theincompetencetheorist
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User ID: 1270
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
1yr ago
Recently I've tried to stay away from the culture war topics just for my personal sanity. It is a part of me not trying to be 'Terminally Online' so I've even given up on using Reddit(killed my user after bulk deleting all my comments) too so I wasn't aware that they had an outage recently. So they posted a post-mortem of the outage. As it turns out it is a casualty of the Culture War.
The nodeSelector and peerSelector for the route reflectors target the label
node-role.kubernetes.io/master. In the 1.20 series, Kubernetes changed its terminology from “master” to “control-plane.” And in 1.24, they removed references to “master,” even from running clusters. This is the cause of our outage. Kubernetes node labels.
The "master eradication activism" is the cause not Kubernetes node labels.
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....
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
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
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
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
10mo ago
Of course there is a difference! But I’m not here to do a culture war and discuss the finer points on gender transitioning, merely illustrate that trans acceptance is not as clear cut when it comes to minors in my value system. I’ve adopted the value partially because I think the transition of minors today is similar to experiments done in the past, if people here feel that I committed a fallacy then do whatever you want with it. I’m not here to change your mind, I’m giving you an opportunity to change mine.
theincompetencetheorist
1yr ago
But I disagree that the capitalist’s goal is to destroy identities.
Rightfully so the destruction of identities is a Marxist project.
To quote https://europeanconservative.com/reviews/the-great-awakening-vs-the-great-reset/
In 1960, Leo Strauss lectured on Marx at the University of Chicago. https://wslamp70.s3.amazonaws.com/leostrauss/s3fs-public/pdf/transcript/Marx-1960.pdf He stated the following argument. “If the division of labor is rooted ultimately in the bisexuality of man [i.e., our division into male and female sexes]…and the division of labor is to be overcome, let’s get rid of the bisexuality.” In other words, Strauss saw that the implication of Marxist egalitarianism was overcoming the sexual difference between man and woman as the source of the division of labor and therefore inequality. The class laughed at the preposterous notion. “Don’t laugh,” Strauss replied, “I mean, it is silly but it is a very serious problem… Marx’s position describes itself as humanism. How can there be a humanism if there is no relevant essential difference between men and brutes, and therefore if there is no relevant essence of man? No humanism without a fixed nature of man which may undergo any changes but which retains its identity within the change.”
theincompetencetheorist
2mo ago
So reddit is selling data to AI training now according to Bloomberg. [Archive] . Well I for one isn't suprised! A huge bunch mediocre data nicely cleaned up by unpaid mods and community sentiment encoded in the karma. When I left reddit I removed all my posts and comments. I lost my trust way before the API debacle and seeing what is happening now, it just validates me. Anyone else?
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.
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
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
10mo ago
Where does it make money? They are in discussions on selling theme parks outside of the US, toy licensing is cratering because the action figures are collecting dust on the shelves, they picked a fight with the UK over the terms of Disney+ streaming (which is not profitable btw) and the box office keeps on bombing.
theincompetencetheorist
11mo ago
Conservatives struggle for lack of counter-argument.
And cybersyns failure was because of a CIA plot not that plan economies never work even if you have fantastic automation.
theincompetencetheorist
1yr ago
The way eradication of identity has manifested itself in capitalism is through ESG. It inserts the neomarxist ideas in the profit maximization function. So true they don’t exclude each other, but the eradication of identity does not emerge from capitalist principles.
theincompetencetheorist
1yr ago
The Police themselves know how to fight it, but it is the politicization of the police that is causing problems. Political interest on describing the problem like you did with "pre-modern" isn't always accurate. There is organized crime from former Yugoslavian countries, there are organized crime related to Turkish families, family networks from Lebanon(that was fairly modern before sectarian civil war started) are also still active.
theincompetencetheorist
9mo 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
1yr ago
"Why are leftists performatively upset? Surely it must imply a lack of real values."
Yeah there are perpetually offended on the other side of the political spectrum that are equally nihilistic. Those nihilist got upset with the Lizzo twerking with a crystal flute they didn't know existed until the video showed up. I only imply leftist in the subsequent paragraphs and not in the first one. Thus the other reply saying that I'm waging a culture war. But I don't believe that it is a single group that is offended because of their lack of values but many groups and of many political persuasions.
Regardless of the accuracy of your observations, the analysis is on shaky grounds. I'm inclined to give Dostoyevsky some credence; I'd like to see more legwork for your interpretation.
You mean that I need to dig up the literary analysis I read that inspired me to read Notes of the Underground? It made the connection of nihilism with offence of something imagined slight almost treated as a game by the perpetrator. I read it so long ago but that quote has stuck with me. Values, created, lack of, and/or passed on from a higher power are a central theme to his works in general.
theincompetencetheorist
1mo ago
Well that is the general theory of how it is supposed to work. They haven't corrected all of the mess that led up to the subprime crisis back in 2008-2009.. 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.
No, if you can't pay your mortgage, the bank takes the house and kicks you out. Yeah and if you can't pay your landlord rent they kick you out. That is the point, with rising property prices people that attempt buy a house if it is too expensive you essentially rent from the bank if they ever get laid off and can't find a new job fast enough to keep up with the payments. Plenty of families ended up in that situation 15 years ago. This is tragic family history for some people.
Sure you can say that it is the customers responsibility and it is absolutely that. And they are plenty of people see that they don't have the economic means of buying property because they are being responsible. A couple of decades ago plenty of jobs it was possible to buy a house and pay it of outright, but now it is fewer and fewer people that get opportunity.
But make no mistake, if someone in the bank thinks that they can make a profit of a loan too you... they will do that, even if it is just the person approving it is just getting a bonus.
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
10mo ago
Oh come on! Your whole shtick here from the start, including your username, was "it's all just incompetence and mundane market forces, guys!"
Yes that is the shtick, give me an example where is there more to it then! I want to have the shtick tested, it is the point of me having it! But it is not only mundane market forces, there is a bit of corruption and dare I say conspiracies there, the reason why I'm claiming the incompetence angle here is that it is obvious in income of the company that there is no customers for what they are selling, why are they still persisting with it?
The ideology creates incompetence though. One of the culture war fronts was woke culture's hostility to meritocracy.
So the incompetent don't join the ideology because they see that it hostile to meritocracy and use it to avoid becoming competent? Can we reverse the cause and effect of your statement?
It's almost like this is exactly what ESG was specifically designed for.
So if we have a sketch on how the ESG system is designed: Who benefits if they aren't making profits by doing this?
theincompetencetheorist
10mo ago
Ok. So. You said they're equally foul. Was that hyperbole? I'm not clear on how you got there. Do you think the two victims are equally traumatized?
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.
Why do you think the experiments are similar? Because they both involve difficult to reverse body modification?
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.
Do you think whether or not the child says they want something initially is completely irrelevant to how ethical it is? That only what they think later matters? Do you have the same position on- say, women who consent to sex in the moment but decide later that they didn't want sex and they were coerced into it? Do you think that is 'equally foul' to violent rape?
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?
Forget changing your mind, right now, I'm either not grasping your foulness metric at all or simply not believing it's your actual metric.
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'm not a big believer in changing minds via debate anyway. It's more effective to change them via friendship and familiarity and positive experiences.
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.
I recently came across this little quillette article. https://quillette.com/2022/10/14/sundance-succumbs-to-social-panic/ where a film of jihadist rehabilitation is cancelled for being "islamophobic". Part of it as I read in the situation is that is a "white woman" is trying to sell the idea that one can be deprogrammed from ideological capture. I suspect that there is a deeper reason (which I can't prove) that we shouldn't go around believing that extremists can be redeemed or deprogrammed. This includes of course that there is no redemption arc for right-wing white nationalist extremists.
As an outsider to US politics I was fascinated by the apparatus of US media to "manufacturing of consent" to fighting terrorism of the evil jihadists with things like "enhanced interrogation techniques" a.k.a. torture. There is a whole TV-series produced to skew the narrative that torture is effective way to combat terror, despite that there being ample evidence that people being tortured will eventually make shit up to avoid being tortured. Also properly motivated persons can withstand extraordinary amounts of pain and delay the divulging of useful intel to the interrogator. So it is not an effective way of gathering information about impending attacks, because motivated and trained people can delay, lie or do anything in between to fulfill their goals and innocent people will probably just make something up to make the torture stop by guessing what the interrogator wants to hear. Yet we have multiple seasons of 24 to implant the idea that torture is effective. The critique of that show is that it was "islamophobic" because it painted the jihadist as an unredemptive terrorists.
I find it fascinating that less than a couple of decades ago the right thought that extremists where irredeemable from their idealogical capturing, but now the left is touting similar reasoning with white supremacists and throws jihadist redemption under the bus, in the same breath.
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