theincompetencetheorist
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User ID: 1270
theincompetencetheorist
10mo ago
Every time we pointed out the warning signals, the /r/IndianaJones circlejerk simply kept dismissing us as bigots still continue to defend it like it's some misunderstood masterpiece and the only ones who hate it are incels that can't handle strong women. It's the same theme every single time.
So how do we know that these are actual fans? I.e. How do we know that these people aren't online activists just claiming to be fans? Dare I say that there might be people making money of the fact that shilling the movie to actual fans, that Disney have their own 50 Cent army sitting in /r/IndianaJones?
I remember back in the day that there was this whole thing about how "fans gatekeeping fandoms is a bad thing!" as a part of the culture war. But gatekeeping served a purpose in my view and it is shame that good fans bought into the reasoning of not gatekeeping anymore do their own detriment.
theincompetencetheorist
2mo ago
Well the modern aristocracy keeps "their people" on top by suggesting that Asians are "white adjacent" when applying to universities and making BIPOC the benchmark for affirmative admission, miseducates the black youth by saying that math requiring correct answers is racist(so they can't succeed when they get older) and so on. If you look closely by the elites woke policy outcomes and if they don't benefit you are not part of the elite. You'll end up paying rent like the rest. Sure violent uprising could happen but chances that you end up being warrior elite from behind they keyboard are slim.
theincompetencetheorist
2mo ago
Well if we are ignoring the superficial political alignments you are essentially getting that end result. Feodalism is the end goal of todays elite when they travel to Davos for the WEF summit. The the mainstream wokism only purpose is to subjugate the plebs allow the elites to become rentseekers. To discuss the finer points enlightenment has given or not given the modern world is pointless since the "inferential distance" is so big between us.
theincompetencetheorist
1mo ago
So you think that "food deserts" don't exist because you can walk an 30 minutes to yours? There doesn't exist places where people live where they have to drive an hour to get "real food" while passing various corporate fast food chains on the way?
theincompetencetheorist
10mo ago
The more I think of it and evolve my position on this whole reddit debacle: One of the greatest ironies of this whole situation is that, if you peel away the layers of this situation reddit has encouraged people to latch on causes and browbeating anyone who try to excercise independendent thought. Well they got a bunch of people who latch on to causes without thinking. Spez is all like "I <3 passive nihilists!" and being all surprised when they act like "passive nihilists".
theincompetencetheorist
2mo ago
Why do you not want your comments used to train LLMs anyways?
well my concern isn't around LLMs in itself, it is slightly more abstract possible abuse of this data for behavior modification of crowds. I'm not an AGI doomer but I see the outlines already with inciting compulsive use with various apps like YouTube, TikTok and Instagram where it might be possible to use data like reddits to create similar compulsive loops for text as we have for video. I don't know if it is possible but it might be.
But my comment is more of that I made a decision a couple of years ago and this just proves that don't give a shit of the people who use their service, so I'm patting my own back.
theincompetencetheorist
2mo ago
Advertisers are not usually receiving data wholesale, it is a process of that the advertisement targets are determined by the data "owner" so they can take a portion of the ad sale. The whole cambridge analytical scandal was just that they mined Facebook data for personality profiles and bragg about behavior modification based on that data, despite it going against an actual contract with Facebook. Now in hindsight the media narrative was overblown and there where a bunch of claims that didn't turn out to be true. But that a company that wasn't supposed to keep the data and use it, kept the data and used it is true.
Trust in what?
That they are sensible people running the place. Look I was one of the 10 000 first users of Reddit. I was naive in thinking that it was run by people who wanted people on the internet build communities. My leaving predated everything with API blackout and this whole LLM mess. I saw admin crackdown on small communities that did nothing wrong and power mods bullying regular users accross multiple subreddits without the admins lifting a finger. The LLM sale is just aligned what I saw. They don't give a shit about the users of the site, I got wiser...
theincompetencetheorist
11mo ago
Why is anyone wasting any money on any of this stuff in the first place?
“Governments don't want a population capable of critical thinking, they want obedient workers, people just smart enough to run the machines and just dumb enough to passively accept their situation.”
― George Carlin
DEI is the tool that is used to scare you into obidience of due to its arbitrariness. DEI is based on something that rebukes objective reality and stacks arbitrary relativistic moral values which you can't predict logically.
theincompetencetheorist
5mo ago
My highly personal pet theory is that the culture war is changing is combination of
- Twitter changes with community notes, needing an account to see replies and so on
- Reddit changes, like shutting down alternative clients that "Culture Warriors" both users and mods relied on.
- The fall of highly polarized news blogs like Vice and Gawker Media properties mostly due to high interest rates. As it turns out activists aren't profitable, especially when the main platform to spread rage bait Twitter is changing(see point 1, some rage bait is just killed of with a community note).
I believe that the masses of culture war is not participitating anymore in the same way because of these things and the "heat" is turned down.
I haven't listened to the whole conversation but what I've heard and seen I have question. When did Autistic Catastrophizing become accepted by the mainstream? We got Greta Thunberg and now we have the "Big Yud" getting his opinion in the Time.
How do I become mainstream with my Catastrophizing that the combination of attention grabbing AI that subvert our lives with knowledge of behavioral psychology and the combination with generative AI giving us personalized content just massaging our brains just right? Imagine people trapped in a pleasure cube just watching personal generated colors and sounds that only has meaning to them....
My skepticism to the "propaganda chatocalypse" is that is that it operates on a flawed model of how humans operate. That are humans view of the world is hopelessly tied to cultural consumption, media and so on. So our inputs from culture and media needs to be controlled at all costs so we don't end up making the world worse by being exposed to dangerous ideas cultural and/or media content. This is the quintessential post-modernistic thought process that if they stuff the "the message" in everything it will create a better world. But we already did this experiment with the totalitarian states of the 20th century and people still thought differently even when they were force fed with their culture and media with the right way of thinking. It didn't work and it is not going to work this time either even if we have more powerful tools.
One of the interesting and kind of worrying aspects of this though is that our media is overrun by these postmodernists that are hell bent on anthropomorphising various artifacts also. Based on that the simulacra of the human form(whether it is in characters in text, images/film, robots, simulation in games or chat AI) is somehow interchangeable with humans and somehow bestows them some rights because that real humans have them. The whole debacle around the chatbot lamda being sentient is based on this. But what about the campaign against sex robots that casually excludes the male form of robots from the campaign. The whole thing around postmodern critique of videogames, movies and books, where they try to give fictional identities inalienable rights. All of these receiving mainstream media time and not listening to anyone going like "hang on a minute, we are not talking about real humans here!". This is at the fringes and I seem to be the only who notices this...
theincompetencetheorist
5mo ago
I find this immensely funny for some reason that no one is incentivized to issue an public correction. Reuters parroted anonymous source claiming a breakthrough and backtracking on that well is a loss of credibility, and OpenAI can't go just "there is no breakthrough" without hurting the for profit investments part of the org. I read the breakthrough claim and did a little further digging and just threw out there with Russel's Teapot!
theincompetencetheorist
11mo ago
The one riling the masses up are the powerusers who don't use the current modern version of the website and detest the official app. They see the unorganic and inauthentic from algorithms presented in the official site/app and tolerate it. With this change of the API is killing the customized experience of the powerusers and forcing a different reddit on them which they don't use but they are aware off. With this policy change is that they are being forced into using the official and it is not what they signed up for. The powerusers are able to rile up the regular Reddit users with ease because they know the sentiment and meta of the subreddits. And for all intents and purposes moderators are powerusers and can't work with the officlal mod tools, they have always relied on third party tools and those are about to be killed to.
The problem here is that the core of the protest is that we have a bunch of corporations that don't understand that regular people want something authentic if they can afford it. It is almost like all of the corporate college educated management read themselves stupid on Baudrillard and how the hyperreal supplant reality and how we can force the masses accept the new. Reddit is about to find out if they can force the new experience on everyone and keep the most profilic users and if they are truly important for regular users.
theincompetencetheorist
9mo ago
Both sides see themselves as righteous oppressed victims fighting against the evil empire of the other side, but for both it is less a Star Wars vision than a Terminator vision. War machines running over skulls at night-time, death and lasers.
The footsoldiers of the culture war are passive nihilists screaming other peoples ideas hoping for attention by the algorithms of big tech. Big tech are the arms dealers of this war.
But at the end of the day the modern culture war is just a continuation of Yellow Journalism which was transfered trough the age of television and now is on Youtube, Twitter and so on. But it is still the same thing. Having passive nihilists fighting each other over stuff that isn't relevant in their lives so they give up a tiny percentage of their income and get their consent on political projects that goes against the publics interests.
Maybe it is possible to move in some orthogonal direction and flank this whole conflict from a side that has the breath of fresh air behind it?
Don't consume the content that is designed to have you worried about problems you don't have. It is the simplest way of finding fresh air. Who knows maybe you will start creating that fresh air after you found it.
theincompetencetheorist
11mo ago
um, interesting claim that endocrine disruptors are "everywhere to be found" in our daily lives, and that because they can sexually feminize frogs, they must be responsible for the apparent explosion of gender dysphoria and transgender identity that has taken place over the last 5-10 years.
Not to peddle a conspiracy theory here and claim any kind of knowledge here. Also I haven't watched the podcast either. Is it plausible that chemical companies that produce endocrine disruptors could be funding trans activism to supress any narrative that gender dysphoria can be because of environmental factors? Is it plausible that research into endocrine disruptors has been defunded at universitys because the line of research is deemed "transphobic"?
To reiterate, I'm not claiming that I have documents/references to any kind of evidence that this is happening. I'm just entertaining the thought that it is possible that it is something that is happening. This is just an idea knowing how the tobacco industry behaved when a link between smoking and lungcancer showed up and how much hard work they put in to discredit any research into it.
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
I'm realizing slowly but surely that most of what is afflicting Disney isn't ideology itself but sheer incompetence of people that run the company, they just get to use the ideology as a shield for their inability. Also because of the mechanics of ESG(so they are funded on arbitrary ideological metrics) and bad media analyst company like Parrot Analytics using social media "engagement" as a success metric not the sentiment. So Disney can shove ideology to pump the ESG numbers and when the audience notices the bullshit they go on social media complain about it, we get response from culture warriors calling them everything bad under the sun, and Parrot Analytics claims it a success because people talking about it. So the incompetent people that decides on all of this get to keep their job because it doesn't affect the investments and they have an analytics company claiming success on something else than if they audience actually liked the content or not.
OK, I'll bite.
How many of the participants in the culture war understand that they're memetic agents?
Do people that latch on to causes because they don't like to think and challenge their assumption of the world know that they have done so? At least instinctively because what I've seen is that they don't like to debate! But do you truly understand that given your own position that you have taken in this post means that you are a mere memetic agent in the culture war. Do you know that it is possible to transcend it with thinking and challenging assumptions?
(It's that righteous causes like trans acceptance are not made less righteous by the fallibity of the people who express trans acceptance, and foul causes like the ethnostates are in fact foul and should be neatly excerpted from discourse by moderator attention, or, barring that, bullying to make sure the nerds to get the message.)
Destroying a 12-year old girls eyes to change its pigmentation and removing 13-year old girls breasts to make them a boy because of junk science is equally foul in my world. But you don't seem to think that.
theincompetencetheorist
1yr ago
This is the kind of sophistry one would expect from random online arguments, and I'm sure you can identity similar instances even in this very forum.
Because it is from random online arguments that they learned it from and apply it to academic discourse. My personal belief: It marks the end for the US hegemony as an academic power and there is little chance to undo it. My prediction: this will leak into other sciences and cause Lysenkoism 2.0 with mass causalities.
theincompetencetheorist
10mo ago
If this Twitter change is permanent the 'Terminally Online' are going to be in for interesting times. Between Youtube experimenting with banning adblockers and Reddit apps closing has the potential of creating a dead sea like effect on the platforms. It will be a shift in internet culture and the online portion of the culture war, how that looks I wouldn't know how to start to speculate about.
theincompetencetheorist
1yr ago
Isn't the point of representative democracy to get an agent that is informed politically on your behalf? This is the simplest idea ever, since it takes a bunch of time, energy and resources to be informed you pay money(taxes) to a person to represent you and you keep informed of what (s)he does and if that truly represents you. If it doesn't you communicate with that person that you think it is wrong... and if they don't listen you don't vote for them next time.
It looks naive when you try to put it succintly. But that is the problem with the modern political landscape, that everything is corrupt to the core including the people that are supposed to expose the corruption.
theincompetencetheorist
1yr ago
She just simply follows the science? So what part of that IPCC report says that climate change stole her childhood?
I draw heavy parallels from enshittification to Meditations on Moloch . It is a process which is not unique to capitalism which Doctorow readily lays down blame to why it happens. The most succinct way I can think of this concept without making it about capitalism is: it is when you optimize for something and you lean in to a local maxima, but if everyone leans into to the same maxima the whole system collapses.
The solution is decentralization and resilient diversification. If see that a bunch of people have been trapped by the molochian forces you move away from them because you know there is disruption, abrupt chaos and collapse about to happen. We are watching this happening with Reddit because they are trying to IPO and we are seeing it with New York because Leftism induced bureaucracy. It isn't capitalism it is moloch.
theincompetencetheorist
6mo ago
There is a good portion of intellectual laziness in why people become tribal. Because that what I read out of your post as a lament of "tribalism". Most people find it cumbersome to build a correct theory of mind of the opposition and currently we are being rewarded for not having them, because it is way too easy for us get approval from our tribes with social media likes or biased personalized social media news feeds. It is something that has served humanity in the past but in the current "global village" of interconnectedness it is becoming a problem, because it eroding social and cultural cohesion that makes cooperation harder in society.
I would prefer to put the issue at an axis of language and status rather than knowledge and power. These people us language to try to bolster their status in their tribe, there is no actual knowledge there to exert power over someone else. Everything about the intellectual laziness is about accumulating status for their tribe with the least amount of energy i.e. just changing the words and behavior they use so to be seen as members of their tribe.
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.
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.
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