madeofmeat
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User ID: 1063
madeofmeat
1mo 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
1mo 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
2mo 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
2mo 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
3mo ago
Very late reply, but this sounds uncannily like Tove K's description of her estranged teenage daughter.
madeofmeat
3mo ago
How I escaped from the Superclusters has aged well.
madeofmeat
3mo ago
How much of playing with toys is some kind of evolved behavior for practicing the use of a weapon designed to maim and kill animals and people? Humans spent an awful lot of time as hunter-gatherers who have a long learning period and are expected to be very handy with some sort of primitive weapon as adults. Maybe weapons are toys because toys are weapons.
madeofmeat
4mo ago
What does it mean to hold yourself in the right way if righteousness doesn't exist?
It means that you need to work hard to come up with an idea of right that is good and that you can hold yourself to, and to keep checking how it's actually working and get back to the drawing board if it looks like something is off.
I understood your
If I am wrong about the universe, I will not be wrong in how I have held myself.
meaning that you feel like you have some internal sense of righteousness that's not completely outsourced to whatever is outside yourself out in the universe.
madeofmeat
4mo ago
If I am wrong about the universe, I will not be wrong in how I have held myself. If you are wrong about the universe, you will have been wrong about the very nature of your soul.
Shouldn't people try to hold themselves in the way they think is right no matter what their nature is?
madeofmeat
4mo ago
Christianity isn't so much about 'things being true' but getting into a mindset where 'it doesn't matter if it's true or not, I believe it'. Christian theology is a complete mess because they go in with the answer in mind and then come up with justifications.
This is definitely what it looks like in TheMotte and adjacent places. People lean hard on the coordination power and social stability aspects and steer well clear of trying to explain nature in religious terms and just shrug at the historical narratives in religious doctrine being very odd. Meanwhile religions keep losing smart and sincere people who start out taking this stuff at face value, realize it doesn't come together, and end up feeling betrayed and lied to. There doesn't seem to be much of a way back either, unless you end up fully convinced in the "it doesn't matter if it's true" mindset after a lifetime of figuring out what is true being important to you. This hasn't always been the case, the 19th century introduced the double whammy of the theory of evolution showing up and a consensus forming that the bible's historical narrative is mostly mythical. I keep wondering what this will do to the religions in the long term, since the process has really only been going for a century or two at this point. You keep losing people who are both smart and sincere, and who you're left with either isn't very smart or isn't very sincere.
madeofmeat
5mo ago
The first Steel Battalion was a cult hit. The actual disaster was the sequel from 2012 that tried to do the same thing with Kinect motion controls instead of a custom controller.
madeofmeat
5mo ago
@gemmaem has a less self-satisfied review up, Ross Douthat's Sandbox Universe
Douthat wants to go beyond the fine tuning argument, however, arguing not just that there is a God, but that humans are special to God in a way that is not shared by anything else that we are aware of. Consciousness is special, he argues, because the “Copenhagen Theory [sic]” of quantum mechanics is “scientific evidence that mind somehow precedes matter.” Regrettably, Douthat’s argument here is based not on the work of any physicist, but rather on an essay in the Claremont Review of Books by Spencer Klavan, who holds a doctorate in ancient Greek literature from Yale.
Approvingly quoted by Douthat, Klavan goes so far as to claim that photons, atoms and the like “cannot exist unseen,” and hence that all of our scientific theories about things that happened before humanity are “about how things would have behaved if there was someone there to watch them.” This is then used to set up an argument for God: “The most fearsome heresy of all … is that indeed there was someone there.”
Let’s think this through. If we suppose that observation by a conscious mind is enough by itself to collapse a quantum wavefunction from probability into actuality, and if God is essentially a conscious Mind, like our minds except perfect and all-knowing and much more powerful, then every wave function must already be collapsed, since God sees all. Yet we know from physical experiments that this is not the case, because this would make the entire field of quantum mechanics unnecessary! The postulates of Klavan, which Douthat encourages us to accept, thus bring us to a startling conclusion. We would appear to have scientific proof that God cannot possibly exist.
madeofmeat
6mo ago
Roger Penrose has been beating this drum since the 1990s and hasn't managed to convince many other people, but he is a Nobel laureate now so I guess he's a pretty high-profile advocate. The way he argues for this stuff feels more like a cope for preserving some sort of transcendental, irreducible aura for human mathematical thinking rather than empirically solid neuroscience though.
madeofmeat
7mo ago
Check out a website called Anna's Archive. You have to get pretty obscure before they don't have a free full download of a book.
madeofmeat
11mo ago
Ever tried reading old philosophy? Plenty of relatable cantankerous depressives like Schopenhauer overthinking stuff out there, but possibly ending up with some genuinely interesting viewpoints instead of just stuff you could fill in yourself starting from "guy's depressed".
madeofmeat
11mo ago
I feel like there's something tricky here. There used to be the thing where people were going "schools should teach critical thinking", that certainly sounds like a cross-domain understanding of sorts. People actually tried to do this, and it turned out that it's either very hard or impossible with the existing toolkit of teaching domain-specific stuff. Maybe it can't really be taught and some people just pick it up by themselves, maybe it needs one-on-one tutoring that doesn't scale.
It's also tricky to apply a fuzzy "might be relevant to business success" / "probably isn't" judgment to rigid curricula and socially recognized pursuits. People will want to legibilize things into clear-lined singular pursuits like "playing tennis" or "being an accountant".
madeofmeat
11mo ago
The success stories for very early hyperspecialization seem to be very "inside the box" things like playing the violin or being good at golf or chess. You know exactly what you're supposed to do, what is and isn't allowed is tightly circumscribed, and mastery generally just involves knowing as much stuff inside the allowed box and being very well trained at executing it. Things like business or science aren't like this. You are allowed to come up with completely new things for both what you're trying to accomplish and for how you're going to do it. Arguably there's still a box of physical reality and the laws of nature, but those aren't exactly easy to start getting a hang of at age five, unlike "what are the rules of chess" or "how do you hold a violin". If you want to do the sort of cross-cutting paradigm-busting that pushes things ahead, having been hyper-specialized into one of what your parents' generation thought was the set of relevant schemas for succeeding in the world might not be that helpful.
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.
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