vorpa-glavo
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User ID: 674
Agree-and-amplify style approaches are much older than Gen Z or pick-up culture. In his Enchiridion, Epictetus says:
33.7. If anyone tells you that such a person speaks ill of you, do not make excuses about what is said of you, but answer: "He does not know my other faults, else he would not have mentioned only these."
Part of the secret of ancient Stoic therapeia (midwifery of the soul) is to replace the usual motivations of pro-social actions (like desire for social approval and status anxiety) with the pursuit of virtue in itself, a sense of duty, and a feeling of connection to the cosmopolis (city of the Cosmos.)
I think this is the purpose of a lot of the so-called Stoic paradoxes. In Stoicism, phrases like "all virtues are equal", "all vices are equal", and "only the sage is free" serve a similar psychological role to Christian sayings like, "only God/Jesus is perfect and sinless", "we have all sinned and fall short of God's perfection", and "let he who is without sin cast the first stone." Properly internalized, both philosophies will make it impossible to feel fundamentally better or worse than anyone else, and changes your point of comparison to a perfect ideal instead of something a mortal human is really capable of achieving in this life.
It makes it feel like Morgan is not in on the joke. It denies his moral frame that any hint of racism = bad. He needs to come up with a more concrete argument. When he instead tries fails to re-establish the frame through repetition, it doesn’t land.
While I hardly think Nick Fuentes is a Stoic sage, I think the power of denying a moral framework is bigger than this. It isn't that you're refusing to be moral, it is that you are refusing to give in to the coercive element of moral socializing, for better or worse. In the best cases, this frees you up to do the right thing in spite of what society's worst impulses might try to get you to do, like when Socrates refused immoral orders while serving the Athenian military under the 30 tyrants, and in the worse cases it enables you do a bad thing in spite of any social censure you might face.
vorpa-glavo
20d ago
Are we talking about before or after the AI is lobotomized to not offend anyone? My understanding is that AI's are better at guessing real world statistics before their edges are sanded off.
Sadly, I don't think there's a lot of frontier AI's that don't have this problem. Even Grok (which is a sub-frontier AI) has been lobotomized to some degree, just in the other direction.
I kind of doubt that intelligence communities have access to models the public doesn't. They wouldn't be making deals with OpenAI and Anthropic if they were capable of just building something better themselves.
Is it really oikophobia, or just political tribalism?
I still think that old proverb, "Me against my brother. Me and my brother against my cousin. Me, my brother and my cousin against the world." generally applies.
The modern right doesn't like woke progressives in "peaceful times", but I would imagine that after a natural disaster like a fire or hurricane, that most people, left or right, tend to put their differences aside and help each other out.
And I think with a truly "worthy foe", most Americans would set aside political tribalism pretty quickly, and band together against that foe. The problem is, we haven't had anything close to a worthy foe since the Cold War.
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