domain:astralcodexten.substack.com
roystgnr
2d ago
I think "nonsense" applies a little to the pop-culture version of MBTI, where you're either e.g. "a T" or "an F". That's like having a tape measure with only one marking that tells you if you're "tall" or "short". That's not how to measure samples from a unimodal distribution! But it's still not complete nonsense, any more than our hypothetical tape measure would be; height and personality traits are still real things.
The more sophisticated tests that return results like "60%T 40%F" probably aren't as useful as OCEAN, because if you want to find the principal components of a low-dimensional manifold then Factor Analysis outperforms Jung Plus Guessin', but they're vastly better than horoscopes.
YoungAchamian
2d ago
I owe you responses to the other posts, but I am a slow & lazy writer with a penchant for procrastination, and lurking. I'll answer this first because it's a quick answer. My motivations is that I'm deeply sceptical about people and the world. This is only partly related to LLMs but starts deeper. I'm sceptical and cynical about human motivation, human behavior, and human beliefs. I'm not really interested in weighing in about "intelligence" that's a boring definitional game. I use LLMs, they are useful, I use them to write code or documents stuff in my professional life. I use the deep research function to do lit reviews. They are useful, doesn't mean I think they are sentient or even approaching sentience. You are barking up the wrong tree on that one, misattributing opinions to me that I in no way share.
fmac
Ask me about bike lanes
2d ago
Karma repost/farming bots have been happening for so, so, long
Like way before COVID, probably close to a decade ago
They were rampant on AskReddit when I was in university
fmac
Ask me about bike lanes
2d ago
Other than that Reddit-like sites have past their peak
What is replacing them?
roystgnr
2d ago
magicalkittycat
2d ago
don't sell guns or sex
Those aren't speech. Those are definitely questions of autonomy, but they aren't speech. Which makes me think we're both having different conversations here.
Quantumfreakonomics
2d ago
There is massive latent demand for sex in the economy. Twitch generates about $2 billion in gross revenue annually. OnlyFans generates about $6 billion. It's just a better buisiness model if you are a young woman streamer to be titillating.
For me:
- About 100 miles
- About 150 miles
- About a quarter mile (Holsteins)
- About 35 miles
- About five miles
- About 110 miles
roystgnr
2d ago
like many Russian soldiers he was wandering around by himself during the day
I know you said "many", not "most", so I'm not really contradicting you, but I still can't resist the traditional reply image.
Even if it's almost a tautology that the Russian soldiers we see are the ones we can see, though, you've got to wonder why those ones didn't learn better. My theory is perhaps a stupid one, too informed by my having tried out Project Zomboid recently: you make what seems like a little mistake or you get a little unlucky, your position is revealed, and you find yourself someplace that seems (and probably is) too unsafe to stay, no matter how unsafe it also is to try to carry too much equipment somewhere else while there's a horde right outside. Then you take what turns out to be the last walk of your life, but it's not the walk that killed you, it's the circumstances that pushed you to it.
SubstantialFrivolity
I'm not even supposed to be here today
2d ago
I'm not sure what a "bespoke suit shop" is.
It means a place which will make a suit from scratch, to your measurements and specifications. It's expensive as you might imagine, but if you want something that a normal manufacturer doesn't make it can be the only way. I've thought about going to one of those, just because manufacturers don't make three piece suits in sizes large enough for me (and I like a three piece suit).
Dean
Flairless
2d ago
Some items I'm looking at this week:
If you want a better / more rounded list, just use the RealClear media roundup portal. The link is to RealClearWorld specifically for global emergent news, but there are a number of other portals (technology, energy, military, US politics, etc.) which provide more articles, from a broader selection of sources, daily.
Fifteen miles; Three miles; three miles; three miles; eight miles; thirty miles. Slightly changed distances in different directions.
The Farm sells all kinds of things, and it’s a perfect example of how poisonous foreigners are to a community. This is a locally owned multigenerational farm, so they price things fairly because their neighbors are their community. They pay good wages, because they hire their neighbors and their neighbors are their community. They are devout Christians, so so they live humbly and give back to the community, which is their neighbors (the list of their giving is absurdly long). There are a lot of older adult workers, who are definitely “inefficient”, but there’s not a sociopath or a foreigner or a corporation owning it, so they care for those whom they hire. It’s a beautiful Americana farm and store. They sell organic, because like most Americans they have a distrust of most commercial pesticides.
If Indians bought the farm, all the employees would be overseas relatives; some of the proceeds would be sent back home; they would have to signal their wealth more, meaning resources wasted on commercial goods; they wouldn’t care about fleecing others; it is unlikely (but I suppose not impossible) that they have the morality to give lots of their profits away, and if they do, it is unlikely to be toward the White American community nearby but instead toward various Indian things, or perhaps to an elite institution that doesn’t need the money. If devout non-Christians owned the store, they would be giving back to their non-Christian institutions, meaning the resources are gone from the community.
Visiting is wonderful; everyone is nice and everything is cozy. It stands in stark contrast to the convenience stores (and in past decade, Dunkins et al), where you have some aggressive impolite overseas Indian staring at you the entire time, and everything is ugly and cheap, and they only hire their relatives.
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
2d ago
In my observations, the median person on the street is far uglier than the median person working (to filter out the obvious confounder of youth if students were considered) at a university. I think any effect to the contrary people notice might just be an artifact of attention - it is easy to ignore the ugly and unremarkable people in everyday life and only notice and remember the beautiful ones, while the exceptionally smart people will be remembered regardless of their appearance.
(1) 17 miles (27 km)
(2) I'm not sure what a "bespoke suit shop" is.
(3) I'm not sure how I would search for that. Also, it's my understanding that most farms near me are "preserved" (heavily subsidized by the state government), so the question may not even be meaningful for me in the first place.
(4) 4 miles (6 km)
(5) 6 miles (10 km)
(6) 43 miles (69 km)
I'd actually love to know the same numbers for non US individuals, if only because the Amtrak bit would be hilarious. Your equivalent long distance commuter train equivalent would also be interesting.
mrvanillasky
Indo Aryan Thot Leader
2d ago
So if I'm getting this straight, a person with a 'weird life,' as you're terming it, isn't capable of making good art? And being a "pariah" in high school is an explanation of Kathleen Kennedy's bad choices in making executive decisions regarding Star Wars?
I meant Leslye Headland, I can never get her name right. Her understanding and depiction of the world is totally warped, as she had bad experiences. I have seen zero Star Wars movies and refuse to watch them now since the entire franchise is somehow more longhoused than movies starring women. Headland is a lesbian who made a TV show named The Acolyte that got cancelled for good reason.
Kathleen Kennedy seems to be a bad person, too. LucasFilm also owns Indiana Jones, which is also dead, thanks to the 5th movie where some ugly chick outdoes the 80-year-old archaeologist. Star Wars is a beloved franchise; there is no reason for it to do worse than Marvel. The movies and TV shows released by them have been bad, given what they could have been. My dad has fond memories of Star Wars, they fumbled hard and have started firing the ideological zealots from the studio, begrudgingly accepting some of the criticism. Leslye just hates the world, Kathleen is just a normal exec who has lefty ideas, the latter is much more bearable.
The issue isn't "feisty women" in film. Strong women are neither a myth nor something new in cinema. The issue is bad writing and caving in to unrealistic progressive norms, making women into stereotypes of men rather than writing them realistically--the points you made in your main post were rather more compelling than what you're suggesting here.
Yes, I like feisty women personally, but I also know that she is a woman. You can have a female protagonist; there are plenty of old Sanskrit texts that have them, they are not girlbosses. Young kids can see themselves in Indian Jones, them being made to see themselves in biracial uggos like that chick in the acolyte is parasitical. The critical reception of the literal worst piece of feminised media is top notch, you are called sexist and racist for not watching and loving these shows.
The only suggestion I have for the anti-SJW crowd is that they should acknowledge this and ask why these two things are wrong at all. The Despot of Antrim gets this explicitly; others get it somewhat. This has been a minuscule white pill for me, if Sargon can get it and not get his bank account or channel taken away for stating the obvious, then I hope we can have movies where the maximum levels of leftism do not exceed Watchmen, which itself,, whilst enjoyable,, makes me really dislike Alan Moore's view of the world. A good next step would be Noalsn Oddyssey bombing badly, having sub saharans and literal trasngenders in a movie adapting ancient Greek epics with Halloween rent-type costumes needs to be panned.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
2d ago
I can find all of these within a 10km radius (assuming the Finnish state railroad station is valid for Amtrak and the nearest big box store for Walmart). The nearest farm I could find where I could definitely say what they farm produces potatoes.
hydroacetylene
2d ago
From my house-
-
Is definitely downtown Fort Worth(easy commuting).
-
Depends on what you mean by ‘bespoke suit shop’. There’s a tailor in the nearest shopping center. There’s a habadAsher in the next nearest one. An actual from scratch suit place is, again, a trip to Fort Worth.
-
Small cattle ranch within thirty minutes, but I think it’s a breeding operation to sell sperm more than a meat production place. Multiple actual cattle ranches or big grain farms within 45 minutes. Thats just top of the head, there might be a fruit orchard closer. I’m assuming you don’t count people who sell backyard eggs and the like.
-
Idk I assume ft worth.
-
Very close.
-
Probably DFW airport.
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
2d ago
Google Maps doesn't even try when I try to find a path to the nearest Walmart, which would be in Canada. So I guess we'll never know.
FD4280
2d ago
~100 miles for 4 and 6, and at least that for 1 and 2.
Walmart is 3 miles out. Farms are closer than that, mostly wheat, some cattle ranches.
No_one
2d ago
I think the Russian objective is to make AFU as personnel poor as possible and make them withdraw & negotiate rather than create a sudden collapse.
That's probably why e.g. bridges over the Dniepr haven't been bombed (it'd also complicate civilian situation a lot). It really is a quite limited war.
5434a
2d ago
actually represents something meaningful
It is meaningful to you, of course, but importantly it's equally meaningful to other people (and I'd suggest this is what makes it truly meaningful to you).
The thing about a wedding ring that makes it eminently appropriate for a tattoo is that it communicates an unambiguous social status to other people and that you are identifiably committed to that status.
The same principle operates for prison gangs, football hooligans and tribal islanders. It doesn't work for artsy urbanites who create their own private symbology, sentimentalists who appear to be concerned that they'll forget their most personally significant relationships, or trend followers that want to add visual interest to their appearance.
johnfabian
2d ago
It's possible - perhaps probable - that you were banned by an AI. Reddit is using LLMs to detect and automatically punish users for "violent" language. So you have to be careful quoting song lyrics, or politicians, or people you don't like, etc. In my experience they've just been warnings but if it was bad enough it might be a short ban.
Not at all! There are few things I love more than getting to talk about this stuff.
The first few pages of this book are great to look at in this context because they both a) demonstrate how analytic and continental philosophy can have convergent concerns and b) they give you a feel for what's distinctive about the continental approach as a whole.
Marcuse in this book is speaking to the debate within Marxism between the humanist Marxists and the anti-humanist Marxists. The two camps disagreed on questions like: what role should individual subjectivity play in our theory of politics, does Marxism even need a "theory of the individual" at all or is everything interesting you could say about an individual exhausted by his class position, etc. These debates are similar to questions that analytic philosophers are working on today, albeit with a much less overtly political bent. François Kammerer is an analytic philosopher whose work focuses on defending illusionism about consciousness: he thinks that consciousness isn't real, he thinks that pain is as real as unicorns are. This seems like it would present a problem for any ethical theory: if there are no sentient beings, then why would anything matter? So he argues in that linked paper that it is possible to construct an ethical theory that makes no reference to subjective states of consciousness.
Marcuse is addressing similar concerns, but he takes the opposite stance: he thinks you can't have an ethics without subjectivity (and furthermore, you can't have a politics without an ethics), and thus the stance of the anti-humanist Marxists is politically impoverished.
Well, let's take a step back for a second. What is "meaningful"? The term "meaningless" is somewhat ambiguous unless we give it further clarification.
It seems to me that there are at least four different ways that a sentence can fall short of providing true, interesting, useful information:
Level 1: The sentence is either just completely grammatically incorrect and can't be interpreted as a valid sentence at all, or it's grammatically correct but it's formed in such a way that it means nothing. e.g. "Colorless green ideas sleep furiously".
Level 2: The sentence does have a meaning, albeit one that can only be interpreted in a poetic or mystical fashion. e.g. "The element of this ether, that within which even the godhead itself is still present, is the holy".
Level 3: The sentence is meaningful, but it's trivially false, or it's just uninteresting and irrelevant regardless of whether it's true or false. e.g. "Mathematical entities exist as non-spatiotemporal objects" (I would not put this sentence on this level myself; I think this is an interesting claim that one can have a valid debate about. But I think the average Mottizen, upon hearing this claim for the first time, and receiving clarification that a "non-spatiotemporal object" is very simply a real object that is not located in time or space, would say either "that's obviously false" or "even if that is true, it's irrelevant to anything that matters so I don't care".)
Level 4: A claim that coincidentally turns out to be false, but would be very interesting and worthwhile if it were true. e.g. "The LHC will find evidence of SUSY".
When you say "meaningless", it's not clear whether you're referring to level 1, 2, 3, or maybe even something in between.
My goal here is to impart to you that the majority of continental philosophy can be brought up to at least level 3, once you're familiar with a specific author's terminology and the historical context in which they were writing. Whether what they're saying is true and interesting is a separate issue that will obviously vary heavily from claim to claim. A lot of times you'll read philosophy and just come away thinking that it's dumb or wrong, as is often the case in many other fields. 90% of everything is crap. (The funny thing about philosophy is that everyone has a different opinion on which 90% of it is crap.)
But "dumb" and "wrong" are importantly different from meaningless. I get the impression that you already think that Marcuse's claims here are at least level 3. You seem to understand what the sentences are saying; you think they're wrong, but you're able to give coherent reasons for why you think they're wrong.
I think it may be helpful here to draw a comparison between Marcuse's claims about value and your own previous comments about anime. You said "I felt like the whole corruption arc was dealt with far better in Breaking Bad". Now, is this something that you could absolutely rigorously logically prove 100%? No, of course not. But does that mean the sentence is meaningless? No, that's not true either.
Granted, you prefaced the sentence with "I feel", so you could say "it's just a pure expression of my own inner subjective state, nothing more, and it's therefore unimpeachable in that regard; and all similar sentences should be interpreted likewise, even if I leave off the implicit 'I feel'". But that doesn't seem to quite tell the whole story. If you're just expressing pure arbitrary subjective feelings, then why did you have the conversation at all, and why did you structure the conversation in the manner that you did? It seems like you're giving reasons for your opinions, reasons that you have at least some expectation that other people will be responsive to: Death Note is subpar because it's not multilayered, because the characters don't have enough psychological depth. It's not a purely rational argument, but it's structured like a rational argument: it seems to exist somewhere between sense and nonsense. We have a shared intersubjective conception of what artistic quality is, and you can reasonably expect that other people will be interested to learn that e.g. a show's characters lack psychological depth. Of course, someone could always come along and flatly tell you "actually I like one dimensional cartoon villains, you can't tell me what to think". And you couldn't prove him "wrong". But that doesn't render your previous utterances meaningless.
One helpful way of thinking about some continental texts (I have to keep repeatedly stressing that there is no single interpretive framework that will apply to all continental texts) is that they're kind of like a movie review, except instead of reviewing movies, they're reviewing society and history / life itself / other philosophers / whatever. Can the critic prove to you that the movie sucked? No. But can he say "the characters were all stereotypes, and the ending was predictable"? Sure. And then you might come away thinking "actually yeah, that movie did kinda suck", even though you may not have realized it at first. Can Marcuse prove that subjectivity invalidates capitalist values? No. Can he suggest that an ethics based on subjectivity could be more humane, more tolerant of individual creativity and expression, more process-oriented than results-oriented, etc. than an ethics based on the profit motive? Yes. And that might end up changing your perspective on things.
No, I really have to disagree on this. Many people self-consciously base their own value system on the pursuit of perfectionism and efficiency. No one thinks that there's anything mystical or unarticulable about this. Therefore, its denial should not be mystical or unarticulable either.
More options
Context Copy link