domain:savenshine.com
There is no non trivial Western political movement today that isn't postmodern.
If post-NRX reactionaries are "woke right" then IDW Liberals are "woke center". To say nothing about how post-liberal libertarians are today. Nobody actually believes in metanarratives anymore, not even Joe Rogan tier normies. And insofar as they do their views are instantly dismantled. All that's left is a handful of classical fascists and orthodox marxists acting like the clock stopped in 1937.
Modernism has died God's death. It's over. And those that refuse to see this like Lindsey are driven mad by this. But there is no journey back to our illusions, because material conditions have dispelled people of the idea that institutions can be neutral.
Foucault won. Popper lost. A very long time ago.
Now can we move on to actually addressing the issues we are facing, or must more Liberals be brought kicking and screaming into the present they created? You have to grow out of the debate club and into actual politics someday. Or you can keep getting diligently losing to cultural communists.
HereAndGone
13m ago
It still is, sometimes, but yeah it goes hard in the wrong direction on some things. When you're losing a battle of wits with the Babylon Bee, it's time to put down the bottle and decide "I should quit drinking methylated spirits".
HereAndGone
20m ago
Botond173
22m ago
I agree with hydroacetylene's reply. No offense meant, but your argument is the equivalent of the "I don't know anyone who voted for Nixon" meme.
Botond173
24m ago
The next day, one of this mom’s younger daughters said something that sums it all up: “I’m graduating, and I’ve never danced with a guy.” Contrast that with her older sister, who just seven or eight years ago came home from prom having danced with seven or eight different young men in one evening.
I'd say there's a high probability that the younger daughter is homely-looking and standoffish, comes across as sassy and somewhat insufferable, whereas her older sister was both pretty and demure or at least didn't come across as hostile/difficult, and therefore stood out. Regarding the seven-to-eight-year timeframe I guess it may seem too short but I think it makes sense. Cultural changes generally happen in cascades/waves I think, with more remote/isolated communities experiencing changes later, to a lesser degree or almost not at all. We can generally tell that there was a period in the US culture war when gender was absolutely at the forefront of it, but it's entirely possible that a community such as this was not yet reached by this back in 2017/18.
Jazzhands
24m ago
https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Jeremiah%2027%3A6-8&version=NIV
Now I will give all your countries into the hands of my servant Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon; I will make even the wild animals subject to him. All nations will serve him and his son and his grandson until the time for his land comes; then many nations and great kings will subjugate him. If, however, any nation or kingdom will not serve Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon or bow its neck under his yoke, I will punish that nation with the sword, famine and plague, declares the Lord, until I destroy it by his hand.
HereAndGone
25m ago
I think it's more people who hate Trump, and probably also hate traditional Catholic teaching, jumping on this about "see what the guy you like is really like? isn't he horrible? you should be offended!" because of their fixed notions that he appealed to the Evangelical Religious Right Vote and they've been trying ever since to drive a wedge between him and that support by "but he's not really religious at all, in face he's a sinner!" posting of examples. You don't say. Remember the fuss about the blue suit at Pope Francis' funeral?
It was dumb, but if I'm going to be offended by social media posts about Catholicism, this is about 9000th on my list of "I am shocked and appalled".
HereAndGone
33m ago
I assume they mostly want to weed out obvious crazies
So, nobody will be a panellist, then?
The vetting is done by volunteers, and researching 1300 people must be pretty time consuming
Given that back in 2018 some Literally Who?* made a storm in a teacup about some poor schmuck making the hideous and horrendous error of copy'n'pasting their bio to be "he" pronouns instead of "e/em/eir/emself or they/them" pronouns (a very understandable mistake to correct "e" to "he"), no wonder they're kicking up blue murder about AI filtering the applicants.
- "Bogi Takács is a Hungarian poet, writer, psycholinguist, editor, and translator. Takács is an intersex, agender, trans, Jewish writer" who is also disabled and autistic, of course.
Well, this is what they wanted for the Hugos, and I hope they enjoy every second of it. Like yourself, nowadays if I see "Hugo nominee" or worse, "Hugo winner" on a work, I avoid it like the plague.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
34m ago
Can you dig it out? I can think of several ways both of you can be right.
- Looking at the proportion of women among gay porn consumers instead of the other way around.
- Looking at all women instead of porn consuming women (might actually be right way to do it)
- What do we mean by "straight"? / What is a woman? I heard several female detransitioners saying gay porn / the fantasy of being a gay boy with a gay lover being a gateway to transition.
No_one
49m ago
Do we know India has a sufficient amount of deployed thermonuclear warheads to actually destroy Pakistan?
No_one
51m ago
Pakistan has bought Chinese military hardware including 100+ mile range BVR missiles with datalinks and AWACS aircraft that can guide such, so .. not that unlikely.
There's a whole bunch of footage out there this morning showing various aircraft parts lying on the ground.
Throwaway05
51m ago
Do they? Last time I saw data on this I thought it said straight women didn't really consume gay porn.
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
55m ago
Well, it's important in context. Many people aren't interested in reading stories that are expected to remain unfinished, but are fine with following ongoing stories as they approach completion.
ApplePie
59m ago
Welcome to the wide world of principle components analysis, orthoxerox! These dimensions are orthogonal.
quiet_NaN
1hr ago
I would argue that you are treating academia as a single thing when it is clearly made from a lot of different parts.
STEM ideally has both feet planted in reality, and is not very subject to ideological capture. Electrons don't have gender identities, the set of integers is not "Aryan". At the most, the prevailing ideology might force affirmative action on the faculty (thus increasing dead weight) and force the academics to pay lip service to the ideology.
These are likely the fields that you mean when you say
Nobel prices and fundamental research that changes the world a few decades later.
The more you stray from STEM, the more the heart of a field is subject to ideological capture, until you get to fields which are pure ideology, like Grievance Studies.
Now, I think that is it useful to keep the Humanities around and give them a bit of tenure, but that has to be justified in its own terms, simply packing them with STEM and saying "universities produce great benefits for society" does not seem very honest.
--
I would also contest a bit that research (e.g. in fundamental physics) is genius constrained. The biggest discoveries in physics in the last two decades were the Higgs boson and gravitational waves. Both LIGO and LHC were massively collaborative efforts. The bulk of the work was done by PhD students who were smart, but not super-geniuses.
Now, you can argue that the puzzle pieces for a grand unified theory are there, and it would simply take a theoretical physicist with an IQ two SDs above the smartest person alive today to figure it out, but that is not a very good sales pitch to the larger society -- fund physics so that you get a 1 in 20 chance that we will find an equation which will make physicists really happy but may or may not have much practical use.
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
1hr ago
This is the kind of minor pedantry I actually appreciate!
No_one
1hr ago
This generalized antipathy has basically been extended to any use of AI at all, so even though the WorldCon committee is insisting there has been no use of generative AI, no final decisions made by AI, and that AI has nothing to do with any Hugo nominations or decisions, people are still Very Very Angry that it was used at all.
I predict the fallout ensuing from eventually discovering their new POC/female high performers are deftly using LLMs to write their works is going to destroy the woke captured legacy publishing industry and the associated awards.
Lots of people are using LLMs to write not just code but also stories. It's inevitable.
e.g. recently this was a pretty big chunk of free Deepseek usage. https://www.novelcrafter.com/
orthoxerox
If you can read this, you're using a custom theme
1hr ago
Are they truly independent? Because I didn't get that from your article.
hydroacetylene
1hr ago
Joseph Smith and Brigham Young did not have access to Orthodox Judaism, correct, but there’s definitely convergent evolutionary similarities. Just like with early twentieth century Catholic practice, similar challenges lead to similar solutions.
For me personally, I intensely dislike AI content and the reasons are the following:
- The quality (not quantity!) of AI output is consistently subhuman and also consistently overestimated, so the heuristic of "all AI output is unworthy slop" is reasonable.
- If AIs improve to above-human levels across the board, it won't end well for humans, so it's advisable to keep the primacy of human interests in mind.
If someone tells me they used an AI tool to do their job more efficiently, I immediately assume that any of the following are the case:
- Their job is trivially easy.
- They had to invest a disproportionate amount of time double-checking the AI output and would have been better off doing without.
- They did a sloppy job that only passed muster because nobody looked too closely.
For the Hugo awards panelist pre-selection, I assume that all three are true.
quiet_NaN
1hr ago
I think they mean that the AI was not used to create media for consumption by an audience, thus threatening the livelihood of artists or authors. An AI which only outputs dry spreadsheets is presumably seen as less of a threat, because accountants have little clot in the SF ecosystem.
quiet_NaN
1hr ago
Perhaps not human-on-human exactly, but with the main characters having roughly human-level intelligence and probably also some human-like drives. A story about an ant from the perspective of that ant, which likely can not even tell the other ants from its colony apart, and might reasonable operate on "walk on trail. pick up food. walk towards colony." will probably not be very engaging for humans. And a story about an ASI written from the perspective of the ASI would be utterly incomprehensible, worse than if I picked up a book on a random mathematical field and began to read it in the middle.
So most SF AIs are actually human level, and sometimes little more than human characters wrapped in tinfoil. C3PO, Data from TNG, positronic robots in Asimov, Murderbot, HAL 9000, Marvin.
If SF authors concede that ASI is possible, they mostly make it verboten and thus irrelevant through some Butlerian Jihad (Dune).
The major exception which comes to mind are the Culture novels, which are told from the perspective of the human pets kept by the ASIs which form the Culture.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
1hr ago
Personally I think the question of what the purpose of rationalism is has been answered: it was to create the AI safety movement.
This was never a question - Yudkowsky set up the so-called rationalist community with the explicit purpose of creating a future generation of AI safety researchers. Or rather AI researchers more generally, because at the point when he did it (LessWrong was founded in 2009) AlphaGo was still years away, academic AI (both the GOFAI and neural nets factions) was in a long-term rut, and the state of the art was machine learning algorithms for recommending viral content. As of 2009, Yudkowsky thought that the problem was "build an aligned AI slowly and secretly" because nobody else was doing anything he expected to lead to working AI.
My assumption is that an underrated source of weirdness in the rationalists community is that the first thing Yudkowsky did to promote this community was to write a viral Harry Potter fanfic, meaning that the 2nd generation of rationalists (after the Overcoming Bias readers) were pulled in from Harry Potter fandom, bringing everything wrong with that community into "Rationalism".
ApplePie
1hr ago
Think of those five dimensions as five indepenent, unrelated personality traits. They aren't clusters, and the fat fetishists aren't really a tiny group, any more than "smart people" are a tiny group. Every person attracted to women could roll up a character on 3d6. For example:
Robert Heinlein
18th level Science Fiction Author
Alignment: Chaotic-Libertarian
Attributes:
- Curve-Lover: 14
- Great Personalities: 16
- Barbie-Lover: 9
- MILF-Chaser: 11
- TradWife-Lover: 4
Vulnerabilities: Nudism, divorce
There's pictures floating around of what looks like MICA shaped debris (a fairly exclusive European missile that mounts on the Rafale).
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