theincompetencetheorist
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User ID: 1270
theincompetencetheorist
1yr ago
The extremes of the political spectrum are equally out of touch with reality. It is QAnon vs White Patriarchy conspiracies at the fringes endlessly triggering themselves to their idea of the enemy. And those who don't ascribe to these descriptions of reality in the center get to be onlookers and increasingly harder to find places to discuss what they perceive to be actual reality and move the ball forward. The biggest contribution to my sanity in most cases when I hear conspiracy like theories is Hanlon's Razor, "never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.". It is just look a couple years back to see the handling of the pandemic and know that the bumbling fools that rule us couldn't conspire their way out of a wet paper bag. Of course conspiracies could exists but it is a extraordinary claim that require equally extraordinary evidence. So what does that say about the future of motte? Nothing if the place gets taken over by extremist descriptions of reality the place is doomed, we will have to try to stay sane.
theincompetencetheorist
1yr ago
So if you were banned for unknown reason that wasn't in the public rules then congratulations, you have found out more of the secret rules. Or you are running afoul with one of the rules constantly because none of the mods are telling you what you are doing wrong, because they are supposed to be secret.
Reddit has managed to neuter the discussions in subs like KotakuInAction where it was a reliable place to find stuff around topics like coordinated journalistic efforts of pushing narratives. It was KiA raison d'etre that has devolved into "oh god, they gender- and/or race-swapped this character in franchise X". The one simple trick that did that was that they have secret rules on that the submods aren't allow to tell anyone. One of those rules are "indentity invalidation" and the solution is that KiA employ without telling exactly what is forbidden is banning trans discussions alltogether. It resulted in that when KiwiFarms discussion needed to be moderated away because KiwiFarms made fun of trans people and the removal of KF of cloudflare is a campaign by a trans person. Of course the shitposters on KiA are going to try to "invalidate" Keffals "identity" and risk to the existence of the whole subreddit.
I just removed my 16 year old reddit account. I removed all the posts and comments that I've written over the years before doing it and before I went and deleted without hesitation. This I didn't do lightly because I've invested in some of personality into that account. The reason I did it was three things in a short period of time. I saw thing that was removed by reddit admins with the appropriate marker left behind, a canary removed that stated that reddit admins have been in contact with the submoderators and also a so called modsummit where a subreddit mod wasn't invited to. Great more secret rules to push the narrative....
theincompetencetheorist
1yr ago
Well yes corporations just want to cover their asses from criticism, but the worst is that the criticism is so powerful that the discussion ends up shallow. I'm so annoyed that we had a cancellation of a language model that produced rap lyrics. FN Meka had a record contract which was later torn up because it was a "appropriator" using words reserved for someone with "lived experiences". It was just reported on and everyone glossed it over and forgot about. I'm like what did just happen? They cancelled a pile of math... There are slightly more deeper philosophical problems with the way it was cancelled. It cuts directly into postmodernism and its issues with treating the inauthentic the same as the authentic. Because at the end of the day the language model is just a mirror of the language used by those with the "lived experiences" and should be understood as such. https://youtube.com/watch?v=vYmfnfljvnM
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
11mo ago
So I think you miss the mark a little. Wokeness doesn't survive contact with normal people. There is a bunch of people who are experiencing the trans-ideology for the first time and simply are not getting with the program. This is not liberal vs. conservative it is "terminally online" vs "people in the real world". The biggest lie that the woke tell us is that everything is political.
theincompetencetheorist
1yr ago
A part of the problem is that some of the AI safety crowd are the victims of the Behavioral_sink. Leading way to comfortable lives that they even claim that 'words are violence'. It was 'safety' concerns that shutdown the Stanfords public Alpaca demo. They are stuck in a local maxima for their likes and retweets, claiming that FN Meka isn't allowed to rap about police violence because it isn't a lived experience, or that virtual Seinfeld jokes are harmful to the trans community. But the biggest danger is what they are themselves trapped in.... the behavioral sink and that more people will be stuck in digital quicksand because of AI.
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
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.
Those in power that don't believe in the values because they are seen as tools of oppression. It is that those who fight for censorship, engage in virtual struggle sessions in the GitHub issue tracker and defend race-swapping in lazy remakes of our old entertainment are nihilist. They don't value anything anymore. The best description I know of the perpetually offended over at twitter is this quote: "I invented adventures for myself and made up a life, so as at least to live in some way. How many times it has happened to me—well, for instance, to take offence simply on purpose, for nothing; and one knows oneself, of course, that one is offended at nothing; that one is putting it on, but yet one brings oneself at last to the point of being really offended." The problem is that quote is from Dostoyevsky's Notes from the Underground published in 1864. But the story is that he writes about nihilists and nihilistic mindsets in that book. So somehow it reflects the truth of human nature over a century later that is applicable in the age of Twitter. You are just observing the loss of values in people to the point of they believe nothing matters anymore.
The nature of what we fight against is as important what we are fighting for. We are in the fight against totalitarian values trying to rush in to the vacuum of their campaign of removing the western values with Oikophobia. The best shot is to decentralize like The Motte removing itself from the censorious reddit Silicon Valley hivemind. (Not trying build consesus here I'm just pointing out that the thing that happened with this forum is already is the consesus for the Motte, to leave the censorious reddit.)
Here have an article about the Oikophobia of Herbert Marcuse https://quillette.com/2022/03/02/herbert-marcuse/
theincompetencetheorist
2mo ago
I'm not going to dwell of the rest of the stuff but I just need to point out.
One conceit that many people enjoy is the idea that a large conspiracy is impossible, because if even one person spills the beans, the jig is up. For example, keeping the AACS encryption key secret was impossible. One person spilled the beans and it was over.
It wasn't a person working with the organizations that spilled the beans. The timeline is clear in the article it was the keys were lifted from software players. It was just a matter of shipping decryption keys to the end user and ignoring Kerckhoffs's principle. So your example of a conspiracies fail is a little flawed since it was "exposed" by an outsider.
One of the funniest things is that Sony is always somehow involved in these fails. And the funniest is that back in the day people could run Linux on PS3 and that feature was actually a moat against competence and patience. When would have thought that nerds that enjoy getting running Linux are competent and patient enough to find your errors in cryptography. To Sony's credit they managed to patch it but reportedly the last bastion of firmware fixes fell in 2012.
theincompetencetheorist
2mo ago
I'm trying to think a little more deeply about this. Geminis generation of nonsense because of the guardrails is essentially the tension of the Enlightenment ideals which the AI is springing up from and Postmodern ideas in critical theory, which I have hard time seeing how it can be reconciled. It is one of the ideas that I hold on to which I've trying describe but have a hard time crossing the "inferential distance". AI does not have a "lived experience" since it isn't living and what these people are trying to encode "lived experience" with these guardrails. They are trying to encode empathy into something that we are not like and failing in that they in demand encoding sympathy into a machine without emotions. There are no mirror neurons and there is no accurate theory of mind even if they try to claim it with emergent behavior of ingesting large amounts of text. So how is the machine supposed to know that someone would get hurt feelings by what it generates?
Imagine when anti-White alignment doesn't create the nonsense above, but it creates extremely entertaining and compelling movies and stories that actually have plausible deniability, such that you seem like a madman if you perceive an agenda aligning the content in such a way.
We are already here with human writers but the results aren't that good. They are supposed to create entertaining and compelling stories with these biases and failing miserably with a leg up on the machines of the human experience. Because it doesn't connect with the audiences human experience. I have a hard time seeing machines being able to connect with a large audience.
My great worry with AI is though that it is able to create behavior modification on an individual level and create the compulsion loops of addiction, since it doesn't require a theory of mind to trapping us in the loop. We have Youtube, Instagram and TikTok (and in some extent Reddit and Twitter/X) where it has happened. But it can't supplant our experience of reality and other people.
theincompetencetheorist
1yr ago
Yes the white patriarchy conspiracy theory is more mainstream. It is the prevailing conspiracy that rules currently in the western world. But it is still a conspiracy theory, it hasn't any more claim on being a true reflection of reality than QAnon. A conspiracy theory doesn't become less of a conspiracy theory when more people believe it.
theincompetencetheorist
1mo ago
My personal pet theory why that script isn't working is that all corporations on the stock market are run on "maximizing shareholder value". Oh times are rough well shareholder value maximizing requires layoffs, good bye for the lifetime employments where get a gold watch after 25 years of loyalty. If lifetime employments with the possibility of buying are reasonably priced house and owning the stuff is being ruined by "maximizing shareholder value". You have no job security in e.g. customer service working your way up is gone, because you have been replaced by a low wage worker who reads of a script and the moment corporations can trust the AI chatbots that entry level job is gone. Banks are interested in loaning you money as much money as possible towards your house so you can never pay it off. If you never can pay off your mortgage you are for all intents and purposes renting a property from the bank who doesn't do any maintenance on it. The reason is "maximizing shareholder value"... That HP inkjet you bought.... well you didn't buy it, HP made an investment in you so you could have a subscription, any issue with payment well you ain't printing shit. And the first thing you contact is usually some kind of customer service bot. Yeah that car you have, if it is newer model with heated seats well those could be a subscription service. Guess why companies do this?
The entry point into the life script is dependent on that you can get a stable job so you can buy a home and have stuff and we are not getting that, and that is feeding into nihilism of some cohort of people that becomes NEETs (Not in Education, Employment, or Training) because they can't enter into "maximizing shareholder value" for some corporation, which can't wait to fuck them over the moment the rogering provides value.
But it is just personal thought...
theincompetencetheorist
1mo ago
If we look at the very public firing of Damore when writing an internal memo of gender differences. More specifically the public firing of Timnit Gebru might have spread that same culture of fear in the AI team. Being uncomfortable by having diverse thought and getting publicly ousted because of them would spread a culture of fear! So I would bet on 2 on being the truth.
Yeah other people have come to a similar conclusion: What OpenAI shares with Scientology
theincompetencetheorist
9mo ago
Well for me I can think of three ways of trying to do it interesting and natural: Star Trek:DS9 has the Trills which for me always has worked as perfect way of sneaking various aspects of trans concepts right under our noses, but not being about trans. Further looking a specific subgenre of transhumanist sci-fi literature we have things like the Culture series by Iain M Banks where humans are so advanced in technology that changing back and forth human physoilogy between genders isn't an obstacle anymore. And there is a scene in the Netflix Series Altered Carbon(haven't gotten around to read the books yet) where a womans mind was transfered into a male body. The thing all of the three have in common is the identity/mind/soul transcending the physical body in some way and making the transcending of the physical limits not about gender but a feature and possibility of it.
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.
theincompetencetheorist
11mo ago
I personally will cave and still be using Reddit on my phone this summer despite it being the perfect opportunity to quit.
I killed my reddit account last year and I haven't regretted it a single second despite hanging on there for over 15 years. You could atleast try to live without before caving.
theincompetencetheorist
11mo ago
Yes but this is going to change the communities. There is a minority of profilic users that drive the "usefullness" for people and if they leave... you got tumblr energy instead.
theincompetencetheorist
1yr ago
In my mind the defining moment when woke burst on to the scene was Occupy Wall Street when the likes of Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert and John Oliver still made fun of the woke ideas that were implemented there. And if you look at those three, they are beholden to ESG ratings of their paymasters and they aren't making fun of it anymore. Just a little anecdote there to do a comparison to the paper!
theincompetencetheorist
1yr ago
There is also a dimension on the chilling effect on speech (in the sense of free speech ideal not law!) that saying the wrong thing can be punished this harsly. I'm starting to look at these things as a societal collapse of the "western hegemony" that 40 years ago was on the same page with the fiction of Salman Rushdie is undeserving of a fatwa, and now can't agree that he deserved the attack on him because he upset some peoples feelings. The Alex Jones stuff is almost the same thing, he goes on an insane tirade that is mostly fiction and is harshly punished for that fiction and I suspect that 40 years ago the majority would have gone "it is obvious that he is insane and the things he talks about is fiction so they are undeserving of the award".
theincompetencetheorist
1mo ago
This little quote from NYU professor
discriminating against people who have a chronic disease.
People who are fat because of a chronic disease is in an absolute minority. The majority have issues with their size is because of eating too much ultra-processed foods full of subsidized crops like corn that is cheap and exercising too little compared to their energy intake. Is it a personal choice? Well if you are poor living in a "Food Desert" (i.e. a place where grocery stores with non ultra-processed food are far away) eating what ever is available, how much choice do you have? If you don't live near a grocery store it usually means that you are poor. Is poverty a choice?
As I see it the polemic of "personal choice" vs "chronic disease" is a faux debate disguising the fact that the options for the poorest urban areas and poorest "flyover country" don't have options with getting food without subsidized crops with high energy content. The only chronic condition they have is being poor.
So where does that leave "gym fascism"? Perhaps "Cui Bono" selling ultra processed foods to the poorest population is a multi-billion dollar business and it is also subsidized by politicians, they get to sell medicine for the consequences of that food(insulin for diabetes, pills against hypertension and so on) and so on. What happens if people notices this, that they are essentially being poisoned by the food supply? Better nip it in the bud the notion to have less processed food and more exercise cause losses. Lets call anyone who has that idea fascist? I don't know... It is a conspiracy theory...
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
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.
It is funny how establishment mainstream media is now clutching its pearls with journalistic ethics when they have the FTX fraudster running around in an "apology tour" and saying that he was bumbling buffoon, where there are court filings showing corporate malfeasance by the fraudster. We are witnessing corruption in the establishment political class of every color and the media is simply trying to protect itself with misdirection of their own corruption when it comes to Twitter! This is not about politics anymore it is about the powerful establishment doing whatever it wants without the interest of the public in mind anymore. So whatever I see more Twitter revelations I'll just consider it corruption, it is as simple as that.
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