domain:alethios.substack.com
Hopefully this exchange isn't too tedious to you. I have obviously not gotten as deeply into continental philosophy as you have, so I hope this doesn't feel like explaining the concept of addition to an infant.
Oh, not sure why you removed the Paul Klee section, I was going to comment on it...
The reason why I removed it is precisely for the reason you stated: he is an artist and not a philosopher. I quoted him initially because IIRC Adorno was influenced by Klee's art and writings, but later decided that it would just be better to quote Adorno himself instead of doing so indirectly through the writings he was influenced by.
Almost all the specific books I've recommended throughout this thread are approachable and can be read like any other book, and they do make coherent sense, such that you could explain them to analytic philosophers without too much trouble.
I have been working my way through The Aesthetic Dimension and already have quibbles with the approach just a small amount of the way in. Perhaps this is a mistake and perhaps I should read more before I comment, but:
On Page 2 Marcuse enumerates the following tenets of Marxist aesthetics: Art is transformed along with the social structure and its means of production. One's social class affects the art that gets produced, and the only true art is that made by an ascending class; the art made by a descending class is "decadent". Realism corresponds most accurately to "the social relationships" and is the correct art form. Etc.
Marcuse's critique is that Marxism prioritises materialism and material reality too much over the subjective experiences of individuals, and that even when it tries to address the latter its focus is on the collective and not the individual. The Marxist opinion of subjectivity as a tool of the bourgeoisie, in his opinion, is incorrect and in fact "with the affirmation of the inwardness of subjectivity, the individual steps out of the network of exchange relationships and exchange values, withdraws from the reality of bourgeois society, and enters another dimension of existence. Indeed, this escape from reality led to an experience which could (and did) become a powerful force in invalidating the actually prevailing bourgeois values, namely, by shifting the locus of the individual's realization from the domain of the performance principle and the profit motive to that of the inner resources of the human being: passion, imagination, conscience."
This claim doesn't feel meaningful to me. Subjectivity could and did become a powerful force in challenging the bourgeoisie? Would be nice to get some examples of this, but I doubt he has any concrete ones. The topic of whether focusing on one's inner world invalidates or bolsters bourgeois values is not really amenable to systematic inquiry. But I would say a person's "inner experience" is very complex, kind of nonsensical and pretty much orthogonal to any political or social system you could put in place, and as such it will never map onto anything that could exist in reality (and that includes Marxism), that's not specific to aspects of capitalism like the performance principle and profit motive. The bureaucratic machinations of a central planner are just as alien to it as decentralised market-based allocation and the incentives it creates.
I guess I can somewhat legibly interpret it if I assume the truth of the critical theorist belief that their ideas are uniquely liberating, but I think that their proscriptions for society are just as artificial as anything that came before. Human emotional experience is so disordered and contradictory that expecting it to align with any model of social organisation is a mistake. People are a hodgepodge of instincts and reflexes acquired across hundreds of millions of years of geological time, some of which are laughably obsolete; it won't agree with any principle at all. Hell, it's not even compatible with granting people liberation, whatever that means. Even if you wave a magic wand and give people full freedom the expression of their instincts will often inherently conflict with the wishes of another, and in addition humans get terrified when presented with unbounded choice, and make decisions that don't maximise utility for themselves. The full realisation of human desires is an impossible task. It will always be stultified in some way or another.
This is, to me, a good example of what I said before: "You read it, you feel like it is true or profound in some deep unarticulable way, and follow the author down the garden path for that reason alone." I can't really reason my way into the conclusion that Marcuse has reached here, and in fact the more I think about that passage the less comprehensible I find it to be. The Lacan passage seems similar, but I have not read it in full context yet so I won't judge. But the reason why analytic philosophy tends to be restricted in its scope compared to continental philosophy is because there are rules that govern what can be legibly said within that philosophical framework.
I suppose I want and need a lot more substantiation and rigour in my academic work than what many of these writers are capable of offering. If you look at my post history, that becomes very clear; I think I demand it more than even your average Mottizen does.
anti_dan
1d ago
The sheer amount of surgical techniques, mechanical/robot assistance, and drug development alone. Not to mention computerization and millions of other improvements neither of us know about too.
I worked in medical device development early in my career. Its not that these are not very impressive technological innovations, it is that people were perfectly capable of living to their 80s in 1776, and the reasons so few did had largely been addressed by the 50s. Lots of development has been in surguries. I'd much rather have surgery now than in 1955.
Ill freely admit I am a bit biased, my work was in life saving pediatric implants, which is not nearly the size of the "relieve grandpa joe's pain a little bit" part of the industry.
ThomasdelVasto
Κύριε, ποίησόν με ὄργανον τῆς ἀγάπης σου
1d ago
What do folks on the Motte think of the "Waves" glasses? Here is the link, quoting the short tweet:
introducing Waves, camera glasses for creators.
record in stealth. livestream all day.
pre-order now.
The idea seems to be another in the long string of VC-funded tech companies who seek to make their name on being controversial in the beginning, and slowly becoming socially accepted. It's extremely frustrating that this profit model seems to work, but we can't deny it does (some of the time) at this point.
On the one hand I'm deeply incensed at the thought of other people recording me without my consent. On the other hand... we already waived these rights two decades ago with the Patriot Act, effectively allowing the government and major corporations to spy on us all the time with no repercussions. I personally find it hard to be sympathetic to outrage against these glasses when our nation's legal system has completely bankrupted any notion of a personal right not to be filmed anyway.
I'm not sure which side of the culture war this benefits either. As it stands, it seems a pretty predictable evolution of trends we've been seeing in privacy and technology for a while in the West.
SubstantialFrivolity
I'm not even supposed to be here today
1d ago
I have no idea why you are nitpicking me so hard over the fact I didn't say "when safe". Yes, of course it's when safe. But the same is true for a red light too. You aren't expected to stop the instant a light turns red, because that would be impossible and unsafe in some situations. Yet I don't think you would nitpick someone for saying "it's illegal to enter the intersection when the light is red", because everyone understands the "if it's safe to stop" implication. So don't nitpick me for using similar language about yellow lights, it's a weirdly isolated demand for rigor.
Magusoflight
1d ago
Kind of a tangential question but
What’s the source on high IQ people becoming less attractive looking? I’ve only ever read that it’s positive for men and neutral for women
hahaha welcome to imposter syndrome sucker!
but no really, overindexing on all of the ways you think you suck and how crazy your brain is is generally a sign of intelligence and competence
not that you'll believe any of this
What? It’s very obviously not illegal to enter an intersection with a yellow light. The light changes from green to yellow with no warning. There are situations where it is physically impossible to brake that fast. I assume you mean “when safe?” But that gives a lot of cover to the defendant.
I’m personally more familiar with the implicit law, which is that yellows are timed such that they stay on long enough for drivers going a reasonable speed to come to a complete stop while braking comfortably before it goes red. So when the light changes, you either don’t have enough time to brake comfortably and smoothly pass the yellow before it turns, have enough time to stop and do so, or break the law by either running a red or jam on the gas to get through - which is, of course, both speeding and reckless driving.
Reading the opinion, Russell was driving above the 55mph speed limit. I’ll allow that his speed was more like 70 than it was 60. He was apparently 200ish feet from the intersection when he noticed the yellow. If so, that’s on the order of 2 seconds to come to a complete stop, unless I’m doing my math wrong. 55 gives you another half second. That’s a slam on the brakes situation, not a reasonable halt. At that point, it seems like either Russell was derelict in not watching for the light until too late, or else he could not stop safely even at the posted limit when the light turned and was totally in his rights to proceed. I’m surprised this doesn’t show up in the opinion. Were they expecting him to burn rubber because it flicked yellow?
@ToaKraka ‘s summary is outright incorrect in one place, in fact, and the truth makes the situation even more redeeming for Russell. The summary says that Jasmine was stopping at the red. The opinion says that SHE WAS ENTERING THE INTERSECTION BECAUSE SHE DID NOT BELIEVE SHE COULD STOP SAFELY, and at time of the crash, was ABOUT TO ENTER THE INTERSECTION (presumably yellow at the time). So why is Russell more at fault here for entering an intersection which the plaintiff was herself entering even later? Reading the opinion, they keep talking about the plaintiff being a young mother and go into great detail on the injuries. I suspect that’s the reason, and perhaps also that they didn’t expect the ex-con who actually caused the crash to be able to pay a cent.
If I were on this jury I’d probably hang it. This looks a hell of a lot like a miscarriage of justice to me. The appeal court, I judge less strongly. They’re right to defer heavily to the jury. But putting 60% on Russell seems crazy. Splitting in reverse would make more sense. But given that the appellate opinion states that the decision hinges in part on the fact that Russell did not testify mitigating factors like whether he considered whether he could stop safely, I wonder whether this whole mess is just the product of a lawyer gap between the parties.
EDIT: spent a minute looking at car crash videos to try and gauge how fast Russell might have been traveling in order to absolutely crush the woman’s car. Assuming he was traveling at 70 and lost half of his momentum hitting the truck, he and she would have collided at a combined speed of 80mph. 55mph crashes with a stationary object are enough to start compromising the cabin. 80 is, as far as I can tell, kill you dead territory. Bringing this down to 70 would probably still be enough. So I’m not sure that the prosecution’s assertion that he must have been driving in safely holds water. But of course that’s right back to the question of whether the lawyers brought proper receipts on the basic math here. Messy stuff, honestly makes highway driving sound a lot less appealing.
I mean obviously there is a major qualitative difference between an LLM's capabilities and Google's. I don't even think Google counts as knowledge work, because it's just a fancy directory with a math formula to rank pages. The alternative was basically a directory or keyword search, neither of which require knowledge work either to assemble or run. And critically, Google is free to use, so it's an exceptionally poor example to choose.
Just the ability of an LLM to summarize documents that you feed it is already enough, in my mind, for it to count as a kind of knowledge work. I hinted at that phrasing for a reason, if you check wikipedia's entry for "knowledge workers" you'll see that it's more or less people who are thinking for a living, and reducing the job to simply that of "looking the right stuff up" is significantly underselling it. A lawyer for example is not merely an information processing algorithm, even if her job may be primarily finding the relevant court case precedents and then applying them in systematic fashion to partial boilerplate motions and filings. It takes a degree of contextual understanding along with a degree of judgement to produce the proper output, and those elements are missing from Google entirely (at least in its traditional and early iterations, since the precise algorithms are highly proprietary, but I don't think this changes the core categorization)
OliveTapenade
1d ago
Muslims circumcise themselves as well. Muslim Palestinians are just as circumcised as Jewish Israelis, so that doesn't function as a tribal distinction any more.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
1d ago
We're already in a world full of violent, sadistic grapists. How much sillier can it get?
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
1d ago
The VG movie (actually I lied there are actually two but one is more a side-story) is actually more of an epilogue of sorts, so I'd strongly recommend watching or trying the series first instead. IIRC the show starts to truly get going by the third episode (and if you're the impatient type you could honestly start there and be OK), but the most memorable and highest rated ones are a little back-loaded in the season.
I've tried a few episodes of Dungeon Meshi but it didn't really hook me, so I can't speak to the praise there.
However, with Frieren I'd say two episodes is the minimum to get a proper feel (concludes a bit of a mini-arc), although the story (such as it is) doesn't properly take shape until the fourth episode and we don't meet the last major companion travelling with Frieren until the fifth, so although I'd still consider it excellent it is very much a slow burn, contemplative kind of show. With that said, it makes the smaller pieces of action even more memorable, but they are still sparse. Somewhat famously, in episode seven or so, we find out that although the show doesn't have an actual big bad (the major plot after all is that she already helped save the world) there are still a few demons out and about that didn't get defeated along with their leader. These demons are worse than irredeemable (in fact they pretend to have emotions and feelings to disguise their true identity as pure predators of humanity) which at least in anime terms is a bit of a trope reversal.
None of that is to say that a certain minimum is required for most shows, but you know how it is, "will I like this" is a tricky question to answer anime or no. One of the only anime where I'd consider it truly mandatory is My Star (Oshi no Ko) where the first episode is a full hour or so on purpose, knowing that you need the full time for it to make sense (also a fun show, about the dark side of the entertainment/movie industry, saying more is a spoiler) because of said major spoiler that changes the course of the show entirely occurring at the end of it. I think Madoka Magica is classically the other, where episode 3 or so has a major twist, but I haven't seen it myself so I couldn't say.
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
1d ago
For the demand thing, it's not like the first time I tell her to do something causes a melt down. If it was that clear-cut, it would probably be easier to figure out. I can tell her to put on her shoes 10 days in a row and on the 11th day she panics, keeps taking off and putting her socks on, runs away, something weird.
And it can be asking her to do something she wants to do. There are lots of times where I plan something nice for her, something she's familiar with and knows she likes, and then when the time comes to do it she starts to act scared without being able to articulate why. "Something bad is going to happen." No, why would you think that!
Now that I have PDA in mind, it has been helping to understand some things. In Bluey, there is an episode where there's a "Magic Stuffed Animal" who makes the Dad do whatever the kids say. Kind of like Simon Says. My 6 year old and my 7 year old started playing that game together. My 7 year old was really into it for a few minutes, and then suddenly reacted violently to the stuffed animal. Before it would have been exhibit #100 of what a weird child she is. Now I'm like, "Maybe A shouldn't play that game."
SkoomaDentist
1d ago
Said no competent engineer outside software engineering.
Oh man. In contrast, I'm constantly juggling work from multiple clients and find myself exhausted when the weekend rolls around, yet I still get the sense that I'm not doing enough/working fast enough/taking on as many new jobs as I should. I'm a tax accountant, and most of what I do is annoyingly detail-oriented work where even the smallest slip-up can attract the attention of the tax office and negatively impact a client (even when the problem was caused by the tax office themselves in the first place, yes they fucking suck and I could write a whole essay about how shit they are). The regulatory landscape also constantly changes. The staff are assigned production targets to meet, and whether one can do so or not hugely impacts on evaluations of their performance. Towards the end of the week I find my ability to concentrate goes to shit; one can only maintain proper executive functioning for so long, and I wasn't extremely good at that in the first place.
The kind of people this job attracts are of a certain breed. My manager recently had to rush over to China because her grandmother was dying of cancer, and even when she was on leave there she was still responding to work emails every now and then. I don't think I'm cut out for this level of grind in a job, and as a result constantly feel like I'm going to get fired. I spend the weekend not working on hobbies or doing anything I actually like but just recovering, or doing some extra work that I don't record on my timesheet in order to make my efficiency look better (then struggling through the following work week while cursing my life). My hobbies have fallen by the wayside, I don't read nearly as much, and my engagement on TheMotte has nosedived as a result. I wish my job was more chill.
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
1d ago
That would require me to examine my preferences in depth, and I'm not sure I'll produce an acceptable reason to anime fans. Basically it's never been a genre I've sought out. I appreciate manga for the artwork, and it drives me nuts seeing people now scroll so quickly through the panels. Short answer is probably I'm old.
Quantumfreakonomics
1d ago
Besides paper trails, the other key is knowing where to apply pressure. Pharmacies don't care about patient reviews. Every pharmacy is below 3-stars on Google. You have nothing to threaten them with from being pissed. The entity the pharmacy can't afford to piss off is the insurance company, and insurance companies have a legal obligation to provide medical care to policy holders. If their in-network providers are unable to provide medical care to patients, that's the insurance company's problem, and in turn they will quickly make it the pharmacy's problem.
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
1d ago
when @JTarrou writes
But IQ is a very limited test, and it predicts only one thing. The capacity for academic achievement. It does not predict talent, ambition, honesty, decency, morality, high income or high achievement in general. In fact, the true IQ test can only be given to small children, because it's a relative predictor of how they might do in school in the future, nothing else. Higher IQ scores mean essentially "learns academic stuff faster".
and
So if black people have lower average IQ scores, and IQ scores college aptitude, and we're discriminating based on college degrees........I think we can locate rather precisely where the systemic racism is happening.
I think he's saying college degrees are not a signal for merit. The fact that our society reorganized itself to require a college degree, and that black people have a harder time getting college degrees is a sign of real systemic racism at work and leftists are to blame because they eat college degree credentialism shit up.
It's a provocative claim because it's both embracing race-IQ but also dismissing IQ as not that solid a predictor. Therefore I'm asking if he'd be okay with actually just giving degrees out with participation trophy energy.
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
1d ago
the way I parse JTarrou's argument, the degree is already not good for anything that useful
ActuallyATleilaxuGhola
Axolotl Tank Class of '24
1d ago
Even as a tattoo hater, I have to admit that this is pretty neat.
FtSoA
1d ago
Because (A) I've seen JTarrou post in that sub and (B) it's a sub that allows wrongthink. Usually trans wrongthink, but it's actually a pretty solid free speech zone.
fribble
1d ago
In your position, I would pursue it. You can gather information without doing anything. You can take the babiest of steps as you want to. It can be really weird what works with kids.
Does your kid react to all demands in the same way? If I told my kid she had to put on sneakers before we could go to the park, she would lose her mind. But if I said we could go to the park but "the rules" said we needed to put on sneakers, that was different. She also loved racing, so we would both put on sneakers and see who could do it the fastest. Or race against a timer.
This sounds like a real tough situation. FWIW, ADHD meds worked wonders for my kid and in retrospect I wish I had gotten her started on them sooner. I waited til middle school, figuring scaffolding her environment and plenty of physical activity were working. They weren't. Her self esteem took a beating.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
1d ago
It’s not just social media, but regular media, education and control mechanisms like the ability for you to be fired for saying something online, or convincing others to shun friends and even family who say things that the regime doesn’t like. Americans are saturated in propaganda and unless you’re paying attention you probably don’t even notice it.
2rafa
1d ago
I wouldn’t say epistemically corrupt so much as irrelevant and childish. If an entire social circle in 1895 imagined hypothetical problems that might emerge from their fantasy of powered flight and then, come 1903, tried to graft that theoretical foundation (which was wholly wrong about how the mechanics would actually work, and indeed didn’t think very much about the mechanics at all) onto the plane as it was being developed, they would have been dismissed.
Google glass was tried like a decade ago. This is just that, incognito, with less features, right?
To me it seems kinda lame, and POV video sucks.
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