madeofmeat
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User ID: 1063
madeofmeat
5mo ago
Alexander Wales wasn't impressed by the quality of the worldbuilding.
madeofmeat
5mo ago
It's kind of sad that the socialization part is both maybe the most important of these and the one least solvable just by you acting in a disciplined and regimented way yourself. If the people around you aren't your people and they don't care about things that you care about and you don't care about things they care about and every time socialization happens it's around things they care about and you don't, at some point you just become too tired and stop going.
madeofmeat
5mo ago
That's what the texts Christians are supposed to believe in say, but the reality is pretty complex. Educated people in medieval Europe probably could claim Christian metaphysics as the correct theory of reality and not get pushback, but at some point pretty long ago this stopped being a thing. I'm pretty sure things had moved from thinking this was literally true to lip service by the late 1800s, and by now the Christians themselves know this too. There's a lot of twisting your brain to apologetics-pretzels to keep things going, and everyone openly knows that apologetics-pretzels-work can be necessary even for the people on the inside and there's no deep exchange of ideas with people on the outside because outsiders will just point-blank reject essential premises of the religious worldview. There's also very long tradition of co-existing with religions you don't share, which relies on things being explicitly labelled with "this is a religion", which is only a thing if you're living in a cosmopolitan society where you actually need to routinely deal with multiple religions.
Progressivism right now is a lot more like what religions might have been like in societies before things got to the point of a cosmopolitan Roman Empire. At that point people weren't saying "this is our religion", it was just the shared understanding how to act in the society and what the world was like. Once you need to interact regularly with people who have a different religion who you can't just conquer and subjugate, your own religion has a new authority problem and you start needing words like "religion". Once the world starts being much bigger and more advanced than when your religion was formulated, so your religious dogma both looks absurd at face value and your clerics start getting curbstomped in public debates because people don't share their load-bearing assumptions about how their worldview works anymore, you have more problems. Progressivism is still new enough that it hasn't really run into either of these problems, while they have been undeniable reality for religious people for centuries now. You can say Christianity is the literal truth, but with the sociological support not being around anymore it will look like performing to everyone, and people will assume even you treat it as performative more than literal.
madeofmeat
6mo ago
Like, okay, let's just focus on the problem then. We want a society where you go to jail if you do a crime and where you get a PhD if you write a thesis, with the same criteria for a crime and a thesis for everyone. Every time we set something like this up, we see outcomes differ by race. People will then use the outcome differences as a pretext to try to destroy the jail institution and the PhD institution and eventually dismantle any system of society setting up formalized expectations for behavior and rigorous standards to aspire to. How do we fix this and go back to being able to have standards that apply equally to everyone?
madeofmeat
6mo ago
Yes, I know, they lie. And it's easy to prove - you just need to establish a principle of "do crime - go to jail" - which is obviously blind to the race, and enforce it diligently without regard to the race. Once you start talking about race, proving that you operate in racially blind framework becomes much harder.
Wasn't this pretty much what people said you were supposed to do from 1980 to 2010 or so? And then it fell apart in a concentrated program to dismantle it that most everyone just went along with for whatever reason where people started saying no, that's not what you are supposed to do, you're not allowed to do that. The system is fully tainted by structural racism, which you can infer from the different outcomes it produces, therefore it must be demolished and the structural racism (which we don't know how to fix because it's inferred from outcomes, not causes) be fixed before anything else. Before 2010, there was a tacit agreement not to talk about race. Then the wokes showed up, realized this lets them go wild with the disparate impact fallacy and started putting race front and center all the time to attack the system, and people couldn't respond to the criticism without arguments that were not permitted in polite society. So what's the next move?
No, not because of this. You don't need to sell the public that 50 millions of US citizens are subhuman (not sure what you'd do with Ashkenazi Jews btw - does every Jew automatically gets PhD at birth? I mean, if you do the negative side, you have to do the positive side too... if you advocated for somehow suppressing supposedly low-IQ populations, you necessarily would have to advocate to promote high-IQ populations... not sure how that's supposed to work?) to sell them the idea of punishment following the crime.
I'm not really sure why you keep pulling things this way. We want a society where you go to jail if you do crime and you get a PhD if you submit a thesis that makes an original contribution to your field. But also one where people won't succeed with campaigns that jails must be abolished because too many black people end up there and PhD programs must be abolished because too many Jews end up there.
How? The wokes would just switch from "you can't jail criminals because it's racist" to "you can't jail criminals because life's hard for them anyway, so you can not ask them to not be criminals, it's just cruel". In fact, many already do it anyway right now - the white progressive left is racist as hell, and many of them internalize a version of HBD very deeply, they just make different political conclusions from it.
Progressives have been doing this a hundred years, people dealt with it fine. The difference here is that now everyone agrees that the criminal did the crime and the criminal justice system is working as it's described. People can and will argue that we should have an entirely different stated purpose for the justice system, but then they need to make a case for that first. They don't have an option of campaigning for closing down the current system right now, because they're successfully making a fallacious claim that the system is fully corrupt, egregiously failing to work according to its stated mandate, and who knows the whole crime problem might just be made up because of structural racism everywhere.
madeofmeat
6mo ago
Now the argument hinges on "cops police and sentence them harsher in the same situations" which you need to demonstrate as true without just pointing to the higher rate of black criminal convictions as direct evidence. This sounds like a much better situation than the one where you can't have an outcome disparity that makes minorities look bad without being blamed of racism. If you can prove that's true then sure, whatever actual thing you dug up is something we can look at as a problem to fix. If you end up getting nothing, then it's back to just arresting people who do crimes.
madeofmeat
6mo ago
I am saying the practical way to solve the crime is to put criminals in jail. You are saying it's impossible because the wokes would interfere and thus we need HBD. But how HBD is helping you?
The wokes get their justification by claiming that disparate sentencing alone proves that law enforcement is racist and illegitimate, and having wide public agreement for this because HBD arguments are taboo and can't be uttered in polite society. If HBD became common knowledge, this would stop working.
madeofmeat
6mo ago
At this point, I think Progressives need their own small army of Tim Kellers - public thinkers who are willing to endure the hardest critiques of the fundamentalisms of their movements, actually hear those critiques, and publicly endure the truth in them in good faith and engage with them.
I'm not sure I see how this would work. Progressivism doesn't have the sort of separate magisterium firewall we've been culturally evolving for recognized religions probably since the Roman Empire, where people agree to a game of partial make-believe around it. By its own lights, it's supposed to be the for-real, actual undistorted picture of reality, no myth-making or noble lies. So if it turns out there were noble lies placed into the foundation after all, it's not an idea you can entertain in a discussion, it's an existential threat, you need to set up a totalitarian system of suppression and taboos around them or risk your whole edifice crumbling.
madeofmeat
6mo ago
Things were on a worse path around 2003 before we had digital distribution. Gaming had a great late nineties when computers were good enough to not cripple every complex game idea with technical limitations, but games were still small enough that a handful of people could get something cool and unique made and into shelves. A lot of the PC game franchises were visibly crippled by the mig-oughties because suddenly games needed to run on XBox as well, and XBox was lower spec than an average gaming PC and dictated a more simplistic user interface. Also the AAA expected quality creep had started going with mandatory voice acting, elaborate cutscenes etc., with bigger budgets leading to more design by committee and people playing it safe and making boring things. You started seeing lots of samey cookie-cutter action-adventure games filling the shelves, with little market left for the older simulator, strategy and complex RPG PC game market until Steam opened up the indie market floodgates.
madeofmeat
8mo ago
I don't know how much but even if you're getting the whole thing it doesn't seem like a great deal. "But if I weren't working, I'd get the whole thing, and it might be worth it being poor if I didn't have to go to work." No, it wouldn't. You don't have to work, and unless your hobbies are watching daytime broadcast television or hanging around outside a Co-Go's, I believe you'd find yourself bored with the welfare lifestyle rather quickly.
This might have been a valid argument in 1989 but nowadays many people can do a remarkable amount of entertaining themselves with no additional cost if they have a computer and a broadband. Anyone academically inclined with an interest like ancient philosophy that doesn't have commercial utility can do a lot of reading and writing with just a small apartment and an internet connection.
madeofmeat
8mo ago
I don't speak the language but the Spanish wikipedia does use the word, Teriantropia. Plenty of uses in the wild too.
madeofmeat
9mo ago
I just switched to uBlock Origin Lite and it seems to work just as well.
madeofmeat
9mo ago
Internet and cable hookups would exist, but would not be covered unless the resident set up their own account.
Making nice internet-connected gaming machines very affordable and attainable could be part of the design.
madeofmeat
9mo ago
Columbia University professor Carl Hart apparently.
madeofmeat
10mo ago
Back when ChatGPT first showed up, it wanted you to login with a Google account, while Perplexity would just let you type queries in an incognito session, so I made a bookmark for Perplexity and kept using that. I wonder how many people ended up with Perplexity out of habit like that.
madeofmeat
11mo ago
There was a person back on reddit-Motte who'd go back on their comments days later and edit some letters to be weird unicode variants and would then delete all their comments when asked about it, so people may be reading this as a crazy person tell now.
madeofmeat
11mo ago
How do you tell if the thing you don't want to do is a thing you nevertheless should be doing or just a pointless small source of misery though? If you can trust society to tell you, great, but this whole current gestures at the Motte project and adjacent stuff thing is that society isn't exactly enjoying that level of trust anymore. And if you feel like you've been left out to figure things out on your own, whether you actually intrinsically want to do the thing suddenly feels a lot more important for judging it.
madeofmeat
1yr ago
It's feeding your need for cognition for threat and survival scenarios with superstimulus parameters. Also, supernatural horror has a lot of the same general appeal as fantasy fiction.
madeofmeat
1yr ago
There's a good Nick Land essay about this where he argues that space exploration is really about planetary disassembly by posthuman intelligences rather than domestead frontier LARPing. But the true vision can't be sold to the voters and politicians since it's too Nietzschean. Alas I cannot find it.
madeofmeat
1yr ago
Think about living in a small village community where you're a skilled artisan of some sort. You feel confident in your work which you do autonomously under your own judgment, get pleasure from your mastery of it, and can immediately see how the results of your work benefit yourself and those around you. You're a known and valued member of your community and you have deep and long-lasting personal and professional ties to those around you. Alienation is the opposite of that.
madeofmeat
1yr ago
I wonder if the logic is something like the first sequel being an easy cash grab where you don't want to expend too much effort or creativity, since it's fundamentally a bit grubby endeavor riding on the coattails of the initial movie, and the sequel is probably going to sink into obscurity after pulling in the expected amount of extra profit. However, if the sequel does better than expected, you've got a potential successful movie series going, and you should again start putting more effort and attention into the next sequel since now you want the sequel movies to be seen as An Entire Thing again.
madeofmeat
1yr ago
No offense meant, but ideally these gifted people would be going into government and industry, not spending all their time on video games.
You can meaningfully start working on a video game even if you're completely disconnected from any sort of career track or network, and can still produce something that many strangers will happily interact with if it's successful. Government is a complete nonstarter for any sort of solo work, and unless you're up for full-stack entrepreneurship on your lonesome, so is industry. Interesting work at unsolved problems also isn't exactly at the bottom of the org chart, so you'd need to maneuver some sort of illegible career-entrepreneurship maze with bottomless will to political power to get anywhere where you might get a chance to have meaningful impact anything. I don't see that many of the sorts of people who have a mindset of being good indie video game programmers wanting to get into that or thinking they would succeed at it. Sixty years ago, "try to join Bell Labs" would have been a clear path for someone who can do clever stuff but isn't terrible interested in constantly spending most of their effort in career advancement, but stable, slack-providing organizations like that are hard to keep around.
madeofmeat
1yr ago
Very late reply, but this sounds uncannily like Tove K's description of her estranged teenage daughter.
madeofmeat
1yr ago
How I escaped from the Superclusters has aged well.
There was some dark humor in Dishonored in that the nonlethal ways to eliminate your targets were stuff like them being sold as slaves with their tongues cut out or getting locked in a rape dungeon for life, that quite possibly left them wishing you'd just killed them instead.
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