domain:streamable.com
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
1hr ago
As others have already been kind enough to point out, the mod team asks that top-level posts within the CWR thread have more to them than a bare-link. Ideally, with more substantive commentary or an explanation of why this worth time and attention. At the absolute bare minimum, quotes of the source material where relevant.
TowardsPanna
1hr ago
The way out of delusion and suffering, of course.
Shrike
1hr ago
There is potentially a discussion to be had about how Catholics got into that position, and I'd guess it has to do with the quite large and influential Catholic education system.
I would also just add that "evangelical" continues to be much more of a signal for "right-wing" than "Catholic" and so I think Catholics are an easy place for righties to get people who agree with them on most everything without also having a religious affiliation that is listed under I AGREE WITH RIGHTIES ON MOST EVERYTHING in the dictionary. (Obviously evangelicals are more nuanced than that, but in terms of public optics I do think it matters a bit.)
As per your comment, I would not be surprised if this actually changes, and Catholicism becomes smaller but much more visibly right-wing as older generations of leaders die out (and as the left shifts to be more and more hostile to religion and away from old Catholic-friendly patronage networks). I foresee Catholic thought-leadership staffed with evangelical foot-soldiers as being a very potent coalition in the future, despite their cracks.
The trouble with untruth is that it is hard in advantage to know when it will be harmless and when it will lead to disaster.
The same can be said about the truth. In a sense the sentence itself is highly paradoxical, as it by itself is also not true and just a rationalist myth - vast majority of them would prefer lies if it increased utils, as they are utilitarians. This can be even trivially demonstrated by people who refuse to tell white lies and make their lives unnecessarily harder and miserable for other people as well. I am sure that even rationalists can be employed let's say in sales or service sector and pretend that they are thrilled to serve their customers instead of telling the "truth". The only thing that the truth destroys in that case is their job prospects with no upside.
I do not understand why rationalist love this sentence as it obviously goes against their main moral philosophy of utilitarianism. Most people - even rationalists - are not against what they consider white lies either individually (e.g. lying to Kant's axe murderer asking where your wife is) or society wide myths (e.g. everybody is equal before law, every vote counts etc). The actual sentence should therefore be something like
That which can be destroyed by the truth should be, except if destroying it would have huge cost in terms of negative utils
Which is basically in line with other moral philosophies as well - most of them like the truth unless it goes against other key values in that system.
quiet_NaN
1hr ago
Meta: This is more or less a bare link.
Did you know that if you start a line with the greater-than character, themotte will show that line as a quotation? Also, most browsers allow you to mark text on websites and "copy" it by holding the Ctrl (or Command on Apple), then pressing the "C" key (Ctrl-C). With Ctrl-V, you can "paste" that text into a text field.
Using quotations and copy pasting together, you can do something like this (Click on the view source button at the end of this comment to see how it is done):
I LOVE DANGER ZONE writes:
Left-wingers tend to think of standpoint epistemology stuff, or various kinds of language policing, as a kind of consolation prize for minorities in an economically and legally subordinate position. Scouring grant proposals for non-inclusive language, pointing out microagressions, asking people to defer to your lived experience, these are tools for non-dominant minorities to begin to build the case for economic and legal equality. The dominant majority doesn’t need those things, the idea that the dominant majority would be jealous of those tools and want to use them is absurd.
[...]
I think to a very large extent left-wing culture in the US was totally unprepared for that kind of jealousy. Because they sort of thought of themselves as underdogs it was really hard to process the idea that right-wing culture contained a ton of people who desperately wanted to be underdogs in the same way, who didn’t view those things as scraps left over by the powerful, but instead thought of it as what power looks like.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
2hr ago
I'm not left of center, but I'll comment anyway.
Of course he's correct. Of course people want to feel like underdogs, of course they want to feel like they have their own "secret club" that the Squares In Power don't have access to. Like, duh. The right is very much not immune to this. Being the underdog lends moral credibility to your cause, it galvanizes your base, there's an intrinsic thrill to the feeling of powerlessness itself, etc.
But, and here's the kicker, all of this applies to the left too. And he's so close to getting it, he's describing everything perfectly, "for the right it's really all about their libidinal investment in their own symbolic matrix of floating signifiers, they love the struggle itself more than what they struggle for, the goal of every political cause is ultimately just to reproduce itself", and I'm nodding along going yes yes yes... but then he has to tack on, "but of course the left isn't like this at all, when we talk about microaggressions it's just a purely rational response to objective conditions of oppression, there's nothing libidinal to analyze there, no siree", and I'm like... no you were so close! Everything you were saying about the right applies to the left too, they're exactly the same in this regard.
I not infrequently have this experience when reading posts from leftists, where they're right on the ball and they're so close to understanding everything, and then at the last minute they veer off into "...but of course, we are Good and they are Evil, and that is the chasm that separates us". Their ideology is axiomatically predicated on the explicit denial of this aspect of their own psyche, so they remain forever blind to it.
ThomasdelVasto
Κύριε, ποίησόν με ὄργανον τῆς ἀγάπης σου
2hr ago
Generally the mods want a little more for a top level comment btw, at least summarizing the link preferably.
sun_the_second
could survive a COD lobby and a gay furry discord server
2hr ago
"Wrong but you can't tell how wrong it is" seems to be worse than "wrong and you can immediately tell that it is".
This is afaik in artifact of excluding violent deaths in the statistics, not the reality on the ground. Obviously it is silly to exclude violent deaths but include childbirth if you want to understand the differences in life expectancy between men and women, yet it is all to common. See for example this letter in the journal of the royal society of medicine.
In many known societies, males had far higher violent deaths rates, to such a degree that adult women would frequently outnumber adult men. For a particularly extreme example see the paraguyan triple war, at the end of which women outnumbered men 10:1. Only in long peace times you would have higher life expectancy for men. This also isn't just due to large-scale wars with modern weapons in the more developed societies; hunter gatherers often have even higher violent deaths rates "just" due to skirmishes.
Obviously we do not really have reliable data of actual life expectancy for most of history, but I wouldn't be particularly surprised if the ancestor statistic is a simple result of enough men dying a violent death sufficiently early so that the 2:1 is simply the gender ratio in the adult population.
Rov_Scam
2hr ago
I"m left of center, and I'd love to help, but I read that comment about five times and I'm not sure what you're asking. It would probably have been better to write a gloss of the (article? comment?) and ask a specific question rather than post it and ask if it's "accurate". Now's your chance.
OliveTapenade
2hr ago
I hope it's clear that I don't consider political influence within the United States to be any reflection of the merits of a tradition. I'm in the devout rump of mainline Protestants - I am, on my typology here, definitely one of the losers. Meanwhile many of the churches that I think will be relatively strong in the future - Mormons, Baptists, and so on - are in my eyes either heretics, or borderline-heretics. There is, I think, probably an interesting book to be written on Christian heresy and its contours in America. (And not the Ross Douthat book. A different one.)
At any rate, that the Orthodox have no political influence is not a criticism of them. The position I suspect the Orthodox are in, and will continue to be in going forward, is the one from an aside in this old article:
However, [Rod Dreher's] situation is complicated. Given his own membership in the Orthodox Church, one would expect him to have quite high regard for civil society, or at least for the magistrate’s role in cultivating and preserving Christian society. That said, one astute friend remarked that because Orthodox Political Theology has such an expansive view of the power of the magistrate, perhaps Orthodox Christians default into a kind of Anabaptist separatism in nations where the magistrate is not Orthodox.
That is, the ideal Orthodox political order, historically, has been one in which the church is to some extent integrated with the state - as in the Byzantine empire, or the Russian empire. Spiritual and temporal authority are intertwined. However, when one practices Orthodoxy in a state where there is zero realistic chance of such integration occurring, Orthodox communities in practice engage in a kind of 'retreat', focusing on internal cultivation. If there is a visible surge of interest in Orthodoxy at the moment, my hope is that much of that interest relates to that question of spiritual cultivation or maturation, especially as a community, within a political order that grows increasingly impious.
I wonder if it might be interesting there to look at the experiences of Orthodox communities in the Ottoman empire. I know very little about that, but it springs to mind as a good case study for how to maintain Christian faith intergenerationally while living in a proudly non-Christian political order.
It is my hope, at least, that there is more of a turn towards the obligations of personal Christian moral formation. My tradition is Methodist and I have noticed, at least among more traditionalist Methodists, some interest in the counter-cultural disciplines of the early Methodists. Maybe we need more Holy Clubs. Whatever church context it occurs in, though, I think there is a desire for more rigorous moral formation among some younger Christians, epsecially the more intellectual types.
You mention the growth of a kind of 'Western folk religion'. I'm not sure how far I want to go with that. There's a sense in which there are already Western folk religions like that, especially in America, which has long had both a civic religion and an implicit set of American spiritual norms that cross multiple denominations and religious traditions. Those religions are evolving as the cultural terrain changes, but I don't think a new one is coming into being from nothing. There will be some sort of spirituality - nature abhors a vacuum, including a spiritual vacuum - but I suspect more of a modification of what is already present, rather than something brand new.
quiet_NaN
2hr ago
Minor technical nitpick: I think something "open source" is carrying a bunch of connotations which do not apply to LLMs. It is a bit like if I called a CC-BY-SA photograph "open source".
To the degree that LLMs are like traditional software, the source code -- the human-readable inputs which decide what a program does -- would be a neural network framework plus the training data (most of which is crawled/pirated rather than open source licensed).
Compiling would be the process of training.
In normal open source software, almost all of the effort goes into creating the code base. Compilation is basically free, and you compile your code a zillion times in the process of building your codebase. With LLMs, training is really expensive. Nobody downloads your sources, everybody just takes your binary, the weights.
With a normal open source project, you can easily git clone the sources and compile. If you run into a problem or need the program to do something differently, you just edit the sources and compile again, and if you think your changes might be generally useful, you make a pull request upstream to start the process of getting them into the official version.
With LLMs what you git clone are giant inscrutable matrices. If you are really good, you might be able to tweak the weights a bit so that the LLM will talk about the Golden Gate Bridge all the time. But this is a gimmick, not a general improvement. If you want to actually make the model more useful for purposes you have in common with others, you need RLHF, which is computationally expensive again.
This is an important difference between how traditional open source software interacts with the users and how "open source" LLMs interact with the users. I would thus propose to use the name "open weights" for LLMs, which carries none of the connotations of "users will contribute bug fixes".
ThomasdelVasto
Κύριε, ποίησόν με ὄργανον τῆς ἀγάπης σου
2hr ago
Correct! Hence why I said "Christian orthodoxy" as opposed to "Orthodox." I admit that the language get a bit confusing ahaha, thanks for clarifying.
ThomasdelVasto
Κύριε, ποίησόν με ὄργανον τῆς ἀγάπης σου
2hr ago
@Blueberry this is what I meant if you're curious.
ThomasdelVasto
Κύριε, ποίησόν με ὄργανον τῆς ἀγάπης σου
2hr ago
Mostly a set of techniques to help settle the mind from the vast distractions in the modern world. A more direct praxis for us to enter states where we can perceive the spiritual world of angels, demons, etc, and get in touch with God.
The ancient Christians recommended meditation or watchfulness before entering into any prayer whatsoever. In the modern world I believe that almost none of us truly are in that mental state due to our myriad distractions. I think Buddhist meditation and understandings could be quite useful for revitalizing direct, contemplative experience of the divine amongst Christians.
ThomasdelVasto
Κύριε, ποίησόν με ὄργανον τῆς ἀγάπης σου
2hr ago
Not being against the Gays is one of the more salient points
No, this is not true at all from my perspective. Not only is it not one of the things Buddhism offers, Buddhism itself is strongly against gays, and also women. If you look into the roots of the Buddhist tradition there is far stronger sentiment and prohibitions against sexual perversion than in mainstream Christianity.
That being said, I do think the modern Church has a perhaps too myopic focus on sexual sin sometimes.
ThomasdelVasto
Κύριε, ποίησόν με ὄργανον τῆς ἀγάπης σου
3hr ago
Thanks for the blunt takes! Interesting views here, very realpolitik. I do agree with most of your take on the Protestant denominations in the U.S., seems as if their cultural moment is fading. Sometimes I wonder if a new religion will come in to pick up the slack, like the "western folk religion" @Stefferi mentioned above, but more formalized.
ThomasdelVasto
Κύριε, ποίησόν με ὄργανον τῆς ἀγάπης σου
3hr ago
Great comment. Yeah I do think that the Western folk religion is quite dominant sadly, especially given how uhhh.... poor it seems to be at actually improving people's lives or leading to useful social organization.
I had to laugh at the (often imagined.) All too true.
Listening
3hr ago
This isn't really something I'm commenting on, but it is culture-war related and I do genuinely want to know, so...
Can anyone who considers themselves left of center comment on the accuracy or lack thereof of this post? Is this a thing, or more something particular to this specific guy.
quiet_NaN
3hr ago
Yes, seems like a storm in the teapot. Anyone doing statistical analysis and worried about the effect of trans people will want more information on what the column actually tracks. Simply saying "the column name is gender, therefore it refers exactly to ..." is always precarious.
but it's hilarious to me that the conservative administration was basically ceding the point here by differentiating at the schema level that "sex" is different than "gender".
I think the steelman of the Republicans would be "there is only biological sex, and 'gender' is a word popularized by our enemies to imply that social roles associated with a sex are worth tracking separately".
But yes, that level of language policing is a bit funny. Not that the woke left has never purged Problematic terms when they were in power, but at least they had the fig leaf of 'it is not about ideology, but the bad term is hurting really people!'
As soon as these countries reach some development/income threshold, the floodgates will open. Syrian Civil war caused huge exodus despite it being only country of 23 million in 2011. In hypothetical continuation of Africa's World War in 2050 let's say involving Nigeria with 400 million people living there, or complete collapse of Egypt if they will have huge war with Ethiopia with combined population of also 400 million, this will completely change the calculation.
And again, I do not think this necessarily needs to be some single source of issues. It is just one of possible outside pressures that will destabilize already fragile situation inside the West.
georgioz
3hr ago
It most certainly does not. The average human alive has twice as many female ancestors as men.
This is an often cited fact, but it hides more than it shows. Historically women had lower life expectancy compared to men thanks to horrible death rate during child birth. Yes, they may have managed to reproduce - but so what. It was their family, mostly males who took care of now motherless children. Without men these children would not survive.
Atheism offers that too, without all the window dressing.
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