theincompetencetheorist
No bio...
User ID: 1270
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
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
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
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.
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
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.
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.
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
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
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
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
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
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
2mo ago
If you ever try to link to JWZ to Hacker News you will be redirected to an image of a hairy testicle in an eggcup with the text. '"Hacker" News a venture capital company's fan club. Finance-obsessed man-children making the world worse'. So he is frustrated too.
I've seen HN comments that threads full of "techies" incorrecting each other and a grayed out downvoted comment with the someone who really knows. I think I've been doing software longer than some of the commentors have existed, and they are occassionally hilariously wrong about tech too. Not infuriated anymore I just don't read the comments that often.
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?
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.
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