vorpa-glavo
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User ID: 674
vorpa-glavo
1mo ago
Even if things like SWATing and more direct attempts to kill people over speech are occasionally practiced, I would say that the vast majority of cases of people talking about encroachments of free speech online is the confused masses crying wolf over and over again. As part of my work, I ended up meeting a man in his 70's who was hardcore MAGA, and he told me that he thought Elon Musk had done more for free speech than anyone alive today.
And don't get me wrong. I'm genuinely happy Elon Musk bought Twitter/X, because I do think it had a positive effect on the quality of societal debate, but I think it is silly to suggest that he did anything to free speech one way or the other.
Far too often, the signal of genuinely worrying encroachments on free speech like the Biden government sending messages to large social media sites asking them to take certain posts down during COVID, or Donald Trump asking universities for control of hiring and firing practices, are drowned out by nothingburgers like "Person X got banned from Platform Y", which almost definitionally cannot have an effect on free speech one way or another.
Like, does anyone believe that Elijah Lovejoy's abolitionist beliefs didn't effectively blacklist him from writing articles in mainstream newspapers? A particular print shop is absolutely allowed to say, "Sorry Mr. Lovejoy, we won't publish your extreme beliefs." So too, a particular website is allowed to say, "Sorry, we don't allow that kind of talk here."
The thing that is killing societal debate is the fact that people are unserious and uncurious. They don't seek out opposing viewpoints, and they double down on dogmatic thinking that leaves no room for debate. They don't care about what is true, they only care about wielding power against their political enemies. And sadly, I think this kind of uncurious thinking is taking root on both sides of the political aisle. I respect genuinely independent thinkers who come to unique positions by following the evidence come what may, but they are a vanishingly small portion of the population.
vorpa-glavo
1mo ago
Now since then they have demonstrated that they are both able to moderate, and also moderate in a way that chills some lawful speech
I think this is a silly statement. Any platform worth being on will moderate some lawful speech, no matter how big or small.
I wouldn't join a Facebook parent's group if it was 90% spam ads for children's toys that I don't need. I wouldn't go to /r/DnD if it was 95% low effort AI slop. I wouldn't go to the Motte if they didn't moderate for tone.
All of the content in those three examples is perfectly legal, and I don't want to see any of it. Or if I do want to see it, I want it on a dedicated place.
I don't actually think there is a principled argument that could separate that necessary function of making any online space worth going to, and possibly restricting certain kinds of legal speech.
If you want to change the law and make the companies subject to suing and litigation, fine. But it is awfully silly to do it because they restrict lawful speech, because they all have to restrict lawful speech in some way.
Also, I think you're just not thinking about the second and third order effects of changing this. In your ideal world, do you think the Motte being subject to suing based on what its users post would make it a better or worse platform for discussion than it currently is?
I guess my stumbling block is that I don't think widespread adoption or reach is necessary for free speech to flourish.
Elijah Parish Lovejoy's abolitionist pamphlets almost certainly had less reach than big city, mainstream newspapers of the time. He probably had a short list of subscribers who shared around his pamphlets when they were done reading them.
How are people, Left or Right, who complain about not being allowed on a given platform, not doing the equivalent of Lovejoy hypothetically complaining, "The big city newspapers should be forced by law to have a column written by me about abolition, so I can have the maximum reach possible!"
Free speech does nothing to guarantee reach. You have free speech if you're allowed to run a dinky WordPress site off of a Raspberry Pi, or hand out your pamphlets on the street corner.
If the big city newspaper doesn't want to run an article you wrote advocating your political position, or a large social media site would ban you for saying certain things, this has no larger implications for free speech, as long as there are other venues where you can say those things.
I just feel like people are being lazy when they insist that the large social media sites must carry their opinion. Like, yes I too would prefer to say my piece on Facebook instead of actually doing the hard work of printing out pamphlets and distributing them at train stations like a Jehovah's Witness. But the fact that you're unwilling to do the latter thing in advancement of your political goals just shows you are a coward and a hypocrite on top of being lazy, not that you have actually had any free speech rights denied in any meaningful sense.
Elijah Lovejoy replaced his vandalized printing press two times, and died for his beliefs. What have you done recently?
vorpa-glavo
1mo ago
Sure, why not?
If we were going to keep anti-discrimination laws, I would prefer to limit them to "essential" domains, like hospitals, banking, and communication technology. I think that that is sufficient for keeping a functional free market where all can participate.
If we really wanted to keep anti-discrimination around employment, I would prefer for it to be limited to military and government jobs, and I would want to implement it in a way that doesn't lower standards in any dangerous domain. (So all the 115+ IQ black men get slurped up to places they are competent to carry out the work, and the remainder get government janitor jobs or something with great benefits.)
During the 2010s, when conservatives were getting banned from social media left and right, a common smug refrain I heard from progressives was "Facebook is a private company, they can do what they want". I continually pleaded with these people to understand: it's in everyone's best interests for rules to be written in an ideologically neutral fashion. You really do not want to set a precedent that social media companies can ban anyone they disagree with and they have no recourse. Every company undergoes ideological drift, whether slowly or all at once: the fact that Facebook moderators share your worldview now is no guarantee that they will a year from now. "They're a private company, they can do what they want" will come back to bite you in the ass when some billionaire who doesn't share the progressive worldview buys a social media network and moulds it in his own image.
I'm not a progressive, but from a more libertarian leaning, I actually agree with the statement, "Facebook is a private company, they can do what they want."
I'm happy if Blue Sky wants to make and enforce rules that favor their progressive/liberal base, and I'm happy if Elon Musk's Twitter/X wants to make and enforce rules that favor conservatives. Isn't that how it is supposed to work?
I can sort of understand the idea of wanting large social media sites to be common carriers, but I kind of fail to understand why it should be necessary. Did the Founding Fathers feel like every printing press in existence needed to be a common carrier that would print anything that wasn't illegal, or did they understand that if there were enough competing print shops, then Shop A might refuse to print something for Cause X, but Shop B would probably be happy to print it?
In the past, the way the mob denied you free speech was by destroying your printing press three times and then murdering you when you didn't get the message. I actually don't think any of the tactics that people use to shut down free speech these days come anywhere close to being that bad. By comparison to that, Americans have been living in a free speech utopia for decades, and barely have anything to complain about. I say this, even as I do think cancel culture and deplatforming are bad.
I'd be far more likely to support laws forcing credit card companies to be common carriers for anything that's not actually illegal, as I have witnessed Visa and Mastercard absolutely demolish free speech online over the last few years, because they're too prudish around niche fetish erotica. There is always cryptocurrency as a workaround, but I would just prefer one of the big governments (EU, US - I don't care) to pass a law that forces the credit card companies to knock it off, and stop worrying about fictional depictions of taboo things that can't possibly hurt anyone. Who elected the credit card companies as the arbiters of morality anyways? Unfortunately, very few people are willing to die on the hill of defending niche fetish porn, so the actions of Visa and Mastercard have continued unabated.
vorpa-glavo
1mo ago
I respect the skill of good management. I don't think that a good manager should feel like they have more capabilities than they actually do.
Put it this way: if you were stranded on a desert island with a broken ship motor, would you rather have people with the knowledge and skills to fix the ship motor stranded with you, or their manager?
vorpa-glavo
1mo ago
Sure, for dumb machines, I agree.
But there's a point where the level of credit one might want to claim becomes silly. I like generative AI, and I think AI art has the potential to blossom into an interesting art scene, but I think a person who can barely draw stick figures making certain kinds of ownership/credit claims over AI art output is silly.
Don't get me wrong. I know there are people who already have a deep knowledge of specific LoRAs and the ins and outs of prompting, and who spend hours in-painting and modifying an AI image until it matches their vision. Those people I would consider "true" AI artists and they do actually have a level of knowledge and expertise that they can be proud of.
I just don't think language and general knowledge have caught up with generative AI capabilities. Today, if I paint something, there is no expectation that I went out and collected the pigments by hand, but that might have been the expectation in some times and places. So too, when I point to an image I made with a single prompt, and say "I made that", a lot of people are going to see me being a little big for my britches (even if I internally don't mean anything more than: I prompted it once and it looked good enough, so I posted it.)
vorpa-glavo
1mo ago
I don't think you've correctly understood the psychology at play. The boss always gets 100% of the credit for the things his underlings did. That's what being a boss is.
I mean, I'm partial to the ancient Stoic line of thought encapsulated in Enchiridion 6:
“Don’t pride yourself on any assets but your own. We could put up with a horse if it bragged of its beauty. But don’t you see that when you boast of having a beautiful horse, you are taking credit for the horse’s traits? What quality belongs to you? The intelligent use of impressions. If you use impressions as nature prescribes, go ahead and indulge your pride, because then you will be celebrating a quality distinctly your own.”
Most bosses may, as a matter of fact, psychologically see all the virtues of their underlings as being, in some sense, their own virtues, but this is an error. (Seneca has a pretty good bit in letter 27 clowning on a rich Roman man named Calvisius Sabinus, who bought a bunch of slaves who were experts in Homer and Hesiod so he could always have an appropriate quote on hand when he needed it, since his own memory was terrible. I think it illustrates some of why this psychology is a bit flawed in practice. The people around Calvisius Sabinus could tell who actually knew anything about Greek literature, and his own stumbling attempts to repeat the lines he was fed only made him an object of ridicule.)
I think this doubly applies when talking about the same psychology applied to LLMs. LLMs are undoubtedly useful tools, but when I use an LLM agent to one shot the creation of a video game or something, I should be aware of which virtues are mine, and which virtues are those of the LLM. At best, I commissioned or arranged the creation of the game, but I didn't really create it in any meaningful sense. (Though, I will say that there are levels of LLM usage that might award me other titles. With the right kinds of effort, I could rightly say I "architected" or "designed" a vibe coded game, or any number of other job titles I could be proud of.)
vorpa-glavo
1mo ago
I think in AI's current iteration, it is less like acting as a vessel for the AI, and more like being the kind of boss who takes 100% of the credit for something your underlings did.
Industrialization and electricity gave us substitutes for servants to fetch water for us, light torches, fetch firewood to keep us hot, and fan us to keep us cold. LLMs are finally giving us a skilled, verbal servant we can boss around to do certain kinds of tasks. Perhaps the Hegelian idea of the master-slave dialectic applies here: in a certain sense, the servant doesn't need the master. He can see his impact on the world when he applies his skills and builds things. However the master needs the slave to recognize him as a master, and yet it can never be fully satisfying because he is only a slave. Except, now the slave almost certainly isn't a person, so the master has to farm out his recognition to people who want astronomy apps.
vorpa-glavo
1mo ago
It's silly legislation, because in practice it will only affect the absolute laziest of AI users in cases where people want their AI usage to not be detected. Run the text through an old fashioned machine translator, and back to English and get rid of most of the signal. Or have an open source model running locally on your machine paraphrase the writing paragraph by paragraph. (You probably don't even need a particularly smart model for this. 7b parameter models fed two or three sentences at a time to rephrase on a loop could probably do this on even potato hardware, since you're just laundering already written text.)
Plus, even if Anthropic will have the tools to tell if the watermark is present, they'll never be able to make those widely available for free to the public, since an adversary could just keep testing against their watermark checker until the text no longer looks like it has the watermark. That means that the presence of the watermark makes no difference in the vast majority of cases, even if you don't get rid of it, since very few people will actually have the means of checking for the watermark.
vorpa-glavo
1mo ago
What is my Motte? I think I’m just making a Bailey argument that for most of history transexuals likely faced violent deaths?
I was responding to a specific claim about what would happen to "a man wearing women [sic] clothing", not about transsexuals. If your original wording is not a fair reflection of your views, then I withdraw my original objection.
I do still think you should have been more careful in your original wording. If you meant male transsexuals, you should have said:
For 8k years of human civilization a transsexual man likely got executed.
instead of bringing up men wearing women's clothing, if that wasn't what you were trying to talk about. I have different objections to that new formulation as well (is "transsexual" a category that easily applies to individuals across different historical periods, or is it a bit of an anachronism?), but I'm much less interested in that particular discussion.
vorpa-glavo
1mo ago
How am I the one doing Motte and Bailey here? You're the one making an expansive claim about how civilization stoned men who dressed as women for 8000 years and retreating to more defensible claims when you receive pushback?
I am bringing up narrow and specific counterexamples, because they are enough to disprove a statement as broad as the one you made.
It is totally fine if you think we should start stoning male transvestites to death, or you admire historical periods where that happened, or you won't consider society normal until we start doing that, or whatever you actually think. But don't pretend that you have more historical precedence for your position than you do.
I am against putting utopia in the past or the future.
vorpa-glavo
1mo ago
Are male transvestites not definitionally, "men who dress in women's clothes"?
I also don't think I brought up professional examples like spying. Are you confusing what I said with someone else in this thread?
vorpa-glavo
1mo ago
Transvestite passes were just an example of men wearing women's clothes and not being stoned to death. I brought it up as an example of behavior, not identity.
Look back through my posts in this subthread. Where did I ever get off of the specific topic of responding to your specific claims about 8000 years of stoning men for dressing as women?
vorpa-glavo
1mo ago
I am not talking about identity at all. I am responding to a specific and narrow claim about how men who dressed like women were treated for 8000 years.
It was a claim about behavior, not identity.
vorpa-glavo
1mo ago
I wasn't talking about transsexuals. You said:
For 8k years of human civilization a man wearing women clothing got stoned to death.
Which is a claim that I disputed. I gave several examples where men wore women's clothes, and were not stoned to death.
If you had wanted to claim something different, you should have claimed something different.
vorpa-glavo
1mo ago
Feminist theories that became law in the 2010s such as the Duluth Model and affirmative/enthusiastic consent (the concept of ‘yes means yes’ as opposed to ‘no means no’) were developed in the ‘90s.
Honestly, I hate the way that "consent" language has crept into so many other domains.
Like the artists complaining about the lack of "consent" to having their images be used to train image models and LLMs. Like, if there's some sort of law that has actually been violated, I'm all ears, but I care about artist's "consent" to AI training about as much as I care about an artist's "consent" to me learning their art style and stealing all their business by undercutting their pricing.
Unfortunately for them, destroying someone's livelihood doesn't require consent under capitalism. Look what happened to the AM radio monopoly after FM radio was invented! Or what is happening to Google as LLMs start to become the most common way to search the web.
vorpa-glavo
1mo ago
I was just trying to give a basic existence proof. I don't think there was anything inevitable about the Weimar Republic becoming Nazi Germany, and so I think the fact that there were years of official tolerance of transvestites is a decent proof that your statement was wrong.
If you want more, look at Plato's Republic, suggesting that upper class men and women in the ideal republic wear the same clothes. Look at the legends of Achilles being raised as a girl and wearing girl's clothes, because his parents hoped to avoid his prophesied death if he ever took up arms. Look at the eunuchs in the cult of Cybele.
And you breezed right over my examples of cross-dressing in theatre and pantomime in the British tradition, which lasted for hundreds of years and doesn't fall to the flaw in my Weimar example.
Even as hyperbole, I think your comment falls short. Practices differed across time and space, and to pretend otherwise is to replace nuanced historical analysis with a make believe mono-culture extending back further than one is actually attested to in the historical record.
vorpa-glavo
1mo ago
For 8k years of human civilization a man wearing women clothing got stoned to death. That’s normal.
I don't think you're correct here, no matter how narrowly or broadly you define human civilization.
In the UK, you have things like Shakespearean actors playing female parts, or the pantomime tradition of cross-dressing.
In the Weimar republic, you have things like transvestite passes.
And even in places where it was disapproved of or illegal to crossdress, I bet you would find a variety of actual practices for most of written history.
We didn’t just create a new sex 8k years into civilization.
No, arguably we did that early on, when eunuchs were more widespread in many different human societies.
Certainly, calling a eunuch "male" probably isn't obviously correct until the discovery of sex chromosomes, (and even with that discovery, I think you could have a perfectly viable definition of "male" that excludes eunuchs.)
vorpa-glavo
1mo ago
It costs about $2000 per problem, and American labs have that money to burn (they only publicize positive results), while Chinese labs do not.
Also, Chinese models are by and large worse than American frontier models, more than the benchmarks would suggest, and sometimes they just lack the special spark that the current models have.
(Though, it is clear that frontier models weren't necessary for all these math results. People have asked older versions of Claude and ChatGPT, and been able to rediscover the same proofs. So we didn't need the absolute latest models to find all of these.)
vorpa-glavo
1mo ago
Was the monoculture anything more than a brief blip in history?
I guess anything post-printing press, or post-radio could be a possible start date for a monoculture, but even in those eras, you had tons of little subcultures popping up around magazines or people photocopying/hand-copying and circulating stories via letter among a particular circle, or a club or organization for a niche interest.
If we look back and see monoculture, I think it is just because it is much easier to study the artifacts that monoculture left behind. But then you look into something like chapbooks, or read the letters of prominent pulp fiction writers, and it becomes pretty apparent that there were niche interests through the entire height of the monoculture.
I do agree having things to talk about with other people is a real problem. We have such an embarrassment of riches, that it can be easy to fall out of sync with the people around you, unless you make a deliberate effort to engage with the same content they do.
Did men always look backwards in this way, or is it a consequence of men not enjoying a crop of media not really aimed at them or their tastes?
As an example, I assume men are not reading Pride and Prejudice at higher rates than women, even though that is an older work, because it is an ur-romance book that tends to appeal more to women than to men. And when the Dracula Daily trend started (which sent out Bram Stoker's Dracula in bite-sized chunks via email, so everyone could "read along" to it), my impression was that most of the readers were women. I suppose you could make the case that Dracula Daily was just a new and trendy thing, even if the trend was a 100+ year old work of literature, but that seems to at least show that the trends women jump on don't have to be new things at all. (See also, recent works like "The Other Bennet Sister", which build on classic chick literature.)
We don’t have to live like this, though. One of my favorite newer shows is Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End, which I’d recommend to anyone from the last thread who was skeptical or worried about fanservice. It is a heartfelt, understated story with lovable characters and beautiful animation.
I wholeheartedly second Frieren. It is a beautiful story, and is well-suited to non-anime-watching normies. (In a similar class to things like Death Note or Fullmetal Alchemist.) The dub is also fairly well done, for people who don't want to read while watching something.
There exists a media ecosystem where you don’t have to be lectured about progressive ideals, masculinity and whiteness being problematic isn’t the story’s metaphysical assumption, and yes — as Botund said, sex appeal that exists for the eyes of straight men is allowed to exist. I used to have a hangup about that last category in a rather Scott Aaronson manner and saw it as immoral, but I’ve come around on it and now see the male gaze, in moderation, as a good thing. Women enjoy media meant to appeal to their tastes and don’t question it or wring their hands about it; you should too.
I mean, I would argue there's a few media ecosystems like that around the world. I've enjoyed the occasions where I've dipped my toes into Indian cinema (Bollywood and South Indian cinema) as well. While there's less overt sex appeal in most Indian cinema than in anime, it is still a media ecosystem where they often allow unapologetic stories of badass men doing cool things and getting the girl.
It might rub some of the most pro-Western members of the Motte here the wrong way, but I consider RRR to be one of the best action films of the last 10 years. I've sometimes joked about making it a part of a "British Empire Cinematic Universe" movie marathon, alongside The Patriot, and The Wind that Shakes the Barley.
And where Indian cinema does go quasi-woke, it is most commonly focusing on things like caste discrimination, which I suspect are easier for most anti-woke people to stomach. For example, I really enjoyed the film Karnan (2021), and it was probably inspired by 1995 caste riots (while not referencing them directly.)
vorpa-glavo
2mo ago
Maybe you could write the "Farewell to Manzanar" of UK rape gang survivor stories, and then find a way to make it part of the curriculum.
Honestly though, I find your post here pretty silly. A fundamentally curious person would read both The Diary of Anne Frank and the Turner Diaries, and they'd have already waded through all of the reports around the UK rape gang scandals.
Time is limited of course, and no one will ever have time to read or care about everything, but it would be ridiculous for me to say something like, "I'll give a fuck about Karl Marx's Capital, when Gulag Archipelago is required reading in public school", because it is obvious posturing.
I just think we're quick to forget. Abraham Lincoln was essentially in the group you criticize, he didn't think black people would turn out as capable as white people, but he didn't think they should be slaves.
Even if black people have an average IQ of 85, we would still predict there to be an IQ 145 black person in the United States who is not an outlier (he's perfectly on the bell curve.) Why should he be treated like a murderer, thief or criminal before he has actually committed a crime? Why should he not be allowed to live in a nice suburb if he can afford to live there? Why should he not have a colorblind chance of getting into a school based on his own hard work?
I really do think that a lot of the emotions people feel around 13/50 statistics are about as irrational as the women who would rather encounter a bear than a man when walking in the wilderness. Some men are rapists, but that doesn't mean that an average man is particularly likely to rape you. So too, some black people are violent criminals, but it doesn't mean that the average black person is particularly likely to commit a violet crime against you (especially when you're talking something like a college or professional environment which is more likely to be pulling from the upper end of the distribution of black people.)
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