theincompetencetheorist
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User ID: 1270
theincompetencetheorist
1yr ago
Don't try to force yourself to read them if you aren't enjoying it. Maybe it is something in the old writing style that doesn't agree with you. I remember when Dan Brown was all the rage and I really wanted to like the books but... I only managed read Digital Fortress to completion and I hated it. There are so many other books and authors out there to read. I might be getting back into reading the Three Body Problem trilogy again, I needed a break after the first book since it gave me a bit of existential angst.
theincompetencetheorist
1yr ago
I've spent a bunch of time earlier in my life reading and watching documentaries about cults, odd religions and people that engage in conspiracies. I find it fascinating that it isn't brought up more on how the fanatics are actually miserable people. They constantly live in fear of the "enemy" outsider who doesn't think like them. The most vocal participants of the culture war are fanatics that either sees bigots everywhere or see wokeness in everything, but aren't living well because they have distorted their world view to search out the "enemy". Living well is not being a fanatic and disengaging with the culture war, which is the conclusion that you came to.
theincompetencetheorist
1yr ago
I've spent only a little time with ChatGPT and I've stated earlier that it is prone to unforced errors. But one of the bigger problems that I found is that it is prone to believing common falsehoods or myths. Go ask about the wage gap between men and women, which is just a bunch of statistical trickery but still a something that many people believe and consequently encoded into GPT.
Case in point during the week a bunch of Hacker News commentators took personal offence by a guy making the case that computer code should be written for computers if you want any kind of performance out of it. It is common opinion that code should only be written for other humans and writing it for computers is almost always a waste of time. It is the most prevalent attitude within my chosen profession and after 20 years I know that attitude of not writing code for machines is wasting performance. Guess what gets encoded into something that you cant reason with even less that a person that is convinced of superiority of his opinion? I've tried the output of GitHubs CoPilot, it does so many things wrong because the input to the models are wrong and incorrect code is so common. The ancient computer programmer adage Garbage In Garbage Out still holds true, and AI doesn't change that.
theincompetencetheorist
1yr ago
For me it is hard to believe that people were so stupid for such a long time and wasted time and resources doing it just for fun.
So sacrificing food and other resources to gods that there is no evidence for is not wasted time and resources that has been done for millenniums? All of the superstitions that people use to have that where disproved by science in one form another makes them valid again, because they were practiced for longer than it has been disproved.
There is a difference to say that torture doesn't work as interrogation tool compared to informing your enemy of your callousness so they fear you. I never claimed that torture was totally useless, I only claimed that it usefulness was limited for the innocent and the well motivated trained individual! But torture as a tool to strike fear in your enemy it might be effective.
Isn’t this consensus building?
how is it consesus building? I can modify my comment to clarify...
Sweeping generalizations of the outgroup
What outgroup? There is a sweeping generalization but not a specific group you could point to. Or is "those in power" and my description of the many groups of offendacons present on twitter made into a single group?
theincompetencetheorist
1yr ago
For me more likely there is an overcrowding in the AI-safety where you have libertarians and wokies trying to panic with different implausible scenarios.
So the formal proof managment system Coq is going to change its name any day now to use a less sexist name. Oh they have been in a naming committee for over a year now! https://github.com/coq/coq/wiki/Alternative-names
I've witnessed so many of these where a complaint is lodged in the issue tracker over something without more reason that something in the "project" is problematic and not inclusive in some way. It is just simple wording or including a CoC(note the acronym for Code of Conduct) . It is not consistent or helping the project in a meaningful way to be more inclusive.
I witnessed the eton project get piled on for its original name of “coon” without fully explaining to the project author what the problem is, just assuming that the author is American.
How about this a German guy complaining to the Italian about the usage of master/slave internally in the Italian guys project, which is quite popular.
All of these examples take no concern in that there are consequences to the things that they are wanting to change. Because changing stuff other than adding a CoC could possibly break stuff or make a casual user not finding it again.
As for race-swapping a character is in some contexts possibility to break immersion. In a similar way not valuing the consumer of the thing that they want change only thinking of their own sensibilities.
theincompetencetheorist
1mo ago
Sure people pay off their loans, but there are a bunch of people that use the raising equity prices to fund that they can on other liabilities.
I cannot parse this sentence.
People take out more loans when the price of the property goes up, they leverage that as an asset to have as collateral on other loans.
Obviously, the bank is not a charity. People enter into agreements for mutual benefit.
Again looking on the mechanics of the subprime crisis back in 2008, the loans given were not to the benefit of the lender. The calculus for the banks where that the value of the property would be higher when the lender defaulted, thus being the only ones benefiting on collecting the interests and get the money back with the sale of the asset.
Without video games, or Marvel movies, or football to keep them passive, maybe young men would start getting up off their butts and get active. Don't "fight" to take back gaming or comic books, fight to take back your country, to take back Western Civilization. Because there won't be anyone trying to "wokify" your little hobby once the Woke have been crushed utterly.
What do you think they are fighting when they are fighting for escapism to be free from wokeness? What the hell is "Woke" anyway?
I'll spit out a definition and see what happens. Woke is anti-enlightenment. We owe so much of modern way of living to enlightenment ideas. We owe Western Civilization to its ideas.
One of the things that has allowed Western Civilization ideas become so prevalent even outside its modern central nation state of US is entertainment in any of its forms. Books, Movies and now in this modern age Games. The centerpoint of this latest gamer drama is a Brazilian guy that noticed that consulting company that does sensitivity reading inject anti-enlightenment ideas into the stories. So he recommends against the games, closes down the public forum and writes a note full of the shibboleths that woke tries to accuse anyone who contradicts them.
This is the culture war in its essence, the fight of anti-enlightenment ideas that has infected the western civilization and is about to kill the host. The pathway it uses to infect others are media in any of its forms. It started with a slow burn of entertainment and education but it is continuing infecting our institutions. Because when it kills the host then we are back in the middleages with how people are governed, like the non-western civilizations... Russia, China, Large parts of the middle-east and most of Africa.
theincompetencetheorist
3mo ago
yet all of our art sucks (my opinion obviously but it seems to be shared)
May I suggest that you might not be looking at the right place? Especially if your suggestions for new "art" comes from an soulless algorithm trying to prolong your engagement with a particular service. Because it will only present with more of the same stuff that you indicated with past behavior that you are willing to spend time on, it is not going to present something new because it means that you might disengage your attention. So either you stop using the algorithms or you find a way to trick the algorithms to present new stuff for you.
theincompetencetheorist
4mo ago
To sum up, this is essentially a rehash of the year-old ethical kerfuffle around Stable Diffusion, as well a direct remake of an earlier crackdown on AI Dungeon along the same lines, so technically there’s nothing new under the AI-generated sun. Still, with the seedy undercurrent getting more and more noticed, I thought I could post some notes from the underground, plus I'm curious to know the opinions of people (probably) less exposed to this stuff on the latest coomer tech possible harms of generative AI in general.
I haven't been following this particular development, but in general that there is very little counter arguments has been made to the critical theory wielding elites when it comes to this type of discussion. I already noticed it with Campaign against sex robots back in 2015, where it was totally okay with arguments that sexual activities with inanimate woman shaped artifacts is akin to rape (but assfucking a adult male shaped artifacts seems to be OK according to them, but I digress). But from my point of view it is inability by these people to see the difference in fantasy and reality, why would we have these people decide on how we interact with these artifacts?
This whole line of thought go back to ELIZA a chat bot from 1967 when people are tricked into thinking that the machine has human qualities. People who that chatted with with it sometimes were asking to be left alone for a therapy session. It is a magic trick and even when people were told how it worked they still anthropomorphised it. Now we have ELIZA on steroids with LLMs and people still do the same stupid mistake of treating it like a human and attributing some real world harm if I'm allowed to talk dirty with it.
Finally YouTube did something useful. If you have an YouTube account and turn of your watch history, YouTube stops recommending you videos. The final piece of my day to day internet experience free of outrage bait that was making me depressed. If I want to be recommended videos I can always log out.
I’m not sure exactly how culture war-like this idea is, but I’ve never actually heard anyone else compare Anorexia with trans people before.
This is very much a big issue in the Culture War! If you don't want to be banned or harrased e.g. on certain subreddits you need to avoid this line of reasoning. Because you are supposed to say: "they have always been there they are more comfortable to express in the modern day". One of the first things you notice is that you haven't heard of it: my claim for the reason is "media bias" and gender ideologs.
I don't see a reason why a study in academia couldn't be constructed that could prove or disprove a link between eating disorders and gender dysphoria. I've seen claims made by various people that this research is not being funded or passing an ethics board because the research would be deemed "transphobic".
theincompetencetheorist
10mo ago
Well yeah gaming has had its kerfuffles ever since back in 2014 when Gamegate happened. But somehow the air over culture war battlefields are different now, I can't really put my finger on what has changed. The Hogwarts Legacy boycott was DOA and majority of the regular people just ignored bought and played the game. Something has changed, and I don't know what.
theincompetencetheorist
10mo ago
Why did they layoff staff then? https://variety.com/2023/tv/news/disney-layoffs-end-7000-1235629809/ to make more money so they can fund more activism?
theincompetencetheorist
10mo ago
Right, that's fine, but my point is that it's not "realizing slowly but surely", it's just your initial assumption.
Well almost. My username is based on how the COVID response was handled and listening to conspiracy theorists talking about it, like there is no conspiracy there... politicians just were incompetent and large corporations(e.g. amazon and pfizer) took advantage of to increase their profits of the cost of the citizens. So I'm just reprogramming my brain from thinking that it is grand conspiracy by changing from the first thought what is going on from that someone is puppeteering the masses in the background to trying to identify who knows what they are doing and those who don't. So the initial assumption here is Disney don't know what they are doing, so who knows what they are doing, takes advantage of it and why. I'm being honest here, it is a long slow process for me.
Maybe they only care about profit as a means to an end, and one of the ends is pushing these messages. After all, what's the point of having money and influence, if you can't spend it on anything?
Yeah but they are spending the money to send message in media that no one is looking at? So if nobody is paying for it or even looking at it, isn't it a failure in activism too when nobody wants to hear the message?
OTOH, if it's incompetence, how did all these people end up on the top of all these companies at the same time? They are all incompetent, and never got weeded out?
Well that is the little flaw in my theories, that is why I discuss it at all I'm trying to find out! I found partial explanations in Stupidity Paradox and Bullshit Jobs but it is not covering all the holes.
That sort of works too, but at some point you have to ask - if the incompetent are able to push through against everyone's wishes an ideology that will shield them against meritocracy, are they still incompetent?
Well it is assuming that the incompetence is on all areas. They are maybe more competent on keeping their job and blaming it on bigots but not competent on producing mass market media. Like I'm fairly competent at my job but I suck at organizational politics so it has hurt my career.
People who want to use ESG to reshape the world according to their vision.
So if ESG is fighting against climate change why does Shell have a higher ESG score than e.g. Tesla that is more inline with the current ideas on how to reach the vision on climate change?
theincompetencetheorist
10mo ago
Ok. It's too many times at this point. Too many of you are saying this stuff.
Who says that? Where do they post?
I have to go see what the people you are all actually referring to are about- because my mission- is to understand what is going on- and clearly, there is a whole third side that I have not actually ever spoken with.
I don't know what to tell you! I see subreddits being banned, websites taken down, authors being lied about, DLC removed from videogames, streamers harrased and so many other little things that I have forgotten. But I'm not here to do culture war I'm just pointing out what I've observed online.
No I wouldn't fuck the kid-
So the situation here is that you are excercising agency most likely by a root cause that you are the more powerful in the situation. Yet here you are relativizing "victims" and forgetting that those who "perpetrated the deeds" failed ethically because of ideology.
but I don't think transition goes even 5% as badly even 1% as often (but then I'm probably > 90% in num(trans friends) on this site).
Over at reddit I've seen detransitioners being heavily censored. Comments and posts remove in front of my very eyes because they feel betrayed and cheated. So of course they didn't feel safe on there and left. So if you the site you are talking about is reddit then that number of how many feel that transitions have gone badly well that number is going to be heavily skewed because they don't air it there anymore.
Responses to suicidal ideation should account for perverse incentives.
So why is the argument for puberty blockers suicide prevention in trans youth? Yet progressive nations like Sweden stopped use of them because the benefit of them because the science is unclear? Does the swedish stance take into account that there might be perverse incentives at play?
Yet again, this is me observing the online world and asking question, not waging a culture war.
I'm hoping we can get a 100% empathetic mentor rate within 10 years by implementing them with AI and then I'll feel a lot better about this whole imperfect people raising children thing.
So this is a philosophical question, how can a bunch of numbers put in to a mathematical formula without a body and perception be 100% empathetic without lived experience?
theincompetencetheorist
1yr ago
I know close to nothing about econ,
The day I learned how the economy worked is the day I stopped improving my productivity by my own accord. The economic system is thoroughly rigged. With luck and grit you can escape but if you are unlucky none of your hard work will matter. I just stopped playing the game and do as I'm told instead.
It could very well be that a part of the Hollywood "wokeness" is wresting away controll of profitable IP:s or kill them off while trying. Hollywood accounting tricks are well known and it is prominent in other creative industries like the recording industry. But then there is also an aspect of Hollywood wokeness is just old fashioned nepotism and using woke shibboleths to signal being part of the group. A while ago read an article (which for some reason google is not finding, suspicius) that analyzed the ties of woke Hollywood writers on Twitter with their public interactions on there. No surpise that they all knew each other and went to the same colleges and so on.
theincompetencetheorist
1yr ago
Thus, the precession of simulacra. Leike's job, even if he does not know it, is not to align AI to import human values, it's to align AI to export them under the illusion of Democracy and that the cart is driving the horse.
That is the open secret of the activists that have read themselves stupid of post-modern thinkers like Baudrillard is that through the control of media in all forms they can transform society. But it presupposes that people are Tabula Rasa without the possibility to escape Plato's Cave. But we are the result of evolutionary pressures where our progress is under the condition that we can unmoor our thoughts from our perceptions to seek out objective reality.
theincompetencetheorist
1yr ago
Well I didn't write it as a culture warrior with a call to action. But Kolmogorov knew that Pravda had absurdist influence, the irrationality didn't reach him and many others. As individuals they weren't part of that irrationality. So not all individuals are going to be captured. Maybe most people are captured, maybe it will be a horribly oppressive place... but you as an individiual can try to stay rational even if you aren't free to express it.
theincompetencetheorist
1yr ago
I think you're missing the simple fact that torture scenes are incredibly dramatic.
No, I'm positing that torture was included to "manufacture consent" in a similar way that the series contained rationalizations of mass surveillance to not get upset at the politicians when they continued to vote through continuation of "war on terror" policy that was eroding their liberties. I'm a total outsider of US-politics and culture in many ways. It is schadenfreude when the Jan 6 republicans got their names in the no fly list that was rammed through by republican politicians in the "war on terror".
theincompetencetheorist
1yr ago
I'll be more mindful with the rhetoric going forward. The move from reddit is a part of the culture war, although might be a skirmish but it is a clash of values. That is a part of my comment of that the move is already done so there is no more fighting remaining of that battle of "values". I'm not calling for any further action from anyone more than knowing that what I view the move away from reddit was.
theincompetencetheorist
1yr ago
Yes, you are touching on the worst aspect of modern media in general. Everything is being desconstructed and reconstructed on a flawed model on how humans work. It is inauthentic in the attempt to entertain, it is a lecture instead.
My personal pet hypothesis is that postmodern thinking has come to the conclusion is that no one can escape Plato's cave https://yale.learningu.org/download/ca778ca3-7e93-4fa6-a03f-471e6f15028f/H2664_Allegory%20of%20the%20Cave%20.pdf or enough people can escape to create change. So to change the power dynamics of the world we must reform the shadows and what we name shadows to make change in the world. The more I look into Focault, Derrida, Horkheimer and Baudrillard. It gives the impression that the human perception of reality is only programmed by the powers that run society and it has an unwavering belief that it can perception can be reprogrammed somehow to affect reality. It is the ultimate in the blank slate since it is not only the human mind but also reality is a blank slate. We can redefine reality by controlling the shadow puppeteers and what we name the shadows in the cave from the allegory. Like western canon is what defines the modern power structures in the postmodern view of the world, so if we redefine the canon we redefine how power works in the world.
No it is because both are a result of mass movements that reasonable people see the folly of but unable to stop, because they would be persecuted by ideological zealots. The foulness is people that are supposed to be our best and brightest to help other humans being captured by an idea that is obvious for the non-captured that it won't work... even a century ago.
No it isn't the body modifications that is the issue. Both things were done in the name of progress while rejecting the very thing that allows human progress namely reason. Both fascism and gender ideology is throwing away the enlightenment values.
Would you have sex with a child that wants it? Is it ethical to do so? Is it ethical for a tattoo artist tattoo a child if the child threatens to commit suicide if they don't get one?
I use the word "value" in the sense that it can be compared not necessarily measured as opposed to "metric" that can be measured and compared.
I try to be honest about being open to be swayed by arguments. I used to debate online all the time back in the day and have changed my mind in a few of them. It changed back in 2014 when I ran into my first SJW online and saw it more and more. I have read enough history in my life to know where it was going and became more careful. Open minds can be changed in discussions.
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