domain:sotonye.substack.com
naraburns
nihil supernum
7hr ago
the fact that he said LGBTQ
That's a good point, I missed that entirely.
Now how would you respond to someone who came back at you with:
Whoa there buddy. It might seem to some people like you're making an interesting and valid point about the reality in which we're living, but are you sure you can't rephrase that in terms of statistics and case studies covering every possible angle, sourced from an academy hell-bent on avoiding the issue? Which publicly advertises that it explicitly forbids looking into such questions? And is open about only hiring those who wouldn't want to in the first place?
Can you do all that for an audience trained from birth to ignore the possibility?
Seems to me you're just sketching out a picture of something you've personally observed and hoping it's congruent enough with people's own personal experience that they derive something valuable from the exchange.
Would you keep trying to communicate, if you thought it were important, or would you just stay silent?
What I'm doing here is saying guys, this is my sincere best guess as to what's going on. And I want feedback, I want arguments, I want corrections, insights, the whole works. Because even though, for systemic reasons, I cannot provide the receipts, this is the only place on the internet where the conversation may be had.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
7hr ago
No. Mormons are substantially less Christian that Christians are Jewish.
...I'm not sure Mormons would agree with the first part, nor Jews with the second. I agree, but then I would, wouldn't I.
I'd agree on the latter part, in any case. Whatever my theological disagreements with Mormons, people who wish them harm are my enemies.
crushedoranges
Can Marx explain the used panties market?
7hr ago
He had a meltie about being called out on the whole LibsofTiktok hoaxing thing.
If he had just did it for the lulz, he would have been forgiven, but he had pretensions on becoming a Serious Intellectual. The whole affair became his cross to bear and he kept on doubling down on how lying to people to make a political point was a Good Thing Actually until he flounced out of here.
Shitposter fails to launch to serious political influencer career, many such cases.
Primaprimaprima
Aliquid stat pro aliquo
7hr ago
...yeah, if that's all correct then it would be hard to call it Christianity.
Stellula
7hr ago
I would imagine so? This is a pretty unambiguous teaching which is routinely affirmed by their leadership.
Primaprimaprima
Aliquid stat pro aliquo
7hr ago
I was looking for examples of specific theological beliefs or other aspects of Mormonism that might render Mormonism incompatible with Christianity as it's traditionally conceived. Looks like Quantumfreakonomics has it covered though.
ThomasdelVasto
Κύριε, ποίησόν με ὄργανον τῆς ἀγάπης σου
7hr ago
To be fair, Nicene Christians do believe that we will eventually become God in some sense, via theosis, or union with God. It's definitely not the same thing as the Mormon vision, but I could see people getting confused if you squint.
Goodguy
7hr ago
Is "God was a human that lived in an existing universe, and through good works ascended to God status" actually the belief of the average modern Mormon, though?
ThomasdelVasto
Κύριε, ποίησόν με ὄργανον τῆς ἀγάπης σου
7hr ago
I'm a follower on his page. Apparently he is having a lower profile due to career/school stuff for a while.
BahRamYou
7hr ago
Personally I really enjoy the simple, no frills restaurants that just have 1-3 items on the menu and make them in large quantities but really well. Unfortunately a lot of people (boomers I guess?) still seem to love the menus with a huge thick menu of 50 different things, and interrogating the waiter to find out which one of them they should choose. Hopefully restaurants find a way to adapt, like those coffeeshops where a robotic arm makes the drinks.
personally I put them in a category that I think of as 'Jesusists', that is, religions that take Jesus as their central figure, but which are too different from historical Christianity to be understood as the same thing
I feel like this is an obvious place to taboo "Christianity," though of course--I can't imagine any self-identified Christians lightly acceding to that. In my years I have been fascinated to hear from Evangelicals that Catholics are not Christian; from Jehovah's Witnesses that Protestants are not Christian; from Wokists that Christians are not Christian. I have heard arguments about the "historical Jesus" and the "historical creeds," I've met "restorationist Christians" in the form of Seventh Day Adventists and Mormons, and I have to say: it sounds like a whole lot of wildly unproductive verbal disagreement to me. I've read my share of Kierkegaard and C.S. Lewis and others who have weighed in on the debate, I'm not ignorant of the stakes. But I haven't got a horse in the race, so to speak, so while that probably makes me a nicely impartial judge of the matter, it also seems like maybe the kind of disagreement for which none of the relevant parties want an impartial judge!
(FWIW, my own heuristic is that anyone who thinks Jesus was Divine can be comfortably regarded as a "Christian" for every practical purpose imaginable, and people who gatekeep categories with such practical value can in almost all cases just be safely ignored. Surely Mormonism as at least as much a "Christian faith" as, say, Denmark is a "Christian nation." I assume that I would probably feel differently if I subscribed to a different metaphysics, though!)
So it's hard for me to say that Trump's interpretation of the shooting is wrong, even though it is almost certainly clumsy. This was a targeted attack, and it was an attack on self-identified (if plausibly heretical) Christians, and it appears to have been an attack on their faith for adherence to their faith (as opposed to e.g. for their race or their presumed politics), which is a surprising and unusual thing here in the United States--though, crucially, not a historically unprecedented thing for Mormon congregations.
And I have to seriously wonder--did Trey Parker and Matt Stone have something to do with this? Did Hugh Grant, or Netflix, or FX, or Netflix, or Hulu, or Netflix? Other than the musical, those are all productions from the last four years--at what point would it be plausible for the Mormons to begin to worry that society is prosecuting an active vendetta against them?
One response might be that (at least some--there is no "Quran the Musical") other faiths also catch Netflix shade--Unorthodox and One of Us are relatively recent productions touching on Judaism, Midnight Mass and The Sinner seem arguably critical of Catholicism, etc. The Mormons aren't unusually persecuted, rather, Netflix (and perhaps Hollywood more generally) portrays all religion in maximally negative light!
And this is where I think Trump's comment becomes clumsy--or, if you believe some of the more extreme things sometimes said of him, not clumsy but deliberately Christian nationalist. This appears to be a possible case of genuine sectarian violence. How often does that happen, here? This Wikipedia list of attacks on churches in the United States is quite interesting to me, especially the "motive" column. "Anti-Christian" violence is clearly a thing, but it would probably be more accurate (and inclusive) to suggest that anti-religious violence is a thing.
Whether or not they are ultimately part of the "Christian" coalition, the Mormons are clearly part of the coalition backing Trump. I don't personally think Trump is actually trying to move the United States toward Christian nationalism, but if he were, it would have to be a Christian nationalism inclusive of Mormons--or else a Christian nationalism with no hope at all of maintaining rule over the Rocky Mountains.
Quantumfreakonomics
7hr ago
Mormon cosmology is completely different from the Abrahamic religions. In Mormonism, God did not create the universe, he simply organized preexisting matter. God himself is part of and subservient to the material universe.
This leads to a bunch of strange (though arguably coherent) beliefs, many of which are explained in this less-than-sympathetic cartoon, although from what I can tell everything in it is technically correct.
Also, endless celestial sex. You can decide for yourself whether this is a positive or a negative.
Goodguy
7hr ago
But then why are Mormons not Christians in your view? Granted I don't know much about their views, but from the little I know, it doesn't seem more different from the Nicene Creed than Matthew 24's Jesus quote: "But about that day or hour no one knows, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father."
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
7hr ago
uh, sure, I guess. The following is speaking very generally and aiming for as neutral a view as I can manage.
Jews (speaking very broadly here as I will for all groups) think they have a revelation from God, and that revelation is at a certain point closed. Then they have a system pertaining to how that revelation interfaces with their community, which may not be closed per se but where thousands of years of tradition usually vastly outweigh present concerns.
Christians believe the Jewish revelation is valid, but don't see it as closed, and believe there was a subsequent revelation which at a later point closed. They likewise have a community-interface system which likewise draws on thousands of years of tradition, which is completely incompatible with the Jewish system. So while both Jews and Christians think the Old Testament is the word of God, Jews think the New Testament is heretical pagan nonsense and the church and its traditions have no valid connection to God, while (many) Christians think Jews missed the boat, the rabbinical system is in the same way heretical nonsense, made up to paper over the fact that Judaism ended with the destruction of the temple, when it became impossible to fulfill the requirements of the Law.
Mormons are to Christians as Christians are to Jews. They have what might be described as a Newer Testament, which they see as a subsequent revelation to the Christian one, which is, you guessed it, now also closed. And they have their own community-interface system which is only a couple hundred years old but hey give them awhile, sheesh. And to their credit, a couple hundred years ain't nothing, and they do seem to be going fairly strong to date, but this system is likewise incompatible with the Christian system in the same way that the Christian system is incompatible with the Jewish one. Christians think the Newer testament is bad fanfic, in the same way Jews think the Christian New Testament is bad fanfic, for similar reasons.
In each case, you have the older version rejecting the newer version as a heresy, and the newer version thinking the older version missed the boat. ...Only, I'm not actually sure whether Mormons think Christians are fine as-is, or should ideally become Mormons, the way Christians think Jews should become Christian. I'd assume so, just on a naïve application of memetics.
Stellula
7hr ago
Jesus and Paul both believed that God was The Universal Prime Mover, that is: there is nothing before God. He set the universe in motion. Mormons do not believe this, but rather that God was a human that lived in an existing universe, and through good works ascended to God status.
No. Mormons are substantially less Christian that Christians are Jewish.
The mormons believe that God was once a man who then became a God, and their version of enlightenment/ascendance/heaven is that they will themselves become God. Christians and Jews believe in the same God. Mormons do not believe in the same God as Christians, Jews, or Muslims.
Here are some mormon redditors trying to figure out how to square this, btw.
I know there are quite a few mormons who post here. Feel free to just ignore all this, btw. I love a good debate about religion, but I love you guys more, and don't want it to come at your expense, or to feel like people are kicking you while you're down - what happened yesterday was horrific.
Mushguffler
7hr ago
And it's not like foreign foods and music never make it to the US without mass immigration. We've all eaten pad thai and listened to flamenco, yet there's few or no Little Bangkok neighborhoods or ghettos full of Catalonian gypsies.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
7hr ago
I have a few vibes benchmarks:
-
Asking a model to rewrite an essay (usually mine) in the style of an author I am familiar with. Can it redo a few chapters from novel in the voice of Banks, or Morgan? Most models flanderize them, or settle for a shallow pastiche. Some get them, and you'd be fucking surprised which models those are. Some aren't even SOTA, but beat the best reasoning models.
-
Throw in as much of my profile as patience and context windows allow, and then ask it to mine it for insight.
-
Do the above, and then ask it to do an intentional emulation. Call that fine-tuning on a budget. Can it capture my voice? Can it write something I see myself writing? This is a hard problem, most of them suck ass. Gemini 2.5 Pro flanderizes me, Sonnet 4 did a decent job (after a lot of prompting), but paradoxically, Sonnet 4.5 often refuses, gets confused, or simply does poorly.
-
Ask it to solve physics or maths problems (where I have access to ground truth). I'd use medicine, but models are already so competent that my ability to evaluate them there is limited.
That's it for semi-formal assessment. For the rest, I build up impressions through sustained usage, till I have a firm grasp on model capabilities and personality.
For reasoning tasks:
GPT-5T is the best, almost matched by Gemini 2.5 Pro.
Quick answers, where I don't want to wait around:
Claude Sonnet (4.5 is too new for me to know how good it is)
Diversity candidates who have interesting capabilities in one domain or the other:
Kimi K2, GPT 4.1
(I refuse to use GPT-5 Instant. It's ass, and is dominated on the Pareto Frontier by other models)
Primaprimaprima
Aliquid stat pro aliquo
7hr ago
But can you provide a more detailed explanation?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
8hr ago
I wasn't sure whether to frame them as Christians (new revelation outside the law) or Jews (human prophets, perceive incarnation as blasphemy), so left them out as more confusing than the point was worth, but yes, essentially. "I'm his son, but he claims he's not my father."
Primaprimaprima
Aliquid stat pro aliquo
8hr ago
On the one hand, Mormons aren't Christians.
...how come?
The have licenses for most major sports titles? FIFA, Madden, NHL, CFB, F1. (Think of that microtransaction money flow)
That is also without mentioning the Star Wars license.More options
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