somethingsomething
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User ID: 1123
somethingsomething
3yr ago
Instead of picking up the book again, I'd recommend looking up history of ancient Christianity videos, preferably by those not active in the faith, because I don't think reading moral lessons into the New Testament is ever going to be fully coherent without knowing who was writing the letters/gospels and what their motivation/politics was. I think Christians tend to underrate the problem of "should we be taking moral advice from people who were convinced of a looming apocalypse?" and "Should we be taking moral advice from a weirdo who never met Jesus but had visions of him alone in a cave, and didn't really talk much with the original 12 disciples, but due to the path history took had a profound influence on the gospels and most of the rest of the New Testament"?
somethingsomething
3yr ago
What's happening now and in the near future is the dark humor "Coen Brothers" version, where the AI isn't nearly as sentient or convincing as in Her, but people are falling in love with it anyway.
I see it more in the frame of decades than weeks, if I'm understanding your turn of phrase there. Siri is a good example of a lot of hype that didn't really go anywhere. In fact, I believe all of the Siri-likes got noticeably worse at some point after some zenith point after their launch. I personally used "Ok Google" for a while until I just didn't anymore. Is that a question of will, technology, or expense that we saw that degradation? It seems plausible that whatever challenge was there will continue to dog future versions, and then you add the layer of uncertainty with AI just randomly choosing tokens and I have some skepticism we're really that close to it working as a business model.
As for the specific tech portrayed in Her, you need to move past the "wide as an ocean, deep as a stream" effect of current chatbots, and I think that problem is severely, severely underrated in the AI discourse. That feeling you get with ChatGPT where it suddenly feels paper thin, where it starts feeling like a mode of Quora-summary? That never happens in Her, and you don't even feel like it could happen. And the question is how fundamental or persistent will that shortcoming be to the model of ChatGPT, and I find it very plausible that it remains that way for a long time.
somethingsomething
3yr ago
The piece of evidence in favor of this theory that I think is the clearest smoking gun is the classic Hillary Clinton quote that surely was shaped by the brightest minds in the Democrat establishment who were working on her campaign:
“If we broke up the big banks tomorrow….would that end racism? Would that end sexism?”
Now was the purpose of this to stop real progress, or just a cynical way to undercut a political opponent? Most practically it's the latter but if you look at what the campaigns represent it does kind of fit the theory. You could argue on the merits why breaking up the banks is unwise... but instead the play was an appeal to identity politics.
somethingsomething
3yr ago
I can buy that, and like I mentioned in my reply to @justawoman, calling it a majority may have gone too far. It's more that we all understand toxic relationships to exist, and we all know that disrespect is often not disqualifying, not just due to recent dating developments but throughout human history. I don't think that it's the best dating strategy to "become an asshole", but at the same time, a fear of being an asshole can hold you back, because it's often exaggerated, so in that sense "respecting women" is not necessarily the first piece of advice I'd give to someone in a bad spot. And I feel like there are a lot of depressed young men who think they are respecting women but are actually just fearing them, which etymology-wise isn't that different.
somethingsomething
3yr ago
My point isn't whether you or anyone else advocates for relationships like that, it's just my observation that they happen with a high frequency. The reason everyone talks about "red flags" is because we are so blinded by flattery and the glow of an early relationship that we often miss when the other person actually doesn't respect us. We may not want to date someone like this, but we are certainly willing to trick ourselves that we aren't when we actually are.
Does the disrespectful attitude actually work out to be a majority of successful men? Well, maybe not. But a more defendable position is that every man has the experience of knowing some real assholes who have no problem picking up women, and I think plenty of women have seen the equivalent on their side as well. And many of these kinds of people are perfectly willing to gaslight their target into thinking that it's really "them" who is the one being selfish immature liar. And a toxic relationship can run on those fumes for a very long time.
This should all be common liberal understanding (and I am very liberal myself, full disclosure), and yet when a frustrated young man is resentful, suddenly the liberals become stoic. Surely it's something wrong with the frustrated young man that is preventing him from finding a partner? If a man were to so much as vent, surely that would be evidence of his own insufficiency? But because it's so hard to argue this in the liberal framework, arguments like yours have to be totally tortured to assume that most women, or most anyone, can sniff out good men from bad, and are immune to toxic disrespect.
It's much simpler, and more harmonious for the liberal worldview, to just admit that some men get screwed over by the way women judge attractiveness and by the way society teaches men to date, and that they should get to vent harmlessly if they so desire. And they should eventually let go of the resentment! But they shouldn't have their venting be held against them.
somethingsomething
3yr ago
It's also a pretty absurd trope. I'd be surprised if anyone really believes that the successful men in the dating market are always or even mostly those who "respect women". It's an interesting inconsistency so many liberals have where they simultaneously see all of these issues in gender relations and yet so often the dating scene is "working as intended" when they want to use it as a cudgel.
somethingsomething
3yr ago
Ah yeah that almost seems like a developmental psychology problem of some kind at that age. I can understand wanting to have a standard just to give kids direction or expectations but that's out of my realm of expertise at that point. Good luck!
somethingsomething
3yr ago
I think you could do good gradeable art tests using human proportions and perspective work, both of which can be made to have "right answers". Possible using graph paper if the student needs to turn in a drawing. Then have quick ways of counting tiles uses for proportions etc. And just as an artist I would feel way more comfortable grading that than various stylistic choices.
somethingsomething
3yr ago
I don't see how you can ask who were the sensitive sexless moralizers of the past without at least mentioning the priest class, which has always existed. And this would clarify your view of the enlightenment which was clearly a secular movement away from this force. If anyone lost power in the enlightenment it was the moralizers.
somethingsomething
3yr ago
It doesn't follow that those who aren't moralists are amoral. A moralist does not have to consistent, honest, effective, intelligent, or correct, and their actions, or the actions they desire others to take, do not have to make the world a better place. All a moralist needs is to think they will.
A moral non-moralist however, merely needs to think that not evangelizing or exemplifying is sufficient, and they may be right.
somethingsomething
3yr ago
Days of Heaven for a movie that kind of quietly shows a lot of aspects of the 1910s around a personal romantic story. One of the great Malick films so it's one of the most beautifully shot (and edited imo) movies of all time. (oh I see you have it, nice)
I was also thinking if you wanted to use a Herzog film, Lessons of Darkness could be a good 90s one, as it just brings an interesting visual understanding towards an aspect of modern war (burning things)
Midnight Cowboy might be a good one, it's been a while since I've seen it
somethingsomething
3yr ago
It's funny, I've just started getting into classical philosophy and my therapist asked me if this was an interest I might be able to find others to share with. It's interesting that it does seem to be a "male" self-improvement kind of thing, but really, I just felt it as a click on of sudden interest and finding some good books.
I don't know anyone in my area and dont have a place to host if I did, but maybe this kind of thing is something I could work towards. Seems like you'd want a good grasp of things as a host anyway.
somethingsomething
3yr ago
It's not strictly class based but I do think there's a clear connection to the market, when you have the epicenter of this in public institutions, and jumping off your conclusion, sucess in the market is more or less rational self interest.
If you buy that pro/anti-market was never really about class, but more of a kind of its own philosophical battleground, I think "anti-racism" fits pretty well into "anti-market"
somethingsomething
3yr ago
I see this sentiment often enough and I feel like there's a few places you can deconstruct this to possibly understand what's behind the feeling a little better.
"Protagonist" is obviously a term for a character in a story and doesn't really have an exact analog to actual real life. A story is a construction, and a protagonist is basically a post-hoc analysis of story structure, which refers to one or often more central characters the story focuses on.
So using that analysis I don't see why we "should" feel like it should be ideal to identify with this structural trope more or less. A novel is built around protagonists to fulfill its structural and thematic needs. The protagonist construct in itself does not have a moral valence, and there's no inherent reason one should strive to identify ourself with this construct.
And regarding being part of history, it's similarly comparing stories we tell to lives that are lived. It's not the same exact thing, and we all know that historical acts tend to be consolidated into much fewer lives when told as a story, and every movie or TV show will simplify and reduce these characters even further.
I think what has happened is basically that our culture, by being so story-focused, has failed us in preparing for what we should expect from our lives and the effect we have on the world, and what satisfaction we should take. At the same time we've seemingly lost perspective on how many people we are able to reach. 800 people have viewed this thread as I write this, and a good portion have presumably read your comment. That kind of reach with the accessibility we have is pretty historically profound. So I think a solution to this kind of malaise can be a combination of rejecting that our lives must look like the stories we read, while at the same time finding satisfaction in the actually pretty profound reach and influence we all have that is often invisible or veiled by our very high expectations.
somethingsomething
3yr ago
Yeah I just feel like this puts into words how I feel about GPT. For instance I basically saw the following scenario on twitter with someone musing on how it works and a reply woth someone saying "this is how" posting a screenshot of the GPT answering their question "how do you work".
You don't ask the AI how it works, you look into it's brains, you look at the code (obviously harder with ML but still). The code isn't open source so you don't know how much is canned (beyond the basic "canning" that comes with ML).
But beyond internet dummies you're really seeing a lot of journos and like philosophy or neuroscience majors jumping on the AI bandwagon. And I just want to tell them to learn to code.
somethingsomething
3yr ago
My main complaint is that it slows my reading speed to a crawl. I think partly because space is used inefficiently, and it also just makes it slower/harder to parse text when you dont have paragraph structure.
somethingsomething
3yr ago
I didn't have the most precise phrasing but this is the hypothetical we were debating from OP
somehow, losing the House but keeping the Senate is framing in some areas as 'Republicans lost.'
If Ds lose the Senate I'd agree that it doesn't look like much of a victory. That said I'd bet on a D senate.
somethingsomething
3yr ago
I agree that better than expected isn't sufficient to qualify as good. For instance, if the races happened to be extremely close but the senate went +1 Republican, that would still beat the fundamentals for Dems, so I should probably expand my point.
To regard D senate and R house as a D loss seems to be judging victory based on the ground gained. But I think there's plenty of examples, in ongoing conflicts, where merely gaining some ground isn't sufficient to claim victory. If your goals are to gain a certain amount of ground and you get some but not all, that can also be fairly framed as a defeat.
Both sides appeared to me to view gaining the Senate one victory condition, and gaining/preventing a sizable R advantage in the house as the other. Taking those as the victory conditions, the Democrats won both. The results are:
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Republicans fail to prevent Democrats confirming more judges.
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Rs fail to stop a potential Supreme Court confirmation.
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Rs have a much harder time dealing with their house than if they had a larger majority, and have less of a mandate of using the house to pressure Ds
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The R dream of a senate supermajority next cycle is extinguished.
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The R leadership is in disarray after their kingmaker failed to produce satisfying results.
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If the economy happens to turn around, Ds get to take a lot of credit (though also more blame if it doesn't).
D's are happy with that, R's are very much not, and historical precedence appeared to give R's the advantage. That helps clarify why winning the senate was considered a condition to claim an R victory, not just gaining some ground in the house.
somethingsomething
3yr ago
Just regarding your win/lose takeaway: I think you could argue fundamentals were always "midterms with a unpopular president." What happened during the campaign never made Dem victory a wholly expected outcome that they could then lose. Against the core fundamentals, Dems were always underdogs, and it seems hard to me to see this as a Dem loss.
somethingsomething
3yr ago
As someone who also turned 30 this year and feels similarly, I just wanted to chime in.
I've been exposed to more and more people who had good liberal arts educations recently, mostly because of Andrew Sullivan's podcast where he always asks people how they grew up, but I also found myself jealous of Oppenheimer's education reading American Prometheus and I recently started watching old Firing Line episodes where education can come up and it resonates similarly for me there.
I think how year 30 cut through for me was in realizing how deeply rich the fruits of liberal intellectual pursuits can be, how on one hand you can offhandedly know Freud was flawed, but on the other you can read him, and other texts around him, and gain so much understanding in the process. I got a good math education because that institution seems to be doing fine, but liberal arts education failed to persuade me similarly.
I think the pernicious effect of losing out on a good liberal arts education is to invite "bad" liberal arts, which is to say, bad arts, bad media, bad values, to simplify. And I feel like my 20's were very much indulging in those things, while the media around me was saying this is good, this is fine, normal, etc. I think if you are a talented young person, "entertainment" can feed off that talent in a way, without giving much back in return.
I've landed somewhere a bit opposite from you, very much in solitude as I've removed most of the people from my life, but a few of them happened to be really toxic, and breaking from them left me with a pretty big wound I've been trying to recover from. So I've been trying to treat it as a Rilke-style isolation that I'll eventually be able to come out of stronger while I realign my values and pursue a wider and more fruitful liberal education to help me do so.
somethingsomething
3yr ago
This is basically the secret to getting better at something on your own in my opinion, it's to kind of finding ways to keep getting more ambitious and doing things that people are too lazy to do.
Regarding conspiracies, I think it's actually pretty rare to have multiple people working together at this kind of level, I think ambition is usually a solo venture for the person at the level they're at unless it gets kind of encoded into the scene like it can with sports and games.
It's so strange reading this because when I was in school (in the US) there was never any hint of a compulsory nature to these kinds of thing, which happened often enough (and I often partook).
There was always respect towards people's autonomy and personal feelings, and I never sensed or felt any judgement towards either decision people made.
I'd wear a different shirt for the sole reason of making kids who chose not to feel comfortable. It doesn't even matter what the cause is or how credible. A socially enforce uniform to determine "good person" status is basically an illiberal environment.
I feel like people used to understand this.
somethingsomething
3yr ago
That sidenote came more from a feeling than thought out logic, so I kind of have to analyze it to answer your question.
One case in a different video was Destiny getting a heartfelt call from a therapist talking about trans issues, while Destiny just "uh-huh"ed through it playing Terraria.
In this video I feel like the constant chat feed is used as this sort of distraction in order to kind of reinforce the speaker's socially dominant role, while allowing him to kind of skip through an unthorough argument.
In both cases, there is kind of a conflation of entertainment with politics and philosophy, that obviously has been only growing the past 10 years. But it's not a marriage of those things, like a well-written political book that makes you think. It's like a series of orthogonal, unrelated abomination of various styles of dopamine hits.
somethingsomething
4yr ago
I'm not sure what you mean by your question
I do think voice support would be really fun to try with a version of chatgpt that's just a bit more interesting to talk to, with near-perfect voice-to-text accuracy. I'm not sure how far away we are from that, but I do feel like voice-to-text progress has stalled, you would have hoped we were there by now. And while chatGPT is amazing, its "Quora" mode, or you could call it "buzzkill" mode, where it really seems like it's just summarizing common denominator internet opinions is definitely a hurdle, and I don't think its just a result of PC-ification. I think a lot of it is just a result of processing a ton of text, rather than actually having a model of reality.
Beyond being interesting to talk to, getting it to do things is hopefully getting worked on, but I still think I'd take the bet that it either hits some fundamental consistency challenges a la self-driving cars, or just doesn't get widely adopted because it turns out people just don't like the mode of interaction a la VR.
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