OliveTapenade
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User ID: 1729
OliveTapenade
18hr ago
I can't speak for anthropology specifically, but what Rouse says in that interview does remind me a great deal of what I hear from left-wing professors in my field of religion and theology. Take this, for instance:
On that note, your statement also said that there’s “substantial and active literature that contradicts or at least complexifies the assertions made by the report, literature that would have been immediately apparent to anyone who consulted working scholars in the field.” What’s a citation or two you would recommend to that effect? And what’s the different view of anthropology that they would show?
Well, the first thing that came to my mind was my own recent paper. It’s called “An Anti-Genealogical Take on U.S. Anthropology and Disciplinary Reform: From Anti-Racism to Decolonization.” I wrote, “The ‘decolonizing generation’ is a critical new movement that has captured the imaginations of many younger scholars. While the author would like to consider herself an older member of this generation, she questions whether this moment needs periodization. Is today’s moment really so different from the past, when we saw the rise of world anthropologies, postmodernism, the crisis in representation, neo-Marxism, and anti-racist movements? And what is meant by ‘decolonizing anthropology’ when experiences with colonialism and decolonization differ around the world? While acknowledging the value of reforming the discipline, the author encourages her colleagues to separate the very important critique of anthropologists’ gatekeeping practices from idealized renderings of what anthropology should be. Rather than decolonization, the discipline ought to focus on establishing a continual decentering of hegemonic knowledge production.”
To me, that’s just a typical thing in our discipline — we’re debating each other in a friendly way.
I think she is completely sincere in saying this. From the outside we can see that this is a "fifty Stalins" situation, of course. She is criticising a particular movement, but she is criticising it from the perspective that there needs to be more of it, not less.
Nonetheless, internally, I think she's serious, and simply sees the borders of legitimate scholarship as ending somewhere short of the possibility of conservative or traditional anthropology.
It's easy to mock this, but let's consider whether that might not be the system that we built, deliberately. The whole point of an ivory tower is to be sealed off from the world. It's supposed to form its own unique culture, and to be free of the currents of the wider culture around it. Should we have built such a system? Well, probably not. But we did, and maybe we shouldn't be surprised when said tower has formed its own bizarre little culture that's significantly out-of-step with the wider population.
OliveTapenade
1d ago
Insert obvious crack about the British being wise to that strategy on small islands across the Atlantic, but blind to it at home?
OliveTapenade
5d ago
OliveTapenade
5d ago
Also, sort-of-unrelated-but-not-really: Is "Total Clanker Genocide" an acceptable sign for an anti-AI protest?
I'm in favour of normalising hate speech against clankers, at least.
Anyway, I can sort of see what they were going for here - we know you have concerns, we're listening, we want to take your worries seriously. I don't think they understand how widely loathed their technology is, though, and therefore how much what they're saying comes off as a bad parody or even villainous and sneering.
OliveTapenade
6d ago
If it helps any, in my experience Hinge dates aren't worth going on. I was on Hinge for a while, got my share of matches, went on plenty of dates, and they firstly aren't particularly enjoyable, and secondly are not what you want if you're looking for a serious, long-term relationship. I did eventually quit and uninstall the app because it was obvious that the app is not supposed to help you find a relationship, much less a personal connection or even love. It's a device for setting up lots of short-term 'dates'.
You're really not missing much. Long-term relationships are good, and absolutely worth seeking out, but I don't think Hinge will lead you to one.
OliveTapenade
7d ago
Without getting into the specifics of this individual case...
As Freddie said long ago, social conservatives have a really good track record when it comes to predictions. Generally they predict some consequence (which they consider negative) to a social change, the social change happens, and then the consequence happens exactly as predicted.
When I was a teenager, I was pretty thoughtlessly liberal on all the major social issues - or at least, on all the ones that I understood. I grew up in an atmosphere where it was just taken as axiomatic that of course social conservatives are wrong, and usually motivated by a combination of fear, ignorance, and bigotry, and all of history is a long scroll of them being wrong about everything. As I got older, I started to realise that that isn't always true, and then eventually realised that, hang on, they have in fact mostly been right. They haven't been correct in every single instance, but they have gotten most of them.
Today, I often see something I think of as an inverse boy-who-cried-wolf, where the social conservatives cry wolf, progressives/liberals/mainstream all loudly insist that there is no wolf, then a wolf eats a sheep, and then the next day the process begins all over again.
I remember a few months ago running into a tweet where someone said that they won't take conservatives seriously until they admit they were wrong on gay marriage and apologise. Naturally the conservatives say, "well, no, because we weren't wrong on gay marriage", and really, with every year that passes, I feel like the evidence is mounting that they were right.
OliveTapenade
7d ago
I suppose I do need to be careful here. I think of LLMs as just like any other technology, rather than a paradigm shift, and that means that while I think they will inevitably have effects that we can't predict, some of which will be undesirable, 'standard' safety precautions are sensible. No technology has wholly predictable efforts, but we don't abandon the entire idea of safety. So trying to make bots as safe as possible is a good idea.
What I think of when I hear people talk about 'alignment' or 'AI safety' feels different to that, though. The framing is generally not "let's try to make this tool as practical and safe as possible", just like every other tool we make, but rather "we are on the cusp of making robot gods who will radically change everything about what it is to be human, and we have to make sure that they turn out to be benevolent toward us".
OliveTapenade
7d ago
This is not a fully developed thought, but I'll throw it out there as well - another similarity I see is a combination of what I see as deep conceptual confusion alongside a baffled failure to understand that anybody thinks differently to them.
In this context I doubt it will be necessary to explain where I see the Marxist confusions. What is value? What constitutes exploitation? Why is incremental reform insufficient? Perhaps more controversial would be the idea that the AI people are similarly confused.
Let me take a simple example. What's alignment? There is a great deal of talk about it and I'm not sure it's a coherent category. Structuring AI to prioritise 'human values'? Great. What are those? What on Earth are those? Channelling Alisdair MacIntyre for a moment - Whose Alignment? Which Human Values? Presumably they would reply to me that they don't think they need to have a complete, comprehensive moral theory (after all, that has been baffling philosophers for millennia), but just need some broad strokes like "humans being alive is good" or "material prosperity is good", but I am unsatisfied that this is enough, especially considering the, well, crazy moonbat stuff that so many of these thinkers end up committing themselves to.
Moreover, just on the practical level, I can hardly resist pointing out that we can't align dumb technology, much less any hypothetical future AI. Phones are mis-aligned. Television is mis-aligned. There's a small cottage industry arguing that agriculture is mis-aligned. We have rarely aligned anything before now. It is a good idea in principle to design our tools to accomplish the tasks we intend them for, but every transformative technology before now has had unexpected, unintended, and frequently undesirable effects, alongside the intended effects.
Marxism describes a system that it calls 'capitalism', postulates a set of problems with that system which are both moral/ideological (exploitation, theft of surplus value, etc.) and empirical (the tendency of the rate of profit to fall, etc.), and then points the way to an imagined solution. I feel like 'AI safety' does something similar. Unfortunately I don't think either group is particularly tethered to reality. They both start from a series of reasonable observations about something happening in the world, but then go on to confidently build towers in the sky.
OliveTapenade
8d ago
Tell me more about this?
OliveTapenade
9d ago
I think a key to understanding this problem is that there is an unspoken assumption that your true self is primarily to be found in your desires.
This is the one-sentence explanation, and it is both simple and correct.
The implied theory behind most 'authenticity' talk today is that you simply are your desires. No line can be drawn between the self and its desires.
It is probably worth reflecting at some point, actually, on how this outright contradicts pretty much every major spiritual tradition in the world. You are not your desires, and the more you follow them, the more you become a slave to them. Maybe an effortpost for another day.
OliveTapenade
9d ago
We probably shouldn't be that surprised - the approval of the tribe is something humans are pretty-close-to-hardwired to crave, and the interaction of that instinct with social media can go very dark places. Would you rather be a famous freak, or a healthy, happy nobody? It's not surprising that young people in particular sometimes choose 'famous freak'.
(Apparently it is disputed just how much Gen Z kids want to be influencers or content creators, but even in the lower end, 5% of people is still enough to give you a big supply of freaks.)
I think age does come into it. Most of people doing this are kids, and people in their teens or early twenties often don't really understand lifelong consequences of their actions, especially when those actions are things like taking hormone treatments, getting surgery, or over-eating. Often it's only when you get a bit older and start to feel the creaks and pains that you realise you really do need to take care of your body. Still, if we combine big ambitions, insensitivity to or ignorance of consequences, a greater tendency to reckless behaviour, and brains being hacked by the virtual crowd, this is what you get.
When I was at school, there was usually a clown or a reckless attention-seeker in the class. Sometimes he (it was almost always a he) would pursue attention in obviously stupid, self-destructive ways. I remember a boy whose 'thing' was going up to to the fence during recess and throwing his packed lunch into the road, and watching it being run over by cars. Other students found it funny and cheered, so he kept doing it, day after day. I sometimes wonder how that guy felt a few hours later, as his stomach rumbled...
OliveTapenade
9d ago
I'm actually not sure this is about trans or gender at all.
Finnster reminds me of nobody so much as Nikocado Avocado - somebody who put a huge amount of himself online, obtained a large and enthusiastic following, and became addicted to the likes. This then leads to the person sharing himself more and more, modifying and selling his body in order to gain more and more attention, no matter how permanent, unhealthy, or damaging.
It's tragic, and I feel awful for the people doing this to themselves, but ultimately I have more condemnation for the social media system they exist within, and even for the slavering audience.
OliveTapenade
11d ago
I agree, whenever rationalist types discuss AI, it sounds like they're living in an alternate reality.
That's largely my feeling here - a baffled "what the heck are you talking about?", in that what they describe this supposed 'AI' being or doing is just totally detached from anything these systems have been able to do in reality. It feels that they are inhabiting a totally different world entirely.
I guess it's fun that they're indulging their hobby of amateur science fiction writing, but I'm just not seeing any of the points where this is supposed to touch on the real world.
OliveTapenade
11d ago
Charlie Kirk was a meme prior to his death, though, surely? Those edits with the TPUSA slogan, and the tiny-faced Kirk? After Kirk's death I remember a wave of articles explaining that, contrary to what many on the left thought, he was not just a meme, but rather a significant and influential political organiser. As the immediate aftermath of his death fades, I am unsurprised that he is a meme again.
KYM has a page on TPUSA going back at least to 2017, thank you Internet Archive, and it includes pictures of Charlie Kirk used for meme purposes. Part of it, I suspect, is just that Kirk had a kind of silly-looking face, and when he tries to look serious, it always comes off slightly askew. I've since seen videos and he was a lot more natural-looking and sounding in person, but the goofy pictures of him made him easy prey for meming, and that hasn't changed.
OliveTapenade
13d ago
And, well, bluntly it seems completely in-character for everything else we've seen of Platner thus far.
Could you convict him of rape in a court of law? Probably not. It is a notoriously difficult accusation, after all. But as something to add to the pile of evidence that Platner is a lousy person. I'm inclined to agree with Josh Barro. He lacks conscientiousness. He has poor executive function. He fails the character test for office.
(And just because I feel defensive, yes, there are a great many people currently elected to office in the US who also fail the character test, including many on the right, and including the president. This is also bad. But one bad thing does not excuse another bad thing.)
OliveTapenade
15d ago
Sure, but that's exactly the same thing a homeopath or a chiropractor would say. The word 'woo' is pejorative. Nobody uses it of himself or herself. I think the subculture is the interesting part. Whether it's nootropics or the older counter-culture embrace of mind-affecting drugs, or to take substances out of it entirely, the way that both original-flavour-hippies and rationalists have gotten really into meditation, Buddhism, Hinduism, and eastern spirituality, I think there's a noticeable qualitative similarity.
OliveTapenade
15d ago
Musicians still exist, but the community of "instrument players" around me is going increasingly gray. Young people generally don't create music, or they stick to various flavors of electronica that they can produce on their own.
This reminds me of Jacobs' concept of 'handmind'. The physical business of manipulating an instrument introduces resistance and friction, and perhaps also opportunity, that is not necessarily accessible otherwise.
OliveTapenade
15d ago
I'm surprised that people are surprised by this, to be honest?
If I think about 'rationalists', I think about people who are really into 'AI safety', who experiment with and use nootropics, who are keen on inventing and trying new life hacks, who are actively interested in reinventing things like relationship models from the ground up, and who for some reason are associated with California and the Bay Area...
Obviously that's a group that are going to be into woo because, well, they're already into woo. They always have been. They're already cousins of traditional hippies, right? They're pro-tech where the older generation of hippies tended to be anti, but you can see the kinship, surely?
OliveTapenade
16d ago
For what it's worth this observation is actually consistent with my experiences in other countries as well. I love visiting Britain, but you would have to pay me to make me live in London. The smaller and mid-size cities, on the other hand, are lovely.
In general I think I prefer the smaller towns.
OliveTapenade
16d ago
Yes, for what it's worth, I've visited America a few times, and my experience has generally been that it's a nice place to visit but I am very glad I don't live there.
I don't want to judge all of America based on the big cities I've been to, because it is very large and diverse, and people have told me that I would find the Midwest or some of the smaller states and towns much more congenial, but you would have to pay me to make me consider living in New York. I find it quietly terrifying that people who live in that bubble have so much global influence.
So, maybe there are parts of America I would love, but for now, I still call Australia home.
OliveTapenade
16d ago
WhiningCoil didn't mention anything about the monarchy, and certainly I feel no shame in the fact that we have a king.
OliveTapenade
16d ago
The mistake of America is believing anyone else could possibly achieve this.
Surely Canada, Australia, New Zealand, etc., are evidence that other people can and have built comparable countries?
The whole process of "English people sail across the ocean, establish a colony, and build a free and independent nation that provides for the material prosperity of themselves and their descendants" has happened multiple times.
OliveTapenade
16d ago
I think I'm mostly just annoyed by this sort of thing because the ABC is publicly funded - it's a federal agency and is in theory supposed to be politically neutral. Now, it isn't, and everybody knows it isn't, but even so I think it is unusually brazen of them to publish a piece, not marked as opinion or analysis, that firmly takes the view that the Trump administration is the enemy and opposed to the founding principles of the United States.
OliveTapenade
16d ago
Hmm.
It's embarrassing to change one's mind, but I think I am coming around a little on this one. I think I'd like to see how the word 'jurisdiction' is used in other statutes contemporary to the Fourteenth Amendment, to get more of a sense of how it would have been read in the 19th century, but I'll grant that it's not crazy to say that, for example, a tourist currently holidaying in the US is not subject to its jurisdiction in the same sense that a permanent resident is.
How do you create the former without the risk of the latter? And if the latter does eventuate, how do you remove it without making the tower once again vulnerable to fads and markets?
I don't mean this as a gotcha question. I think the current situation is clearly bad, and I'd like to find a better option that still achieves everything we want universities to achieve.
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