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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   35372 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 3, 2022

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I am curious, because I saw it written many times here, but had no chance to investigate more.

What happened to the Alt-Right movement, and what makes it very different from the dissident right of now?

I'm sure there's more inside baseball, but I think people stopped self-describing as "alt-right" after the Charlottesville debacle.

I never saw anyone self describe as "alt right."

If you have an example, please provide one.

Maybe I'm misremembering but I believe it was a media applied label.

Edit:

upon further inquiry, I still believe that it is basically a media applied label in most cases.

from the SPLC:

https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/extremist-files/ideology/alt-right

As I read the SPLC page about the alt-right, I am more convinced that virtually nobody, outside of Richard Spencer and of a few of his associates, uses the term alt-right.

The one professor listed as included in the movement was condemned by his own university.

It seems as if these are the same 500 people that showed up at Charlottesville.

So my initial statement stands, with one caveat, outside of Richard Spencer and his immediate associates, I don't know anybody who refers to themselves as "alt-right."

From the SPLC:

Although Spencer has positioned himself as the effective leader of the alt-right, other proponents include several well-known names on the far right, including Jared Taylor, editor of the American Renaissance racist journal; Greg Johnson of the publishing house Counter-Currents; Matthew Parrott and Matthew Heimbach of the Traditionalist Youth Network; and Mike "Enoch" Peinovich, who runs The Right Stuff blog. But the general population of the alt-right is composed, by and large, of anonymous youths who were exposed to the movement’s ideas through online message boards like 4chan and 8chan’s /pol/ and Internet platforms like Reddit and Twitter.

I looked on google analytics and it looks like the term exploded in 2015 around the time of Hillary's speech asserting a link between Trump and the alt-right, followed shortly by a New York Times article.

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/27/us/politics/alt-right-reaction.html

Hillary Clinton, speaking in Reno, Nev., highlighted Donald J. Trump’s support by the “alt-right” movement, saying he is “taking hate groups mainstream.”

  • -12

It was absolutely a self-applied term used by people in the alt right. From roughly 2015 to 2018, it was the term of choice to describe the movement. If you listen to any TRS or Millennial Woes podcast recorded during that era, you'll see them using the term copiously. Here are some instances of the term appearing in text; there are many others.

https://counter-currents.com/2016/08/the-alt-right-means-white-nationalism/

https://www.unz.com/article/what-is-wrong-and-right-with-the-alt-right/

https://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/2019/12/08/the-abcs-of-the-alt-right-a-guide-for-students/

Yeah, the only real competitor was "intellectual dark web." And "alt-right" came across as a little more dignified.

See my comment above. Thanks for these examples. It can simultaneously be true that media outlets used the term to paint with a very broad brush.

Also the google analytics show it is not even on the radar until Hillary Clinton's speech and the accompanying New York Times article.

Basically Hillary said, look at this fringe group that totally supports Trump, (although strangely Richard Spencer endorsed the Democrat candidate in 2020,) and suddenly it gained national attention.

Please stop blaming everything on the "liberal media" without even reading the first two paragraphs of the wikipedia article - "In 2010, the American white nationalist Richard B. Spencer launched The Alternative Right webzine". There was also https://old.reddit.com/r/altright, which has one capture in 2010 but only takes off in 2016. There were a lot of people who were far-right and explicitly called their movement "alt-right".

Browsing this stuff is a bit tedious - I use a combination of web.archive.org and pushshift's api and just read the json... but there's a lot of positive mention of white nationalism.

Amusing aside, one random post: "As a gay anarcho-capitalist and white nationalist (both are organically tied together), I find it quite annoying when I encounter vulgar, violent and vitriolic homophobia on the right. Such hateful focus on what people do in their intimate moments surely most be one of the most useless things one could spend their valuable time on. ..."

I appreciate you providing what I asked for here.

Here is the evidence of why I had this general perception. The Economist labeled Ben Shapiro as "alt right." Later retracted, which I was unaware so good for them.

Both can be true at once- that there were some people who called themselves the "alt right"... (which is why I asked my question,)

And the media and social media commentators have a tendency to paint with a broad stroke.

"This article has been changed. A previous version mistakenly described Mr Shapiro as an "alt-right sage" and "a pop idol of the alt right". In fact, he has been strongly critical of the alt-right movement. We apologise."

https://www.economist.com/open-future/2019/03/28/inside-the-mind-of-ben-shapiro-a-radical-conservative

The term is sufficiently poisoned at this point that people certainly aren't going to willingly describe themselves this way and have probably even tried to scrub any history of having ever done so, but my recollection was a decent number of people on the far right referring to themselves as alt-right, to the point where there was some pushback on Spencer for trying to grab all the glory of leading it. I really doubt that I'll be able to find any meaningful evidence of that, but my recollection is that the term was used by people up to something like the Bannon wing of politics prior to Charlottesville.

I voted for Hillary so wasn't really paying attention. Another user showed there was an /r/altright sub. But I am curious how many followers it has. If it's less than 500 then I feel like my point stands. Maybe I came along later, but I distinctly recall it being used often as a conflationary slur in the same way that "white supremacist" later began to be used.

archive.org should have a premium subscription that makes your requests take <200ms i'd pay at least 100/month for it

this shows "12395 Fashy Goys" (i.e. reddit subscribers, the reddit skin lets you rename it, often subs do themed ones) . Although from browsing said spaces for a while, there are a lot more people that who are alt-right or similar overall.

You could write a whole book about it, but the main things are:

  • Deplatforming: There used to be a time when the alt right could freely proselytize on youtube and facebook and twitter, sell their books on amazon, and collect donations and membership fees online via credit card. All of that has been made much more difficult, which limits their ability to organize and expand.

  • Doxxing: In the wake of Charlottesville, a lot of people got doxed and lost their jobs, which scared people off. No one wanted to show their face at an NPI or AmRen conference anymore.

  • Scandals and Lawsuits: Major figures in the movement like Richard Spencer, Mike Enoch, and Andrew Anglin had to deal with a spate of personal scandals and post-Cville lawsuits, which tarnished their image and the image of the movement as a whole. No one wants to bet on the weak horse.

  • Changing Political Landscape: Trump felt like the “last hope” to many people, and he essentially turned out to be a total failure. Demographic change in the west feels inevitable now, which blackpilled a lot of people and lead to decreased interest in the alt right.

I think the terms just changed.

Alt right originally just meant the same thing that MAGA does now. It was conservatives who didn't identify with the likes of Mitt Romney or the Bushes. Alt rights were in favor of limited, but useful government, in favor of religion, but as a structure for families and communities, not the weird evangelical stuff you used to see from conservatives (so: Catholic).

Eventually the media succeeded in convincing people that "alt right" was equivalent to neo nazi, so people stopped using the term. I still people say it to each other ironically. For instance: "I don't think that the CIA should be telling facebook what news stories to allow on their platform because I think that is election interference. I guess I'm an alt right neo fascist."

Alt right originally just meant the same thing that MAGA does now. It was conservatives who didn't identify with the likes of Mitt Romney or the Bushes

what? This isn't true at all.

from wikipedia

In 2010, the American white nationalist Richard B. Spencer launched The Alternative Right webzine. His "alternative right" was influenced by earlier forms of American white nationalism, as well as paleoconservatism, the Dark Enlightenment, and the Nouvelle Droite

from alternativeright.com (sorted by earliest first, i.e. from field)

The URLs say enough already - "julius-evola-radical-traditionalism", "hbd-human-biodiversity/liberals-face-reality", "left-right/the-failure-of-conservatism", "authors/steve-sailer",

"From wikipedia" should lose you any argument.

Also, "alternative right" is not "alt right" for the same reason that "Afro-American" is not "African-American"--"these two phrases are almost the same so they mean the same thing" is not how the culture war works.

SPLC also distinguishes Richard Spencer as the premier author/person of the alt right movement, whether rightly or wrongly.

"From wikipedia" should lose you any argument.

Wikipedia is in almost all contexts a better source, in practice, than any random news website or blog. It is especially a great way to get broad context on a topic or issue, which is precisely what OP doesn't have! And in this case it is accurate. Nevertheless, it's confirmed with "primary sources" from alternativeright.com, and elsewhere from /r/altright. Sure, it's morally biased against the right, but that doesn't prevent it from having detailed and mostly accurate articles on it.

Also, "alternative right" is not "alt right" for the same reason that "Afro-American" is not "African-American"--"these two phrases are almost the same so they mean the same thing" is not how the culture war works.

Sure, but richard spencer, when he was still emphatically alt-right, used both, and was using alt-right to describe a "movement" in 2011. That objection doesn't make sense in relation to the way people used the term. I've talked to a lot of far-right people over the past decade, and have seen 'alt-right' used to describe their own white nationalist/fascist/extreme right movement many times, and used to describe their own 'maga / conservative who dislikes bush movement' not many at all.

Wikipedia is in almost all contexts a better source, in practice, than any random news website or blog. It is especially a great way to get broad context on a topic or issue, which is precisely what OP doesn't have!

Not on topics related to American contemporary culture war, of which Alt Right is a prime example.

Gamergate wikipedia article is sufficient to prove my point:

Gamergate or GamerGate was a loosely organized misogynistic online harassment campaign and a right-wing backlash against feminism, diversity, and progressivism in video game culture.

... it would make sense to include attacks on wikipedia as a source in a context where: wikipedia was being used to support incorrect claims - wikipedia was making incorrect claims - or wikipedia was a key pillar of my argument. But in no cases is that true here - what was being debated was vaguely "did a significant group of people call themselves alt-right, or was it a media term to label conservatives". And I was using it to show how easily accessible that information is, and also supported it with direct links, so I don't see why it's worth questioning wikipedia here. And the wikipedia article very effectively answers that question -

The alt-right, an abbreviation of alternative right, is a loosely connected white supremacist and white nationalist movement. A largely online phenomenon, the alt-right originated in the United States during the late 2000s and the early 2010s, before increasing in popularity during the mid-2010s and establishing a presence in other countries, and has declined since 2017. The term is ill-defined, having been used in different ways by alt-right members, media commentators, journalists, and academics. A far-right movement, it rejects mainstream political ideologies such as conservatism and liberalism.

I think the connection between the alt-right and white supremacy is more 'very close' than 'entirely', but that's very complicated, and this is a decent introduction to the topic.

In 2010, the American white nationalist Richard B. Spencer launched The Alternative Right webzine. His "alternative right" was influenced by earlier forms of American white nationalism, as well as paleoconservatism, the Dark Enlightenment, and the Nouvelle Droite. His term was shortened to "alt-right", and popularised by far-right participants of /pol/, the politics board of web forum 4chan. It came to be associated with other white nationalist websites and groups, including Andrew Anglin's Daily Stormer, Brad Griffin's Occidental Dissent, and Matthew Heimbach's Traditionalist Worker Party. Following the 2014 Gamergate controversy, the alt-right made increasing use of trolling and online harassment to raise its profile. In 2015, it attracted broader attention—particularly through coverage on Steve Bannon's Breitbart News—due to alt-right support for Donald Trump's 2016 presidential campaign. Upon being elected, Trump disavowed the movement. Attempting to move from a web-based to a street-based movement, Spencer and other alt-rightists organized the August 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, which led to violent clashes with counter-demonstrators. The fallout from the rally resulted in a decline of the alt-right.

This is also a decent introduction to the topic, and would've been very useful for the people who claimed 'nobody called themselves alt-right" to read. The mention of dailystormer, occidental dissent, paleoconservatism, dark enlightenment, etc - those are definitely relevant!

So, given that many people in this thread would have been informed by reading just the first two paragraphs of the wikipedia article, the claim that "[wikipedia is not a better source than a random blog / not a great way to get broader context] on topics related to American contemporary culture war" is, imo, false. The rest of the article is certainly morally against the alt-right ... but that's to be expected, everyone is against the alt-right, they're "nazis"! Outgroup, the hated enemy, etc, it's really not worth expecting anything else. The rest of the article is also worth reading - much of it is misleading, of course, and wikipedia's article about priming is also misleading, writing things that are entirely accurate is ... quite hard, but it's still worth reading.

If you think that Wikipedia is a decent introduction to culture war issues, then the only words I have to describe are unflattering. Gullible comes to mind. Naive, willfully naive, and stridently naive are some others

Wikipedia is controlled by admins and editors and their bias permeates anything remotely controversial, and is prevalent across the entire English language site. The kind of things are and are not relevant, noteworthy, acceptable curtains, be and so on, provide a hundred thousand absurd for the common PMC bias to sleep through.

But none of this is new. I learning it in 2014 and 2015 regarding the gamergate article, which cannot be described as useful by anyone operating in good faith.

Did you even check the talk page to get a sense of the changes that have occurred, why, and when?

... I'm very far-right, and very clearly stated that wikipedia is biased against the right in the original post. (what is "PMC" bias? Does the new york times like chief financial officers, or corporate lawyers, in their rhetoric? Why aren't CEOs PMC, and hence wikipedia biased towards CEOs?)

If you have an organized source that's informative and detailed on a wide range of culture war issues in a wiki or article, as opposed to news format, that you think is better than wikipedia here, post it.

I don't have any particular reason to believe that this particular fact, that Spencer ran an Alternative Right website in 2010, is being editorialized by Wikipedia.

I have my skepticism about that instance popularizing the term "alt-right," since I figure Spencer would claim influence whether or not it actually existed. But "alternative right" clearly existed, and it clearly had overlap with the HBDers and the Steve Sailers who would later wave the alt-right flag.

Also, it's one more source than either you or the parent provided.

I don't think that's correct.

In the late 2000s, libertarians were reeled in by the Tea Party if they weren't outright supporting Ron Paul. No idea what the Catholics were doing. But neither group was a MAGA-equivalent. The Republican mainstream was compatible with those stances. Even if they weren't a Romney fan they probably voted for him over Obama.

I'm not sure that Spencer really gets to claim invention of the alt-right label, but he was certainly using it for his niche. It's not until the neoreactionaries get going that awareness spreads down to the people you're thinking of.

I believe the Catholics were allying with the libertarians such as Paul Ryan.

Not really that much. The "alt-right" can both generally refer to the varied yet associated movements of the far-right, or narrowly referred to a specific sense of trying but failing to imitate respectable politics like richard spencer, or a "cringe" focus on race / white genocide / jews, and the name just became "toxic", some said Unite the Right clearly showed the "failure" of the alt-right, and people stopped using the term. Some will say the "dissident right" is more nietzchean or aesthetic or something than the old alt-right, but the far-right in 2016 had just as much of that in some subgroups as it does now.

Richard Spencer claims to have coined the term "Alt-Right" in 2010. But for a brief time around 2015-2017 the term was applied more broadly, with even Steve Bannon and Breitbart claiming to belong to the Alt-Right. It was never clearly defined, but broadly speaking it was a big-tent, right-wing movement that included populist elements and radical elements of the right. It spread through memes and edgy optics, and had some momentum from the election of Donald Trump. Richard Spencer was viewed as a leader, more by default due to his willingness to serve as a lightning rod for the media.

The Charlottesville debacle stopped the Alt-Right in its tracks, as for the first time it received serious opposition in the form of lawfare and mass deplatforming. So the movement immediately crumbled under the pressure and is defunct for all intents and purposes. "Dissident right" is used on one level to avoid the baggage of the alt-right, but on a deeper level the alt-right really does not exist anymore. I would estimate that a majority of those in the DR were red-pilled post-Charlottesville and never belonged to the alt-right in its heyday.

In contrast to the alt-right, I would define the dissident right (DR) as highly fragmented discourse surrounding issues of politics and culture that is only united by its universal acceptance of certain highly controversial premises. Things like the race question and Jewish question more broadly aren't controversial; they are premises that are just understood as true and therefore embedded in the discourse on other political and cultural topics, like the war in Ukraine.

And that leads to a bunch of small groups with wildly different ideas for how the right-wing should move forward. There are Nietzscheans, Christian nationalists, Neo-Platonists, fascists, but there's no broader organized movement and no aspiration for big-tent advocacy. Outsiders would probably consider them all alt-right, but they don't view themselves as part of the same movement although they'll refer to the broader discourse as "DR".

And that leads to a bunch of small groups with wildly different ideas for how the right-wing should move forward. There are Nietzscheans, Christian nationalists, Neo-Platonists, fascists, but there's no broader organized movement and no aspiration for big-tent advocacy. Outsiders would probably consider them all alt-right, but they don't view themselves as part of the same movement although they'll refer to the broader discourse as "DR".

The far right is probably even more ideologically diverse than the far-left. I have seen on Unz articles that Covid either does not exist (a hoax or a flu), came from the US, or came from China. These cannot be mutually inclusive especially not the first one. For Covid to have originated from the lab in China implies that it also exists and is a real thing. Some see China as a major threat, others see China as an ally against US-led globalism and multiculturalism .

There's no analogue to Marxism on the far right, so the radical right is more of a greenfield. There is a lot of ideological diversity, even if they are unified on some issues. There's no sign of any consensus emerging from the DR any time soon.

The dissident right more or less agrees that-

Traditional gender roles are good and necessary. If this means that women’s lib and equality is much reduced that is either desirable or at least an acceptable price to pay. Sexual promiscuity is bad, and birth control is a problem at least in part because it enables it.

Blacks, on average, have lower abilities in all sorts of ways and achieving black-white equality is a pipe dream.

Atheists are untrustworthy.

Bolsonaro and Trump were good, but frustratingly moderate.

The Covid vaccine is bad and this is symptomatic of the state of medical knowledge being generally poor as a whole.

Medical knowledge is unreliable because academia is generally compromised in all sorts of ways, but there’s usually a nugget of truth there.

Human beings have a right to self defense that is more fundamental than freedom of speech or association, never mind the ‘rights’ invented by progressives. Restricting self defense unnecessarily is bad, and that includes the right to keep and bear arms.

Gays are at least suspect if not generally assumed to be perverts.

Capitalism isn’t great but it’s at least better than socialism. Where technology enables human flourishing this is generally good, but there are many technological advances that do nothing of the sort.

State power is necessary.

An excellent summation.

The alt-right as a movement died with Charlottesville and Richard Spencer; it was basically the right version of Occupy. Energy that went nowhere. These days, the group is much larger, but also less coherent. Others have pointed to MAGA, dissident right, etc., and these are all related, but not exactly direct children of the Alt-Right.

Near as I can tell, the WN types coined the term. They applied a critique to the mainstream Right, and then answered that critique with their own prescriptions. The thing is, WN types are a vanishing minority, and much of their critique wasn't actually dependent on specifically WN axioms, or even particularly novel to their ideology. A lot of relative-to-WNs "normies" adopted positions generally similar to that critique, but then supplied their own prescriptions rather than drawing the conclusions the WNs prefered. Given that these relative normies outnumbered the actual WN types by several orders of magnitude, it was trivial for them to appropriate the "alt-right" label for themselves, and claim the WNs had no actual ownership of it.

This article captures the landscape at the time.

Anything associated as closely with racism and bigotry as the alternative right will inevitably attract real racists and bigots. Calmer members of the alternative right refer darkly to these people as the “1488ers,” and for all their talk of there being “no enemies to the right,” it’s clear from the many conversations we’ve had with alt-righters that many would rather the 1488ers didn’t exist.

These are the people that the alt-right’s opponents wish constituted the entire movement. They’re less concerned with the welfare of their own tribe than their fantasies of destroying others. 1488ers would likely denounce this article as the product of a degenerate homosexual and an ethnic mongrel...

...1488ers are the equivalent of the Black Lives Matter supporters who call for the deaths of policemen, or feminists who unironically want to #KillAllMen. Of course, the difference is that while the media pretend the latter are either non-existent, or a tiny extremist minority, they consider 1488ers to constitute the whole of the alt-right.

Those looking for Nazis under the bed can rest assured that they do exist. On the other hand, there’s just not very many of them, no-one really likes them, and they’re unlikely to achieve anything significant in the alt-right.

Of course, while a vanishing minority, the WN types did enjoy one advantage: they wanted to control the label, and the media likewise wanted them to control the label. Charlottesville provided the necessary pretext, and the media went to work cementing the "alt-right = nazi" meme indelibly into the public consciousness. Anyone with the slightest bit of insight saw this particular battle was lost, and so ceded the term permanently to the WNs. "Dissident Right" was the next-best alternative label for the mass of non-WN, non-establishment right-wingers to adopt, but the population as a whole lacks much in the way of coherence or structure. MAGA is probably the largest block at the moment, but even there you see significant variance between the die-hard Trump partisans and the people who think Trump is, at the moment, weakly, the best of a bad set of alternatives.

I think there were a few groups/people describing themselves as alt-right in the mid 10s before Donnie came along and the movement entered media prominence. The groups that constituted the alt-right, as perceived by news stories primarily referred to themselves as whichever group they were originally, be they White Nationalists or Seduction types and so on.

It is potentially a useful distinction from the sort of conservativism espoused by older people, which tends to focus on keeping the welfare state alive for the elderly while selecting random populist items, such as re-legalising imperial measurements and cyclist registrations as policy goals.

Currently the term refers to any ideology that places itself in opposition to the liberal mythos, and they are all lumped in together. Bi-weekly we see articles in news outlets that decry the dangers of the "alt-right" recruiting young men and boys to its nebulous banner. If you bother to read the article this is mostly anti-feminism with elements of white nationalism.

Currently the term refers to any ideology that places itself in opposition to the liberal mythos, and they are all lumped in together. Bi-weekly we see articles in news outlets that decry the dangers of the "alt-right" recruiting young men and boys to its nebulous banner. If you bother to read the article this is mostly anti-feminism with elements of white nationalism.

Anyone on the right who does not disavow Trump it would seem is lumped together.

It became low status around mid 2018 but lingered until around mid 2021, when it finally died out when Nick Fuentes, the last holdout, had his twitter account suspended. Also, de-platforming . It's hard to create a movement when its members keep being arrested or booted off every platform. I think the alt-right has been replaced by the ethno-trad right, especially on Twitter starting in 2021. It's composed of popular people like Cernovich and Posobiec who evaded the de-platforming that plagued alt-right, and puts much more emphasis on Christianity, self-improvement, and mainstream conservative politics (generally a white pill message) compared to the alt-right, which tended to be more negative, nihilistic, and eschew mainstream politics. I think the alt-right became associated with doomerism and larping, which made it low status. The 4chan people however are not going away but they don't seem to have as much influence as they had in the past, before 2018

From 2015-2018 or so was a period of indecisiveness and uncertainty. The Obama era was closing, and then Trump against all odds won, but no one knew what was next. There was an opportunity for fringe movements like the alt-right to fill this gap. But by early 2021 with the inauguration of Biden, it became clear what the stakes were: the woke vs. anti-woke, but the alt-right does not fit into this categorization or paradigm, so it became irrelevant.

Interestingly enough 4chan itself is also increasily becoming whitepill affiliated. I don't lurk /pol/ because I value my sanity, but across /lit/ /fit/ /int/ and some of the video game boards there is a notable uptick in christian clean living as counterculture towards modern woke consumerism. Raw Egg Nationalism, Bronce Age Mindset, Harassment Architecture, Which Way Modern Man, you are my best soldier, if there was no hope their propaganda would be futile are all memes, books or buzzwords becoming more mainstream across all boards. Most notable is goyslop, which encapsulates the general disdain for modern society and the garbage it feeds it's citizenship, which is bordering on spilling over into the mainstream.

I think the whitepill is the successor microtribe to the redpill, because it is way more fit from an evolutionary psychology standpoint. A redpiller may find himself ostracised from society and become a complete loser through his tribal affiliation, while a whitepiller may even increase his standing among other tribes through it just by becoming rich, handsome etc. etc. How beneficial a tribe is for the tribesmen long term is imo the strongest parameter for it's staying power.

Harassment Architecture

I'm sorry, what? Is this literal n-word towers?

That one is a book by Mike Ma. Kind of infamous on /lit/, given that Mike Ma pilfered in style from Behead All Satans, which was written on /lit/ itself. Quite archetypical for the 4chanesque interpretation whitepill in a way, it is sort of like an amphetamine fueled trip through a world of paranoid delusions and various forms of extreme racism and mysigony, all coalescing in a general dislike of industrialisation and a call to hit the gym as hard as possible. It is a wild read, side splittingly hilarious at times when Mike Ma goes off on semi self-aware rants about poison in the tapwater and estrogenic chemicals in cashier receipts.

Now that was a paragraph I was not expecting to read today. Or ever really. I know what my popcorn reading will be this weekend.

Do tell me what you think of it when you read it, I wonder how all of the political shock factor and hyperviolence comes across when one isn't as in tune with chan culture.

I first remember hearing the term to refer to a variety of Right Wing thought that rejected the more staid conservatism of a Romney or a Bush II, and particularly that did not center either Libertarianism or Evangelical Christianity (as most of the more extreme right-wing movements to that point tended to do). So "Right wing" in whatever sense, without being married to either Pat Robertson or Ayn Rand philosophically, and with an aesthetic that was more rude mix of 4chan and "punk rock" than suit-and-tie George Will.

During/After the 2016 Trump campaign the term came into popular use in the media, and self application by supposed adherents, to mean something more like what other posters have talked about. Too nebulous to ever really be a useful descriptor, it has fallen out of favor. But in many ways, Alt-Right is more like asking where Hipsters went: we're all hipsters now, and the whole right is Alt-Right now. The idea of a Republican politician doing what Desantis does in terms of both tone and content was unimaginable in the Bush years.

the whole right is Alt-Right now. The idea of a Republican politician doing what Desantis does in terms of both tone and content was unimaginable in the Bush years.

As I've touched upon before, I think that this has far more to do with the Patrician wing of the GOP having been soundly defeated, than it does any sort of success or influence on the part of the NrX and Taki's Mag crowd

I agree with your point more generally, but I'm talking more about tone (which I think is the essence of Alt-Right as a label) than about ideology or class or politics; these can't necessarily be conflated. It's not really a Social Conservatives vs Wall Street conservatives thing, the Social Conservatives of my youth were unfailingly polite. They aren't anymore, they cuss. It's not really a tax rates vs white pride thing, or an Ayn Rand vs Julius Evola thing; it's a Veggie Tales vs The Boys thing or an Oral Roberts vs Joe Rogan thing.

Long story short the American right had been in something of a civil war since the signing of the Troubles Assets Relief Program in 2008 while a temporary cease fire had been called in 2012 to prevent a split vote awarding automatic victory to the Democrats, Romney's loss brought the conflict roaring back. Seeing the establishment wing of the GOP solidly on the back foot a number of academic types from UCLA and Berkeley (Sailer, Spencer, and Yiannopolus being the most prominent) sought to establish themselves as a sort of new vanguard party, an alternative right that would unite the waring factions, and bring balance to the force.

Problem is that their ideas of what would unite the right basically had 0 buy-in outside the west coast academic bubble they'd been inhabiting and thus they found themselves lumped in with the quislings, trolls, and controlled opposition, by the wider right.

Adding on to the history a couple other people have laid out, first let me set the stage. Obama was elected in 2008 on a platform of Hope and Change. By 2016, Occupy had come and died, healthcare reform was a disaster, the banks had been bailed out, infrastructure investment was a failure, and we capped things off by bombing a Doctors Without Borders hospital. On the culture war front during those eight years, we had Atheism+, the gender wars, Gamergate, and the start of BLM.

Imagine you're a younger guy, late teens to twenties, in late 2015. You don't really care about gay marriage, or abortion. You're not religious. But at the same time, you're a veteran of the gender culture wars and Gamergate and you think wokeness and feminism are retarded and dishonest. You've been blackpilled on mainstream media and large parts of academia. You think socialism is fucking stupid.

Where is your political home? The answer, from maybe mid 2016 to early 2017, was an "alternative right". "Not yer granddaddy's rightwinger." This was the alt-right of The_Donald and "God Emperor Trump gonna make anime real". The media was in the early, heady stages of Trump Derangement Syndrome and in full war footing. As a counter-offensive against the nascent alt-right, they drug Richard Spencer's loser ass out of obscurity and put him on TV at every opportunity, culminating in this scene.

And that was the end of the alt-right as a name with any power. There was just no saving it against the kind of full court media campaign being waged. Anyone who wasn't a white nationalist started to abandon the term, with Charlotteville as the final nail in the coffin.

They are alive and well. You have groups like Patriot Front that are doing more activism than all the alt-rights groups in 2015 or 2016. McInnes left Proud Boys but Proud Boys is still around and recruiting. Gab has taken off and is a bastion of alt right, the CEO is alt right, and it has 100,000 users.

Some minor event like unite the right made them seem popular, but only a few hundred showed up there. It’s as popular as it has ever been, it’s just touched as much by the mainstream.

Who exactly is the audience for a story like that? I doubt very many women have any regrets over metoo era accusations now.

Now people will lament the post metoo sexual dynamics, but any examination of How We Got Here would be extremely predictable and limited unless it’s in small publications such as Unherd.

Man, I really don't know where I fall on that. On the one hand, it reads like a copy-pasta or meme. But more boomerish. Like that "300 confirmed kills" one.

On the other hand, it also pretty accurately describes a lot of insecure, vindictive, attention seeking women I've known or seen. Only in the real world they lack the self awareness or courage to ever write a letter like that.

Which raises a fascinating question. How do you meme the meme-sex?

I really hope calling women the "meme sex" doesn't become a thing here... It doesn't feel like the sort of thing you would do if you were trying to "write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion."

Hope it doesn't as well. Besides, the 4chan joke of "women are the jews of gender" is more apt and hilarious.

Lennon did it first.

Is...is the "meme-sex" supposed to be women?

I've never really understood the expression, so I'm hoping this thread provides some elucidation.

My plain reading of the phrase is that it centers women's "agreeableness". But contextualizes it in terms of women deeply internalizing social narratives. It's tangential to the NPC meme, but less about mindlessly repeating whatever CNN is telling you, and more about how susceptible women are to all info hazards.

That seems like the kind of generalization that would not survive contact with evidence.

Or, more likely, that requires enough qualifiers and hedges to be useless.

Would you consider Abigail Shrier's Irreversible Damage a point of evidence? Where she digs into how the infohazard of gender identity is convincing the same cohort of young girls and women who easily socialize to eating disorders, cutting, etc to now socialize towards a trans identity?

Or how it's well known among professionals that you need to separate these women from each other on a ward to rehabilitate them? Because if you leave them among themselves, they just socialize around their self harm identity too much.

Nope, never heard of it.

One journalist can write whatever she wants. Though subtitling it "The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters" suggests that she might have an angle. You wouldn't be convinced by Kendi arguing that the infohazard of whiteness makes you inherently racist, or take a Trump exposé as proof that Republicans are immoral.

I would consider the mental-health-professionals point as weak evidence, sure. It would be better if there was an actual study, or if it's "well known" that this is only true for women.

I have absolutely no context on it, and I'm interested to hear what others say, but I thought it might have to do with women being the arbiters of social acceptability, women determine what ideas get passed on what ideas don't. Men tend to look to women for moral guidance on what is okay to think, okay to talk about, okay to do.

I think the idea that women are the arbiters of social acceptability is itself a controversial idea, but it's one that I believe is true, nonetheless.

It's less of a steelman, and more actually sexist than that. Imagine some bit of boomer humor, the sort where the punch line is "Women! Can't live with 'em." And the joke is that you stopped before adding "can't live without 'em". "Meme sex" and "woman moment" are the Zoomer version of the same thing, eyerolling or sneering (depending on how mean-spirited the speaker is being) at an instance of a woman acting in a stereotypical way.

It's kind of hilarious reading all the Mottizens in this thread explain their interpretations of the term that are way more intelligent and charitable than the truth. It just means "women are a meme, lol".

I think it came from this 4chan thread.

P.S.: I couldn't find this post using DDG, Google, or even Bing. I had to go to Yandex to dig it up, where I found it straight away.

The sentiment behind the expression is straightforward: women should not be taken seriously. This is used as a catchall reminder of the various dysfunctions more prevalent among women than men.

Yes, it's straightforwardly sexist, and probably shouldn't be okay to say here.

It's edgelord for "girlz R stoopid."

It does indeed originate from the 4chan thread @KingOfTheBailey posted below. Somehow I find myself explaining dank memes. The world is not right.

Its more complex that it appears... there's both the "Women are a meme aspect" which is rude, but also taboo, ergo funny...

But there's also the deeper psychological insight that women are consistently vastly more psychologically vulnerable to memes than men... mass hysterias have been disproportionately female since the Devils of Loudon and Salem, women are vastly more vulnerable to social contagion diseases (Anorexia, Cutting, gender dysphoria)...and generally accept socially acceptable memes, even if they're absurd, vastly more readily than men.

Which is all what we'd expect given one of the most heavily gender loaded traits is trait agreeableness.

On imageboards "meme X" has connotations similar to "gimmicky", "not serious", or focusing on shallow viral (and often comedic) appeal. For example Goat Simulator is a famous meme game. It is often insulting, but not always, though it is more likely to be insulting when applied to something that is not obviously a meme. Neko-Arc in the fighting game Melty Blood is universally understood as a meme character whether you like her or not, she has bizarre gameplay elements, is a chibi catgirl, and one of her moves can result in covering the screen with a Twitch overlay while she shows up in front as a streamer, covering up important parts of the screen like the health bars. The Bongcloud is a meme chess opening. Ron Paul was a meme presidential candidate, as were Kayne West, Deez Nuts and Trump, but Trump ended up proving he was more than just a meme. Of course while Trump wasn't a meme candidate in 2020 anymore, he was still a meme president. Anarcho-capitalism and Maoism Third Worldism are meme ideologies.

Some years back, calling things a meme in the above sense as a (often not entirely serious) insult was particularly popular on imageboards. Calling women the "meme gender" was a meme that arose around then. The thread that a screencap was already posted of seems to have been the origin, there were a couple "meme gender" comments before that but they didn't get attention. If you read the replies it looks like someone thought of the more serious "women are more likely to follow social trends" interpretation even then. But the primary meaning is more saying that women are too much of a gimmick, like how it would get old if you made a fighting game with only two characters and one of them was Neko-Arc.

Anarcho-capitalism ... meme ideologies.

You think Bryan Caplan, Michael Huemer, Jason Brennan, the Friedmans, etc. are memers?

By the above 4chan usage many of them would call it a meme ideology, yes. It has the distinctive unseriousness of having never held power and thus never having to make compromises with reality. It is generally justified based on a set of principles that are too strict to fail gracefully if they run into problems and that are major contributors to its appeal as abstract ideas. Some of those ideas have bizarre and meme-worthy implications, as seen in the anarcho-capitalism memes that tend to focus on the Non Aggression Principle. E.g. "My NAP-bot detects the neighbor's voluntarily-contracted child slave has stepped 0.4 inches past my property line onto my flower bed, responds to his aggression by dousing him in McNapalm." The McNuke meme actually predates its modern incarnation by decades, as a child I remember reading Vernor Vinge's The Ungoverned from 1985, and that's a story generally considered sympathetic to anarcho-capitalism. Or the general idea that it deeply matters whether a system of social organization is classified as a government or not. I remember anarcho-captitalists on the internet talking a lot about boycotts and refusal to provide service as an alternative to government, as something that would limit pollution for example. Experience with real-world examples of that sort of thing, like social media companies, payment processors, and even banks cracking down on those expressing the wrong opinions, paints a less idealized picture and has probably played a role in making such rhetoric less popular. By analogy Goat Simulator owed its popularity to a few strong ideas, but those ideas didn't have the depth and staying power to remain entertaining under closer and longer inspection, and it had bugs that were often funny in the abstract or the first time but not if you had to deal with them all the time

It has the distinctive unseriousness of having never held power and thus never having to make compromises with reality.

I don't understand how a positive policy of restraint, of withdrawing or neutering power, is in any way inherently idealistic. Most Anarcho-capitalists, including me, argue that it is the very pragmatic, consequentialist strain in our thinking and in our politics that should drive us towards promoting voluntary interactions as much as possible and towards beating the swords of the State into plowshares. It is a very quick and, frankly, disingenuous oversimplification, merely a hand-wave, to treat the "ideology" as if it were utopian. It is most decidedly not.

Some of those ideas have bizarre and meme-worthy implications, as seen in the anarcho-capitalism memes that tend to focus on the Non Aggression Principle. E.g. "My NAP-bot detects the neighbor's voluntarily-contracted child slave has stepped 0.4 inches past my property line onto my flower bed, responds to his aggression by dousing him in McNapalm."

The existence of memes within communities that share an ideology says nothing beyond the fact that people like to make and share memes. It's certainly unrelated to any actual assessment of the ideas.

Experience with real-world examples of that sort of thing, like social media companies, payment processors, and even banks cracking down on those expressing the wrong opinions, paints a less idealized picture and has probably played a role in making such rhetoric less popular.

None of these examples are in any way dispositive since they are examples, first and foremost, of institutions wielding State power in various ways as their primary means of maintaining market share or even validity. Social disassociation is not an effective strategy against the State, especially the US behemoth. The idea is more apt for discussions about inter-personal and inter-group conflicts within truly private spheres.

In short I don't think you've engaged with anarcho-capitalist thought, but merely noticed some internet phenomena and come to some wry conclusions about some internet strangers.

I don't understand how a positive policy of restraint, of withdrawing or neutering power, is in any way inherently idealistic. Most Anarcho-capitalists, including me, argue that it is the very pragmatic, consequentialist strain in our thinking and in our politics that should drive us towards promoting voluntary interactions as much as possible and towards beating the swords of the State into plowshares. It is a very quick and, frankly, disingenuous oversimplification, merely a hand-wave, to treat the "ideology" as if it were utopian. It is most decidedly not.

I think the point of the quote you were responding to there wasn't about what AnCaps would do, but more the fact that AnCapitalism has never been tried and is unprepared for contact with the real world (see also: communism).

The Marc Laidlaw novel Dad's Nuke also had privately-owned nukes. (Though contra the Wikipedia article, I think the titular "nuke" referred to a reactor and not a bomb.)

Which raises a fascinating question. How do you meme the meme-sex?

Oh, come on. This is not cool no matter how convinced you are that every female in your life is crazy. Don't do this.

I don't know if this has any bearing on your sentiment, but the author of the short story is a cisgender woman.

There was a comment once, where one of the further-right people here claimed that given a sufficient intelligence gap in day-to-day interactions, "your mind contains theirs". This struck me as a fantastic example of intellectual hubris, sufficiently clear that it should be preserved as a reference sample.

From the excerpts, I think there's some interesting questions here worth exploring... but trying to describe, in first-person perspective, the internal experiences of someone with whom you seriously disagree is such a profoundly fraught exercise that it is pretty clearly a bad idea, and neither the author nor anyone here are so skilled as to be the lone exception. Your mind does not contain theirs, and pretending it does traps you in dangerous illusions.

I disagree. I think trying to imagine the internal experience of someone who seriously disagrees with you is a great idea. The risk is that you might take your own speculations too seriously without trying to corroborate them.

imagining is one thing. Expressing it to others, speaking to third parties in the voice of a second as though it were their own, is what I'm objecting to. Particularly for a fictitious third party meant to stand in for a large group of people.

I can see how this could be deliberately misleading, but isn't what you're describing basically all of fiction? Also, I think that while any particular guess at another's internal state is likely to be wrong, simply coming up with a coherent hypothesis that explains someone or something's behavior is, imo, a good contribution if we're trying to understand that behavior without direct access to their internal states.

I can see how this could be deliberately misleading, but isn't what you're describing basically all of fiction?

Fiction, speaking generally, is fictional. Most fiction does not present itself as directly representative of real-world people. Fiction that does this, and is highly adversarial about it, is generally not held in high regard. Think Chick Tracts and "happy merchant" cartoons.

Also, I think that while any particular guess at another's internal state is likely to be wrong, simply coming up with a coherent hypothesis that explains someone or something's behavior is, imo, a good contribution if we're trying to understand that behavior without direct access to their internal states.

Attempting to model another's internal state is useful. Presenting that model as though it were their own voice makes it marginally more persuasive to third parties for entirely irrational reasons, while adding nothing to the model's accuracy and providing the modeller with temptations to bias they might not otherwise have. There's a reason that mimicking someone else's voice is one of the early tricks kids spontaneously develop to annoy each other. This is the adult version, and while it's certainly more sophisticated, it's not really any better.

Again, from the excerpts, I think there's some potentially interesting points raised here. What does the first-person framing add to them, in your view?

I agree that nobody knows 100% of anybody else's knowledge, but the sentiment rings quite true to me. It kills me when people dedicate their lives to things and remain mediocre at them. This comment I wrote earlier is one example. Another is a friend of mine who has been making youtube videos for years and invested tens of thousands of hours and dollars into them, only for each to get a few dozen views at most. I have plenty of other people like that in my life. I'm sure you can think of examples too--people who are just much, much worse than they should be at things they are quite dedicated to.

Let's arbitrarily break knowledge up into two categories--emotional and logical. I don't know what it feels like to give birth, though logically I know it's probably worse than most things I've experienced. You are criticizing the OP for their lack of emotional knowledge, but I don't think that's what they were talking about at all; I think they were talking purely about logical knowledge and the different arguments you'll hear about political things in day to day life.

I came forward with evidence that a former roommate of mine was falsely accused.

The accusation was made on Facebook just after the Kavanaugh hearings. It was a surreal experience because the stories she told were such obvious lies. I was there for some, not all, of her "abuse" allegations. Pure DARVO.

I knew I would lose social capital by standing up for him. But it was more than expected. Also, to this day, many of my former friends apparently still believe her and think I was lying. In fact, I am in many ways become a larger pariah than he is.

I like to tell myself that it was worth it, to speak the truth in defense of a friend at great personal cost... but i've certainly grown more cynical about human nature.

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2022/11/guggenheim-racism-controversy-curator-nancy-spector/671529/

Well we finally have a story about the self-destruction of the Guggenheim in the summer of 2020. Unfortunately the author seems to be lamenting that the activists didn’t try to get enough people fired by framing it as a story of people choosing a scapegoat instead of fully recognizing their privilege.

This piece appearing as a headline story in The Atlantic actually makes me pessimistic that we’re ever going to get a real examination of the hysteria during Summer 2020. The analysis is so hamstrung by the fact that any mainstream author will agree with the premises of the activists.

Also it’s worth noting that any principled opposition to Lebouvier from within the Guggenheim would have left the art world decades ago. Institutional capture was baked into the cake back then, lamenting it now just seems naïve.

The author seemed pretty critical of the broader trend.

In hindsight, the summer of 2020 was revolutionary, in both good and bad ways; noble goals were being pursued, but the ground was constantly shifting, and it was unwise to end up on the wrong side of the revolutionaries. People are complicated, and not every workplace dispute between individuals can bear the entire weight of America’s racial history.

They felt the museum was playing by the old rules, whereby the most dangerous person to offend was the celebrity with his name on the posters. In the new world, the power had shifted to those who could attract the most attention on Twitter.

As in any revolution, who survived and who fell foul of the crowd was often arbitrary.

At the least, the author is pointing out that devouring the old guard is not particularly just. Spector is painted very sympathetically, and the agitators and consultants are treated with ambivalence. This may or may not have something to do with Ms. Lebouvier's absolute tantrum on request for an interview.

What more examination did you want to see?

If there's one thing you should take away from this story, it's that this is the painting that inspired the whole debacle. I think it reveals more about the people involved than all ~8k words of that article:

/images/16648375033063056.webp

It's not an asthetic that appeals to me at all. But while it really doesn't resonate with me stylistically or compositionally, I do like that there is a very pronounced style - a Basquiat looks like a Basquiat to me, in the same way a Picasso just looks like a Picasso. And I like that there is a strong point of view and that comes across in a very direct way.

It is a Basquiat, and although this particular piece does not do much for me, in general I find that Basquiat's works tend to have real emotional power, though why, I don't know (color? composition? I don’t know enough about art to say. And, no, anyone can't do it; I attended a showing of an art teacher colleague who worked in a similar style and felt nothing. Similarly, lots of people can execute the lines and shapes of Guernica, but the result will not necessarily be the same. I can cut out pictures and paste them on a canvas, but I can't create anything like this stuff

I was feeling vaguely sympathetic up until this part:

Around the same time, political concerns were getting louder at the Guggenheim. According to several sources, in late 2016, some staff members expressed frustration that the museum was not doing more to signal its opposition to Trump. Then Nancy Spector, as the chief curator, had a chance to join the #resistance. In 2017, the White House got in touch to request the loan of a van Gogh. Spector instead offered an artwork by Maurizio Cattelan called America—a solid-gold toilet. Liberals on Twitter loved the insult. “You spend your life hoping one day you’ll get the chance to respond to an unreasonable request in a manner worthy of Oscar Wilde,” tweeted a Georgetown Law professor named Aderson B. Francois. “For this one Guggenheim curator, that moment came last September and, as the kids say, she didn’t throw away her shot.”

"But why would the leopards eat my face????" You live by the sword, you die by the sword.

I don't read her as believing that anyone should have been fired. That's probably the worst possiblle way to diversify - scapegoating and targeting someone, largely for their race is gross. Especially when there were so many better and non-racist options available. They have an obscene endowment, and in that moment, donors would likely have been all too wiling to fund even more if it was targeted toward increasing the diversity of staff, or artists whose works are collected and exhibited.

I think she's just making clear - lest she be the next one targeted - that calls for more inclusivity aren't the problem.

It does seem like the director was a little too trusting. The article does suggest that the guest curator had a "long-standing pattern of excoriating others who were interested in Defacement or Basquiat, even when they sought out her opinion." A little more due diligence probably could have avoided the situation all together. .

Unfortunately the author seems to be lamenting that the activists didn’t try to get enough people fired by framing it as a story of people choosing a scapegoat instead of fully recognizing their privileg.

I read it a little differently; I thought the article's point was largely to criticize LaBouvier for acting like an insane narcissist. The author seems to carefully let LaBouvier make the argument against herself in her own words. There was hardly a single sentence in that article that made LaBouvier seem reasonable. For instance:

Chaédria LaBouvier was one of those dissenters. She quote-tweeted the Guggenheim’s post, adding: “Get the entire fuck out of here. I am Chaédria LaBouvier, the first Black curator in your 80 year history & you refused to acknowledge that while also allowing Nancy Spector to host a panel about my work w/o inviting me. Erase this shit.” She followed this up with a long viral thread the next day, claiming that working at the Guggenheim “was the most racist professional experience of my life.” She zeroed in on Spector, the woman who had brought her into the museum’s orbit but who, according to LaBouvier, was “trying to co-opt my work,” and likened her to Amy Cooper, the “Central Park Karen,” a white woman who had recently been in the news after she called the police on a Black bird-watcher.

Even by the standards of the Atlantic's readership, this isn't the kind of thing your average white liberal is going to appreciate or agree with.

The thing that struck me most about this whole ridiculous series of events was that it was over what is, objectively, a terrible painting. I mean look at this. In what universe is this considered a powerful expression of rage against a horrible tragedy, instead of the scribbling of a child on a canvas? The writer laments (in what is clearly a bald-faced party affiliation statement) the fact that:

The collections are slowly diversifying, but only 1.2 percent of artworks across 18 major American museums are by Black artists, and the big crowds still flock to the Great White Males: Picasso, Monet, van Gogh, Pollock, Warhol.

Please note that I chose my wording above (expression of rage against a horrible tragedy) very carefully. I ask that you compare Defacement (above) with one of the aforementioned "Great White Males" own expressions of rage against horrible tragedy. The famous Guernica by Picasso. Or perhaps Van Gogh's reaction to his own anguish and termoil? Shall we consider Monet's reaction to his wife's ill health and decline?

Of course people flock to these paintings. We have eyes. No matter how often the art community screams and cries and stamps their feet and demands that we acknowledge that they are the masters of their field and we mere peons cannot possibly comprehend the mysteries they do, we have eyes. We appreciate beauty and we recognize ugliness when we see it. People go to art galleries to appreciate beautiful things. That's it. That's the answer to this accusation that all art-museum goers are secretly racist. They just want to look at beautiful things, and this painting is not a beautiful thing.

I agree that painting is trash but it's not like anything by Pollock (one of the listed great white males) is any better

Pollock's paintings have a considered colour palette, rhythm, harmony, scale, and originality/novelty, all elements that factor into the aesthetic and historical assessment of art. It's not the greatest art mankind ever made but it represents a new development for its time. On those bases it's arguably better than Basquiat, who retrod a path laid down decades earlier by abstract expressionists like Pollock without notably refining or extending it.

Of course people flock to these paintings. We have eyes. No matter how often the art community screams and cries and stamps their feet and demands that we acknowledge that they are the masters of their field and we mere peons cannot possibly comprehend the mysteries they do, we have eyes. We appreciate beauty and we recognize ugliness when we see it. People go to art galleries to appreciate beautiful things. That's it. That's the answer to this accusation that all art-museum goers are secretly racist. They just want to look at beautiful things, and this painting is not a beautiful thing.

I'm not really sure this cuts it. There are plenty of black artists who have produced work that the average non-artist, non-expert such as myself look beautiful/impactful/impressive as those other paintings but few go to see them either. Which isn't to say that you shouldn't see Picasso or Monet or Van Gogh, but that the popularity of particular artists has as much do to with either a) arbitrary fashion and accidents of history or b) abstruse points of art history that 99% of gallery visitors know nothing about.

But these days you won't know the skin color of an artist unless someone goes out of their way to tell you (which they will in certain cases).

Discrimination is a completely bogus reason to explain why some works are popular and others aren't.

I tend to think fine art, especially contemporary art, is mostly a scam anyway, but the cries of racism here just ring painfully deceptive.

So, I've made this post more or less verbatim a few times, every time the idea of discrimination as the driving force for differing outcomes in racial groups gets brought up as a justification for the relative poor performance of black Americans. I figure I may as well make it as a top-level comment, and see if anyone has any serious critique of it.

Historical discrimination is not the primary driver of group outcomes. Slavery and Jim-Crow-era policies are frequently brought up as justification for the relative underperformance of black Americans. However, it is clear that this is not the case generally, when one looks at literally any other group. I personally prefer to use Jews in this example, because of how many points of similarity I can make; Jews were historically relegated to ghettos and denied economic opportunities, chased out of their homes repeatedly, suffered public outbreaks of mob violence, had their successful businesses plundered, and, for a time, had it generally considered that basketball was their sport. Jews, historically, have suffered serious discrimination, for longer than African-Americans have literally existed. And yet, the mean outcomes of Jewish Americans are above the majority. If it were the case that historic discrimination was the sole or even primary driver of group outcomes, as in the frequently-used metaphor of a racer given a handicap which is removed partway through the race, we would expect the group outcome of Jews to be well behind the majority. We do not see this; Jews commit relatively little violent crime, make relatively more money, and achieve relatively more scholastically. We see a similar pattern with (some) Asian immigrants at the turn of the 20th century, who came to the U.S. with very little, suffered significant discrimination and group violence, and yet their descendants are now in a similar situation.

It does not matter if this racial ordering is due to genes, culture, or a giant racial conspiracy detailed in the Protocols of the Elders of Martha's Vinyard; the point is that the existence of these groups shows clearly that discrimination does not necessarily lead to lesser outcomes.

There are a few attempts at counterarguments I've heard. The most common is special pleading; the claim is made that the specific discrimination against black Americans was unique, and that while other groups have had individual pieces discrimination applied, the whole adds up to more than the sum of its parts. As theories go, it's of course unfalsifiable; if there is some dark alchemy of historic appearances which, when inflicted on any group, would force them into group outcomes comparable to black Americans, then the less likely it becomes that history would track it exactly as time changes. The follow-up, of course, is simply that the dark alchemy has already happened and that it has left a stain on the character of black Americans, such that racism in their favor is needed now due to their persistent inferiority; this is, of course, simply racism with one extra step, and can be ignored just as the claims that black Americans carry the curse of Ham and must repent to YHWH with an appropriate sacrifice could be.

Another claim is to dig into the specifics. Jews (and Slavs, and others) were enslaved, but not as recently as blacks. Of course, other races suffered from redlining, but blacks had it the worst. Sure, the victims of lynching were surprisingly varied when you look into the details, and if you look at the KKK's traditional enemies you will see that they did not simply target blacks, but surely blacks were the worst-off in all of these cases? Well, perhaps, and perhaps not. I don't need to weigh how many Tulsa Race Riots make up a Krystalnacht; I just need to claim that they were both bad, that they happened to different people, and that the group outcomes of one group are above-average while the others are below. If the claim is that the current position of black Americans is primarily due to racism, and not "Well, sure, obviously they'd be below every other race in every metric we care about if there wasn't historical racism, they'd just be less behind.", then that is an argument that might be worth engaging with, but unless you're already attempting to split those hairs, I don't really find it so.

But the reason I'm bringing this up here is that by far the single most common response I've had to this argument is silence (or being silenced, when I bring it up in Wokist-controlled spaces). Repeatedly, I've heard people make some assertion about relative underperformance of black Americans (and only black Americans) being due to historic discrimination, repeatedly I've brought up the presence of other groups who have suffered historic (and current) discrimination and who relatively overperform, and repeatedly, receive no answer, neither a "That's clearly wrong." or even a "Hmm, let me think about that." It is because of that silence that I wanted to bring this up as a top-level post, because I've made it so many times and never had it challenged. My feeling is that the argument is not really an argument; it's an attempt to bring up emotively-charged history to justify current discrimination, and that literally no one who makes the argument started by looking at a bunch of racial groups, looking at their relative performance and historic ill- or well-treatment, and drawing a graph to prove that historic mistreatment generations ago leads to poor outcomes today.

If you want to disprove that 'literally' above, I invite you to post. I don't get how my argument can seriously be novel, when even a Wiki-skim level of history and literal first-week-in-logic analysis (Persons B have property D. Persons J have property D. Persons B have outcome Bad. Persons J do not have outcomes Bad. Does property D imply bad outcomes?) is enough to generate it. So, since I keep seeing it get treated as novel, here I am, posting this.

I have left a list of citations off of this post, because I believe all of the factual claims made (black Americans earn less money, commit more crimes, and do more poorly in school, while Jewish and some Asian groups earn more, crime less, and school harder, and that all groups have suffered notable historic discrimination.) are taboo, but not actually controversial. If it is necessary, I can post a reply to this with a list of sources, but I do not feel that these statements are either partisan or inflammatory.

So, since I keep seeing it get treated as novel, here I am, posting this.

Is this your first week reading the culture war thread? Its not a novel argument around here. In fact, it might be the whole reason this culture war roundup exists, and thus the oldest argument on this particular forum.

The argument you are gesturing at is sometimes call Human Biodiversity (and sometimes called "scientific racism" by its detractors) or HBD for short.

Some history:

There was a blog called SlateStarCodex (the blog still exists, but is now continued under a different name: astralcodexten. That is a whole story in itself). A guy named Scott Alexander wrote interesting articles on there. People liked his writing. They made a subreddit to follow the blog, the subreddit took the same name as the blog. Scott Alexander occasionally wrote about culture war issues (it was mostly supposed to by a psychiatry blog). These articles would attract a lot of attention. Scott often did not like all this attention.

Scott had weekly open threads where people could talk about anything. He found that people kept wanting to talk about the culture war and it drowned out all other conversation. So he said 'no more talking about the culture war'. The subreddit stepped in, and created a weekly thread where all the discussion of the culture war would be contained, so that it wouldn't spread and infect all other discussions.

This went on for a while. Eventually some people felt that the culture war thread was being taken over by HBD arguments. Some of those people were moderators of the SlateStarCodex subreddit. They decided to ban discussion of HBD in the subreddit. I was a moderator of the subreddit at the time. I did not like how often HBD discussions happened. I was weakly against banning the discussion altogether. Unlike most readers of a subreddit, when you are a moderator you can't just ignore a discussion because you don't like it. You have to read through all the comments to suss out what is going on. I wished there was less HBD discussion, but I didn't think banning it would mean less work for me as a moderator (and my main complaint at the time was how much work it created for moderators).

Eventually the HBD discussion ban expired or was overturned, I can't remember which one. It left a sour taste in a lot of people's mouths. Some people were upset about the HBD discussion, others were upset it had expired. I'd guess that most people that are still around in this community today were more upset by the discussion ban.

Things went on for a while, but Scott was recieving increasing pressure from people and threats of doxxing because he was associated with a subreddit that allowed discussion of HBD and other ugly culture war things. Scott asked for the subreddit to end culture war threads.

The mods agreed, but also decided to create a splinter subreddit that would not be directly associated with Scott, but would also allow the culture war discussion to continue. This splinter subreddit came to be called "TheMotte", a reference to motte and bailey arguments. There was uncerntainty about whether this move would succeed. I can say I was publicly confident enough that I took a bet on it and won the bet. I wish I had also taken a public bet for the move from reddit to off reddit to succeed too. I felt it was more than likely to succeed, but less likely than the subreddit switch.

The move off reddit happened because reddit admins were increasingly removing random comments, and going after subreddits that we had previously thought of as 'canarys in the coal mine'.

HBD is an answer to the question "Why do different races have persistent group outcomes?". I was asking a different question; specifically, "Why do people frequently claim something clearly specious (group rates of discrimination) to explain (one particular set of) group differences, when literally minutes of thought and research is enough to disprove it?"

I mean, the answer might be "Claiming anti-black discrimination explains all group outcomes is a matter of Wokist doctrine solely, and no one ever advanced the argument in good faith, and its common presence simply indicates how far public discourse has fallen.", but I figured I should at least ask people to take stabs at the argument first.

when literally minutes of thought and research is enough to disprove it?

I think some intellectual humility is probably in order here. Your own argument appears rather flimsy as well I'm afriad. As an addendum to my other comment on your main comment, my objection to the logic of your argument is this; the argument that factor Y is the main contributor to group X's underperformance does not imply that all groups facing some degree of factor Y should also underperform the average. True, we would expect other groups to feel negative effects of Y, but the presence of other factors may be such that, in spite of Y other groups nonetheless outperform the average, other factors from which group X does not benefit (in this case, as I wrote above, one potential 'other factor' being the selection for educated and driven migrants).

"Why do people frequently claim something clearly specious (group rates of discrimination) to explain (one particular set of) group differences, when literally minutes of thought and research is enough to disprove it?"

So you're asking why is politics political?

I would surmise that the literal answer to your question is that most people simply don't find it worth their time to research an answer to this question. I would also contest that this explanation is really so specious that it can be summarily dismissed after a minimum amount of thinking and research. First, I simply doubt that you've actually looked at "literally any other group" and found no exception to the claim that historical discrimination is not the primary driver of group outcomes. I could, for example, bring up the example of Indian untouchables, who have faced de jure and continue to face unspoken caste-based discrimination and still lag behind privileged castes. Second, I don't believe that success in the face of discrimination proves its relative irrelevance in general. Consider a commonly offered explanation that Ashkenazi Jews are simply more intelligent than native Europeans and exhibit stronger enthnocentrism. Let's say that's true - well then, it may be the case that AJs are a special exception. They may have had the tools to thrive despite oppression that a group without such an advantage did not. I can foresee you claiming that this is special pleading, but to make a case for special pleading you'd need to already have a firmly established general pattern from which someone wants to claim exception. Can you list more than just Jews who have had to face a comparable level of oppression for that long in the country where they are the minority and came out on top or at least at parity? Third, it does not seem obvious at all as to what is the appropriate scale for answering this question. Jews have been in Europe for centuries. As recently as the 19th century, prominent individuals not especially invested in furthering a bigoted agenda like deutsch physik felt comfortable making the claim that Jews were of manifestly inferior intelligence to the native European. Were they simply ignorant, bigoted without cause, accurately assessing the apparent state of affairs at the time? When exactly since the departure from their homeland did Jews go from lagging to ahead? Moreover, should one factor in that a group identity like religion (and a preserved common language) could operate across borders while something like race, less so? Should one consider the size of the minority group at all? Fourth, I don't see any clear way to disentangle discrimination from other explanations. It seems just as plausible to me that, say, alleged Jewish ethnocentrism could be an evolved cultural response to oppression as a pre-existing protective factor. It seems plausible to me that persistent discrimination could have kept African Americans more localized in the initially poor South and that compound effects of being in a poorer part of the country and facing vicious discrimination could have done more damage than expected from a simple composition of those factors. Fifth, how do you even define a group? Do you differentiate them by how they immigrated? By some sort of measure of the interconnections in their social network? Genetically?

I don't think finding satisfactory answers to those questions, even limiting it to satisfactory relative to what conclusions can be drawn from extant knowledge (which may very well fall short of a more general standard for what is satisfactory), is going to be anywhere south of at least 100 hours of research. So, if I had to answer someone like you in a setting where my real identity is attached, I'd make the simple calculation that the generic, safe answer nets me the social win and a more detailed answer is simply not worth the time since it won't be actionable or necessary to socially defeat you. I imagine I'm not the only one with that position.

Eventually the HBD discussion ban expired ban expired or was overturned

It expired, it was always a moratorium. Mostly because of a small cadre of users (TrannyPorno, LeggoMyEggo, zontargs, situation_normal, Et Al...) insisted on making every conversation about HBD. Conversation in the fun thread about the NFL playoffs? Here come the usual suspects to talk about how Atlanta isn't going to make it past the first round because they have too many n*ggers in skill positions.

Wait, was zontargs one of the HBD people?

Not initially, but he sort of became one as time went on. the dissatisfied HBD people formed the founding population of /r/CultureWarRoundup.

How do you know there is a difference? Do you have a list of multiple peoples who were chattel slaves, and their relative performance over time during, immediately after, and generations after?

This isn't a gotcha; I myself do not have statistics ready to spring on you, and would be interested to know, e.g., how the descendants of the Roman empire's slaves did, if there is any such data (or even widely-present stereotypes).

What is the difference? Most immigrants came to the US not knowing English at all, and they managed just fine. Surely learning to read is easier than learning an entire foreign language.

Many immigrants weren't even literate in their native languages. This PDF (found here) claims that a majority of Southern Italian immigrants in the 1900–1903 period were illiterate. Yet Italians successfully integrated into American society.

Edit: Another source on illiterate immigrants. Apparently, it was a big concern at the time, but today there are no traces of it left. No Italian- or Irish-American knows the education level of their great-etc.-grandparents who first immigrated. In fact, a few centuries ago the vast majority of people were peasants (or even serfs!) with no "need for literacy".

Fair enough. This is basically my take, too.

However, blaming Black American culture for the modern-day predicament of Black Americans is probably outside the Overton window at this point.

No, it’s politically incorrect, but well inside the Overton window. Lots of people believe it and it probably wouldn’t cause much more than criticism if a non woke said it.

Why are gypsies so very hard to integrate in to societies yet their ethnic brethren from North India much easier?

The ethnic brethren from North India that make it to the West are the ones with a job offer and university education. You'd expect such people to have an easier time fitting in regardless of ethnic origin. Also, the Wiki article about Roma people states in its section about genetic inquiries into their origins that the original population that migrated westwards was quite small, as evidenced by founder effects like several heritable diseases being quite frequent in modern European Roma. Given this, it's very plausible that there are also other genetic oddities in Roma compared to the broader population of their ancestral homeland.

Sorry, who is the “ethnic brethren” of European Gypsies in North India? Are there Gypsies in North India? Do they often emigrate to the West? Because if you think that regular North Indians are “ethnic brethren” of European Gypsies, you are extremely wrong. They don’t even speak the same language, much less share other ethnic background.

Yes, immigrants were illiterate. But their children weren't. And whatever the weaknesses of urban public education were in the time period you are referring to, I am pretty sure that they pale in comparison to those of the education provided to African Americans in the South during the same period. Funding isn't everything, but apparently "'Alabama spent $37 on each white child in 1930 and just $7 on those who were black; in Georgia the figures were $32 and $7, in Mississippi they were $31 and $6, and those in South Carolina were $53 and $5[.]'" And, many states even forbade private schools and colleges from integrating

This isn't a novel claim in this space.

I'm not sure whether discrimination is the primary cause for differing outcomes between racial groups, but the question isn't as binary as it may seem. What if discrimination is responsible for the way that group's culture developed, or for selecting certain genes? It's been hypothesized that the type of discrimination jews faced for centuries placed a selective pressure for high intellectual achievement. If jews were pressured into professions requiring high IQ like doctors and banking (jews were the only ones allowed to charge interest in many places), then evolution would filter out the ones too dumb to practice medicine or banking. I'm inaccurately paraphrasing Scott Alexander's argument here but my point is that discrimination has downstream impacts that can last longer than the discrimination itself.

Most people read into social subtext, so if you say, "blacks underperform for reasons other than discrimination" what most people hear is "blacks are bad, or somehow inferior." Although you didn't say the cause was genetic (in fact you explicitly gave other possibilities too!), it comes off to most people as being about genetics, just because lots of americans learned in school about scientific racism and how genetic arguments were used to justify slavery or discrimination. It doesn't matter if that's ahistorical, school gave many of us that impression anyways.

Also, in some spaces it's not acceptable to attack black culture. The argument goes that: why build society where it's acceptable to act a certain way by fiat, when you could rebuild it so it's acceptable to act a different way instead? Or to accept both ways of acting. So, "believing black people should change" is problematic to many people.

At the end of the day, explaining black outcomes by discrimination is done in order to place agency, blame, and the responsibility to fix; on society at large instead of on black people in particular.

Most people read into social subtext, so if you say, "blacks underperform for reasons other than discrimination" what most people hear is "blacks are bad, or somehow inferior.

Perhaps not for solely 'discrimination', but if one rejects that historical factors are the cause of racial disparities, what else are you left with? The OC offers as the only alternative 'culture', but that hardly helps; we can then only ask what causes the difference in culture? Hence, if you don't think there's a genetic difference we are left only with history and discrimination.

"believing black people should change" is problematic to many people.

I don't think people regard this as 'problematic' so much as pointless and unactionable. Where does a statement like that leave us in terms of actually making things better? As worthless a contribution as saying your solution to alcoholism is that people should drink less alcohol.

First, cultural differences are just as much an accidental difference between people as genetics. I do agree that history can influence culture, though.

The framing is important though. If we say culture is the cause, the solutions that come to mind are "socializing black people to act differently." If we say discrimination is the cause, the solutions that come to mind are reparations or something.

I agree the exact cause and effect is largely the same, so I will reiterate that the whole debate is largely a proxy argument for who is an agent. Feminism being also woke adjacent treats men as the only agents, too.

E: typo

You know who else under performs? Southern white proles. One might go so far as to invoke cultural contamination from the poorest, mostviolent subculture in the US. It's less black culture that's the problem, and low-class borderer culture, which black Americans had thrust upon them.

You could say, "of course Asians in California do well; they assimilated to the culture of California." And "Of course Jews do well; they assimilated to the cultures of New York and European intelligencia." And "Of course Black Americans do poorly; they assimilated to poor Southerner culture."

You'd think, being that it's acceptable to bash Southern culture, this would be an acceptable path. It sounds like blaming racism, but it's really blaming The South, which is even better to some. Jazz, Blues, Rap, Hiphop, etc are distinctly Black in origin, but drug-addled criminality, low test scores, under-aged polyamory, and parents in and out of prison are not.

This immediately fails if blacks have even worse outcomes and norms than southern Whites, or non-black southern minorities. If the culture sucked for everyone, but blacks are worse again, once more the dread wolf Racism rears his head.

You’d need to somehow compare them to the white descendants of the free antebellum poor(so white subsistence farmers and sharecroppers). And these people exist, but they’re hard to separate out.

It seems equally plausible to me that black culture is screwed up because of influence from planters, not rednecks, and that the similarities to poor southern white culture are more or less incidental. That is, adopting the culture of a landed elite when you yourself are neither landed nor elite is probably a bad idea.

We got a problem though - white households in Mississippi earn about $50K per capita. That's below the American average, but not catastrophic, almost double what the Mississippi black population earns, and well above quite a few European countries. I pick Mississippi because it's the poorest American state, but the same basic pattern replicates across the South. White Southerners aren't as rich as white Minnesotans, but they actually do pretty well relative to any other standard.

White southerners are a mishmash of traditionally wealthy-working class groups/small business owner groups(Cajun diaspora, white Mexicans- both occupy a similar cultural niche to Koreans in LA in parts of the rural south), educated northern transplants, the descendants of southern elites, and the actual southern white proles who historically sharecropped alongside the blacks and now live in trailer parks instead of tenements.

There’s not a great way to separate out the latter group, but I doubt they outperform blacks much at all.

The central problem with your argument is that you are ignoring the vastly different history of all these groups and the flattening the different circumstances of each by saying they were all discriminated against. Of course, you do address the point that each group are/were disadvantaged to a similar extent, but it isn't really that simple. Of course, Asian and Jewish Americans did/do face significant discrimination. However, for instance, in the case of Asian Americans the circumstances of their arrival have had the effect of counteracting disadvantage based on race faced on an institutional or inter-personal level. Asian Americans are almost all here as or as descendants of economic migrants, which selects for the most educated and grafting. Consider this; in the period immediately following 1965, Asian immigrants (excl. Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam) had an average 15.2 years of schooling, which makes plenty of sense - it was not your average Indian or Japanese that immigrated to America in the 1960s and 1970s, or even today, especially in the case of poorer countries. This far exceeded the average native level, which as late of 1980 was only 13.07. This represents an enormous advantage in terms of ensuring the kind of beneficial which, as you, Asian-Americans disproportionately enjoy. So of course Asian immigrants should do better than average.

The circumstances of the arrival of African-Americans are plainly vastly different. Hence why recent Nigerian immigrants and their children actually out-earn the American average. Looking at such a vast disparity between recent black immigrants and the descendants of slaves, what else can explain that gap except the circumstances of the arrival of the slaves and their subsequent treatment, first as slaves and then as free but disadvantaged citizens?

With respect, I think you're misreading me. I am making no argument as to why there are group differences; I am simply pointing out that a frequently-given explanation (prior trauma) is clearly and obviously a non-answer. Clearly, races are distinct in terms of outcome at the group-aggregate level; equally-clearly, we see that outcomes of races do not correlate directly with discrimination.

I do think that we've got a lot to untangle if we did want to claim it's all group-founder effects. If we posit that the primary determinant in group outcomes is subgroup selection and founder effects, we could also look at the outcomes of indentured servants who were shipped across to the burgeoning Americas as well; if selection effects explains all, then we should find a clear delineation in demographic destiny between the children of free colonists and indentured servants (who we would expect to be very close to the descendants of slaves). We could also dig into the histories of Irish immigrants who came over en masse in response to the Famine, as well as digging into those sentenced to transportation to, e.g., Australia.

Of course, the big issue is that if the secret sauce is selection effects and we're just getting the cream of the crop from various nations, then we could look at the pool of people who didn't immigrate from various nations and see if the world really is divided into Economic Go-Getters and Everyone Else. And now that I mention it, wouldn't the descendants of the original American colonists be the ultimate economic migrants? Shouldn't we see parity between their descendants and the others?

Again, I make no claim as to why group outcome difference exists. I just note that it does, that it's durable, and that historic discrimination doesn't account for it. As far as I'm concerned, the reason for different group outcomes is that people are different, and groups contain different people, and because I believe this, I am very skeptical of any "But for Factor X, these groups of people would have identical outcomes."

Equally-clearly, we see that outcomes of races do not correlate directly with discrimination.

This is just a causation/correlation problem. Just because discrimination has a significant negative effect on group outcomes, that does not imply historic discrimination will correlate directly with discrimination. In my view the two central factors determining group outcomes are historic discrimination/disadvantage and selection effects/the circumstances of arrival. These both work against African-Americans significantly, but for Asian-Americans the negative impact of discrimination is counter-acted by selection effects.

if selection effects explains all

I didn't say it explains all, just quite a lot and a very large part of why we see many more recent immigrants groups perform very well.

the reason for different group outcomes is that people are different, and groups contain different people,

Vague waffle. How are the people in these groups different and how is that affecting outcomes?

Again, I bring up what those two factors would imply about the pool of non-immigrants; if we assume that groups are blank slates, then we should see the same demographic outcomes in non-immigrants from Nigeria, and from Israel. Do we? And again, does this assumption encode American original-colonist exceptionalism as an expected outcome, where we should assume that the best outcomes should belong to the stock of those that did the hardest initial work on arrival? Do you think there is any reversion-to-the-mean going on, and at what rate?

And yes, I'm being vague. From my perspective, I'm a guy who can watch the night sky and has an OK memory hearing astrologers confidently announce that a plague is happening because Mercury is in retrograde and that is what causes plagues, and lining up that with the other times I know that Mercury was in retrograde and there was no plague. I am not a doctor or a microbiologist or even an astronomer, but I don't need to be; all I need to do is evaluate "Does condition X, which I hear people claim as the reason for this observable event in the world Y, actually correlate with Y, or do we have cases of X not causing Y and in fact being associated with the opposite of Y?"

My own default position is vague because it's complicated. My thoughts are that sets like black Americans and Jews are a huge, confounded mass of distinct lineages and cultural influences, and that what might be true about subsets of those groups could not be true about the whole. My default position is that while knowing someone's race gives you information about their likely group outcomes, every group contains diligent sinners and callow saints and that looking at the individual in front of you and tracing their specific life outcomes to their specific choices and reactions to the events of their own specific life is the only way to get a non-statistical answer.

And so, if anyone is going to say "But for X, these groups which have wildly divergent group outcomes would have near-identical ones.", then they'd better be able to show the general principle first that groups are not distinct in the absence of X, and second that X moves the needle for a high confidence interval of groups that I can think of in the expected direction."

non-immigrants from Nigeria, and from Israel

By non-immigrants, do you mean Nigerians in Nigeria and Israelis in Israel? If so, then I'm not sure what the thrust of your point is. The different levels of prosperity of different countries are affected by various historical and geographical factors.

And again, does this assumption encode American original-colonist exceptionalism as an expected outcome, where we should assume that the best outcomes should belong to the stock of those that did the hardest initial work on arrival? Do you think there is any reversion-to-the-mean going on, and at what rate?

Again, not quite sure what you're getting at here. With regard to reversion to the mean, yes that definitely is happening to some extent but we should also recognise that these things are often very inter-generationally persistent. Indeed, this is the whole argument for programs to help certain groups with poor outcomes, that it is quite difficult to break the cycle of low education, low earnings and poor childhood circumstances for the next generation etc. without some external help.

My own default position is vague because it's complicated. My thoughts are that sets like black Americans and Jews are a huge, confounded mass of distinct lineages and cultural influences, and that what might be true about subsets of those groups could not be true about the whole. My default position is that while knowing someone's race gives you information about their likely group outcomes, every group contains diligent sinners and callow saints and that looking at the individual in front of you and tracing their specific life outcomes to their specific choices and reactions to the events of their own specific life is the only way to get a non-statistical answer.

If we want to look towards solution to the problems regarding the performance of different groups this appears a deeply unsatisfactory and pointless conclusion. Of course it's complicated, everything about society is complicated, but that does not preclude us from making general statements about the position of certain groups. Obviously the outcomes of each individual will depend on their specific circumstances, but the disparities between groups indicate broader forces are at play.

"But for X, these groups which have wildly divergent group outcomes would have near-identical ones.", then they'd better be able to show the general principle first that groups are not distinct in the absence of X, and second that X moves the needle for a high confidence interval of groups that I can think of in the expected direction."

I think the problem here is that you seem to be confusing 'X moves the needle' with 'groups affected by X must be below average in outcomes'. I think discrimination does and did affect the outcomes of Jewish and Asian-Americans, is just that it's moved the needle from over-achieving somewhat more to overachieving somewhat less.

A somewhat similar argument was made by John Ogbu

years ago; he made a distinction between voluntary and involuntary immigrants [edit: he actually referred to minorities, not immigrants], the development of a caste-like status re the latter, and the effects on the culture of each. I don't know, however, how that theory has fared subsequently.

Edit: Ogbu's arguments were not just about the US, he tried to explain why, eg, the Buraku do poorly in school in Japan but do well in the United States, or why Koreans do well in school in China and in the United States but do poorly in Japan.

Regardless, the OP errs in glibly equating the experience of African Americans with that of other groups. It was literally illegal to teach slaves to read, which was never the case for other groups, and Jews of course are famously literate on average. Non AfAm groups tended to immigrate to urban areas, whereas AfAms largely were in rural areas until the 20th C, so AfAm culture presumably has rural influences. Asian Americans largely immigrated in the last 60 years, when discrimination was less and opportunites greater. Etc, etc. None of this demonstrates that OP's conclusion is necessarily wrong, only that his argument rests on a dubious premise.

A somewhat similar argument was made by John Ogbu years ago; he made a distinction between voluntary and involuntary immigrants,

Jew didn't "voluntarily" immigrate from nazi Germany, yet their achievements are greater than many other European ethnic groups that had merely economic reasons to come to the US.

  1. The vast, vast, vast majority of Jews in the United States immigrated long before the Nazis. According to this, the Jewish population of the US was 4.6 to 4.8 million in 1937 (i.e., pre-Kristallnacht), and 4.5 to 5 million in 1950. Moreover, this estimates that total immigration from Germany from 1931 to 1946 was only about 120,000 (50,500 x 16 x 0.15) and from Central and Eastern Europe about half that, while this states that only about 110,000 Jewish refugees were admitted to the US.

  2. I have not read Ogbu in years, so I misspoke. He actually refers to voluntary and involuntary minorities rather than immigrants.

  3. Note also that his work is cross-cultural; he is also interested in why the Buraku do poorly in school in Japan but do well in the United States, or why Koreans do well in school in China and in the United States but do poorly in Japan.

Can everyone have their cake if we say something like, "African American descendants of slaves are disadvantaged by the epigenetic effects of slavery and brutal selection effects that killed their best and brightest early as they were the ones with the greatest chance of escape/rebellion?" I can't tell if saying it's genetic/epigenetic but also white people's fault is the worst or best of both worlds.

No, because the punch line to that explanation is not consistent with the policy preference of it being possible to correct the problem.

I doubt that was common. If anything smart slaves could learn a trade or a get a cushy job instead of farm labor. Toussaint Louverture comes to mind as an example.

Or maybe being enslaved in Africa to be later sold selected for low intelligence. Maybe Galcticus, the evil alien god of mischief(yes both an alien and a god, why not?) shot every slave crossing the Atlantic with a bad genetics ray. It doesn't really matter the origin story, those culpable are long dead or flew off for other mischief. Social Justice advocates/blank slatists are not going to be happy with an explanation that doesn't come with a viable solution no matter who is to blame and there is no actual solution besides becoming less interested in breaking statistics down by race.

You're preaching to the choir here. I agree completely, I think this assertion often goes unchallenged because the most obvious alternative explanation (genetics) is so taboo.

Isn't a broken culture another obvious alternative explanation?

People residing on the western coast of Africa had an existing, stable culture. With the rise of modernity, polities started raiding each other, slaughtering most people and atomizing the survivors into marketable goods who were sold to buyers on the other side of the world. Even once they formed new family structures, those were broken apart at higher rates (possibly?) than comparable populations. Cultural knowledge was lost, and that reverberates to this day, perhaps exacerbated in recent times by government policies that discouraged family formation. It continues to this day because only (relative) elites are able to maintain stable families

I'm not claiming that this is true, exactly, but it's a prima facie plausible and obvious argument that's been made many times. Black thinkers originated this argument, and since then figures ranging from Du Bois to Sowell to Obama have propounded versions of it.

What's most interesting is that in recent times it's become as taboo as the genetics explanation, and making the claim that black culture is broken is as likely to receive accusations of racism as full-on HBD.

You are conflating two different theses:

  • Historical discrimination is the primary driver of group outcomes

  • discrimination does necessarily lead to lesser outcomes

I believe both are false, but you only disprove the latter claim, despite claiming to disprove the former. The latter is much easier to disprove.

If historical discrimination was the primary driver of group outcomes, then we could look at two groups which had suffered similarly, and confidently predict that they have similar outcomes relative to an undiscriminated-against control group. This is not the case; you can suffer historic discrimination and be either wildly above-mean in outcomes, or distinctly below-mean in outcomes. (And, of course, you can as an individual be in the above-mean group and fail hard, or in the below-mean group and succeed hugely.)

Because discrimination does not necessarily lead to lesser outcomes and can in fact lead to greater outcomes, it cannot be the primary driver. At least, that's how I'm understanding the term; if you have a different understanding, please feel free to elaborate. Or alternately, if you want to claim that Jewish and Asian overperformance in the face of discrimination is a historic fluke specific to a place and time, reminiscent to a legless man winning a marathon due to a series of freak coincidences (while having functioning legs is still generally the primary driver of winning footraces) and that we should expect to see Asians and Jews with comparable outcomes to American blacks in other areas and times, feel free to make that case as well.

Ok, so, first things first, this is simply not mathematically true.

Suppose two variables: X and Y cause outcome Z:

X = Norm(0, 1)

Y = Norm(0, 1)

Z = 1.1 * X + Y

X is the primary driver of Z, but, given two groups (i, j), P(Z_j > Z_i | X_j > X_i) ~ 77%

This gets exacerbated by the fact that the "doing worse" groups are much larger than the "doing better" groups: black and hispanics outnumber asians and Jews 4:1 in the US. So, if you believe discrimination led to blacks and hispanics doing worse and had a small negative effect on asians and Jews that it counteracted (and exceeded) by large positive effects (e.g. "culture"), then it is still entirely true that you think discrimination is the "primary driver" of group outcomes. Indeed, I think this is the accurate summary of the liberal position.

[Edit: to clarify, I believe most liberals believe the first point, but not the second; I believe this is wrong but perfectly consistent; which means, I don't think you've really debunked them ]

Just got a RemindMe message from January and want to follow up on it. On January 3, one of @Highlandclearances's predictions for 2022 was that all mask and vaccine mandates in Western countries would be lifted by September. They said:

90% All mask and vaccine mandates in all Western countries will lift by September. 30% by June.

I said:

If you’re taking bets I’d take this one at even odds. This seems so extremely unlikely to me that it’s hard to believe you mean it.

They said:

I do. I think the median voter in most countries has pivoted from concern about Covid to exhaustion fairly rapidly. Even the most risk-averse people I know personally now want full reopening. Eventually power hungry governments will deliver reopening especially once vaccines are approved for children under 5 and there is no further milestone to justify waiting for before the end state is reached.

That said, I have a charitable view that governments are not using Covid to arrogate permanent powers and restrictions. I think very soon, if not now, their incentives from the public will flip to normalize as fast as possible and away from being biased toward social desirability (being seen to do more rather than less).

It's true that many mandates have ended. But they said all mandates would be lifted, and the US still has a mandate for healthcare workers to be vaccinated against covid. The Pentagon also has a vaccine mandate. Many colleges also mandate covid vaccines. I think I was right. I'd be curious to hear what Highlandclearance thinks they got wrong in this prediction.

(This feels like a mean callout post, but that's not my intention. I greatly respect people who are willing to go out on a limb and make falsifiable predictions. I didn't have a list of a bunch of 2022 predictions, so I recognize that there is some unfair asymmetry here.)

I think the prediciton is correct becase it was assumed that by 'all' he was referring to the general population, not govt. employees or healthcare workers.

I think the prediciton is correct becase it was assumed that by 'all' he was referring to the general population, not govt. employees or healthcare workers.

By this metric, there never was really a vaccine mandate for "the general population," so the prediction is non-falsifiable.

Even so, general population needs to be masked when around healthcare workers. That's still mandated, I think, to be masked in hospitals, doctors offices, etc.

Then he should have said that instead of "all"

As The_Nybbler pointed out, there is also a vaccine mandate for foreigners entering the US and Germany has mask a mandate on public transit, so there are mandates that apply to the "general population" too.

There is still a vaccine mandate for entering the US by air for most non-citizens. As of October 1, Germany oddly dropped mask mandates on flights but increased mask mandates on public transit. So this is definitely busted.

I didn't follow it too closely, but there was some minor scandal about government ministers being photographed maskless on planes immediately prior to the flight mask mandate being lifted. Don't know if that really was the cause, but it may be interesting gossip to some.

I don't know if vaccine requirements for institutions that have traditionally had vaccine requirements is a good metric to go by. I mean, yeah, a lot of universities are requiring COVID vaccines, but a lot of universities already had other vaccine requirements. I know Pitt requires an MMR vaccine for all students and a meningitis vaccine for students living on-campus. Healthcare workers in a lot of places already required a whole host of vaccines down to a flu shot. For these kinds of places, the COVID vaccine isn't so much an additional burden for the institution but simply another vaccine on the list. The real test is places like concerts and the like that required proof of vaccination and weren't already accustomed to it. These places had additional costs involved in verifying the vaccination status and were only interested in doing so because of the pandemic. I'm sure some of these places still exist, but I haven't come across any (and I was never required to show a card for anything personally despite living a pretty active lifestyle).

But they said all mandates would be lifted, and the US still has a mandate for healthcare workers to be vaccinated against covid.

Isn't that to be expected, though, don't they have the same for the flu?

The Pentagon also has a vaccine mandate

But the military has had vaccine mandates for a variety of vaccines for centuries?

In general, if something mandates a flu vaccine, mandating a covid vaccine too is expected. So that'd also explain colleges.

Anyway, his mistake was taking a bet saying 'all mandates' (what criteria) when he meant 'most mandates', there are many cities / states / countries / institutions, and many of them have very slow bureaucracies or processes, so even if all of them intended in some sense to repeal something, one might stick around for a while.

As I've said before, if you have good reason to be confident in a proposition, losing a bet made about that proposition will be dominated by the cases where you didn't phrase the bet properly. This is one of the reasons bets are a bad idea.

Hardly anyone is going to phrase the bet properly. It's as if the bet is a computer program, and you are forced to make sure the program runs perfectly the first time you try it.

Sure, but it's a relatively simple computer program. And you can write those to run perfectly the first time if you are very careful, and if the stakes are high enough to incentivize you to double check your work before submitting.

Importantly, the ability to do this is a skill which can be learned, and is important to actually use when making predictions. When I see

90% All mask and vaccine mandates in all Western countries will lift by September.

a red flag goes up in my mind. Because "all" is an extremely ambitious condition, and 90% seems way too high for that. And part of the point of being rational (or rational-adjacent) is to recognize and avoid the exaggeration and hyperbole that everyone else uses in common speech. You might casually say "all of mandates will be gone by September" and, when someone calls you out and questions that as being unrealistic, and asks for a concrete prediction, you should think about it more deeply and walk back the exaggeration. "Well, not literally all, they'll probably keep some for healthcare workers, and maybe one or two nations will keep most of them, but I predict at least 8 out of these 10 specific nations will lift mandates for 90% of the population" or something like that. The fact that this person didn't walk back their bold and unrealistic claim when making a bet is an actual mistake that deserves a loss, not a technicality. The term "all" didn't set off a red flag in their mind, and it should have.

It's a technicality. The proposition it's trying to prove is not "literally all", it's "substantially all". That proposition was proven true by reality,.

The fact that he literally said X doesn't mean that the intent of the bet was to prove X.

"All" means "all". "Substantially all" just invites arguing over "substantially" after the fact. Perhaps you can quibble about rules from subnational entities (since the bet was about "Western countries"), but there are still national mask mandates and national vaccine mandates in place.

"All" means "all".

My whole point is that, no, it doesn't, except literally, and literally is not the intent.

Isn't that to be expected, though

I mean, yeah, that was kind of my point back in January.

Healthcare workers, in fact, are not mandated to take influenza vaccine in most states. Neither is military required to get a flu shot, for that matter.

I think he's closer to correct on cultural vibes, but you win on the specific technical claim.

Another example of a remaining mandate is that my city requires either vaccination or a negative PCR test to be an election worker. For the first time in my life, I have enough time on my hands to participate in an election in that way, I'd like to do so, but I absolutely refuse to play along with Covid charades, so oh well.

When you start including words like "all" in your predictions you're setting yourself up for trouble.

If this prediction was a bet it would be a 100-leg parlay, even one exception invalidates it. That's not the kind of thing you can be 90% confident about.

The moral of the story is clearly "never generalize." (Hmm...)

Not even being Pendantic.

The CDC still requires a full vacination regime ofr covid to enter the US, and every unvaxed Canadian or anyone else risks being turned around for their personal medical decision when they try to enter the US. Has happened to my neighbor trying to drive home to Mexico. No sign this is ending.

Canada's Digital vaccine passport regime only ended start of october, so your sept timeline is accurate as well.

.

A whole lot of people are going to try to downplay the fact they forced vast segments of the population into medical appartheid over the next few years, and it should never be allowed to be forgotten. Who you are at the moment of crisis is who your are always. If you were an Auswitz guard in 45 you never got to stop being that, and we should never let the COVID authoritarians take off the mark of Kane either.

For once I agree with kulak revolt near uncritically; Covid restrictions must be treated as never again territory on par with 9-11 and the holocaust, and those responsible for pushing them treated like 9-11 planners or architects of the holocaust.

We are likely going to get a new serious narrative fragmentation in the Western discourse between the minority who were on the receiving end of the apartheid and will remember this for a long time, and the majority who did what they were told and did not even notice that the McDonalds they were eating was banning 20% of the population for no good reason.

Almost everyone I know is in the category of "did what they were told without much fuss" and they have already binned the events of the last 2 years almost entirely in distant weird times category.

I do not think "serious" narrative fragmentation will occur, given that:

Almost everyone I know is in the category of "did what they were told without much fuss" and they have already binned the events of the last 2 years almost entirely in distant weird times category.

Those who suffered little from the virus but much from the lockdowns and are aware of such facts have no one fighting their corner and are not large enough to demand serious restitution. Pro lockdown media has already prepared their inevitable rebuttals, expecting you to forget everything that was done to you in the name of public health. Those times have been brushed under the rug, and now all our woes are the fault of Big Vlad or whoever.

There will be no reckoning, no rapture, and that is a pill so black that light cannot escape its surface.

Yes I agree. That’s exactly what I mean by new narrative fracture.

Some people are very upset and will remain so. Majority doesn’t even remember anymore and will consider those people obsessive loser conspiracy theorists. The political actions and rhetoric of this small group will stay incomprehensible to the respectable members of the society which will create all sorts of strange political and societal tensions which is pretty obvious if you have a memory longer than a goldfish but the media will somehow be totally unable to decipher. We have been seeing this dynamic with many contentious issues in the west for decades.

Yeah you’re right: this one’s busted. I also described it poorly. I should have been much more precise. I was imagining government or major institutional mandates for Normies, specifically around travel, universities, hospitals, the civil service and so on. For Canada, i missed my prediction by one day on travel. But of course universities are still requiring vaccines and hospitals masks. I definitely did not appreciate how fast vaccines would be incorporated into the vaccine regimen everyone is expected to get.

I don’t think I’m gutsy enough to re-up. I honestly can’t imagine when hospitals here are going to stop masking. My wife gave birth a month ago and we were asked to mask in the delivery theatre (when the going got real we stopped and no one protested) but there is no natural limit.

My other predictions look decent though haha. I still have some time for Italy to detonate and those put options were juicy.

Over the past weekend I read an article entitled “Offensive Naming” (Note: There’s a paywall but you get the gist from the preview).

Essentially, the article cites 2 named people. One of which is a totally unremarkable Canadian paleoanthropologist, the other a president of the International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature. The former believes that the system of special naming, which has been around and relied upon for almost 300 years, must be destroyed because of offensive names (including Hitler, Gypsy, the usual suspects).

In a sense, I’ll put my own Cancellation hat on here and say, hypocritically, that Mirjana Roksandic should never have been given tenure, much less the mouthpiece of one of the most respected publications in the world. Here we have an elegant system, that for hundreds of thousands of species on our planet has worked almost perfectly. A couple of trivial edge cases of malpractice cannot be enough to even think about altering such a thing.

I’m a stickler for well-defined systems that effectively cover the vast majority of their use cases. I find myself recalling the hullabaloo over the use of master as a git branch name a couple of years ago, which culminated in every single Application Lifecycle Management software pushing out new defaults for any fresh code repository. As the person who built nearly all our deployment automation around these conventions, I was fucking furious. I reverted the change in our organization and pre-emptively bowed up if any of my employees would complain. Thankfully, none did, probably because they didn’t want to rewrite everything. Nobody’s done a cost analysis of these pushed-down changes, but given software engineer salaries and what I’ve seen personally, it’s in 7-figure territory at the very least.

I’m not sure how cohesive this is, but I think one of the fundamental issues here is how disconnected the people who want changes to systems are from the costs of doing so. Ms. Roksandic doesn’t have to write the software to manage taxonomy or anything else. Doubtless, she’s working in some backwater excel spreadsheet and thinks adding an alias column is as hard as it gets.

I want systems to be discussed and improved upon over time, even if some of those are for silly social reasons, as long as the costs are remotely reasonable. Ideally, these are net-new ones instead of those that have worked well for centuries.

Does anyone in fields that use zoological nomenclature frequently have a comment as to the scale of this sentiment? Is my worry about the toe being in the door of another massively net-negative change to the overall chaos of the world unjustified?

Maybe I'm confused but I don't find any support in the article for doing away with the convention of having a scientific genus-species naming schema for distinct species. Rather, the article points out a couple of species that are unfortunately named and suggests changing the names of those species specifically as well as perhaps refraining from naming future species after celebrities or other famous people.

You're correct - my post has to do with both the norms of the system being changed in the future to provide some sort of external actor with more power (such as the ICZN) getting to decide which names are acceptable, and retroactively changing others already made.

unpaywalled: https://archive.ph/Z4uxN

The stakes here are renaming a few species with weird names, so ... seems unimportant tbh. Taxonomic names are regularly changed, often because species weren't related in the manner previously thought, so it wouldn't be that disruptive to do a few more. Obviously the motivation for doing so is very dumb, it accomplishes nothing and creates needless work, but it won't be destroying taxonomy or anything.

Taxonomic names are regularly changed, often because species weren't related in the manner previously thought

They are regularly changed because the previous names were wrong: placing a species in the wrong genus, grouping two species into one, and so forth. They are never changed because someone doesn't like the name.

There is a firm principle that scientific names can't be changed unless it's justified by new discoveries. Changing even one name will open the floodgates. You know it won't stop at Hitler. There are many other species named after bad people, and still more named after people wokeists would consider bad. It will lead to all sorts of squabbles, with no benefit whatsoever.

The Hitler beetle's name wasn't even changed after World War II. I think everyone agreed at that point that Hitler was bad; many had experienced his badness first-hand. But they stood by their principles, because they knew changing it would just make everything much more complicated.

You're not disagreeing with them... They even say

Obviously the motivation for doing so is very dumb, it accomplishes nothing and creates needless work

They are affirming that not only is the motivation dumb and it will create needless work, but that it will be abused and create conflict within the field of taxonomy. i.e. They are saying the consequences will be worse than what the OP is proposing.

seems unimportant tbh.

If it's too unimportant to object to, it's too unimportant to insist upon.

No, not if the cost/benefit favors one side.

If someone is making an objection, clearly they have their own calculations about what the costs and benefits are. One side or the other (or neither) may be right, but that can be decided on the merits, and dismissing the values of one side out-of-hand as invalid doesn't strike me as productive.

Or to put it another way, apply "just get over it" omnidirectionally or not at all.

They are saying

  1. Such changes would impact a small number of species

  2. Such changes are common

  3. Therefore, this doesn't matter that much.

They even agree that the motivation is "very dumb" and "creates needless work".

You simply rounded their answer to the nearest meme argument (X is unimportant, so why are you complaining) and responded with the appropriate meme response.

Sorry, but history has put me very much on guard against salami-slicing tactics.

"Oh, come on! They care about it so much, and you have no reason (we'll permit to you) to object! Just this one time, this one time give them everything they want."

But this is an iterated game. It's never just "this one time." A few "this one times" and suddenly Putin is trying to grab the entire rest of Ukraine and how could this have happened?

But there is a criterion that tells me when we're not hurtling down a slippery slope, though: some specific, sturdy catch somewhere before the bottom. A Schelling point that can be pointed to to say that the line of argument can be extended only there and not indefinitely. Is there one in this case? Probably. I can't envision any given one that's particularly clear, myself, so if there's something that seems clear to anybody else, I would much appreciate the clarification.

Yeah, that's why uncompromising fanatics always win.

Taxonomic names are regularly changed, often because species weren't related in the manner previously thought, so it wouldn't be that disruptive to do a few more.

TBH I appreciate you saying this though. I was under the mistaken impression that there would be downstream effects, of mass renames. Perhaps there would be at the scale that would "satisfy" those who want to, but it makes sense that the system isn't totally fragile.

Why is it called A. hitleri? Was it in honor of Hitler, or as one entomologist's way of making fun of Hitler, who was famously germophobic?

Apparently in honor, if wikipeda is to be believed.

I'm somewhat incredulous, naming a blind beetle after a statesman seems like an insult.

Why is it called A. hitleri?

According to Wikipedia:

The scientific name of the beetle comes from an Austrian collector, Oskar Scheibel, who was sold a specimen of a then undocumented species in 1933. Its species name was made a dedication to Adolf Hitler, who had recently become Chancellor of Germany.

So it was named back when Hitler was "The guy who is pulling Germany out of the post-war morass and decline, the strong capable leader" and not afterwards, when he was "Ah. Yeah. Oops!"

I can see arguments on both sides: on one side, that this is the historic name and the opposite, that it was deliberately intended to honour someone who should not be honoured. I think changing the name in this case has a lot more in favour than pulling down statues, but it all depends how stridently the demands are made. If it's a reasonable "not the best idea, all things considered" request, fine. If it's part of a rant about cishetnormative privilege and the patriarchy and all the rest of it, no wonder people aren't convinced.

It is always the invisible stuff. Nobody knows about the species names and as for anything code or IT related it is the same thing. Case in point for IT, the headers for Brötli compression in the Firefox proposal was shortened 'bro'. But "north american feminists" decided it had problematic connotations. http://www.favbrowser.com/google-and-mozilla-ditch-the-bro-extension-because-a-feminist-told-them-so/. Guess what... the same year the mozilla foundation decided to fund a network monitoring software that was called "Bro" https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/mozilla-open-source-support-first-awards-made/

Also I was really nervous when they piled on antirez and Redis for master/slave, back when that was happening I ran Redis in production. A bunch of people casually going like "no problem, just change the words in the public protocol it is only a search and replace". Well yeah in the redis project, but then I have to upgrade the connection libraries and keep track of compatibility and shit. If it is removed from the program stuff stops working for users.

Does of us who run automation and production workloads know that isn't just a search and replace in text even how much the politically correct wants to believe it is. In biology it is even worse if it is printed in books, you can't do even that.

I think over the last few months we've established that AI issues are on topic for the culture war thread, at least when they intersect with explicitly cultural domains like art. So I hope it's ok that I write this here. Feel free to delete if not.

NovelAI's anime model was released today, and it's pretty god damned impressive. If you haven't seen what it can do yet, feel free to check out the /hdg/ threads on /h/ for some NSFW examples.

Not everyone is happy though; AI art has attracted the attention of at least one member of congress, among several other public and private entities:

WASHINGTON, D.C. – Today, U.S. Rep. Anna G. Eshoo (D-CA) urged the National Security Advisor (NSA) and the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) to address the release of unsafe AI models that do not moderate content made on their platforms, specifically the Stable Diffusion model released by Stability AI on August 22, 2022. Stable Diffusion allows users to generate unfiltered imagery of a violent or sexual nature, depicting real people. It has already been used to create photos of violently beaten Asian women and pornography depicting real people.

I don't really bet on there being any serious legal liability for Stability.AI or anyone else, but, you never know.

I've tried several times to articulate here why I find AI art to be so upsetting. I get the feeling that many people here haven't been very receptive to my views. Partially that's my fault for being a bad rhetorician, but partially I think it's because I'm arguing from the standpoint of a certain set of terminal values which are not widely shared. I'd like to try laying out my case one more time, using some hopefully more down-to-earth considerations which will be easier to appreciate. If you already disagree with me, I certainly don't expect you to be moved by my views - I just hope that you'll find them to be coherent, that it seems like the sort of thing that a reasonable person could believe.

Essentially the crux of the matter is, to borrow a phrase from crypto, "proof of work". There are many activities and products that are valuable, partially or in whole, due to the amount of time and effort that goes into them. I don't think it's hard to generate examples. Consider weight lifting competitions - certainly there's nothing useful about repeatedly lifting a pile of metal bricks, nor does the activity itself have any real aesthetic or social value. The value that participants and spectators derive from the activity is purely a function of the amount of human effort and exertion that goes into the activity. Having a machine lift the weights instead would be quite beside the point, and it would impress no one.

For me personally, AI art has brought into sharp relief just how much I value the effort and exertion that goes into the production of art. Works of art are rather convenient (and beautiful) proof of work tokens. First someone had to learn how to draw, and then they had to take time out of their day and say, I'm going to draw this thing in particular, I'm going to dedicate my finite time and energy to this activity and this particular subject matter rather than anything else. I like that. I like when people dedicate themselves to something, even at significant personal cost. I like having my environment filled with little monuments to struggle and self-sacrifice, just like how people enjoy the fact that someone out there has climbed Mt. Everest, even though it serves no real purpose. Every work of art is like a miniature Mt. Everest.

Or at least it was. AI art changes the equation in a way that's impossible to ignore - it affects my perception of all works of art because now I am much less certain of the provenance of each work*. There is now a fast and convenient way of cheating the proof of work system. I look at a lot of anime art - a lot of it is admittedly very derivative and repetitive, and it tends to all blend together after a while. But in the pre-AI era, I could at least find value in each individual illustration in the fact that it represented the concrete results of someone's time and effort. There are of course edge cases - we have always had tracing, photobashing, and other ways of "cheating". But you could still assume that the average illustration you saw was the result of a concrete investment of time and effort. Now that is no longer the case. Any illustration I see could just as easily be one from the infinite sea of AI art - why should I spend any time looking at it, pondering it, wondering about the story behind it? I am now very uncertain as to whether it has any value at all.

It's a bit like discovering that every video game speedrun video you see has a 50% chance of being a deepfake. Would you be as likely to watch speedrunning videos? I wouldn't. They only have value if they're the result of an actual investment of time by a human player - otherwise, they're worthless. Or, to take another very timely example, the Carlsen-Niemann cheating scandal currently rocking the world of chess. Chess is an illustrative example to look at, because it's a domain where everyone is acutely aware of the dangers of a situation where you can't tell the difference between an unaided human and a human using AI assistance. Many people have remarked that chess is "dead" if they can't find a way to implement effective anti-cheating measures that will prevent people from consulting engines during a game. People want to see two humans play against each other, not two computers.

To be clear, I'm not saying that the effort that went into a work of art is the only thing that matters. I also place great value on the intrinsic and perceptual properties of a work of art. I see myself as having a holistic view where I value both the intrinsic properties of the work, and the extrinsic, context-dependent properties related to the work's provenance, production, intention, etc.

TL;DR - I used to be able to look at every work of art and go "damn someone made that, that's really cool", now I can't do that, which makes every interaction I have with art that much worse, and by extension it makes my life worse.

*(I'm speaking for convenience here as if AI had already supplanted human artists. As I write this post, it still has limitations, and there are still many illustrations that are unmistakably of human origin. But frankly, given how fast the new image models are advancing, I don't know how much longer that will be the case.)

EDIT: Unfortunately, this dropped the day after I wrote my post, so I didn't get a chance to comment on it originally. Based on continually accumulating evidence, I may have to retract my original prediction that opposition to AI art was going to be a more right-coded position. Perhaps there are not as many aesthetes in the dissident right as I thought.

The value that participants and spectators derive from the activity is purely a function of the amount of human effort and exertion that goes into the activity. Having a machine lift the weights instead would be quite beside the point, and it would impress no one.

But would you take the complaints of powerlifters demanding cranes not be used seriously? This is the crux of things, you want difficult art for love of the process itself, and if you want to join hobbyist communities to promote human created art for that sake more power to you. But to those of us who are not interested in this thing your complaints really do seem to boil down to making our lives worse so that people you feel kinship with can continue to monopolize a market. And it really does seem to be the market thing that is in contest.

Every piece of human art might be like Mt. Everest to you, and more power to you if you want to celebrate people who make that climb for no reason but leave the rest of us out of it.

edit: a question to cut out some speculation. If All ai art was reliably tagged in the metadata and software existed so that you could avoid accidentally seeing ai art and only frequent places where all tagged art was prohibited would that satisfy your complaint?

Cranes, like the cotton gin, manufacturing plants or programming language compilers, are engineering tools used to serve a purpose. That is, an actual purpose. Whereas things we consider art tend to be done because it is fun or for status.

The difference is, that the existence of a crane doesn't affect the status of powerlifters. You can still appreciate a power lifter because you know he's not a crane. To the extent that Stable Diffusion etc. mimic art, you can't really tell.

Now, there are a lot of good reasons to have AI-art generators. Like cranes, they can help us engineer and build things faster. People here have mentioned that AI art is probably already being used for generic business presentations for when a slide needs to be livened up and it doesn't need to be too precise or fancy for the audience to get the point.

Fine, artists no longer get their money ripping off people making powerpoints, but AI art still threatens the status market they're engaged in, which as far as I know, has no analogue.

Fine, artists no longer get their money ripping off people making powerpoints, but AI art still threatens the status market they're engaged in, which as far as I know, has no analogue

I think power lifting is a fine analogue. You can't tell if a building used very strong men to get concrete pillars in place or a crane and yet powerlifting as a competition persists. AI art is threatening the market potential for artists, it's not removing the ability to produce art the hard way.

I own a chess board and play friends occasionally, the existence of an ai that can produce superior play than either of us does not spoil our fun.

The invention of the crane reduced the reach of the powerlifter status market, because when people look at buildings, they're assumed to all be made by cranes, but you can still watch real people lift weights and they're obviously not a crane.

AI Art will reduce the reach of artists and their monopoly on making pictures. Maybe in the future, people will assume most logos and the like are made by computers. That's all well and fine. But how can you prevent imposters from submitting AI art to museums and competitions? It would be as if a bodybuilder could hide a hydraulic arm under his clothes (or take steroids!) and compete without working.

But how can you prevent imposters from submitting AI art to museums and competitions? It would be as if a bodybuilder could hide a hydraulic arm under his clothes (or take steroids!) and compete without working.

Same way powerlifting tournaments prevent imposters: make them do the labor on-site.

I wonder if that would really suffice for them. After all, the guy may generate the image at home on his PC, then memorize it and paint it on site from memory. If this is still "A-ok", then this is a weird esthetic preference.

"This man didn't create art -- he held an image in his mind and put it on a canvas through the movements of his hand and arm!"

Bro, at that point he's not faking anything, he's just actually making art.

Is the art in the arm movements or the idea, the composition, the choice of colors etc? If I memorize how to paint a Mona Lisa replica, am I as impressive as Leonardo?

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That just sounds like how a classical artist might have memorized the way nature looked in a particular spot, then went home and painted it. If someone has the skills to do all that, I think they deserve the credit for it.

You keep bringing up the counter argument yourself. Steroids! I do expect high end art competitions will have to take a trick from the sports community and take some measures to prevent ai art from winning, they even have the advantage that one can't use ai at a live event like one can use steroids. I do think most commercial art will be assumed to have come from ai in the future, this will change the artistic landscape in real ways, but so what? Art status competitions haven't exactly been a great example for long lived consistency.

But how can you prevent imposters from submitting AI art to museums and competitions?

I'd lean the direction in how photography is also considered an art form. It's not the mechanical creation of the image that is relevant so much as the artistic intentionally and editing that results in the image to be displayed. Prompt engineering and selecting which of many different output artifacts seems rather analogous to composing the photo and selecting which of many (and for some many many) takes to exhibit.

I agree that promptmancy is the appropriate analogy to photography.

But I can't imagine prompt engineering is subjective though. Translating human intent into a prompt to make an image feels like a skill in a way that photography feels like art

But this just might be sloppy thinking on my part, or an opinion I've been socialized to hold

Most artists (graphic designers) who get paid to do stuff on an everyday basis aren't the next Michelangelo and aren't doing something extremely novel at the forefront of artistic expression. They just design another corporate logo, paint weird Rule 34 images, etc.

I'd like to echo your sentiment and add another example to the mix, although not exactly analogous: I've worked for a few years on a programming project trying to compete with a closed-source service that has a monopoly. If, for whatever reason (it probably won't happen) they decide to open-source their work, I would be livid. To me, the wasted time wouldn't just be about a sunk cost and "no reason to finish," it's because the current WIP is itself pretty impressive, but it wouldn't seem impressive because for all everyone knows I just ripped off the open source version.

I can't really think of anything perfectly analogous to AI art, with how it retroactively invalidates past human effort:

  • engineering advances cheapen ancient wonders, but you can still appreciate how epic the Pyramids are because they didn't have a crane

  • things that used to be art (custom tribal weapons) can be manufactured when they have an actual purpose outside of just being art, but you can't mistake an heirloom for a mass-produced widget (Unless you're Anakin Skywalker building a protocol droid)

  • photography helped artists pivot to non-objective art, but it's unclear how a visual artist is supposed to distinguish their future work from AI-generated pictures, apart from only showing them in physical media.

EDIT: Would like to explicitly distinguish between some things here:

Motte: It's bad that you can't distinguish between AI art and human art.

Bailey: It's bad that AI art reduces the total status of artists.

The invention of cranes probably did reduce the status of powerlifters. In fact, I've heard theories about how technology is making brute strength obsolete in favor of knowledge work and symbol manipulators. That is, when the tribesmen saw big rocks on top of one another they thought, "how wondrous are our power lifters" and after the invention of cranes, they shrug and go, "yeah we can put rocks on top of each other."

If the future of seeing the average logo or image is "yeah our computers are pretty cool i guess" instead of marveling at how beautiful the art is, so what? As long as we can still run powerlifting competitions (where they aren't cranes) and also have curated museums and DeviantArts where somehow we could verify it was human created, isn't that all we need? Granted, that tagging technology might not be feasible.

engineering advances cheapen ancient wonders, but you can still appreciate how epic the Pyramids are because they didn't have a crane

This is exactly the situation with AI art, though. Nothing in the past is invalidated. I can appreciate the skill Van Gogh had to have, because he didn't have a computer program to help him. And conversely, I can still appreciate the skill that an artist today displays even if they could have used a computer program (but chose not to). There's no reason to say that AI art cheapens past, or even future, artistic endeavors in a way that engineering advances didn't for engineering endeavors.

but it wouldn't seem impressive because for all everyone knows I just ripped off the open source version.

...Is that not what credits are for? I mean, I'm not well-versed in crediting for open-source software that was made by more than one person, but still, you could probably at least put it on your resume.

I can't imagine caring about the work that goes into art. Art is a product; the process is not something to exalt, it's something to lament, because the process has only ever been an imperfect means of translating the perfection of thought into the rough matter of reality with crude tools. A statue is beautiful because it is beautiful; it is no less beautiful if God willed it into being with the merest flick of his finger, and no more beautiful if the most devoted artisan spent his entire life on it.

Work for work's own sake is an abhorrent waste of time and energy. I rejoice at the prospect of AI obsoleting the artist -- and any lover of the arts should. A doctor should think a world that has no need of him is amazing; a soldier should long for a world that doesn't need soldiers; and wouldn't it be grand if we had no need of farmers, for all were fed?

The ultimate triumph of a field is self-destruction.

I simply thoroughly disagree with this sentiment, and I am quite certain that I am not exceptional here. The process is important, the social context is important.

I would probably go as far as to posit applicability of some sort of labor theory of value: if you print out a random photograph, nobody will value it very highly, but if you paint the contents of the photograph on canvas, it will immediately be seen as having more value. Even more so, if we build technology that allows us to make a painting with a some kind of a gantry CNC painting machine, it’s product will be seen as less valuable than something that human painted by hand.

I think the above sentiment is shared by most normies, whereas your comment exhibits rather postmodernist ideals that few people actually share, as shown by revealed preference. Why are people spending millions on original artworks, instead of hanging cheap replicas that are exactly as beautiful? Because they strongly disagree with you.

If what you say is true, there is no cause for concern! If there is some ineffable quality of realness to authentic human-made art, and revealed preference does indeed show people prefer it, then AI art is not a threat to real artists.

I wonder why all the artists don't have that same confidence.

Why are people spending millions on original artworks, instead of hanging cheap replicas that are exactly as beautiful?

To show off. Jesus didn't say "yo, here's a loaf of bread, it's only one, so it's very valuable, make sure to hoard it". He instead multiplied the loaves of bread and the fish to feed the crowd. Sharing is good. If you have a reliable way to copy something, you should do it. Same way I think about file sharing, free software etc.

I think you are in fact an exception, not the rule. The process isn't what matters to most, unless you happen to have an interest in learning about it. What matters is not the process, but the output.

And this isn't just for art. This is generally true. I personally enjoy programming and learning more about how different programmers have solved particular problems. I'm in the extreme minority, though. Most people don't give a shit, they want their software to do a task for them and don't care how it was made. A statistician may care about the beautiful mathematical model they use, but most people just want to be told the results. And so on, for pretty much any discipline you can imagine. People just do not care about the process by which things are made, unless they happen to have a particular interest in that topic.

Not to mention that the AI model itself is built using beautiful and creative mathematical ideas and engineering principles. The code can be elegant etc.

So what, specifically, is the source of that value? My intuition is that if the same painting were made not by a machine or a career-artist, but by a young child, or better yet, an animal, it would be seen as even more valuable, still. (Well, disregarding the effects of name recognition that can balloon chosen artists' work to staggering prices.)

At the risk of making things too meta, it seems to me like this value stands in proportion to how unusual (and thus rare and potentially otherwise-useful) the displayed skill seems to be. A great painter may be of extraordinary use in producing other great paintings that you want. A child prodigy, or an intelligent animal, may portend greater things still.

But a machine is just a machine, whose capabilities we know, just like we wouldn't care about the works of an animal if it were just an accountable product of instinct. The more of a good surprise it is, the more we treasure it, it seems.

But this is just my impression and I would be very glad to hear others with better theories.

I think most normies don't entirely care about the process. I could be wrong, but it really wasn't until recent decades where most people actually got to peer into behind-the-scenes stuff for things like movies, music, and video games. Now, there are definitely consumers and audiences of those things who do care and want to know, but at the same time, probably the broad majority of people in the world don't stop to think about how things are made, but just the thing in front of them.

Yeah, check out how few people view art streams vs viewing the same artist's art. Even very popular artists usually have less viewers than some no-name twitch game streamer or 2view v-tuber.

People into the process are mostly other artists trying to crib notes.

I agree. A parallel can be drawn between the invention of AI generated art and that of of optimizing compilers. They effectively replaced hand generated assembly code and I don't want to go back to a world where every programmer has to write their own assembly. It's much more productive to use higher level languages and reason about data structures and control flow, not registers and jumps. And just like AI art generators can make better art than the average person, a compiler can generate better code than even a competent programmer used to high level languages.

This doesn't make an understanding of assembly and the intricacies of the various families of processors any less useful in the narrower domain of compiler design. So maybe a keen understanding of art will be no less useful in a world filled with AI generated art, where the true connoisseur will appreciate the hand crafted art, while the masses will happily stare at machine created images.

Another comparison is procedural generated. I'm perpetually disappointed by it in games like Dwarf Fortress or the randomly generated side quests that games like Borderlands use - not because a human didn't put effort into each individual character name and backstory or quest goal, but because they're bland and boring for the most part, and it soon becomes obvious that even though there is infinite variety on the surface level, it all operates under a rigid structure.

a soldier should long for a world that doesn't need soldiers

Rather ironic given your flair!

I agree with what you say here. The way I see it, what AI is is the decoupling of art-as-status from art-as-product. People value the labor of prestigious artists because that artist has a monopoly on good artistic output. They respect the work so far as dedication is necessary to hone a craft, but if they could snap their fingers and make fantastic <music/video games/character portraits/illustrations for their novel/whatever>, they would, gladly.

Once the masses can produce art that satisfies aesthetic preferences, the status-artists will lose a huge market share. It's understandable why they'd bitch and moan, but it's the gurgling of a dying creature.

Rather ironic given your flair!

One must crush their enemies to enjoy the peace of a world without enemies.

This doesn't make an understanding of assembly and the intricacies of the various families of processors any less useful in the narrower domain of compiler design. So maybe a keen understanding of art will be no less useful in a world filled with AI generated art, where the true connoisseur will appreciate the hand crafted art, while the masses will happily stare at machine created images.

I like the technology, but I worry that this metaphor may not continue. In a world where computers just Did Everything for you in the programming and compsci spheres except the extraordinarily difficult exceptions, would many people be able to develop the interest or fundamental skills that eventually lead to a successful compiler design understanding? Or would their first genuine CompSci problem going to throw dependency hell at students that don't know what a file is, and they just turn around and say fuck it?

Sometimes it's chicken-sexing, sometimes it's a problem of available resource scaling (how do you train in your basement to run multi-million-user scale cloud?), sometimes it's a matter of developing the temperament to not throw computer monitors out windows. The First Step is a Doozy, and a lot of these skills are hard to learn and harder to understand what you have to learn.

It's plausible this won't happen. Past changes to CompSci haven't eliminated on-boarding opportunities, even if they've mangled many of them; artists have adapted structures to discourage bulk-scale tracing and seldom (have the specific tech skills to) take available 'traditional' automation tools to their maxima. Music is different than it was a hundred years ago, but it's not lacking steps for the garage band. Even if it does happen, there will always be the auties and the paranoid and the slightly nuts who hypnotize themselves into doing in the old-fashioned way.

And yet, there are skillsets that are lost, at least to country-scales. If you wanted to rebuild Saturn rockets pre-SpaceX, you'd have to start by rebuilding the entire aerospace industry (and might still today). There's a lot of woodworking techniques that have turned into gimmicks, shown only by weirdos on YouTube because you'd have to scour auction sites to even find the tools in the right quality to have a chance to learn the trick, because a trim router can do the easier variants and no one finds the hard ones worthwhile. There are classes of power transformer that can’t be made in IGBT or MOSFET forms due to physical constraints, and when the last guy who knows how to make the vacuum tube version retires, I doubt we build up a whole infrastructure to support a replacement.

And there's only so much confidence that induction can give you, in a case where the Type II errors are invisible.

The ultimate triumph of a field is self-destruction.

Sublimation, surely.

Tomato, tomato. The ultimate triumph of medicine would eliminate doctors. The ultimate triumph of creation would eliminate creators. If we could all be our own little Gods, speaking worlds into being, it'd take a real odd sort to gnash his teeth over all the construction workers and carpenters put out of business.

All of those are basically engineering to serve a purpose. Picture engineering exists, which is why AI art is even used. Picture engineering is how you obtain company logos and silly images for ads and presentations.

Art is a status competition. It sounds like what you're saying is art is dumb.

Art isn't dumb at all. I have plenty of pictures on my walls that I find aesthetically pleasing. They're not high status, they were free, gifts from a friend who liked Bos Ross landscapes, would smoke, and paint his heart out.

Art as an elite status competition is stupid, but I don't really care. Let the elites posture.

Tomato, tomato.

mm.

If we could all be our own little Gods, speaking worlds into being, it'd take a real odd sort to gnash his teeth over all the construction workers and carpenters put out of business.

I'm inclined to agree, but it seems to me that this line of thinking butts up against some pretty serious philosophical questions about what we actually value. I'm not an atomic individualist, so a future where humans cocoon themselves away into perfect solipsistic selfishness doesn't actually sound all that hot. Making things easier is a good thing if the things in question are themselves good, but it seems to me that connection to others is something I'd miss if it were gone.

You don't need to be an individualist to see the value in trivializing the creation of luxury goods. Bond with people over a shared appreciation of the art, rather than the making of it -- which is typically a private and boring affair, anyway.

no disagreement there.

Art is a product; the process is not something to exalt,

The skill of it? The technique? The way the artist struggles with the medium, be it stone or paint, and solves for themselves the problem put to them? You see no difference in watercolours versus oils, impasto versus a smooth glossy finish, the way the artist blends colours and shades to achieve an effect - who would have thought that green and yellow and mauve would be part of painting flesh tones in a human face, but they are.

The invention of the camera didn't do away with art and the camera went from being "now we can have a perfect representation of a moment in time, no need for a painter to spend hours painting a portrait of someone when we can do it in minutes with better fidelity" to being used to create art itself.

It may well turn out that a lot of the current hysteria about AI art is just that - hysteria. That AI will become another tool for artists to use. It probably will replace a lot of commercial art, but maybe not - CGI did not replace humans as creators of images, now we need humans trained in how to use CGI to create effects.

The skill of it? The technique? The way the artist struggles with the medium, be it stone or paint, and solves for themselves the problem put to them? You see no difference in watercolours versus oils, impasto versus a smooth glossy finish, the way the artist blends colours and shades to achieve an effect - who would have thought that green and yellow and mauve would be part of painting flesh tones in a human face, but they are.

Those are all differences in the end product, too. The skill and technique are relevant so far as they create a different output to enjoy.

Except for your example today weight lifting does have function. It’s the main means of maintaining a healthy human body.

Watching human weight lifting is a relatively niche sport especially for spectators but they still have ways to validate human versus machine lifting. Which brings up as said elsewhere weight lifters don’t argue for banning cranes. There will likely be a split between art made for production purposes - machine fine - and higher end art that has human provenance. We already do this with artifacts where being 10k years old gets higher prices than a modern replica that looks identical.

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Renaissance works have been filtered and preserved based on quality. Prehistoric art probably went through a much more random series of events and what is left is probably not the pinnacle of the contemporaneous state of art but some random person's makings. But I have no qualifications to say either way, but it seems logical.

There was more than just a little improvement in the Renaissance state of the art, though. Perspective drawing, for the most extreme example, is probably the innovation that gives a painting enough verisimilitude in my eyes for me to really focus on what the painter was trying to depict without being distracted by the obvious flaw of distortions in the depiction.

As an aside, perspective also is a nice counterexample to the "image AIs were just trained on our work, that makes it plagiarism!" theory I see floating around. AI might be producing copyright-infringing works, but learning from other artists' works isn't proof of that. That's just how art works, which is why principles like one-point perspective went undiscovered for millennia only to then see universal uptake within a generation. Renaissance artists didn't all just suddenly get smarter at once (consider the delay before two-point perspective was discovered...), they were all learning from each other's works.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lion-man

In some sense it's grading on a curve, but it's clear that substantial effort and technical expertise (for the tools available at the time) went into these prehistoric sculptures.

First, I agree there is some value in putting in effort into something. It demonstrates a virtue in the person, the ability to delay gratification, to work towards a purpose. The reason we like this is probably evolutionarily determined, as such people are useful allies in bad times. Admiring people for the effort they put into climbing a mountain etc. is alright, it pushes us to become better and apply effort in smaller scale things. It's a symbolic distillation of our everyday struggles and shortcomings. That's all fine.

What I don't see as virtuous though is the other half of the attitude you show, namely that you want to feel that the stuff around you was done with a lot of human effort. Essentially this is the opposite of striving for efficiency, which we have been doing as humans since time immemorial. It would take more effort to swim to the other shore, but instead we build ships. It would take more effort to walk, but at some point people decided to ride horses instead and then invented cars.

Things that are made in an inefficient way for the purpose of demonstrating extra human effort are luxuries. Probably it would feel nice to be carried around town in a litter but why do that if there are cars? Understandably, it is a way to signal status if you can get many people to do inefficient work for you. Essentially it's a way for you to show that you can boss people around, having amassed (perhaps over generations) enough effort-tokens (presumably through some efficient method, using leverage, not by the sweat of your brow) to do this. It makes one feel important. I, however, think that the enjoyment of other people's senseless labor for showing off one's own status is a vice.

We should continue to use our brainpower to achieve more with less effort. This is not an argument to be lazy, but to work smart and get more done. Putting up artificial constraints makes no sense in general. Now if the constraints allow for the exploration of something interesting, that's another things. For example it could be a way to hone one's wits, eg the limitation of size in demo scene demos etc., to see novel ideas and creative solutions. That's all fine. It's also all fine if the actual hand made product is better. Furniture made of solid wood, designed to fit your rooms is better than the cheap stuff you buy at IKEA. But the reason to want it is that it's better. Also if you want lots of stuff done for you manually, how do you justify that? What makes you think that you deserve the fruits of all that effort? And independent of the answer, can you understand that many people can't afford having so many people jump around to their whim, and for them increases in efficiency can bring more improvement in quality of life?

Essentially this is the opposite of striving for efficiency

It most certainly is!

So I sat there and smoked my cigar until I fell into a reverie. Among others I recall these thoughts. You are getting on, I said to myself, and are becoming an old man without being anything, and without really taking on anything. Wherever you look about you on the other hand, in literature or in life, you see the names and figures of the celebrities, the prized and acclaimed making their appearances or being talked about, the many benefactors of the age who know how to do favours to mankind by making life more and more easy, some with railways, others with omnibuses and steamships, others with the telegraph, others through easily grasped surveys and brief reports on everything worth knowing, and finally the true benefactors of the age, who by virtue of thought make spiritual existence systematically easier and yet more and more important. And what are you doing? Here my soliloquy was interrupted, for my cigar was finished and a new one had to be lit. So I smoked again, and then suddenly this thought flashed through my mind: You must do something, but since with your limited abilities it will be impossible to make anything easier than it has become, you must, with the same humanitarian enthusiasm as the others, take it upon yourself to make something more difficult. This notion pleased me immensely, and at the same time it flattered me to think that I would be loved and esteemed for this effort by the whole community, as well as any. For when all join together in making everything easier in every way, there remains only one possible danger, namely, that the ease becomes so great that it becomes altogether too easy; then there will be only one lack remaining, if not yet felt, when people come to miss the difficulty. Out of love for humankind, and from despair over my embarrassing situation, having accomplished nothing, and being unable to make anything easier than it had already been made, and out of a genuine interest in those who make everything easy, I conceived it as my task everywhere to create difficulties. I was also especially struck by the curious reflection as to whether it was not really my indolence I had to thank for the fact that this task became mine. For far from having found it like an Aladdin, by a stroke of luck, I must rather suppose that by preventing me from intervening in good time to make things easy, my indolence has thrust on me the only thing that was left.

-- Søren Kierkegaard, "Concluding Unscientific Postscript"

"It's too difficult to meaningfully contribute to this society" vs "there is no difficulty any more, we must artificially make things difficult"?

In earlier discussions on art AI, I expressed significant skepticism in AI generated art for two reasons:

  1. There was little proof that NSFW images could be done well, which was where a large part of online art commissions come from, and which indicated that there were likely some issues related to being able to get images of things you actually wanted instead of just taking whatever the AI would generate for you. Copying a human face in a portrait-style setup is one thing, but capturing bodies in various sexual positions without ending up with a cthuloid mess of dicks or at least falling hard into the uncanny valley is quite another.

  2. The lack of stability, i.e. that it was hard to create a character or theme, and then change little bits of it at a time, e.g. create an image of a person eating an apple, and then also being able to create an image of that same person sitting and reading a book.

The things I've seen on /hdg/ have pretty convincingly proven to me that issue #1 has been solved, or never existed in the first place. I've seen some pessimistic takes that it requires tons of time and 98% of it is garbage, but the fact that random anons on 4chan can generate the level of quality I've seen means AI art has advanced quite a bit more than I thought it had.

I can't believe autistic booru taggers became the heralds of an artistic revolution. Has anyone seen Gwern lately, or is he filling up a 500tb RAID with Asuka pics?

/hdg/: Is there an as109 embedding up yet?

Finally people asking the important questions

Has anyone seen Gwern lately, or is he filling up a 500tb RAID with Asuka pics?

Yes.

https://old.reddit.com/r/AnimeResearch/comments/xumxfk/novelai_diffusion_has_arrived_nai_launches/

Is the whole NovelAI thing worth dropping the ten bucks to try it out at the image generator tier?

It's interesting, but if you're not hugely into this stuff, you can run a local StableDiffusion if you have 6GB+ of VRAM (sometimes down to 4GB, albeit slowly and with some frustrations) pretty easily using the automatic1111 UI, or it's possible to run on Google Colab for a couple hours a day at the free trial level.

NovelAI's version is better than almost all of its competitors -- I'm genuinely hungry to know how they increased the CLIP token limit -- but I don't know that it's 10 USD better unless you plan to use it pretty heavily.

If you like anime, then go for it. It's pretty good.

I am old enough to have developed physical film in a real darkroom. Using negatives and developer was real work that took skill and helped build an appreciation for film photography. I think it was a really fun thing to learn, and I'm glad a did it, but oh boy is it useless now. Now, I can pick up my digital camera and have it automatically focus, adjust settings and snap off pictures at ~12 fps, apply all of the lens and color corrections and spit out gigabytes of jpgs onto a tiny memory card, then I take all of those photos and store them on my multiple-terabyte hard drive with backups in several locations.

I don't think the new-found ease in photography has rendered it inherently cheap, but has certainly opened the floodgates to a morass of shitty, low-level photography. I shudder every time I see a 'gram-girl (or boy) taking some basic selfie at a scenic location. But there is still a lot of photography to appreciate, pictures that take real work, not just in getting the right shot but in setting up the camera even now. No matter how smart the camera itself is, you still have to be at the location and looking the right way at the right time, and no matter how good it is at selecting a generically good setting itself, a skilled human can do better.

I installed Stable Diffusion a few days ago and, let me tell you, it's the real deal. My dumb, artistically-challenged caveman brain can put in 75 characters or less of generic prompts and in just a few minutes select from a slew of reasonably decent AI-generated art, select one and spend an hour refining it down to something I really like. It's the real reason I will be upgrading my several-generations old video card when the new 40XX series drops, not my habitual gaming, so that I can speed up that generation process. It’s absolutely blowing my mind, and I find it so very exciting to think about how I’ll be applying it to RPG or writing art.

But it’s still not magic. It has trouble taking very specific commands, it has trouble with anatomy, it has trouble with some prompts, it’s still limited in how many prompts it can handle, etc. It has a lot of limitations, many of which will most certainly go away with time, but for now I would liken it to having a decent artist who will immediately draw some art for you, but you can only communicate with them via tweets (less than that even!). Much of the skill in using it comes in through using other programs to clean up the images, removing artifacts and dropping the right “seeds” of implanted features for the program to take up. Another huge part is in getting a better feeling for how to give prompts and adjust settings to really get the most out of it. I expect the skill floor to raise up over time, so yeah, we’ll be inundated with reasonably good generated art.

This is already the case though! There are people who post on Imgur just dumps of elf art or pixiv manga art, endless seas of generic fantasy concept art, so much dross that fills DeviantArt with human-made but utterly indistinguishable work, work that people have pored so much time and effort into. Out of all that, only a few gems seem worthy of to keep around. How much worse can it get? I don’t see putting in prompts as really that terribly different now from entering terms in a search bar; that a human drew every line in one and not the other feels totally irrelevant.

I think the deeper question is a feeling about how much the AI is actually creating art, and how much of it is just "it got trained on a zillion images and it's just cutting and pasting according to your prompts; you tell it you want a buxom blonde woman in a bikini sitting on a beach and it selects out of all the stored images of buxom blonde women, beaches, and bikinis and trims it as you refine your prompt".

I think the fears and opposition come from a place where it's "a human imagines the work, puts it together, creates something new" while the machine (so far) isn't creating anything because it doesn't have a mind to think, it just does as it is told. Collage art, cutting out images created by humans and sticking them together in the combination you - not even it, itself, but the human prompter - tells it to do.

Do you get what I mean?

My understanding of the mechanics of Stable Diffusion is very limited, but I don't think this "collage art" model is quite right. The computer doesn't really pull out whole chunks of images; it doesn't know what blonde, buxom or even woman are. But what it does have are statistical relations, so when it generates a bunch of noise it pulls out lines and shapes and colors based on those statistics, depending on the prompts, then makes a bit more noise on that drawing and draws again, and eventually it pulls a random-ish image from the noise. This reminds me of when I used to sketch, and I would lightly draw lines in pencil, then as the concept firms up you make your lines darker, until you're left with a fixed image that you can commit to pen. But that's all mechanical skill really; I can imagine scenes that I would never be able to sketch, much less bring to full art; the imagining and the art-drawing are separate to some degree. Is this better or worse? I don't know. But pencils and photoshop don't think either, and no one seems to mind.

But what has really made me ponderful is that the way Stable Diffusion creates art feels similar to the way I create art, and it appears to think somewhat how I think. Perhaps that's why its unrealistic mistakes go unnoticed sometimes, my mind fell into the same trap that it did and e.g. overlooked an extra finger, because my mind doesn't sit there and count fingers and neither does Stable Diffusion! It just takes what it sees and roughly maps the shape and position into the "hand" map and calls it a day. But even human artists have trouble with hands!

I think the deeper question is a feeling about how much the AI is actually creating art, and how much of it is just "it got trained on a zillion images and it's just cutting and pasting according to your prompts; you tell it you want a buxom blonde woman in a bikini sitting on a beach and it selects out of all the stored images of buxom blonde women, beaches, and bikinis and trims it as you refine your prompt".

If this is the deeper question, then it seems to come from just a fundamental misunderstanding of how AI art works. There's no cutting or pasting going on. Not unless you want to say that a human artist who develops his own personal style through observing pre-existing pieces of art and experimenting with what he can draw is just "cutting and pasting" from the images saved in his head from those observations.

I really don't find your post convincing in the least. And the constant whiny bitching and crying by artists about AI art has made me suspicious of the motivations of these so called "artists", who claim to do it so much so for their love of the art. @EfficientSyllabus, said it a lot better than me. You are not lamenting the loss of an artform, you are lamenting the loss of status.

Here are a few scattered as to why I am so deeply unsympathetic to those who endlessly moan about AI art.

  • I'm a programmer. I believe I love the art of programming. I also know some people who genuinely love the art of programming. When I saw what OpenAI Codex (AI that can generate code) was capable of doing, My jaw was on the floor. A program that could write more programs?? It was science fiction in-front of my own eyes. Every other programmer I know who loves the game itself had the exact same reaction; amazement.

    So what if a machine can write code? Code is good! The world needs more code! Code makes machines more efficient, it does boring jobs that people would have to do, code optimizes processes that literally puts food into most peoples mouths.

    In the same vein? Is art not a good thing? Is the world not a richer place because there will be more art? Isn't it great that an independent blogger who couldn't afford commissions will now get to have art that makes his blogging richer? Is it not great that a mom and pop shop can now produce artwork that will make their corner store more lively? Won't the world get a little bit more aesthetically pleasing?

    Why are the majority programmers so enthusiastic about machines that can code but not artists?

    Maybe because the greatest trick the devil pulled was that "artists" are in it for the love of the art and us uncool dirty nerds are in it for the money and status?

  • There is an art to almost every process right?

    Farming can also be an art right? Getting the soiled tilled just right, making sure the seeds are placed just the appropriate distance apart, etc.

    However, if someone lamented the loss of farming as an artform because combine harvesters were invented... My and hopefully any rational persons response would be;

    " You motherfucker. Do you not realize that millions of hungry mouths will be fed because of this thing? Is your artsy fartsy shit more important that people not being hungry?"

  • The world is a place where things need to get done.

    I love the art of programming and spend countless hours cleaning up my programs, but ultimately it's of no value if no one can use my programs. Chefs can put their heart and soul into their food, but it would be of no value if no one ate it.

    The value is in the PRODUCT, not the PROCESS.

    If my favorite bakery found a way to mass produce their cheesecakes but the pastry chef was not required anymore and it would be all done by machines, then good. More people can enjoy great food for cheap. And to be honest my tongue doesn't care, if it did, its priorities are not in order.

    Boohoo for the pastry chef, if they love making cakes so much they can make the cake and throw it in the trash. In my world cakes are for eating. Is it not wisdom that you cook for your friends and family for them, not for you? The sanctity is in the fact that their stomachs are full not that your knife skills are perfected?

    Same for the artists, they can draw their art and throw it in the trash, its the process that matters right?

As someone who believes that more things are good. Products are good. Anyone lamenting about a process that brings more good things into the world is my enemy. You are actively lamenting that the world is becoming a richer place, in both the very economic and metaphorical sense of the word 'richer'. The pie is getting bigger, you are just lamenting you won't be having a relatively larger share of it.

I too am a programmer, and am horrified by Copilot and friends. I write code to solve problems and release it under copyleft so that people can modify it for their own ends and share alike. I don't release it for it to be bundled up into some training set for a system that will accelerate the generation of non-free software.

Whatever an artist's goal in developing a skill, I think it's fair for him to be utterly crushed at the thought of his artistic career and personal style being reduced to an "by artist X" prompt to an image generator.

Sure if they were honest and just said "im not pleased about losijg my job" everyone would be sympathetic to them.

Instead they piss and shit all over about how their jobs are divine edicts from god and simulacras are demonic.

But part of it really is that making art is a very human thing to do, from the earliest records we have of humans, and mechanising it away with AI feels like chopping out part of the human experience. It isn't like "a better way to make cheesecake", where the AI is churning out industrial-recipe amounts in an industrial process. It's reducing creativity and imagination to a set of standard tropes for lowest common denominator appeal, like the production line of Marvel movies which, I think, people are beginning to get tired of because it's all too much and too the same: just slot in a new comic book character and sprinkle in explosions and fight scenes. A formula that gets over-used no longer works, because it's tedious. You've seen the same thing sixteen times before, why go see this particular one?

A lot of the complaining is taking themselves too seriously, but it's not merely about losing a job. It makes people feel replaceable, and in something that was considered to be uniquely human. Maybe a robot could replace you as a worker on an automobile assembly line, but as an artist? How would you feel to be totally replaced as a programmer, and whatever you might produce would be regarded as amateur hobbyist stuff, "that's nice dear", but everyone knows real coding is done by AI. Your occupation would be gone, and if this is something you do because you love this stuff, and not just as "well I gotta do something to make a living", wouldn't you feel lost and valueless?

It isn't like "a better way to make cheesecake", where the AI is churning out industrial-recipe amounts in an industrial process. It's reducing creativity and imagination to a set of standard tropes for lowest common denominator appeal, like the production line of Marvel movies which, I think, people are beginning to get tired of because it's all too much and too the same

(Emphasis added). I'm not sure where the bolded part came from. What reason is there to believe that AIs would reduce creativity or imagination to a set of standard tropes for lowest common denominator appeal? Nothing about the actual process of the creation of art by AI would imply that. If we look at usage of AI in other fields like, say, go or chess, AI has been known to display creativity far beyond what the best humans have been known to come up with.

Same for the artists, they can draw their art and throw it in the trash, its the process that matters right?

I think there have been instances of artists destroying their work or making art that essentially self-destructs (e.g. KLF, that one MMO art game where the game would shut down if people killed each other enough times or something, I think there was an installation piece that would beat itself apart), so really, they're kind of ahead of you on that.

My point was that if the process is what matters, there is nothing to be afraid of. No one cam steal that from you.

If my favorite bakery found a way to mass produce their cheesecakes but the pastry chef was not required anymore and it would be all done by machines, then good. More people can enjoy great food for cheap. And to be honest my tongue doesn't care, if it did, its priorities are not in order.

I think you go too far here. If your tongue cares, it's because the machines are not producing the same cheesecakes you enjoyed from the pastry chef, they are producing almost the same. This is great for everyone who wants a good cheesecake for a reasonable price, but it is also good for the pastry chef - now he gets to make cheesecakes for people who want cheesecakes that are better than the machines can make. Plus he gets the fame and prestige of being the model upon which the machines are based. Nobody is putting "Made by machines!" on the label of their cheesecakes - they want a cheesecake made by the pastry chef for a reasonable price. Thanks to the machines they can get it, and if that's not good enough then they can pay for the chef's actual cheesecake.

They are equal in my analogy.

They are equal in my analogy

But in reality? That is the difference between people's experience of increasing automation and industrialisation, and the rosy forecasts of "by the 1980s, people will have so much leisure time it will be hard to fill it all, because the work week will be hours not days, thanks to machines!"

Unless we get Star Trek style replicators, the machine-made cheesecake will never be equal to 'the real thing' (and even in Trek, people still go out to restaurants where humans do the cooking). There's even an entire Youtube channel with different levels of chefs making different dishes - here's one for cheesecakes. This is why people pay different prices for different levels of cooking - you don't expect premium prices for fast food burgers, and you expect a higher level of quality if ordering a steak in a fancy restaurant.

I believe there is an American expression, used pejoratively, about "whitebread" or "Wonder bread", deriving from commercially produced sliced white bread loaves, filled with flour improvers and preservatives to enable it to remain soft and long-life. Now this is decried as spongy, tasteless and inferior. These were created thanks to the [Chorleywood Process}(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chorleywood_bread_process) which gave rise to the expression "the best thing since sliced bread" since the innovation was new and remarkable and consumers loved the product.

But I think anyone will agree that the commercial sliced panloaf is not as tasty as the bakery loaf, even if it lasts longer and is ready-sliced. I use both, I prefer batch bread. The constant 'improvements' turned out not to be improvements but were certainly an economically superior process. The end product suffered. That is the fear around AI art.

Wonderbread is a real brand and product that exists and is popular, not a pejorative. I prefer it for some types of sandwiches, like a pb&j and not for others. The world is richer for the existence of wonderbread.

What a strange thing to say. Never mind that mass production has been around for a century and never ever created products identical to handmade, what other priorities might your tongue have then? Have you considered that maybe your tongue doesn't actually care, but due to a minor addendum you made to one of its arguments - helping it no less - it is just pretending to care because it is a child?

Why are the majority of programmers so enthusiastic about machines that can code

Because they have no foresight.

I write code for a living. Of course I don’t want machines to learn how to code. That would put me out of a job! Why would I want someone to build something that would put me out of a job? That makes no sense.

I assume that by the time machines have truly automated coding (that means they can debug and fix your 40 year old proprietary system too according to natural language requirements, not just generate new code) then we’ll have AGI. I’ve become even more pessimistic about AGI lately and I think it’s likely that it will lead us straight into a dystopia, because there’s no reason for the rich to give us UBI. Once they no longer need us, they’ll more than likely just let us starve. So I hope to God that machines don’t automate coding in my lifetime.

I'm of the same opinion. If the future is fully automated, then one doesn't need the AI itself to go bad in order to have a humanitarian catastrophe - it will be sufficient for those who command the AIs to determine that keeping the unproductive classes as pets is no longer fashionable.

This is my belief about the dangers of AI - it's not the AI itself (because I don't think we will get self-aware, having goals and wanting to meet them, agentic like a person AI) but the people who use it, control it, and think they can depend on it to solve problems like "best economic policy" or 'let's create the technocratic utopia'.

Let's say Boston Dynamics creates a genuinely humanoid robot that can do all the things humans do, and Amazon buys a ton of them to replace the human workers in its fulfilment centres (particularly since they have concerns about labour shortages ). Great, this is way more efficient, Amazon can now sell us "same hour delivery", costs go down and productivity goes way up, things are better all round for everyone!

Except the laid-off warehouse workers, because where are they going to find jobs? How are they going to live? Even 'learn to code' isn't enough anymore, because we have AI to do that, too. And Amazon is not going to pay them wages or the equivalent in UBI out of the goodness of its heart, why would it? It's a business, not a charity. The government may have to do this, and it will raise money by taxing Amazon, and Amazon will use the usual legal loopholes and run-arounds to avoid paying more tax than the minimum necessary (tax avoidance, not tax evasion is the distinction I have been told) so where will the money come from? If we think the pensions shortfall is going to be a massive shock, wait until you can't even work until you're 80 as a Walmart greeter to supplement your pension or whatever money you have to live on, because there's a BD robot doing that now,

tax avoidance

Tax avoidance works because we have literal laws on the books that let them do it, usually for quite good reasons. If the tax revenue is insufficient we can simply eliminate these ways to reduce tax burden or raise taxes.

I find this pessimism ridiculous, what are the rich going to do with all that corn? Everything I've seen or heard about them is that they want to be admired and loved by the people, and I at least live in a democracy where it's not totally up to the rich to decide to let us all starve.

Why are the majority programmers so enthusiastic about machines that can code but not artists?

Because they aren't. They're collectively deluding themselves into believing in the «soul» and that programming will never be automated by AI. Just like certain artists are.

I am a programmer. OpenAI scares me. I'm putting every effort I've got into the Grind, because I think the industry's due for a phenomenal crash that'll leave the majority in the dumps. You are free to disagree.

I too am a programmer, but fortunately the German software industry is so far behind the times and slow to evolve and German employment laws in general are so strict in their regulations in favor of employees that I think I can safely coast halfway to retirement before I feel any market pressure.

That depends on how much of a difference AI will make, doesn't it? If advanced AI enables big American corps to churn out absurdly efficient code or highly advanced machine designs in minimal time, what will sclerotic German companies do?

I used to work at Siemens and half the people employed as programmers there thought that automating things in Excel was black magic, let alone doing basic things in Python with libraries like pandas. The difference in productivity compared to its rivals is small enough that coasting on momentum of past strengths might be sufficient to stay relevant in the present, but strong AI could plausibly make a lot of crusty German institutions obsolete in a way that our lawmakers won't be able to compensate for.

Stop scaring me. If the statists are going to tax me anyways then the least I expect to receive in exchange is the illusion of security.

You really think AI is going to replace programmers? If it does then it will be smart enough to self-modify, and then career concerns are the least of our worries.

If it does then it will be smart enough to self-modify,

This does not work out the way you think it will. A p99-human tier parallelised unaligned coding AI will be able to do the work of any programmer, will be able to take down most online infrastructure by merit of security expertise, but won't be sufficient for a Skynet Uprising, because that AI still needs to solve for the "getting out of the digital box and building a robot army" part.

If the programming AI was a generalised intelligence, then of course we'd be all fucked immediately. But that's not how this works. What we have are massive language models that are pretty good at tackling any kind of request that involves text generation. Solve for forgetfulness in transformer models and you'll only need one dude to maintain that full stack app instead of 50.

What I'm saying is that AI's are made of code. If they can write code then they can improve themselves. An AI able to code better than people can also code a better AI than people can. Maybe you don't think that that will lead to recursive self-modification--I think there's at least a good chance that there are diminishing returns there--but just consider the advances we've made in AI in the last year, and you're supposing a future where not only have we gotten farther but then there's another entity capable of going farther still. At a bare minimum I think an AI capable of doing that is capable of replacing most other careers too.

We've been trying to innovate ourselves out of a job since the very beginning. I work with high powered business people that frequently can't even manage the most basic computer tasks, let alone automate them. We'll have a niche so long as people continue to work. What a glorious day it will be when all that intelligence and ingenuity is put to tasks other than making ads serve 0.2% faster.

There is no problem humans face that cannot be reframed as a programming or automation problem. Need food? Build a robot to grow it for you, and another to deliver it to your house. Need to build a robot? Make a factory that automates robot fabrication. Need to solve X medical issue? Write a program that figures out using simulations or whatever how to synthesize a chemical or machine that fixes it. Given this, the question of "what happens to programmers when computers can write code for arbitrary domains just as well as programmers can" answers itself.

I expect that fully automating coding will be the last job anybody ever does, either because we're all dead or we have realized Fully Automated Luxury Space Communism.

Is there something misleading with the way I phrased my comment? I don't understand why multiple people have succeeded in reading "programmers will be completely replaced by AI" into my words.

And this isn't a nitpicking thing. It is an extremely important distinction; I see this in the same way as the Pareto Principle. The AI labs are going to quickly churn out models good enough to cover 95% of the work the average software engineer does, and the programming community will reach a depressive state where everyone's viciously competing for that last 5% until true AGI arrives.

Your first paragraph misses how hard it is for human programmers to achieve those things, if it is even possible under current circumstances (find me a program that can acquire farmland & construct robots for it & harvest everything & prepare meals from raw materials). Even hiring an army of programmers (AI or no) would not satisfy the preconditions necessary for getting your own food supply, namely having an actual physical presence. You need to step beyond distributed human-level abilities into superhuman AI turf for that to happen.

There is a sense in which the job of coding has already been automated away several times. For instance, high-level languages enable a single programmer to accomplish work that would be out of the grasp of even a dozen assembly-language programmers. (This did, in fact, trash the job market for assembly-language programmers.)

The reason this hasn't resulted in an actual decline in programmer jobs over time is because each time a major tool is invented that makes programming easier (or eliminates the necessity for it in particular domains), people immediately set their sights on more-difficult tasks that were considered impractical or impossible in the previous paradigm.

I don't really see the mechanism by which AI-assisted programming is different in this way. Sure, it means a subset of programming problems will no longer be done by humans. That just means humans will be freed to work on programming and engineering problems that AI can't do, or at least can't do yet; and they'll have the assistance of the AI programmers that automated away their previous jobs.

And if there are no more engineering or programming problems like that, then you now have Automated Luxury Space Communism.

Roughly speaking, I see your point and agree that it's possible we're just climbing a step further up on an infinite ladder of "things to do with computers".

But I disagree that it's the most likely outcome, because:

  1. I think the continued expansion of the domain space for individual programmers can be partially attributed to Moore's Law. More Is Different; a JavaScript equivalent could've easily been developed in the 80s but simply wasn't because there wasn't enough computational slack at the time for a sandboxed garbage collected asyncronous scripting language to run complex enterprise graphical applications. Without the regular growth in computational power, I expect innovations to slow.

  2. Cognitive limits. Say a full stack developer gets to finish their work in 10% of the time. Okay, now what? Are they going to spin up a completely different project? Make a fuzzer, a GAN, an SAT solver, all for fun? The future ability of AI tools to spin up entire codebases on demand does not help in the human learning process of figuring out what actually needs to be done. And if someone makes a language model to fix that problem, then domain knowledge becomes irrelevant and everyone (and thus no one) becomes a programmer.

  3. I think, regardless of AI, that the industry is oversaturated and due for mass layoffs. There are currently weak trends pointing in this direction, but I wouldn't blame anyone for continuing to bet on its growth.

For (1), what you're saying is certainly true; the better abstractions and better tooling has been accompanied by growth in hardware fundamentals that cannot be reasonably expected to continue.

(2) is where I'm a lot more skeptical. A sufficient-- though certainly not necessary-- condition for a valuable software project is identifying a thing that requires human labor that a computer could, potentially, be doing instead.

The reason I called out robotics specifically is because, yeah, if you think about "software" as just meaning "stuff that runs on a desktop computer", well, there's lots of spheres of human activity that occur away from a computer. But the field of robotics represents the set of things that computers can be made to do in the real world.

That being so, if non-robotics software becomes trivial to write I expect we are in one of four possible worlds:

World one: General-purpose robotics-- for example, building robots that plant and harvest crops-- is possible for (AI-assisted) human programmers to do, but it's intrinsically really hard even with AI support, so human programmers/engineers still have to be employed to do it. This seems like a plausible world that we could exist in, and seems basically similar to our current world except that the programmer-gold-rush is in robotics instead of web apps.

World two: General-purpose robotics is really easy for non-programmers if you just make an AI do the robot programming. That means "programming" stops being especially lucrative as a profession, since programming has been automated away. It also means that every other job has been (or will very soon be) automated away. This is Fully-Automated Luxury Space Communism world, and also seems broadly plausible.

World three: General-purpose robotics is impossible at human or AI levels of cognition, but non-robotics AI-assisted programming is otherwise trivial. I acknowledge this is a world where mass layoffs of programmers would occur and that this would be a problem for us. I also do not think this is a very likely scenario; general-purpose robotics is very hard but I have no specific reason to believe it's impossible, especially if AI software development has advanced to the point where almost all other programming is trivial.

World four: World two, except somebody screwed up the programming on one of their robot-programming AIs such that it murders everyone instead of performing useful labor. This strikes me as another plausible outcome.

Are there possibilities I'm missing that seem to you reasonably likely?

For your point (3), I have no particular expectations or insight one way or another.

Hi, I just want to leave a stub response: you seem right and I failed to type a recent response after reading 2 days ago.

This is probably the key point. It’s impossible for a non-programmer to do anything useful with Copilot. Non-artists can already do useful things with NovelAI right now though; they’re ready to start cutting artists out of the loop now, today. It’s not a comparable situation.

But, critically, that isn't the actual argument being made by artists, probably because it's a losing argument. Milton Friedman's classic story:

While traveling by car during one of his many overseas travels, Professor Milton Friedman spotted scores of road builders moving earth with shovels instead of modern machinery. When he asked why powerful equipment wasn’t used instead of so many laborers, his host told him it was to keep employment high in the construction industry. If they used tractors or modern road building equipment, fewer people would have jobs was his host’s logic.

“Then instead of shovels, why don’t you give them spoons and create even more jobs?” Friedman inquired.

And the constant whiny bitching and crying by artists about AI art has made me suspicious of the motivations of these so called "artists"

Write like you want to include everyone in the conversation, please. This is unnecessarily heated.

I think there are two distinct divisions here that are worried or not worried about AI art.

(1) The 'fine artists', producing the likes of Basquiat painting in that story further down about the Guggenheim. The very top ones won't be affected, hell they may even get into using AI to produce art, because it's all about the concept and not the actual work. Damien Hirst did not cast himself works like this, he does the design then hands it off to a foundry to make it. So AI art is not a threat to art which is about concept, notoriety, ethnicity, who is the latest hot property taken up by the galleries and rich collectors, etc.

(2) The commercial artists, who very well may find themselves out of a job if AI can churn out made-to-measure works for posters (like that awful German Green Party one), magazine and online article illustrations in this style called Alegria or Corporate Memphis, advertising and product art, and the rest of it. Some of them can adopt it as one more tool, like the software they already use, but if a big corporation can create its own in-house art by purchasing an AI program to do it, then that cuts out freelancers and those who rely on commissions. Amateur artists are a sub-set of this, all the artists doing fan-art for commission may be priced out if you can instead get to use an AI who will do exactly what you want the way you want it.

So there is definitely a panic about "the AI is taking our jobs!" and that isn't completely mockery, because there will be people who can no longer make a living doing commercial art. How that shakes out remains to be seen, and we really won't know until AI art is widely used. Maybe people will go back to having a Real Human Drew This piece of work, to stand out from all the mass-produced AI art, especially for things like fashion magazines that want to sell themselves as being creative and different and unique.

And there are real concerns about art as art, from people who enjoy creating art and don't like the implication that this is just one more human activity that can be mechanised and turned into extruded product. You say that the value is in the product, not the process, but for most of us our experience of mass-market mechanised production of, for instance, food products has not been "oh wow, this cheesecake is so delicious and gorgeous, just like a pastry chef made it!", it has been "replace ingredients with cheapest substitute, lots of artificial flavouring and colouring, and a process that is economically convenient for the manufacturer" ending up in bland, processed, 'not as good as the real thing' goods (see the furore over how Cadbury chocolate has changed since Mondelez bought it).

If the experience of mechanisation was "wow, gorgeous!" instead of "yeah, now it's gonna be cheap, bad-tasting gunk", then people would be less alarmed about AI art (as distinct from the financial element). You say "More people can enjoy great food for cheap. And to be honest my tongue doesn't care, if it did, its priorities are not in order" but would you really not care if it tasted different? Why is that bakery your favourite bakery, if not for the very reason that it pleases your tongue? "Okay, now the cheesecake tastes like chalk and mouse-droppings and gives me diarrhoea after I eat it, but shut up tongue! The process is more efficient and cheaper and productive, who cares about the quality of the end product?"

If the experience of mechanisation was "wow, gorgeous!" instead of "yeah, now it's gonna be cheap, bad-tasting gunk", then people would be less alarmed about AI art (as distinct from the financial element). You say "More people can enjoy great food for cheap. And to be honest my tongue doesn't care, if it did, its priorities are not in order" but would you really not care if it tasted different? Why is that bakery your favourite bakery, if not for the very reason that it pleases your tongue? "Okay, now the cheesecake tastes like chalk and mouse-droppings and gives me diarrhoea after I eat it, but shut up tongue! The process is more efficient and cheaper and productive, who cares about the quality of the end product?"

So artists are losing people without taste who were being overcharged for what they were experiencing, people with taste will stick to real artists. What's the problem here? I can still get and do still get fancy hand crafted artisanal food, it costs as much as it always has. But now the poor can get at least an approximation for cheap enough for them to afford. I imagine high profile publications and AAA game titles will still have humans doing their art for them, but suddenly indie publications and indie games can afford as many art assets as they can productively use. This is a pure win for expression.

I think there is a certain line of thinking that can plausibly be raised as a defense:

  • The process of freely creating art is valuable as a form of human expression, either per se or because it enriches the human experience in some way. (This position is apparently one which you do not hold, but let's assume for the moment that a large portion of the population does sincerely hold it.)

  • So far, the process of creating art has been subsidized by its products which can be sold: corporate art, commissions, etc. However, in the future, these products are poised to be far more efficiently generated by AI.

  • Without revenue from these products, many of today's artists will be forced to move into other fields, and perhaps curtail their personal output due to no longer having enough time, supplies, or practice. This is bad, since it decreases the quality and quantity of valuable art creation.

  • Similarly, once the creation of art becomes no longer profitable, the second-order effects start to occur: the entire industry of art education gradually falls apart, and many people become unable to learn the skills to express themselves through art in the way they would prefer.

That is, the process of art-as-human-expression will be impacted negatively by the AI-driven devaluing of art-as-a-commercial-product.

I recall a discussion on LW or SSC (that I am now unable to find), about how many try to find economic justifications for avoiding animal stress, looking for evidence that less-stressed cows (for instance) produce better meat, since that kind of justification is the only form our society will accept: if no such justification can be found, then animal welfare will inevitably get tossed out the window. I interpret @Primaprimaprima's perspective in a similar light; if there is no more value in humans creating art as a product, then there will be nothing left to prop up the tradition of art as an expression, and the world will be worse off for it.

(Whether this assumption of art-as-expression depending on the existence of art-as-a-product holds up in reality is a different question. But it certainly seems like a plausible enough risk to worry about, assuming one values art-as-expression.)

If art as expression is valuable enough then people will spend money to do it for its own sake. If it is not then they were being subsidized the whole time and it was less valuable than we previously thought. I think art will survive but most artists will need to get dayjobs, just like all the people who used to subsidize their art who didn't personally get to experience the expression element. Because that's really the hidden cost that isn't being brought up, the tiny tax on everyone else in society so that artists could be for lack of a better word "unproductive"(undoubtedly they were productive in a pre-ai-art world but they are no longer productive in a post-ai-art world)

Indeed. I suppose that the next step of the defense would be that society persistently undervalues art-as-expression: if the general public were aware of its full value, they would pay for art-as-expression, but structural factors and lack of quantifiable benefits makes awareness implausible in the near future. (Compare this to the animal-welfare activist who fights against factory farmers' greed and consumers' apathy: they believe that if the public were aware of the full value of animal welfare, then animal-protection laws would be passed in a heartbeat.)

In this scenario, the best outcome, short of formal subsidies for artists, would perhaps be a large-scale donation model, much like for many orchestras and museums today. But this is still much less accessible to artists than the pre-AI status quo, where art-as-expression maintains a safe existence as a byproduct of art-as-a-product. So it would still make sense for those who value art-as-expression to lament this change beyond the effects on their own lifestyles, given that this particular Pandora's Box isn't getting closed any time soon.

Do you make art?

I make art as a hobby and teach it, and feel moderately positive toward the recent developments in AI art.

There are a couple of different things that will become more obviously different. There's commercial art, which will likely be extensively created by AI in the fairly near future. The automation of anime nudes hardly seems like a loss worth mourning. There's high status Artist art, which will not change all that much, and already isn't much about visual skill, so much as social skill. There's popular art, which might become some kind of combination thing, with different classifications and disclaimers. There's gift art, which is almost entirely about effort and thoughtfulness, and not much about skill. This seems intrinsic in children as soon as they can talk, and won't be changing much.

Personally, I like the process of art making more than artistic artifacts, and am generally uninterested in artwork that clearly took painstaking detail oriented labor. There are photorealists who show off by making 100 hr paintings of extremely detailed faces or whatever, and I understand caring about that, but do not care about it myself. This seems unlikely to be faked very often -- process videos are already very popular, and will likely become even more so. There is not enough status at stake, and it's rather niche. There isn't really any reason you couldn't still find detailed realistic artists practicing their craft.

There's a quote attributed to Picasso that "when art critics get together they talk about content, style, trend and meaning, but when painters get together they talk about where can you get the best turpentine." I like paint and wool and cold pressed cotton paper and warm wax and translucency and the smell of certain mediums and the changes that pottery undergoes as it progresses through multiple firings. I'm excited that there are now water mixable oil paints (no turpentine required!) and Derwent ink pencils. These artisanal practices have already been stripped of most of their importance. They are crafts, practiced by retired ladies in their craft sheds. They are unserious. Plenty of visual art is already like that as well. Hobbyist empty nesters painting impressionist oils of the local wildlife. This is a bit dispiriting, but will not be meaningfully changed by AI. Children will still always give something they made to their family, old ladies will still paint Monet knock offs of their regional landscape. These phenomena are not primarily about the image as such anyway, but about the process and physical manifestation of love or attention.

It doesn't seem all that much more effortless than many of Robert Ryman's works.

I'm sure someone will find a way to get their vision in AI assisted art creation featured in a gallery or sold for a princely sum.

[...] on topic for the culture war thread [...] I hope it's ok that I write this here. Feel free to delete if not.

As far as I can tell, anything is on-topic for the culture war thread if it's interesting and well written.

EDIT: Unfortunately, this dropped the day after I wrote my post, so I didn't get a chance to comment on it originally. Based on continually accumulating evidence, I may have to retract my original prediction that opposition to AI art was going to be a more right-coded position. Perhaps there are not as many aesthetes in the dissident right as I thought.

I suspect that pro-/anti-AI art won't cleave neatly along existing ideological lines, but I do think for now, there's good reason to believe that pro-/anti- will be right/left respectively. The 2 dominant factors that would drive this are (1) most pre-existing artists are on the left and (2) AI art makes censorship tougher. Why (1) would lead those on the left to be against AI art has been expounded upon plenty in this very thread. For (2), when it comes to the most mainstream instantiations of art, i.e. pop culture, the dominant narrative for the past decade+ from the left has been that art that doesn't fit neatly within certain boundaries can cause literal harm to real humans and thus must be censored or at least censured in some meaningful way, for the prevention of harm to innocents. AI art - or more specifically easy access to AI art tools - would open up the floodgates to everyone being able to create art that is deemed harmful, in a way that our current censorship technology just couldn't keep up with.

I wonder if this will hold in the long run. There are plenty of leftist reasons to support AI art (e.g. more access to sophisticated art creation by people who otherwise would be unable to do so) and rightist reasons to be against it (e.g. traditional and/or religious reasons of being against degeneracy which AI art would enable like nothing before). It's just basically impossible to predict the way things will go when it comes to which subgroups within each tribe will win out.


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