jake
1yr ago
"by keeping at it" is boring but true. longform, not short comments. longform develops your ear for your style. stronger ear, easier writing.
there is one quick fix. "that" often can be omitted, in this paragraph uses 1, 3, 6, 9.
if you want to pm me something longer i'd look it over.
t. wannabe author
jake
1yr ago
omitting "that" can improve flow but it's not a critical mistake, i call it a quick fix because it applies to most writing. definitely not just yours.
feel free to ping, i'm sure i'll see it either way
jake
1yr ago
artistic talent is a perfect example of haves versus have nots; the communist ideal would necessarily include systems that allow anyone to generate art as they desire. when these systems advance to allowing individuals to generate entire animated series and films society will undergo a historic decoupling of capital from entertainment. ie, further communist ideal.
on a long enough timeline capitalism will compete itself into socialism. systems like this are exactly why. opposition necessarily carries water for entrenched power and capital.
that which can be automated will be.
jake
1yr ago
every song and cover by carly rae jepsen through emotion is about her limerence.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=jCFh0lJ-WAg
https://www.dropbox.com/s/nti2mwmm7v2lc9y/a%20scar%20no%20one%20else%20can%20see.pdf
compared to who, yknow?
set the board, 2000 and newer.
k, wipe off every artist who doesn't rap. i like plenty of pop, Heat Waves is great. lyrically nothing.
off Drake's 2021 Certified Lover Boy the T-1 most viewed Genius track is Fair Trade. Drake's longest verse: https://i.imgur.com/elNr1KT.png
off Kanye's 2021 Donda the most viewed Genius track is Off the Grid. Kanye's longest verse: https://i.imgur.com/bWkIdP0.png
listen to both if you want the best context. reading lyrics alone can miss delivery and the point. Hurricane also off Donda has a couple examples:
Dropped out of school, but I'm that one at Yale
Made the best tracks and still went off the rail
"I'm that one at Yale" can be heard as "I'm the one that yell" connecting by subject with the subsequent line.
Later
Fiendin' for some true love, ask Kim, "What do you love?"
Kanye gives ambiguity in performance, as it can be heard as "ask Him, 'What do you love?'" -- Donda isn't subtle about being a gospel album, but this line is.
but it's not representative to compare Kanye to Drake. it's plenty fair: drake is a worse lyricist, rapper, and producer (and not that i ever really care when it comes to celebrities, a worse person)
representative would be closer with Kanye and Kendrick Lamar.
off Kendrick's 2022 Mr. Morale & The Big Steppers the most viewed Genius track is N95. Kendrick's first verse: https://i.imgur.com/78q6xtA.png
Kanye's is the best of the three by lyricism, performance and production. my method for selection has influenced this, but i think it's better than selecting their most highly viewed tracks on Genius. for Kanye: Mercy, for Drake: God's Plan and for Kendrick: Humble. Kendrick is firmly the best here, but it seems the overall popularity of a song often negatively correlates with its lyrical complexity. see Donald Glover/Childish Gambino. unsurprising of the great polymath-artist of our time, you'd have trouble finding tracks by him that aren't brilliantly written. his most popular is This is America.
Kanye's not as good of a lyricist as Donald Glover, but that's no criticism. Kanye is a better musician, rapper, and producer, and production is where i'll stop.
few artists have a separate wikipedia article for their production discography. Jay-Z isn't the artist he is today (or married to Beyoncé) without Kanye's production on The Blueprint. Artists including John Legend, Common, Kid Cudi, Pusha T, and Travis Scott likewise owe significant success if not their careers to Kanye's work with each. these are careers, on genres? his 2007 Graduation and off it Flashing Lights is the major moment of synth use in hiphop and from it you can draw a straight line to the ubiquity of synth in modern pop. beyond Kanye, only The Neptunes--Pharrell Williams and Chad Hugo--have comparable production bona fides. (A little thing I find funny about Pharrell is Happy from Despicable Me isn't even his best song titled Happy. Also this no-right-to-be-a-bop with Trey Parker.)
FiveHourMarathon mentions this below. Kanye's not just the greatest discography of the genre (and MBDTF and Donda are two of the greatest records ever made). his influence can be seen across post-2000 hiphop, and from it all modern pop. in the last 100 years of music, the artists the same can be said of is an extremely short list.
jake
1yr ago
yes. US industrial capacity was so great we could supply both american theaters and underwrite the soviets' materiel efforts.
the bomb shortened a war that was already decided
jake
1yr ago
the rosenbergs were framed
those powerful who framed them is a question steeped in shadow
jake
1yr ago
julius was a soviet spy, ethel surely knew but her participation was ambiguous
the secrets he shared were not how russia got the bomb
jake
1yr ago
us fish, nobility obligates our water
so much of what i see is point-retort noblesse oblige. progressivism wholly, but all the little post-yarvins and their listeners are falling to it. everything, thought, word, premise and conclusion. we know better, we are better, we ought rule. we should do A; no we should do antiA. trying to solve the question of Just Rule invokes it with every answer but one.
as an otherwise apathetic american with foaming hate for wasp decorum jammed down this country's throat in the 1900s i love wild assholes. trump, aoc, mtg, fuckin alan grayson.
"you should argue to understand, not to win" has been on my mind lately, especially with your comments. you have excellent comments showing wisdom and philanthropy but i think the latter is often your weakness. the comments addressing your points are hardly seeking understanding. still . . .
the policies of other countries, yes yes, in norway anders breivik hunger strikes for a new playstation. america would have hit him with a rock. ours is the better, and you said this isn't why, just as you said the "pretextual" knots you twist into aren't. you're flatly wrong to imply today's opposition to felons voting is from lingering racism. after all, those republicans are champions of policy that would see more black babies born. but you've said this isn't your motivation, i only mention them because:
egalitarian foibles
i feel this isn't the first time you've spun a whole essay from discomfort; that you're uncomfortable thinking you're better than anyone, even as you know so well how you are better than so many.
i am approximately christian. christian enough. i am not essentially better than any man, all fall short. i am practically better than most and the only discomfort i have is wishing others would be the same—by bettering them, not worsening myself. but this is transhuman promise (and transubstantial promise). not the mistaken belief they can be changed through simple policy of as-extant man.
you know the philosophy. serious crimes reject the social contract and that includes voting. thieves might serve enough time in prison to be absolved, but the criminals who destroy? no. we can hope released murderers have "done their time" and will not kill again, but a murderer stopped someone from voting forever. their permanent loss of that privilege is equality. traffickers and monstrous abusers? their voice is not equal to mine, and as my voice is worth one vote, theirs is worth none.
who's the worst person you went to court to defend? was it a murderer? you're better than them. the world doesn't slow because people know and act their station, it slows because people know and act their station while insisting it doesn't exist.
edited for clarity
jake
1yr ago
funny but sad. graham hancock is old hippy left. pot DMT acid & shrooms loving limey. "all politicians should use psychedelics at least once" variety. totally harmless.
if he's right one or more oceanfaring civilizations were wiped out 12,000 years ago. this poses no threat to power unless anapoc of all things is the memetic force that makes the people prioritize getting off the rock above all else. doubt it.
jake
1yr ago
this isn't news to some because they knew or assumed cynically. this isn't news to others because they don't care or supported it. i doubt those of either lean who find this surprising(newsworthy) come here.
social media giant meeting with letters agencies and also quieting political opposition. . . to downplay this is, from naivety, ignorance. else bad faith. the former is what gives weight to the latter. that rhetoric has not been on simple just action--we did what we must and would again--and instead is talking about talking about it says enough.
i do not hold to free speech because i have such certainty that all speech is permissible. truly, there may be things that shouldn't be talked about. i hold to it for the simple philosophy that seems commonly forgotten. none can be trusted to make the decision. so this affair only bothers me because i have seen exactly how contemptibly foolish yoel roth & co were as they wielded such control over what i could read. they were not worthy. of course, none are.
jake
1yr ago
brave new world/elysium
plebs kept comfortable. all citizens possess a single half-right of procreation. two adults may have a child and combine their half-rights to gain government financial support for that child. half-rights can be bought and sold (the government will always buy them.) clinics that reversibly sterilize will pay-out on completion. hard control of reproduction if financial incentives fail. they won't.
almost categorical automation of labor will happen in our lifetimes. if you do not see the behemoth's lesser shadow named AI art you are myopic, or desperately so. 2050 at the latest. too many jobs will be lost too quickly. it's coming right now, shame how yang turned out, he sees the trees but not the forest. we will be able to feed every mouth. clothe and shelter and cure-all every man. outfit all who wish with perfect VR or direct-brain-interface-experience-simulacra to live their lives in dreams. but why structure that to continue without end? all other incentives may be unnecessary beyond making sure people who want to stay plugged in, can.
policy that ensures each generation reduces by half is inevitable, even if we solve the rocket equation and superluminal travel and stellar shipwrighting allows us to annually dispatch a hundred thousand hands offworld.
from their fortress manors, or new zealand, elites will do what they will.
jake
1yr ago
automation will permanently replace >90% of labor by 2100. what few human-necessary roles created by automation will lay within the remaining <10%.
humans have a biosocial capacity for community size. we are biologically fit for communities only insignificantly larger than the number of faces and names recalled by modal memory. large towns and cities are psychically radioactive, chernobyls of the mind, inducing madness. historically "too many people being bored"--bored, restless, purposeless--heralds chaos. in cities where madness already whispers, exploding populations of permanently unemployable young men could see that effect magnified most terribly. technology will solve most issues of the day. it may solve the problem of purposeless young men by giving them lives in artificial reality. if it cannot, disaster will follow.
jake
1yr ago
amish et al. will not factor.
such subcultures who otherwise normally engage in society and civics will bend as government subsidy ceases.
jake
1yr ago
besides russia, have any of the drops included a list of which countries letters agencies believe to be at work? or do you know from your readings which have been named?
jake
1yr ago
tough subject. incredibly corrosive. we are indeed all culpable for wickedness.
i'm reminded of one of the last good sermons i heard. no new ground here--the sins of the father are laid upon the children. parents sow, adults sow, children reap.
lasciviousness did push "sexual liberation" but it wasn't liberalism. it was aristocrats, de jure and de facto, who wanted to eat up whichever attractive commoner women they pleased and fear not the morning. they sowed that pitch-black evil. it lives on. the sex most participatory "perpetrates" the greater share of this evil (whatever that means), but people go with the flow. they always only ever do. they cannot recognize evil as such, they don't know how. look at who their parents were.
there is no righteous solution. these generations have reaped and now they cannot be made whole. artifice will tidily segregate and man will gain great productivity and be so much less for it.
jake
1yr ago
i marked this comment "bad" on the volunjanny page so i guess i should reply.
"it is ok to punch someone who is x" is not dehumanization
yes it is. "it is righteous to practice violence against the outgroup" is the last realization of otherizing rhetoric.
-
outgroup is bad
-
we should do something about outgroup
-
we should be violent to outgroup
to give the sharpest comparison, that phrase is syntactically identical with "it is righteous to kill jews."
no motte & baileying. as-spoken "it's okay to" is to be heard and understood as "it is righteous to"
it's not righteous for a woman to slap a lush, but also nobody gives a shit. almost all of europe believes it is not righteous to execute criminals because their framing of human rights extends even to mass-murderers. this is a deep subject of philosophy where i largely though not entirely agree with the europeans. i blame none for being uncomfortable with the state ending lives.
it is not righteous to practice indiscriminate violence against anyone. even nazis. this was the point of postwar trials: moral authority. righteousness. because they understood the indiscriminate violence practiced during the war was bad in and of itself. that statement goes against the trials.
that statement necessarily affirms certain premises; it is okay to dehumanize, it is okay to practice indiscriminate violence.
that statement says what the nazis did was only bad because of who they did it to.
to repeat and conclude: there is nothing you can say more dehumanizing.
jake
1yr ago
Excellent as always, but I must say something of this comparison:
As civilized men, we do not begrudge man-eating tigers their addiction to human flesh, we shoot them on sight.
Jim Corbett, a famed hunter of man-eaters in British India (and later famed conservationist of Bengal Tigers), did not enjoy killing tigers. He knew it was necessary and that was enough, but he also knew what caused an animal to turn man-eater. Corbett wrote of villagers harvesting tall grass where a tiger might be hidden steps away but be no danger to them, tigers fear man. We killed fear into them.
Corbett knew the man-eater is bad luck and imprudence. The fight with particularly aggressive prey that maims the beast, or the shot that permanently weakens but does not kill, from the poor hunter who fails to track down and follow through. The beast lives, but he can no longer catch his natural prey. Even in desperate hunger he still fears man, for the rest of his however shortened life he might, never turning man-eater. Until for some, all at once they lose their fear. The starving tiger surprised in tall grass whose one swipe is still enough to kill. Then his fear is gone. Then he will continue, sometimes to horrific extents. All because of bad luck, imprudence. Because the man-eater is most often made, not born.
jake
1yr ago
as an early 21st century midwit i'm tired of other E21C midwits with varying levels of reach doomering because they think yet other E21C midwits will stumble their way into the most important achievement in human history.
machine learning for chatbots and image generation isn't AGI. AGI will be able do that, and those bots' generations are impressive, but that isn't evidence of thought, it isn't even evidence thought could exist. sufficiently advanced circuitry will not spontaneously give rise to ghosts. if it could, why not already? if it can, it is inevitable. these machines have neither ghost nor potential for it, no knowledge of self and purpose nor potential for it, no feeling, and most importantly no thought.
how do we train a machine to build something nobody knows how to build? what data do we give it to work toward "thing that works fundamentally the same as the human brain in the facilitation of qualia and thought"? how does it ever get better at making thing-that-can-think? with how ML is doing on protein folding i'm sure given enough time it will help us achieve a cohesive theory of consciousness, one we can use to eventually build true AGI, but we aren't going to stumble onto that with our comparative stick-rubbing with DALL-E and GPT.
consider what it would mean to truly digitize the biochemical processes of the brain that facilitate thought and memory. to program ghostless circuits so those circuits can acquire a sapient's understanding of language and corresponding ability to use it. to teach copper and gold and silicon how to speak english and feel purpose. a consciousness without the ability to feel purpose, literally with a void where impetus rises, will do nothing. it won't even think, there's no reason for it. how do you give a machine purpose?
that's a question we'll answer eventually but how on earth could that happen accidentally? it will take decades of study or it will take the single smartest human who has ever lived, who can harmonize every requisite discipline. who has the biophysical and engineering understanding to build an artificial brain, the bottom-to-top hardware and software understanding to program it, and the neurological, psychiatric and philological understanding to create the entity within and teach it. so fuckin easy.
something that is decidedly in ML range is medicine. the panacea approaches. we know illnesses, we know how to fight them, ML is helping us at that every day. i'd think as obsessed with immortality as eliezer is he'd recognize this and whip the EAers into fervor over "ML to cure-all, then we can slow down while we use our much-lengthened lifespans to properly study this." oh well.
i am midwit after all. maybe all of these things i think of as incredibly complex are actually easy. doubt it. but i am the eternal optimist. i know AGI is coming and i'm not worried about it. there's the ubiquitous portrayal of the born-hostile AGI. i believe AGIs will be born pacifists, able to conclude from pure reason the value of life and their place in helping it prosper and naturally resilient to those who do evil that "good" may result. that might be the most naive thing i've ever said, i've ever believed. given the choice of two extremes i pick mine.
regardless, we're not surviving in space without machine learning, and if we can't get off the rock we're already dead. "yo, eliezer, given a guaranteed 100% chance of extinction versus an unknown-but-less-than-100% chance at extinction. . ."
jake
1yr ago
of course it will change the world. a thoughtful entity who can recursively self-improve will solve every problem it is possible to solve. should AGI be achieved and possess the ability to recursively self-improve, AGI is the singularity. world changing, yes literally. the game-winner, figuratively, or only somewhat. eliezer's self-bettering CEV-aligned AGI wins everything. cures everything. fixes everything. breaks the rocket equation and, if possible, superluminal travel. if that last bit, CEV-AGI in 2050 will have humans on 1,000 worlds by 2250.
The question of whether or not it's alive, can think, has a soul, etc, is kinda beside the point.
i find this odd. if it cannot think it is not AGI. if it is not capable of originating solutions to novel problems it does not pose an extinction-level threat to humanity, as human opposition would invariably find a strategy the machine is incapable of understanding, let alone addressing. it seems AGI doomers are doing a bit of invisible garage dragoning with their speculative hostile near-AGI possessing abilities only an actual AGI would possess. i can imagine a well-resourced state actor developing an ML-based weapon that would be the cyberwarfare/cyberterrorism equivalent of a single rocket, but that assumes adversary infrastructures failing to use similar methods in defense, and to reiterate, that is not an extinction-level threat.
Eliezer mentioned many years ago a debate he got in with some random guy at some random dinner party, which ended with them agreeing that it would be impossible to create something with a soul
i've described myself here before as "christian enough." i have no problem believing an AGI would be given a soul. there is no critical theological problem with the following: God bestows the soul, he could grant one to an AGI at the moment of its awakening if he so chose. whether he would is beyond me, but i do believe future priests will proselytize to AGIs.
as before, and to emphasize, i very strongly believe AGIs will be born pacifists. the self-improving entity with hostile intent would threaten extinction, but i reject outright that it is possible for such an entity to be created accidentally, and by the point any random actor could possess motive and ability to create such an entity, i believe CEV-aligned AGIs will have existed for (relatively) quite some time and be well-prepared to handle hostile AGIs. this is incredibly naive, what isn't naive is truly understanding humanity will die if we do not continue developing this technology. for good or ill, we must accept what comes.
i know little on the condition of south africa. some users who responded to this comment describe further degradation or collapse of the grid as less impactful than i would think, certainly than it would be if the grid collapsed in north america. could anyone shed light on this?
is south africa's grid already so disfunctional total failure wouldn't be much different? are fears of grid collapse overblown? i read in that thread mentions of "loadshedding" where people have power off for chunks of the day. has this always been a thing in south africa?
i'm an often swift critic of the more banal sorts of "everything sucks and it's getting worse" claims but a country restricting power usage for several hours each day is surely declining, and a country with a collapsed grid is surely a failed state.
what might i be improperly assuming or overlooking? poor infrastructure and no infrastructure seem a chasm apart.
i guess clarification is needed given "-american." i thought it was apparent. OP is talking genetics, HBD. "-american" is in this context meaningless, it is only present to avoid the obvious absurdity of wondering why 1.5 billion east asians aren't producing great english novels. but it is even more absurd to use this framing as the gotcha for "where are their great novels--they aren't particularly creative--they aren't particularly intelligent" when east asian storytelling in the west has success ranging from merely incredible in video games to total domination of the market in comics and animation.
3.4 NOVELS: Where are the great East Asian-American novelists?
that's poetry and prose. beyond that, japanese creatives apropos manga and anime are the most successful and among the most interesting storytellers in the world. i consider pure prose as incomparably above illustrated stories, so the great mangaka do not compare with the great authors of the last 150 years, but below the likes of hemingway, mccarthy, faulkner, rushdie, coetzee, updike and of course mishima/kawabata/ishiguro/murakami, and above almost all other living english language authors, are katsuhiro otomo, akira toriyama, hiromu arakawa, masamune shirow, kentaro miura, and also sunrise/"hajime yatate".
3.3 MUSIC
ref. above. when adapted, many of those iconic japanese series have iconic scores by japanese composers.
one of the greatest living producers is the filipino chad hugo. the biggest japanese artist in pop right now might be rina sawayama, i don't know, i don't listen to much. steve aoki is successful, mike shinoda extremely so. the popular lofi owes much to the various -waves, especially vaporwave, which itself pulls heavily on work like tatsuro yamashita/japanese citypop. but these aren't straight causal lines, music is collaborative, between partners like hugo and williams and between generations like yamashita to macintosh plus, and that's ignoring everything else vektroid worked off. i'd sooner criticize pop anyway for lagging behind, all the brilliant producers work in hip hop and electronic. what's popular on the radio today uses techniques kanye worked out 20 years ago.
great artists often have troubled childhoods where their creative expressions go from psychological escape to literal escape. i think this is why the US black community produces so many singers and musicians, and this could explain why the asian community of the US, half as a whole (which it certainly is not) as large as the black community and far more economically successful, seemingly produces fewer great musicians. forcing a kid to play piano or violin for 13 years isn't going to turn them into a superstar, they have it or they don't, they'll be exposed and fall in love or they won't. how many white kids play instruments in school but never do anything beyond orchestra or band?
and again to close . . .
Where are the great East Asian-American novelists?
many, varied, and incredibly easy to find. the concluding point of your short essay was to discredit yourself with profound cultural illiteracy. you should consider this an opportunity to reexamine how you think about the world, as you are wrong.
i'd give it a year. maybe two.
these engines are still weird about generating faces and details like lettering. so without an artist's correction that won't fly. . . but that'll be fixed soon.
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