somethingsomething
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User ID: 1123
somethingsomething
11mo ago
The moment he stops being investigated he also loses his political power. He's powerful because his actions feed the collective persecution complex of him and his supporters. It's not just political. He also always creates the appearance he is doing something shady behind the scenes, to bait investigations because they are good for him and his political prospects.
somethingsomething
11mo ago
Then wouldn't it be wise for Trump to take steps to avoid being investigated? It seems at every opportunity he acts guilty enough to get investigated but is actually clean enough to get out clean. I don't think it's out of the question to think he benefits from the image of the establish going after him, and he knows it.
In the end you get a bunch of people complaining about how he was treated, and that's what he wants. That's why he acts the way he does, anything to make him look like more of a victim.
somethingsomething
1yr ago
Yeah not to mention the beauty of the inverted sun, which to me had a kind of deep archetypal quality that I feel like is pretty rare for natural phenomena. Highly recommend.
somethingsomething
1yr ago
To those using ChatGPT to brainstorm, what kind of prompt engineering techniques have you found to be useful?
Something I've been doing is asking chatgpt for a list of responses, and then basically running high order functions on those lists. So you ask for a list of X, and then say for each item do Y, or combine all items into Z. This just lets you look at more than one idea at once, with some turning out better than others, and I think it also results in more creative answers, since you're not just getting the most common idea, but ideas 1 through 5 or 10 that are all going through these transformations. Then you can ask it to combine or shift ideas into each other for more possible creativity.
somethingsomething
1yr ago
The Ehrlichs float the idea of adding "temporary sterilants" to the water supply or staple foods. However, they reject the idea as unpractical due to "criminal
Stop there!
somethingsomething
1yr ago
I would be curious if rationalists are even less "social conformity" biased. I'd guess the average rationalist grew up an outcast who became (often irrationally) suspicious of the ingroup, and gravitated to outgroups to fulfill their social needs and went on to justify their continual social exclusion via their own intelligence whether they were or not.
They are just as influenced by social conformity, but through an inverted/rejection/wound/resentment model that leaves them able to see through the blind spots of the normies, but just as biased when it comes to the particular outgroups they identify with. Which is still valuable to have, but the self congratulations are probably unwarranted.
somethingsomething
1yr ago
He seems like a character out of a Kurt Vonnegut novel
somethingsomething
1yr ago
I'm reading The Western Canon by Harold Bloom, a pretty entertaining mix of anti-resentment culture war from the 90s with literature worship. Got me listening to the Paradise Lost audiobook.
somethingsomething
1yr ago
It's not cope, but I agree that would make a cool cut. In my other response I fleshed out my argument a bit and mentioned Run Lola Run which did something similar with FPS switches. It's just worth analyzing why the different FPS makes you feel things differently and the possibility that there are actual reasons 24 has remained the standard and is vastly preferred by enthusiast in a way that hasn't happened for other tech advances, like digital film, CG, etc beyond the incurious "cope" argument.
somethingsomething
1yr ago
Cope is far from the most likely explanation. What I have to work with is:
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An intense revulsion towards high FPS film and television every time I have encountered it outside a nature documentary, that I share broadly with the film industry and enthusiasts.
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Things I have noticed that I like about 24 FPS that appear degrade at 30 and even further degraded at 48 FPS, but also degraded in a different way at 12 FPS.
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Finding 60 FPS games vastly preferable to 30 FPS games, despite growing up with games at a low FPS, which I also happen to share broadly with the games industry and enthusiasts (although it's only been more prioritized recently). Also, finding no degradation in 120 FPS or higher.
Empirically I don't think your analogies hold up well. The average record enjoyer does not feel revulsion towards digital audio outside of memes, the black-and-white movie enjoyers, as much as they even exist, don't feel revulsion towards color film. If this is Stockholm syndrome, it's on a far more massive scale than any other phenomena like it that I can think of.
When considering mass psychosis we should at least be curious towards what actually changes with different FPS choices. You say blur is in everything, but I was describing the amount and qualities of the blur, not just from fast movements but practically all movement because it's so low. There's also the ways even TV at 30 looks different from film. Watch Run Lola Run which mixes the two, and try to observe the different effects each have in how you process the scenes. I really think if collectively we act incurious, and if film goes to 48 or higher, film is dead. I watched the Hobbit at 48, I watched an interpolated Game of Thrones episode. Both were just absolutely revolting.
somethingsomething
1yr ago
As someone who can't stand 30fps gaming but loves 24fps film, let me just (imprecisely) defend it here.
I'm pretty sure there are ways to mitigate the choppiness from pans, I'm not sure on the specifics. But generally I think it's a limitation that should be worked around as one of the weak points.
The strengths of 24fps film is how the natural blurring of movement in each frame creates the beautiful and subtle impressionistic quality movies have, and that's something that would have to be painstakingly simulated to do in games (and blurring effects in games are pretty bad so I feel like that is a ways away)
somethingsomething
1yr ago
It's interesting how this is almost the opposite of mental health therapies that use body scanning, or focusing on the body to try to resolve mental issues.
somethingsomething
1yr ago
In the situation of literary outliers it doesn't matter if most men are insensitive, because the highly sensitive and talented male outlier can succeed and many have as psychological, emotional, sensitive writers (while other male authors have gone the way you describe as idea-focused etc.)
I think it's more of a question of there being space in the culture and market to draw those people into successful writers who understand their own gifts, have something to communicate clearly, and see rewards from it. I think that what culture that would support that has deeply degraded, to the point where the output of men and women authors are suffering.
Firstly I think sensitive men have become deeply confused by the culture/political war. Male gaze is bad, Fellini's male psychodrama is offensive etc. Sensitive men are so steeped in shame they are afraid of creating sensitive works with honesty.
Secondly, the sensitive male is outcompeted by the sensitive female. When women writers didn't exist, there is much less competition in the niche. It's like when men played the female roles in theatre, when women aren't competing it releases pressure on male gender expression.
Thirdly, the literary culture is less interested in reading the "sensitive man". What people see today as the "sensitive man" is basically an invented personality that has rough edges sanded off. Real sensitivity from men is distasteful in certain ways, so people only feel comfortable engaging with it when it at least was made in the 1970s when you can excuse that kind of thing.
somethingsomething
1yr ago
I agree it's obvious that Christianity was intertwined with intellectual pursuits, the enlightenment etc. But to be clear I am looking for evidence that Christian ideas substantially influenced things in moving things forward, instead of holding us back.
I think without Christianity you can still have Kant (maybe that's a controversial take) because you still have Plato, ideas of "heavens" and the divine, and of key importance, you still have Judaism. These ideas would be around, especially in intellectual circles. There were also other movements towards monotheistic thought in antiquity, we didn't need a Christ cult for philosophy to necessarily see that become more prominent.
That kind of thought experiment of a world without Christianity can get kind of bewildering because of how ingrained it was, but consider that without the fervor it may have secularized sooner. Without the sin of greed, we may have discovered capitalism sooner, and with it liberalism. How many ways did the institution of Christianity resist that (many) and how does it compare to the sliver of insights it gave in return?
somethingsomething
1yr ago
The point I'm making is the idea of a Jewish person paying taxes to gentiles ruling over them was not at all new and is well trodden in the old testament. To turn that into separation of church and state is anachronistic, and I feel like I'm repeating myself to explain why.
Yes people stand on the shoulders of giants, but they add something too. My point is that nothing in that quote was new or interesting at the time.
somethingsomething
1yr ago
Regarding that Mark quote, there absolutely was a separation, the separation between Jews and Romans. To read the separation of church and state into that is anachronistic. Jesus didn't want the Jewish temple separate from the Jewish state. If you look at that quote practically, it is obvious in the context of the bible that taxation was a big deal at the time, and Jesus is weighing in on paying the Romans, which he almost certainly wasn't the only one to do so. If you look at it in the context of apocalypse, of which both Jesus and Paul believed was coming very soon, it adds another dimension that it doesn't really matter because God is coming to bring revelation soon anyway. And finally, if you look at the division between the Earthly world and the heavenly world in this statement, that is entirely an innovation by Paul (not Jesus who thought he would be king on Earth), and Paul was clearly influenced by Plato. So your classic example completely falls apart to support your argument that Christianity stands as an entirely new way of thinking apart from those before it.
I would love to hear from a Christian a compelling argument for why western civilization owes it such a great debt, but this is just not convincing.
somethingsomething
1yr ago
Like someone mentioned elsewhere in the thread, I think those could have been there with intention of capturing a Dunning Kruger effect. Which I think is actually and underused tool in surveys to capture certain overconfident opinions people might have.
somethingsomething
1yr ago
You could try a big namelist and allow one of the lines to be a name, like the original square
somethingsomething
1yr ago
Who could possibly be trusted to actually act as oversight? The conversation has long been poisoned by far out doomsday scenarios that it makes any selection process fraught. It's like having a thousand Greta Thunbergs clamoring for environmental oversight. I agree, but I don't want anyone like her making decisions regarding that.
This reads to me like we should pause development so we can hand out a bunch of grant money that goes into nothing projects and proposals that go nowhere. No one is going to listen to the "luddite" faction. Just like every internet technology it's going to go out of control and we're just going to have to deal with it.
somethingsomething
1yr ago
Before this, both maleness and presumably some horrible mental health issue were both necessary conditions for school shootings. It seems very telling that in this case when we finally see a woman do it, it's one who saw themselves as a man, and was possibly treated with male sex hormones.
So whether it's "more" about maleness or mental illness doesn't really matter, because empirically you need to have both.
somethingsomething
1yr ago
What it sounds like you're saying with more words than necessary is to quote Nietzsche, Christianity is Platonism for the people. In other words Christianity merged Jewish monotheism/apocalypticism with platonic idealism and there's good reason to think it's not too much more complicated than that.
So you can try to get a bunch of atheists to take idealism more seriously, but if that's your goal I would put it more straightforwardly because then they can actually do their own research on idealism with the various sources that are out there. I don't think too many will find it convincing but you may get some converts.
somethingsomething
1yr ago
Regulators should have good laws that work and not have bad laws that don't work, and if that's not happening there should be pushback. But gun regulation isn't the impossible task you make it out to be. The whole "murder is illegal anyway" doesn't track because gun laws can make things more risky by increasing the points of illegality before the murder actually happens. Then you start cracking down on minor crimes, search for guns while you do it, and bam you have a much nicer city Mr. Giuliani. Similarly I easily can imagine effectiveness in inconveniencing and tagging people at high suicide risk (ie people who have attempted before) just because I think many of those happen at intense points, under the influence, etc.
Another thing but the with the whole onerous gun laws thing: Those should just be relaxed if you're a woman, and that'll solve most of those issues. If you're a man, then you should keep a clean slate or get one illegally if you really need to protect yourself and you don't pass the background check, you should probably have connections at that point anyway.
somethingsomething
1yr ago
You have a very unconventional definition that your argument rests on that you failed to introduce when you made the argument. To reduce tone to believable characterization, or your immersion based on characterization, you have to ignore most of the ways the word tone is commonly used, which is generally as the entire structured mood in a film, touching on its genre and its "point-of-view", influenced by all aspects of its storytelling, including cinematography, soundtrack, and genre expectations. Imagine the early scenes of a horror movie where everyone is happy. Is the tone a happy cheerful one? Most people would say no, the tone is still horror, or a kind of tension, just by virtue of knowing what's next. Even if people said the tone is happy, just add some tense violins to the score and its now definitely horror no matter what the characters are doing. That's dramatic irony which most people would argue is an important part of tone, but is completely missing from your definition because it is entirely based on what the characters of the movie are feeling/doing.
To reduce it to immersion also robs it of its variations. Tone isn't just on a spectrum of effectiveness. It can be horror, it can be lighthearted, it can be romantic, cynical, and yes, ambivalent. And a break in tone is commonly seen to mean just shifting from one to another, not as an automatic failure. If something "ruins" the tone, people are generally identifying that the movie shifted tones unskillfully, although some people seem to think that shifting whatsoever is unskillful, which I would strongly disagree with.
somethingsomething
1yr ago
The most entertaining thing I managed to do was get it to write various scenarios and scripts that placed Nietzsche in the world of Final Fantasy with a "The Crystals are dead and we have killed them" kind of philosophy, having FF7 characters debate him, etc.
I think making it mix one thing with another is one of the ways to get more interesting outputs.
The point is Trump doesn't want to stop, and if he knows what's good for him he won't stop trying to get investigated, because they improve his political prospects.
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