouldn't do anything about it".
You're misunderstanding my point. I'm saying whatever it is you like about "American culture" or "Anglo-Saxon culture" or whatever specific culture it is that you're trying to preserve, that culture only exists because of cultural mixing and change. "Your culture" came about as a result of the Angles and the Jutes and the Danes and the Celts all mixing together.
If you're saying that cultural mixing is always bad, then why do you want to preserve "your" culture? If you're being logically consistent then you should also conclude that your own culture is bad because it is a "corrupted" admixture of other cultures.
If they could have stopped the Vikings, should they not have?
If they could have stopped the Vikings from raping and pillaging, absolutely. But it's not clear why it would have been a good thing for them to stop the cultural admixture. If they had prevented the mixture from occurring, then the culture that you're trying to preserve wouldn't exist. So presumably you agree that this cultural mixing was good if you believe that your own culture existing is good.
My interest in continuing this conversation is waning given your unwillingness to present even a shred of evidence to substantiate your rather strong claims.
It seems to me that all your arguments are fundamentally the same arguments that people in the 60s advanced as evidence of the Beatles corrupting the youth. Run for Your Life is a song about beating or killing a woman for infidelity, written and sung by John Lennon who literally beat his wife. Got to Get you Into My Life and Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds are about how great LSD is. Many Harrison songs promote Hinduism like My Sweet Lord. Polythene Pam promotes drag and crossdressing. Not to mention the countless songs that promote premarital sex.
The Beatles were as high-status and looked up to by teenagers as any band in history, arguably far more so than any hip hop act ever. You haven't given any principled reasons why your critique of hip hop wouldn't apply equally to the Beatles. By your logic they clearly and unironically promoted abusing women, doing drugs, leaving Christianity, and wearing drag. Other than wearing drag, these were all things members of the Beatles actually did and unironically supported in their own lives. Clearly you would agree that Beatles songs are harmful if even only 1% of the fans are more likely to do drugs after hearing a literal ode to drug use by their literal idols.
you’re a kid in the ghetto, and you see a guy getting respect and women and money and later learn he runs a gang, will this make you more likely to join a gang? Common sense says yes, and hip hop is merely the packaging of this experience into a commodity to be sold to those outside the ghetto.
Do you have any evidence of people "outside the ghetto" joining gangs because of hip hop? Even one anecdote? It strikes me as exceedingly unlikely.
Well I suppose it’s funny to know that he is still successfully trolling after all these decades.
The Manson murderers literally wrote "Helter Skelter" and "Piggies" in blood on the walls. You're saying that was trolling?
guajalote
1mo ago
You are asking for a peer-reviewed longterm study proving that a statistically significant amount of at-risk hip hop listeners will go on to try drugs relative to controls — yes, I would also like that study. But you understand that they haven’t done this study, right?
No, I am asking for literally any evidence at all. Even an anecdotal story of a middle class kid joining a gang because of hip hop would at least be a data point. Or a study suggesting that certain types of musical structures produce aggression. Anything at all besides your own opinion, really.
Is it your opinion that the 60s and 70s did not see an increase in both LSD and eastern spirituality?
Is it your opinion that this was causally related to the music of the 60s? If so, why do you single out hip hop as special and different in its influence?
“If you cheat on me I kill you” is not exhorting people to beat their wives, it’s a song from the perspective of an obsessive male partner that should be interpreted with exaggeration in mind.
This is special pleading. Lennon beat his wife and wrote a song about beating or killing a woman. If you want to argue this isn't meant to be taken seriously, you have to be willing to say the same about hip hop lyrics about killing written by murderers.
Qualitatively different as I explained in my last comment. You’ve ignored everything from the publicized lifestyles of the artists, to the visual culture (guns), to the aggression embedded in the actual musicality.
The publicized lifestyles of the Beatles included infidelity, heroin use, beating women, leaving Christianity, etc. Appeals to "the aggression embedded in the actual musicality" is special pleading. You're just saying hip hop is different because it feels different to you.
Youve misunderstood thr metaphor. Black gangs don’t recruit white suburban kids, they just sell them drugs.
But surely the violent lyrics and "aggressive" music should be inducing suburban kids to violence too, right? Why are they magically immune to this?
guajalote
5mo ago
And I'd probably care about whatever culture I would have ended up having. Just like if I was born into a different family, I would care about the family I was born into and not the one I have in the reality we live in.
At this point it seems you are conceding there's nothing special about your culture that makes it intrinsically worth preserving. You're just saying "it happens to be my culture by chance, therefore I want to preserve it" (why this conclusion follows from this premise is left as an exercise for the reader).
Even I wouldn't concede that there's nothing valuable about my own culture. There are a number of things about my culture that I find valuable, that I intend to pass on to my children, and that I hope they will continue to pass on as long as those things remain valuable in the ever-changing world my descendants will inhabit. I get the impression that I actually value and care about my own culture far more than you do, I just don't feel any need to keep it "pure" and unmixed with other valuable things from other cultures.
At this point, I am convinced this conversation with you is not worth my time, sorry.
Fair enough. Have a nice day.
guajalote
2mo ago
You can have religion without god, but I don't see how you can have religion without faith. By "faith" I mean roughly this definition that popped up when I googled it: "Firm belief based upon confidence in the authority and veracity of another, rather than upon one's own knowledge, reason, or judgment."
But if they aren’t coming to Jesus anyway, surely I would prefer to funnel those people into a group where they can proudly and honestly proclaim that ‘of course Jesus isn’t real, but that’s not the point; the 10 commandments have served our people well for 2 thousand years because they work and you should follow them too.’
In this form of the religion you have faith in the Ten Commandments or in biblical laws more generally. If the adherents take this faith seriously, then they end up being every bit as "religious" as if god existed. As you put it, people would still have to be "convinced to believe or to feign belief" in the inerrant properties of the Ten Commandments. So at best you have effectively replaced god with the ten commandments, and I think you will find it just as hard to convince atheists to truly believe in them. Alternatively, if the adherents don't really take their faith seriously, then it's hard to see what holds the religion together, or how it answers the kinds of existential questions that people look to religion to answer. It's reduced to a social club at that point. If people were excited to join secular social clubs we'd see participation in clubs like Rotary Club, bowling leagues, etc., rising rather than declining.
guajalote
11mo ago
That midjourney stuff is utter pabulum. It's only beautiful by the most shallow and insipid standards of beauty. The kind of "beauty" that would rank Thomas Kinkaide's paintings above Rembrandt's, because the former is bright and sparkly while the latter is brown and muddy. Or the kind of "beauty" that would consider N*SYNC's music superior to Bach's because the former's is free of dissonance and the later's is rife with it.
I don't particularly like the human art you linked either, but at least the artists are trying to do something interesting. We can do better than ugly modern art without resorting to saccharine crap and calling it beauty.
AI gives people what it gets positive feedback from. It gives people what they want.
Marvel movies and McDonalds chicken nuggets are examples of giving people what they want. Mass appeal produces boring hyperpalatability, not greatness.
guajalote
9mo ago
The system can tolerate a lot of corruption, but Hunter has just been so incredibly sloppy and his corruption is so undeniably blatant that it represents a bridge too far for a lot of people.
I think this is basically the same reason why Trump was and is subject to such extraordinary scrutiny. His level of corruption is in the same ballpark as other recent presidents, but he is too sloppy and is unable or unwilling to correctly play the plausible deniability game.
guajalote
1mo ago
Music is about producing a spirit in a person, a social emotional-behavioral orientation. Music can produce approximately any emotional space, from the felt sense of eeriness, to grief, even to tones that connote honor, duty, profundity, you name it. We do not need to prove how it does this, as we all agree it does this.
I don't think we all agree it does this, at least not in the way you seem to claim. Music can temporarily evoke an emotion, in much the way a movie can, but the idea that music changes people's actual beliefs or actions seems like a very strong and unsubstantiated claim.
I enjoy Excitable Boy by Warren Zevon and Maxwell's Silver Hammer by the Beatles. Both songs basically celebrate deranged serial killers. Neither has made me want to kill anyone to even the slightest degree.
guajalote
3mo ago
IMO, any argument premised on the speaker's personal identity should be bannable regardless.
guajalote
6mo ago
Anecdotes can trump statistics in the context of a specific type of argument, of the following form: "I don't give a shit about how 'the economy' is doing, I care about how me and my family are doing, so aggregate economic indicators are of no interest to me when I have my own lived experiences." Similar types of arguments could be made about other subjects, like policing.
I think quite often, even when people don't explicitly make this argument, it's what they're really saying. For obvious reasons, most people support or oppose policies based on how they think those policies will impact them personally, regardless of whether the policy is "good" or "bad" in the aggregate.
guajalote
8mo ago
guajalote
10mo ago
Your point only functions as an explanation of fine tuning if we assume in advance that the (or “a”) multiverse hypothesis is true.
No, it doesn't. It works equally well with a one-shot universe. If the parameters had not been properly fined tuned, then we wouldn't be here. Therefore we can only observe a universe in which the parameters are fine tuned. This is true regardless of how many universes exist.
It’s unlikely that I would result from my parent’s act of conception, but billions of acts of conception were happening before I was conceived.
Those other billions of acts of conception are irrelevant. You could not possibly have been made by any of those other acts of conception, since those other people had different genes than your parents. Moreover, the statistical likelihood of you being conceived is independent of each prior act of conception in the same way that the outcome of a coin flip is independent of prior flips.
The relevant analogy is to note the large number of eggs and sperm your parents produced over their lifetimes and the extreme unlikelihood that the particular egg and particular sperm that produced you would have combined. This was, indeed, extremely unlikely ex ante, but you can only observe an ex post world in which this highly unlikely event did in fact occur.
guajalote
11mo ago
While I agree mostly ... are the top 20% of that page really any worse than 99.9% of popular existing art?
No, it's not any worse, it's about the same, and that's my point. The midjourney stuff is just as crappy as most of the art that gets made today. The "beauty" that OP thinks he's identified is just hyperpalatablity. Unlike most modern art, the midjorney art is inoffensive, but that doesn't make it good or beautiful.
guajalote
1mo ago
My point is that it's based on one's own situation, not others. You gave an example in your post of a depressed person doing basic tasks. Another example might be someone who had a stroke learning how to move their right index finger, something almost everyone can do. It is worthy of pride because it's an accomplishment for that person. By contrast, doing something that almost no one can do may not be worthy of pride. If Usain Bolt runs a race faster than 99% of the population could, he still may be quite disappointed with his time and feel no pride at all.
guajalote
2mo ago
You are wrong about the medical spending
I think he is wrong about net tax revenue as well. Something like 60% of Americans receive more in transfers than they pay in taxes over their lifetimes, i.e. they are a net drain on government revenue. Plus, I would wager that lower income people are more likely to not wear seatbelts (and drive less safe cars in general) which would skew this even further.
guajalote
3mo ago
I think it's true that technological progress generally leads to moral progress. Here I'm defining "technological progress" as "that which lets people get more of what they value at lower cost." If you are a utilitarian it's almost a tautology that "people getting more of what they value" leads to moral progress, because increasing utility is the definition of moral progress. Even if you are not a utilitarian, I think you should agree that "people getting more of what they value" generally tends toward moral progress, because it gives people the option to choose between more alternatives and therefore more freedom to choose the morally best alternative.
This is why I often disagree with people here who see preserving one's culture as a good in and of itself. Culture is a form of technology - different cultures differ in terms of how well they enable their adherents to get what they value for a given cost in a given context. Therefore cultural progress is possible as a form of technological process. Cultural change should only be resisted to the extent it's not technological progress.
guajalote
5mo ago
And this belief comes from your observation of "free individuals" in a "free society"? If so, could you name which individuals and what society you have in mind, as an example of what these terms look like in practice?
This is a matter of degree. The US is freer than North Korea or China. And within the US, some places are clearly freer than others.
Characteristics of a free society include:
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The ability to privately own guns and other weapons sufficient to enable the violent overthrow of a tyrannical government;
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Free speech and free association;
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All adult humans are equal before the law and are entitled to due process and the presumption of criminal innocence;
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The right to engage in consensual transactions and to dispose of one's property as one chooses without permission;
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The right to bind oneself with enforceable contracts.
It is good to know that the universe has ordained that all incentives must be net-positive
Given a choice between a good thing and a bad (or less good) thing, a person with full information who is able to freely choose between them will prefer to choose the good thing. This is the definition of "good" I am operating under.
In fact, every system I've ever heard of has been pretty close to this description, but I am certainly not omniscient.
There are systems where a single central authority has a massive amount of power to make cultural decisions (e.g. North Korea, Spain in the 1500s, Iran), and there are systems where cultural authority is more distributed and less centrally powerful, e.g., the US. I would prefer even less centralized cultural power than currently exists in the US, but again it is a matter of degree.
If we wish to say that such systems "fail badly", one ought to demonstrate what "succeeds" looks like with concrete, large-scale examples.
Centrally planned economies like Soviet Russia and North Korea produce little wealth and generally cause massive amounts of starvation. They also tend to produce untrue ideas at a high rate, such as Lysenkoism. Decentralized economies like the US produce comparatively more wealth, less starvation, and more empirically correct ideas. It is a matter of degree, but the degree of difference is extremely large.
Or to put it another way, is your love for freedom and openness a means, or an end? If freedom and openness could be demonstrated to enable evil, would you still support them, or would you accept that some level of restriction was necessary?
It is a means. If you demonstrated that freedom and openness have a higher likelihood of causing bad outcomes as compared with another specific alternative system, I would change my view. However, I consider the empirical evidence in favor of freedom to be overwhelming, so I would require a considerable amount of evidence in the other direction.
This statement implies that central power structures are optional.
The degree to which power is centralized, and the kinds of power that such central structures have, clearly vary in different times and places. I don't think it's possible to eliminate central power, but I think it is possible to considerably reduce the influence of central power and to place checks on the exercise of such power (e.g. via the private ownership of the means of war).
guajalote
5mo ago
Perhaps it's not the game for you, but if you ever decide to give it another shot I highly recommend playing combat more like a "turn-based" strategy game with regular pausing to issue orders to your troops, use spells and abilities, etc. Makes the game much more enjoyable and allows you to actually formulate strategy and tactics. I probably pause less than I did when I first started, but I'd say pausing 20-50 times per combat is pretty typical.
guajalote
5mo ago
I'd be interested to hear your criticisms. Personally it's one of the top 10 games I've ever played, and my only real criticisms are: (1) it has a sort of black box complexity that creates a high barrier to entry for new players, and (2) it's a bit buggier than I'd like.
guajalote
5mo ago
I am a big fan of TW:Warhammer III, but it literally took me a year to feel like I am competent at the game. There is so much hidden "under the hood" so to speak and a lack of good resources online to teach you the intricacies of strategy and tactics. The youtuber Legend of Total War is probably the best resource I've found, but I don't really like getting this kind of information in the form of video content, so I've mostly learned the game by (1) playing multiplayer with a couple friends who are good at the game, and (2) trial and error.
guajalote
6mo ago
I haven't read the full transcript of the order so perhaps I have an incorrect impression of it, but I think it is overbroad, yes. According to the article you linked "Justice Engoron said that his statement should be considered a gag order forbidding any posts, emails or public remarks about members of his staff." Being able to speak out against government officials in a proceeding is an absolutely core aspect of what the 1st amendment protects. The right to say things like "the judge's law clerk is politically motivated and out to get me" should be inviolable, even though in this case it's an incredibly stupid thing to say. If the gag order was narrowly tailored to allow protected speech, e.g., Trump can criticize the law clerk but can't call on his followers to harass the clerk, I would feel differently.
guajalote
21hr ago
I've met bears on a number of occasions while hiking, hunting, or berry picking in places like Tahoe, Colorado, and Minnesota. In my mind, meeting bears is a normal thing that happens from time to time, but I suppose that just shows how out of touch I am with normal peoples' lives. I think you're right that the bear is not "real" in the minds of most people answering the question.
I'm not criticizing midjourney, I'm criticizing OP's standards of beauty. It's probably possible to get actual good art out of midjourney in its current form, but OP's examples are crap and were selected based purely on what was most popular among users.
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