popocatepetl
I'm the guy who edits every comment I write at least four times. Sorry.
User ID: 215
popocatepetl
3mo ago
Happy birthday to the Motte! If nothing else, it is a good time to remind myself that I am bad at predictions and should never play the prediction markets, because I didn't think we'd last this long. But here were are today, entering year four!
Any takes on what made our lifeboat more successful than other Reddit pilgrim colonies throughout the internet? The lifecycle of every other I've seen is:
- One month of elevated activity, with everyone criticizing Reddit and celebrating their new home
- A purity spiral towards the far right starts
- Ghost town
I'm certain a few departed/banned left-leaning posters will accuse us of going through #2. But it's nothing like what happened to Ruqqus, for example, and #3 never arrived. We've been stable at 1000-2000 comments/week for years now. Subjectively I'd say quality is down, but eh.
Perhaps mottizens are just built different™?
nifty meta-narrative like DS2 did, or at least not with such gravitas or panache.
Please elaborate.
Oh boy. The following are all spoilers. Although the Dark Souls series never makes these things explicit, discovering them is the marrow of DS1 and DS2. I recommend these games in part for their story, but I'm not going to turn a Motte comment into a CIA document. Read at your own risk.
Dark Souls is set in a kingdom named Lordran, and Dark Souls II in one named Drangleic. They're far away: "if the first game was set in the North Pole, the second would be in the South Pole". Both kingdoms are in a Cormac McCarthy The Road state of social collapse and imminent human extinction. All characters are slowly going mad as they lose hope. The vast majority are already mad ('hollow') and form the bulk of enemies you fight. The games hint, if you pay attention to their death sounds and what makes them respawn, that hollows are 'player characters', so to speak, who unplugged the controller, abandoned the game, and turned into mobs. And ALL player characters of Dark Souls do eventually turn into mobs. The games diegetically loop back to New Game+, so no one ever "beats" Dark Souls, strictly speaking. Whenever you stop, you stop. The "Age of Fire" ends, and the "Age of Dark" begins, though the in-game lore never explains what these terms mean.
All this is an analogy for nihilism in our garden-variety IRL life. Dark Souls games pose the question: Is fighting entropy worth it?
Do you remember when I said DS1 and DS2 are set in different places? I lied. Or Director Tomohiro Shibuya lied in that interview anyway. Once you actually play Dark Souls II, you'll find heaps of evidence that Drangleic is actually Lordran, except tens of thousands or even millions of years later. Most locations of the first game are all accessible, but buried underground, and so worn with age it's hard to tell what you're looking at. First game items can be found as artifacts: the Holy Grail equivalent of DS1, the Lordvessel, is in a trash heap in the basement of the starter village. Characters frequently remark on "countless kingdoms rising and falling on this very spot".
(Side tangent: 2014 was the first time I encountered NPCs in the real world, though I didn't have the vocabulary for them at the time. Debates raged online for the first year after DS2 on Drangleic vs Lordran. One side said "Here is a mountain of evidence Lordran is Drangleic", the other side said "An authority figure said Drangleic is not Lordran, and Trust The Experts, case closed". Fun times.)
Everything in DS2, even the story, is a cheap knockoff of DS1, being repeated over and over and over again. There is an Age of Fire running out, yielding to an Age of Dark. In one sense, DS2 is making another analogy about nihilism and entropy. In another sense, DS2 is talking about video game sequels.
Dark Souls 1 was a smash hit. What's more, beyond commercial success, it became perhaps the Most Admired Game Of All Time. What Ocarina of Time was in 2010, Dark Souls became in 2011. What's more, the premise and ending of DS1 made even the idea of a sequel artistic sacrilege. That hopeless, but nevertheless beautiful descent in the Heat Death of the Universe — and I won't even spoil the way DS1 punctuates that at the ending — did not brook a direct sequel. But because video game franchises, FromSoft did indeed have to make a sequel to a game about the End of the Universe.
This crass act is a bit like taking mom out of her coffin, mummifying her, and using her body as a carnival prop.
Bearer of the curse.
Long have I awaited one such as you, one who might shatter the shackles of fate.
One who can set me free. Bearer of the curse, it was my own manifestation that led you here.
Dark Souls II a game about being forced to go through the motions of something degrading that you hate. Like making a cynical sequel to a story that conclusively finished. Over the course of the game, you forget why you're even doing what you're doing, just like the ugly crone in the opening cinematic promised. Of course, it's not "just" about video game sequels, but that's part of it.
popocatepetl
3mo ago
Could you go from person to non-person?
This is a pretty annoying leftist framing of "rights". Are children not people? Are foreigners living within another country not people? Are the mentally disabled and elderly not people?
Would you be able to live a happy life having had rights and then having them taken away from you?
Of course. Here, the example of expats above is helpful. And indeed, in practice I did experience losing freedom of speech when I was a teenager, having learned things and come to opinions that are de facto illegal in my country. The Boomers lost freedom of association in the 1960s and they managed well enough. And voting? Please. Voting is a joke. The right to vote is the right to be ruled by whoever controls the media.
do you actually think, prosaically, that's what 1890 was like?
Would you willingly live with the rights of an 1890s woman?
Sure. Obviously in this scenario I'm transformed fully into a woman (mentally and physically, with no one including myself remembering my being a man), and all other women would have to have the same rights.
I think the sexual revolution was terrible for society. It was also pretty bad for women themselves.
The most notable thing about him when the shock value wears off is the depth and breadth of his hatred. The man has been railing nonstop about how women should be reduced to sexual chattel and raped by their husbands, along with how all non-white people in the west should be slaughtered for the better part of 30 years now
Eh. There's a reactionary idiom that is the reverse of political language everywhere else. Where most people use euphemisms ("I'm pro-life"), and a stalwart minority of fair-minded folks speak prosaically ("I'm anti-abortion"), reactionaries actively and intentionally use dysphemisms ("I'm pro-Men-Controlling-Women's-Bodies"). They take speaking blunt and coarse to its extreme, to the point of not even being accurate.
Having read a few reactionaries a lot, I am 100% confident they don't literally mean what they say. Why are they speaking like this then? I think this strange affectation is (a) a reflexive emotional rebellion of what they call 'the longhouse', which gags everyone's language and thinking in daily life, (b) a gatekeeping mechanism to keep out "containment conservatives" in the brand of James Lindsay, who operate the modern political ratchet by policing discourse to their right.
Yes, Dread Jim clearly believes in returning race and gender norms waaaaaaay back. Leftists would certainly describe the world of the late 1800s as "reducing women to sexual chattel" and "genociding browns", which is why he delights in calling his politics that. But, really, do you actually think, prosaically, that's what 1890 was like?
HK was also annoying to play until you got the cloak and the claws.
I think you know what I mean now based on your update, but early Hollow Knight was annoying-ish in the sense of "You don't get a dash or double jump for several hours." Silksong is annoying-ish in the sense of "I've died five times in a row to this gauntlet of ant mobs that take eight hits to kill each"
I do enjoy how mobile even early game Hornet is though. (Tip: Keep holding C after dashing to sprint)
After seven long years, Hollow Knight: Silksong released and people could finally play it crashed Steam for several hours after which people could finally play it.
You'll remember that Dark Souls (2011) started a storm of Dark Souls buts -- Dark Souls but Scifi, Dark Souls but Roguelike, Dark Souls but Cooking Mama, etc. Of these, to my knowledge, the only pure success was Hollow Knight. (But Metroidvania.) It captured Dark Souls 1's best feature, which was a feeling of going on an expedition into the deep unknown, with no idea how to get back home. Likewise in Hollow Knight, very commonly players clear the game's tutorial zone and end up falling into a late game spiders' nest a hundred miles underground. Or swim through a hole in wall, but get lost in a complex sewer system with an abandoned city underneath. Or mess around platforming and find a secret level hidden above the cliffs of the starter village. The story, vibe, and lore were also very Dark Souls, although this is mostly because Hollow Knight just plain ripped it off.
Five hours in, I'm enjoying myself but I'm disappointed. It's ironically the exact same disappointment of Dark Souls 2. Silksong is much more linear and railroaded; the difficulty, even in these early areas, is a step up from the original, and this is mainly accomplished but lower player health, higher enemy health, and the liberal use of gank squads. And I suspect Silksong won't pull off a nifty meta-narrative like DS2 did, or at least not with such gravitas or panache.
We'll see if the game opens up once I reach the citadel, or once I finally get a freaking health or damage upgrade. Anyone else playing this? (Or any other Soulslike or Metroidvania, I guess)
I'm asking for stories that are identifiably girl stories but also follow basic storytelling rules rather than expressing the basest cringe urges of women
Kemono no Sou-ja Erin. It's about a sensitive but plucky young girl who, over the course of her life, tries to make connections with people, create social peace, and uphold her values in a cynical world of intense political and social conflict. Positive femininity is shown as a kind of extremophile lichen, which grows in the cracks of an amoral dog-eat-dog world. With each new challenge, Erin has to find a way to turn people away from their dark impulses, resolve interpersonal conflicts, and be subversively moral under evil rules.
I'd certainly introduce this show to a 8yo-16yo daughter if I had one.
Around 2018, someone linked me to a few SlateStarCodex essays (IIRC In Favor of Niceness, Community, and Civilization and I Can Tolerate Anything Except The Outgroup). Pure bliss. I spent days binging Scott essays. I'd finally found someone who thought in the same idiom I did, after a whole life feeling like a space alien.
Post a few years lurking /r/SSC and /r/TheMotte, here I am. This is despite me disagreeing with Rats on most things on the object level.
Not only does 2/3 of the world's current population live without the Christian God, historically we have very successful nearly atheistic civil societies
What is your best argument for why we need God as a society, and why the Christian God in particular?
We don't. The City of Man, as St. Augustine called it, can and does function by harnessing the fear and cupidity of its population. Even in nominally Christian societies, most people obey the law because they fear punishment, and most people labor because they want goodies. Earthly societies work like this. Even the devils in Hell maintain a society that "works" like this. Satan is the top dog; he has goons like Mammon and Baal under him, and every level of the pyramid oppresses those beneath them, and fears and envies those above them.
Of course, the City of Man periodically falls apart. Countries rise and fall, elites are circulated, the 'good times, weak men, hard times' meme cycles. And of course, the City of God, the group of people who obey and work for the sake of love; whether visibly Christian or not, help society run more smoothly. But the Christian church is not One Weird Trick for curing social decay. The visible church is not the City of God. Wheat and tares are mingled together. If anything, whenever the visible church grows more powerful, the City of Man infests it more thoroughly for cynical reasons. "Evil Catholic Church" is not just a Final Fantasy trope.
That said, whenever you see the City of Man being stable via repression, with a degenerate and gluttonous overclass (see China or North Korea); or whenever you see the City of Man losing stability, and devouring itself alive like a swarm of maggots bursting out of a rotting corpse (see the West), that's a hint you don't want to live in place that operates like the City of Man.
"Become Christian to restore the West" is both a trap and easily deboonked. Become Christian because you realize this is not your true homeland. That's it. 🤷♂️
If this is true, you have a nasty problem where you're running civilization off of restricting otherwise-capable women from competing for jobs or niches like 'surgeon' when they can do the job just as well as any other man.
40% of women physicians leave the field or go part time within six years of finishing residency. Our civilization insisting it can't discriminate against women for spots in medical school — let alone its encouraging more women to get there via affirmative action — is utter insanity.
popocatepetl
4mo ago
the best argument against Freddie deBoer isn't a bunch of words but just to point out that he suffers from severe mental illness and is desperately trying to shed that reputation
Chat, is this Bulverism?
Textbook case.
popocatepetl
4mo ago
Thought #1: Incredible machine translation from Claude. 4o interpolates a little that's not in the actual text ("sexy kind of heaven") and does an iffy literal translation for "peaceful moment"; "blissful moment" is a better fit.
Thought #2: Ban LLMs. They will allow comments like this to be translated to English.
Freddie, I plead with you: stay on topic. I’m sure it feels good to call everyone who’s more excited than you about AI an emotionally stunted manchild afraid to confront the real world, but it’s not a productive contribution to the debate. [...] The only way to check the balance of someone’s checking account is to check the balance on their checking account. Anything else is a waste of everyone's time.
It depends on Freddie's goals. If he wants to persuade the undecided middle and silence his opponents, bulverism is the most powerful tool in his box, as it amounts to social shaming. This comment by @Iconochasm puts it well.
As the saying goes, you can't reason someone out of the position they didn't reason themselves into. You definitely can, however, shame them for being low-status losers until they rationalize themselves out of their stupid beliefs and get their kid fucking vaccinated.
Likewise, you can get many techno-optimists (or techno-pessimists) to clam up if you threaten to cross-examine their personal failings. "You want Fully Automated Luxury Communism because your life sucks and you're coping", "You want industrial civilization to be in decline because you're a cubicle drone who think's he'd be Immortan Joe after collapse", etc etc
These accusations work very well if even slightly plausible. Of course, it's a symmetrical weapon. Social shaming via bulverism about racists is the little Dutch boy with his finger in the dike keeping HBD from being publicly acknowledged, and it's almost certainly true. If you actually want to control public opinion, bulverism versus fact-checking is a gun to a knife fight.
As for Freddie and AI though, I could levy a bit of bulverism at him — and I am an LLM skeptic myself. Why is he so desperate to prove the AI optimists wrong, if he is so convinced the passage of time will do that anyway?
popocatepetl
4mo ago
Yes. I went through a period in my early twenties when I worried about this. But eventually I realized it's all preference falsification: "Women like responsible nice guys who respect women" but for men.
If you've ever thought a 16yo looked pretty as a grown man welcome to the "normal heterosexual male club". Almost everyone else is lying.
What could be less interesting than hearing that Jesus loves you, or being harangued about sin, or getting promised Heaven, or threatened with Hell? ... But for some reason, when Lewis writes, the cliches suddenly work... when he writes about Hell you can smell brimstone.
Did Scott miss the plot here? CS Lewis has remarkably little to say about God as punisher. That's one of his signature traits as an apologist. In one brief section in The Problem of Pain, he concedes it as part of a thought experiment to defend the goodness of eternal hell in its most repugnant aspect. But everywhere else, he describe sin as self-torture, and hell as something you do to yourself.
Here lies the primary genius of Lewis as a Christian essayist. Reading him, you really feel, intuitively, that Sin, Hell, and Death are the same thing, rather than the last two being something God arbitrarily imposes on those who do the first. It's the explicit theme of his novella The Great Divorce, where God tries to draw everyone into heaven, but they flee into outer darkness because they prefer their bitter and envious ways. More theoretically, in Mere Christianity, he spends his chapters on the capital vices showing how they make you miserable even at a natural level — in my opinion, this chapter on Pride is one of the greatest ever written, and even a fourth grader can understand it.
Here is a poem in his first work of apologetics, Pilgrim's Regress, sung by an (implied) angel when seeing doomed souls on the fringes of hell:
God in His mercy made
The fixed pains of Hell.
That misery might be stayed,
God in His mercy made
Eternal bounds and bade
Its waves no further swell.
God in His mercy made
The fixed pains of Hell.
This is, on its own, counterintuitive to accept, and IMO the through line of Lewis's oeuvre after Pilgrim's Regress is showing how it's true. CS Lewis's God is a big softie.
popocatepetl
4mo ago
Just reminded of why I cannot play video games (at all). Whole weekend and part of this morning were taken up by civ, when I should have been doing other things.
In an ideal world, video game ratings would not cover violence but addictive content.
On the surface level, it's hard to tell the difference. Mario Kart is harmless. Civilization is risky. World of Warcraft is potentially life destroying. Only after you fall into a few traps yourself can you spot the difference from a distance.
popocatepetl
4mo ago
Where the message of 'Patterns of Force' is something like "you can't separate the good from the bad, and the advantages of Nazism cannot outweigh its disadvantages", I think the message you'd get from a modern historian would be that Nazism is just bad overall.
Can modern historians be trusted? The very topic of this thread is that De naziis nil nisi malum in left-leaning circles, of which academia is certainly one. I read Richard Evans' series on the Third Reich and recall reading a lot of stupid policies from the Nazis. Nonetheless, I can't get past — and I can't see how detractors get past — that in twelve years Nazi Germany saw rapid economic growth, and then lost a war against four great powers with only the help of two minor powers. They gave a pretty good fight. Of course, you can say that the insanity of Nazism lead to them starting an unwinnable war, but they must have been doing some good things to even acquit themselves as well as they did.
Didn't you just say "The decline should be observable within a few years"? Isn't that projecting to begin with?
Of course not, it's a testable prediction to confirm/disprove my priors on the present or near-term state of technology. @faceh said that a terrifying new superstimulus has entered the market that will destroy young men; I say that is ridiculous, and that in this current AI companion technology will barely move the needle at all in terms of parasocial escapism. The only way to adjudicate these wordviews is to make predictions that will either pass/fall, which necessarily involves wait time to see this technology hit mainstream society. This is something I note that AI maximalists generally decline to do, merely making breathless statements about how AI will change the world "soon". (These inevitably fail, but the AI keeps getting better at wordceling or shaperotating, which was not in dispute from most AI skeptics.)
I would be happy to make a 6 month window prediction, or a 10 year window prediction — eg "fewer than 5% of teenage boys will spend more than ten hours talking to AI girlfriends per year — but I doubt you/faceh would accept the first, and I wouldn't even remember the second prediction by the time it proves correct.
EDIT:
And if it AI doesn't become cheap / good enough, how does that affect the question of whether AI GFs / porn being superstimuli? The question seems completely unrelated to me.
The question is not AI GFs being superstimuli; it is them being significantly better, more seductive, and thus more dangerous superstimuli, which was OP's claim. There is no evidence that that's here; there's no reasonable evidence that it will shortly be here, and there I plant my flag.
popocatepetl
5mo ago
If AI GFs / AI generated porn becomes good and cheap enough
So we're still projecting. Sure, hypothetically, if.
From @faceh's toppost I got the impression he was saying the new, dangerous superstimulus is already here in the form of this questionably dubbed Death Note Misa reading you Grok responses.
popocatepetl
5mo ago
dating sites are more of a superstimuli than speed dating bars? Social media vs. talking to people IRL? Watching porn on VHS vs on your phone?
.... the superstimuli lies in having an interactive agent that actively adapts to your prompts, your life circumstances, etc.
So, from each of your named examples, you see one rapidly increased at the expense of the other.
Do you expect OnlyFans, Pornhub, VTubers, Twitch, etc to start suffering big time because a more stimulating version of the same thing has emerged? The decline should be observable within a few years. I on the other hand expect that all those will continue to do just fine, because they're more or equally stimulating to Grok AI companions.
I don't see it. I don't think this is more of a superstimulus than reading/watching/playing Strawberry 100% in 2002 and imagining you're the generic high school boy they're talking to. Then streamers and camgirls emerged for the personal touch. This is just a technically impressive but less potent instantiation of what we already have.
Register my prediction as "Society reached the saturation point on pornography and parasocial escapism without AI in the early social media era". The level of social dysfunction will increase because older cohorts are dying and social mores are decaying, but I don't expect Gen Alpha will be any more goonerish than Gen Z because of this technology.
popocatepetl
5mo ago
The other problem is that the wordcount of these stories doesn't only come from bloated prose; it comes from the design of the story itself. In Wheel of Time, for example, Robert Jordan should have simply axed the Faile Shaido arc and the Andoran Succession arc, which would take a hundred pages to tell even were he writing efficiently.
Even putting aside the limitations of LLMs, re-writing this kind of flaw in a novel is like adjusting the amount of flour and yeast in a cake that's already been baked.
popocatepetl
5mo ago
But reincarnation (not to speak of magic) should be a big proof that there is more to the world than material shit. Fang Yuan should have rather perfected his soul.
Yes. I do wonder whether there's hidden message here under the Daoist-flavored nihilism.
By analogy: there's throwaway worldbuilding in another cultivation webnovel, Zenith of Sorcery, that there are six afterlife planes you can be sent to after death. The character of the plane correspond to the choices you made in life: you can be send to a noblebright valhalla-type world of heroism and adventure, or a wireheaded-type plane of hedonistic pleasure, etc. Interestingly, the dead souls of each world think they've been sent to heaven. The "worst" is Red Prison, which is a constant state of warfare and struggle for power. My headcanon is that Fang Yuan got send to Red Prison.
That's a playing field so slanted it may as well be a mountain cliff. Everyone in church getting lectured by hectoring church ladies is there voluntarily, while college and HR talks are mandatory for anyone who doesn't want to be prole.
The average person in the west still sees pastors and priests as having some residual moral authority, which is why leftist activists still try to infiltrate churches. Respect for woke equivalents is mostly (thought not entirely! The piety of towards George Floyd, etc. is heartfelt) a reflexive and instinctive accommodation to power.
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