domain:putanumonit.com
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
15hr ago
· Edited 14hr ago
Thank you for the thorough reply. I love getting to talk about this stuff.
I might read this + Derrida's Truth in Painting and get back to you at some (undefined) point in the future.
Derrida's a heck of a place to start if you're not already steeped in the continental tradition. He'll rapid fire off references to 10 other books and expect you to be familiar with all of them. Not that I'm at all trying to discourage you or anything, just saying that it's normal if you find him frustrating. I only understand what he's saying about half the time.
The Marcuse book on the other hand is rather short and approachable.
Anything political the Frankfurt School or its descendant schools of thought wrote induces anything from disaffected ennui to downright hatred.
I think appreciating the historical/personal context they were writing in helps contextualize their pessimism a little better. They were all communist Jews who legitimately believed that the world workers' revolution was on the horizon, and then they watched Stalinism turn their Marxist ideals into a hellscape, and they lived through Nazism and WW2, and basically they watched their entire world and all their hopes for the future collapse around them in a spectacularly dramatic fashion. That's the sort of thing that would put anyone in a sour mood.
In general, I find that many philosophers from the analytic tradition had a habit of defending claims and properly defining terms so as to minimise uncertainty. There's often a more rigorous bent to their writings.
You're right, I don't disagree at all. That's by design of course. In the early 20th century, Russell and Moore and their co-conspirators thought that Hegelianism had gone off the rails, and philosophy needed a new beginning that was self-consciously modeled after mathematical logic. That was the start of the analytic school.
Analytic philosophy was my first introduction to philosophy and I think that permanently shaped how my mind works. Or maybe my mind just already worked like that and analytic philosophy was a natural fit for it, idk. But I do feel that on some fundamental level my outlook will always be analytic in some sense. I'm perpetually annoyed at how, at times, continental philosophers seem to care nothing for running basic sanity checks on their sentences (are terms well-defined, am I making any category errors, etc) (although I'm always equally as sensitive to the possibility that this is just a misunderstanding on my part, or that my whole conception of how one should "evaluate" sentences is wrong in the first place).
But nonetheless here on TheMotte I end up talking more about continental philosophy, partially because that's just what I read more of these days, and partially because continental philosophers speak more directly to the types of culture war issues that we discuss here.
It's often extremely fluffy, terms will be so poorly defined that interpretations of their texts bifurcate depending on one's reading of them, and even once you've broken through the morass and divined several possible interpretations of their words, every single interpretation turns out to be endless navel-gazing that has become unmoored entirely from reality.
I get why you say this, definitely. But at the same time, continental philosophy is so wildly heterogeneous that it's almost impossible to make generalizations about it as a whole. It varies heavily from author to author, text to text. You really have to treat each text individually and take it on its own merits.
I was just talking about how difficult Derrida is, but ironically, I think he's actually the closest to analytic philosophy out of all the "big" continental writers. His concerns and methods are ones that analytic philosophers can appreciate, once you cut through all the verbiage. Like his Voice and Phenomenon for example, it's a nice short little book that addresses the question, "do we have privileged epistemological access to the contents of our own mental states?" That's a perfectly comprehensible and "classical" philosophical question, no issues there. And he does have arguments; they're perhaps a bit difficult to extract, and they're not the most carefully rigorous, but they're there.
Nietzsche won't bullshit you. (I think we can safely call him continental. He lived before the split of course, but like Hegel he's very strongly continental coded.) Reading Nietzsche is just such an amazing and wonderful experience. He doesn't provide too many arguments per se (and it would kinda go against his whole project if he did, because he's kinda doing a postmodern performance art deconstruction of the concept of philosophical argumentation itself, which is really not nearly as dumb and pretentious as it sounds, like seriously just read him trust me), but he doesn't need to give arguments because he just like, says stuff, in plain ol' honest terms, and you're just like "damn, that is so true... how did I never think of that before..."
But then of course you do just have the really hyper-weird shit. I wrote a post yesterday where I quoted some passages from Lacan's Seminar XX and, yeah I'll admit, it's fuckin' wild. You're justified in asking, how am I to take this as anything except the ramblings of a very unwell man who is on the verge of a psychotic episode? And I'll admit, I'm not sure how much of it can be defended "rationally". I can give basic definitions of the jargon terms like "jouissance" and "Other", but in terms of justifying why these specific words were put in this specific order and what it means as a whole, such that a sane person would be justified in believing it... yeah, that's tough. But that doesn't mean I can just throw it out, y'know? Something about Lacan's ideas and terminology resonates with me. I don't know what he's onto, but he's onto something. I can't argue anyone into walking that particular path, but I know that there are other people who are interested in walking the same path.
I wish there was more rigorous work done, both philosophical and historical, about how the analytic/continental split came to be and what it means. My current pet theory is that there really is just a certain strain of mysticism in continental thought, and as such it tends to attract people who are more open to mystical thought/experience, and this shows through in the texts, although most of them would strenuously deny this. It's not clear exactly why or how this particular mode of thinking caught on when it did in European philosophy, but multiple of the big "founding fathers" of continental philosophy did flirt with mysticism, to varying degrees of overtness, and this likely set the tone for what "personality type" would be attracted to continental philosophy going forward.
Kierkegaard had his own idiosyncratic brand of existential Christianity, that one is obvious. Magee's Hegel and the Hermetic Tradition goes into detail explaining how Hegel's thought was influenced by Hermeticism. And when Heidegger in What are Poets For? is saying things like:
Poets are the mortals who, singing earnestly of the wine-god, sense the trace of the fugitive gods, stay on the gods' tracks, and so trace for their kindred mortals the way toward the turning. The ether, however, in which alone the gods are gods, is their godhead. The element of this ether, that within which even the godhead itself is still present, is the holy. The element of the ether for the coming of the fugitive gods, the holy, is the track of the fugitive gods. But who has the power to sense, to trace such a track? Traces are often inconspicuous, and are always the legacy of a directive that is barely divined. To be a poet in a destitute time means: to attend, singing, to the trace of the fugitive gods. That is why the poet in the time of the world's night utters the holy.
it's kinda like, what are we even doing here? We're not even pretending that this is "philosophy" anymore. (Actually Heidegger rejected the notion that he was doing "philosophy", he said that what he was doing was "thinking", what exactly that means is up to interpretation.)
And Hubert Dreyfus had the chutzpah to say "oh Heidegger was just doing a philosophical anthropology, the 'unveiling of a world' just means how our social practices influence how we categorize objects, nothing unusual going on here". Come on man.
The result of collecting all these spacey wordcels in one intellectual space, and giving them the freedom to be as spacey as they want without much in the way of outside checks and balances, is a very strange and unique literature that freely transitions between philosophy, history, sociology, psychology, poetry, and religious experience, sometimes all within the same paragraph. They won't announce when they're "changing modalities", that's on you to figure out. You might find it frustrating, but you can't say it's not fascinating.
But anyway. In spite of all that. All continental texts are really different from each other and you have to take them on a case by case basis. There's been increasing analytic interest over the past couple of decades in doing analytic interpretations/reconstructions of Hegel, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Marx, Derrida, all the big names, figuring out what ideas are in there that can be extracted and pressed into a more easy-to-digest form. I wouldn't say there's anything like a "bridging of the gap" between the two traditions but the interest is there. It's not all bullshit.
Seems like an easy Occam's razor to me. Either Candace Owens is just bullshitting with the obvious incentive that she is rewarded with views and attention and money, or she of all people stumbled on hard proof that the first lady of France is transgender, hard proof that is strong enough to overcome the questions of "Why would no one else know about this till now?" and "she somehow faked three pregnancies?" but also isn't able to be shared to convince others to overcome their prior.
Also consider that this is part of a movement accusing large amounts of celebrity women to be secretly trans. It seems like the standards of evidence they use might be pretty weak, or maybe Taylor Swift/Jennifer Lopez/Lady Gaga/the Kardashians/etc are really trans after all.
magicalkittycat
15hr ago
And allowing "our children" to see things put out by the Chinese is a national security threat exactly how?
Consider that despite a literal ban being passed, two presidents have ignored it in a row. That seems pretty concerning, they must have a lot of influence in the country if we aren't even enforcing our laws.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
15hr ago
Didn't get a chance to do a lot this week. Any better luck @Southkraut?
magicalkittycat
15hr ago
I mean didn't he literally just get purged for expressing a political opinion?
He doesn't have to read about authoritarian states, he's already living in one!
If my employee is on TV and says rude things about a major client of mine, should the government ban me from firing them? From my perspective as a business owner in this hypothetical, it seems more the authoritarian government is the one that forces me to keep shitty and unliked employees around even if they're costing my business reputation.
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
15hr ago
Israel is dissolved and thus the state reverts back to being the Arab state of Palestine.
As with Taiwan, this cannot happen, because this would not be a reversion. There never was an Arab state of Palestine. There was an Ottoman province there, and then the British mandate, but no Arab state.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
15hr ago
Trump was involved in an unusual amount of litigation for an ex-President, and is now involved in an unusual amount of high-profile litigation as President. You are saying that this is the result of his political opponents waging an unprecedented campaign of lawfare against him. I am saying that it is a result of his behaviour.
The point is that Trump's pre-politics litigation history is evidence that my view is correct and yours is not.
quiet_NaN
15hr ago
I think that both sides can reasonably claim a fear of a slippery slope.
Have you heard of this obscure group called Hamas? They were kinda big some time ago, and seem really hell-bent to fast forward to the end of the slope where the Jews are drowned in the sea. Do you think that if Palestine was recognized as a state in the borders of 1968, they would think their jihad over and decide to become good neighbors?
And on the Israeli side of things, there are groups who want Jews to settle in the West Banks to establish a permanent Israeli claim to this land. Last time I checked, they were running the Israeli government. If I was a Palestinian, I might reasonably get the impression that they will take the next slice of land rather sooner than later.
Of course there are moderates on both sides, but fear of the extremists seems to be very appropriate.
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
16hr ago
Having a model of space and time is, quite literally, a model of the world. What more do you expect me to produce to shore up that point?
Human brains have arrangements of neurons that correspond to a 3D environment. This isn't a joke, when your brain thinks in 3d, there's a whole bunch of neurons that approximate the space with the same spatial arrangement. Almost like a hex-grid in a video game, because the units are hexagonal. If your standard of a world model excludes the former, does this get thrown out too?
A little 3D model of the world is, as far as I'm concerned, a world model.
Dismissing the whole Mozart analogy as being due to just negligible "statistical word co-occurence" is an incredibly myopic take. But how does the model learn that non-co-occurrence so robustly? It's not just that the words "Mozart" and "hip-hop" don't appear in the same sentence. It's that the entire semantic cloud around "Mozart" - 18th century, classical, Vienna, harpsichord - is astronomically distant from the cloud around "hip-hop" - 20th century, Bronx, turntables, MCing. For the model to reliably predict text, it must learn not just isolated facts, but this vast web of interlocking relationships. To call that "just statistical association" is like calling a brain "just a bunch of firing neurons." It's technically true but misses the emergent property entirely. That emergent, structured representation of concepts and their relations is the nascent world model. In that case, you're overloading "just" or woefully underestimating how powerful statistics or neuronal firing can be.
You can also ask an LLM for its opinion on whether Mozart might have liked hip-hop, and it will happily speculate on what's known about his taste in music and extrapolate from there. What query, if asked of a human, would demonstrate that we're doing a qualitatively different thing?
Regarding Claude plays Pokémon. I've already linked to an explainer of why it struggles above, the same link regarding the arithmetic woes. LLM vision sucks. They weren't designed for that task, and performance on a lot of previously difficult problems, like ARC-AGI, improves dramatically when the information is restructured to better suit their needs. The fact that they can do it at all is remarkable in it self, and they're only getting better.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
16hr ago
Given that every negotiation has failed by one side or the other, and the two sides expect defecting by the other side (and thus have every incentive to defect first and seize initiative) there’s no viable way to have a two-state solution of any type. There are two end states on offer
1). Israel controls all the territory and has enough weaponry to protect its borders and citizens.
2). Israel is dissolved and thus the state reverts back to being the Arab state of Palestine.
3). We keep up intermittent wars until one of those two states is reached.
Given this, the best solution is backing one side to break the stalemate and take over, the quicker tge better. Then once one side or the other loses completely enough to accept they won’t be in the Levant anymore, the conflict ends.
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
16hr ago
· Edited 16hr ago
I frequently hear women express sentiments that actually, promiscuity is good, being a camgirl is a completely normal job, and having a dozen boyfriends in one year and collecting gifts and favors from all of them on the way is par for the course and bystanders should politely not notice it. I very rarely (in fact, not in almost a decade by now) hear the opposite IRL.
I don't know that I've heard that IRL, though I do recall even in school there were lots of girls who expressed interest in marrying a man for the money, or in using sexual appeal to get things from men, while never expressing interest in the idea of actually loving a man.
I guess these motivations have been around forever, along with the more intrinsic motivations like intimacy, companionship, physical affection, etc. But it's surprising to me how the shoe has moved to the other foot and it's much more rare for me to hear discussions of intimacy, companionship, and physical affection as the core reasons people are looking for a relationship. "I would like to have children" has a strong constituency, but I'd argue that's still an instrumental reason to have a relationship. (But an important one!)
Does Israel actually want to be the ones distributing aid?
I don't know. The March-April blockade ends with Israel propping up, scaling, and now supporting its own sanctioned distribution network. The GHF posts daily press releases. Today's message is the same as yesterday's:
“As we exceed 91 million meals delivered to the people of Gaza to date, we are taking a moment to reflect on the adversity we’ve overcome for this herculean humanitarian mission. Our aid staff and local partners have demonstrated tremendous courage and commitment to those in need.
“Looking ahead, we will not stop until our mission to feed as many Palestinians in Gaza is accomplished. We are also offering to distribute UN and other international organization aid for free — we have the scale and operational efficiency to feed more Gazans, and we encourage all humanitarian groups on the ground to partner with us. The people of Gaza are depending on us and we cannot let them down.”
Israel wants to at least threaten a commitment to solely manage aid distribution. If you think "ceasefire talks" are serious, and Israel is going to sign a deal for some hostages, pack up, and go home, then this is simple leverage to speed that process along. If you think ceasefire talks are not very serious, and to me this appears very possible, then this may be the start of the long haul. It looks like one stage of a plan than it does negotiating leverage, but I'm open to other interpretations. If the UN does hand over its trucks to the GHF I'll be more certain.
quiet_NaN
16hr ago
The person who is now Mrs Macron was born in 1953. Given the prevalence of people transitioning at that time, I think it is very unlikely that she went m2f before she was 30 or at whatever age she met her future husband.
If she was known as a "that weird cross-dressing teacher" back then, I think the media would have reported on it, the story of their marriage is obviously too juicy for the tabloid vultures to not have been picked to the bone years ago.
I thought there was some scholarly hypothesis that the Philistines were Mycenean Greeks, which helps explain certain things like Samson being a more Herakles-type hero, instead of the more typical "Mouthpiece of God" prophet in the Old Testament.
I suppose that it is possible that the Philistines or their descendants Arabized, but I'd want to see the account of that survival since the connection seems a little dubious to me.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
16hr ago
Then it’s not much of a “default career,” is it?
I think you’re defending the motte to Southkraut’s bailey.
TequilaMockingbird
Brown-skinned Fascist MAGA boot-licker
16hr ago
Agriculture generates hundreds of billions in revenue, and is far mor essential to continuing civilisation than Orangutan or LLMs are. Does that make grain, or the tools used to sow and harvest it "intelligent" in your eyes? If not please explain.
As for comparing like to like, GPT loses games of Chess to an Atari 2700. Does that mean that rather than progressing AI has actually devolved over the last 40 years?
FtSoA
16hr ago
Well Vietnam Syndrome has been replaced by Iraq Syndrome.
So a newer example plus the passage of time is all it takes to change public consciousness.
quiet_NaN
16hr ago
I think that "aristocracy" is covering a lot of ground. Nobility has been around about as long as long as agriculture has. From Ramesses II to Wilhelm II, you have nobles in very different settings, from low-born leaders of troops who managed to conquer something and kill anyone who disputed their nobility to products of dozens of generations of inbreeding.
You have aristocrats who relied on vassalage, Roman patricians, figureheads of some anonymous imperial bureaucracy and centralizers of power.
Still, that I agree that for the most part, the aristocracy was likely very bent on avoiding precedents of "you can simply kill some nobles and take their land". You needed at least a flimsy excuse, like "actually it was rightfully my land all along" or "yes, but the nobles I killed were following an evil religion, they don't count".
FtSoA
16hr ago
I think that on a grand strategy level, everything is going according to plan for Hamas.
No, it's not.
It was not expected that Israel would curb stomp Hezbollah and Iran, and that Assad's regime would fall.
The Axis of Resistance is pretty well fucked for the indefinite future.
JarJarJedi
16hr ago
If we're being fair, that's partly because the PA is supposed to be in charge but actually are mostly grifters, so they've delegated blame, but ultimately you don't really see Israel trying to expand citizenship to more Palestinians
Given that PA territory is under full civil administration by PA, I'm not sure how would you expect Israel giving citizenship to Arabs living there. Security arrangements are more complex, but for this it doesn't matter - PA enjoys pretty much complete self-rule in civil matters (and so did Gaza btw) so calling Arabs living there "second class" compared to Israelis is just bizarre - they are not Israelis at all. As for PA leadership being grotesquely corrupt and indifferent to the needs of the population - that's extremely common situation in the Middle East, and Israel can't really fix it. It could annex the PA territory, kick out the PA and provide its own institutions, but nobody wants that. Short of that, the Arabs will have to do with the institutions they can build for themselves, and if those are not great, it's not Israel's fault.
FtSoA
16hr ago
The Arabs and Arabic didn't enter the Levant at scale until the Muslim conquest in the 7th century, right?
"Philistine" comes from Hebrew, originally. If you didn't know, Hebrew is also a Semitic language.
https://www.etymonline.com/word/Philistine
My understanding is that the genetics of Palestinian/Levantine Arabs and ethnic groups that predate the Muslim invasion differ, but there's a lot of admixture due to conversions to Islam.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Origin_of_the_Palestinians
Long story short, "Palestinians" are not "Philistines" even though it's the same label.
Zephyr
16hr ago
A concern about “loser pays” is that the payment only occurs when they, well, lose. If I can’t afford the up front costs, or if the settlement is much less likely to hurt me, I may have to go for it, as I can’t be certain that a case that I should win will go my way if it goes to court.
It also has a number of weird edge cases - for example, say that I sue someone for $10000, and my lawyer is going to charge me $1000 - if my opponent has deep pockets, they could hire a lawyer that costs them $90000, which means that if I lose, I lose $91000, which puts enough of a risk factor that I couldn’t afford to sue them, period, even if my case is good.
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
16hr ago
How exactly does an LLM know that Mozart wasn't a fan of hip hop without some kind of world model? Do you think that fact was explicitly hand-coded in?
You already got called out for this below, but this question is either a poorly chosen example, or betrays an ignorance of the mechanics of how LLMs work, which would be ironic given your lengthy nitpicking of the OP. I do assume the former, however.
I also really wouldn't call awareness of space and time a real world model as evidence either way. Space and time are perhaps the most obvious of clustering that you can possibly get in terms of how often they are discussed in the training material, and IRL. It's super-duper possible to get passing-good at space and time purely on statistical association, in fact I'd be surprised in an LLM didn't pick that kind of stuff up. Yet if we look at Claude Plays Pokemon, even coming up with tools to assist itself, Claude has a ridiculously hard time navigating a simple 2D space by itself. In almost every case I'm aware of in the literature, when you ask the LLM to generalize their understanding of space and time to a new space or time, it has enormous trouble.
JarJarJedi
16hr ago
50 thousands Arab Christians would be very surprised to know they are "mostly gone". Gaza, indeed, was pretty much cleansed of Christians by Hamas, which is what happens when you give Islamic fundamentalists free reign of the territory, but in PA, where comparatively less insane Fateh is ruling, Christians still exist. Of course, just as all the good-wishers of the world totally ignored what happened to Christians who used to live in Gaza, if PA decides to cleanse all Christians from PA territory, nobody would even squeak, no Jews - no news. Things like that happened many times in other places (in the Middle East and outside) and no students on college campuses ever protested about it. You all know why.
I wish there were such an outcry, but I am skeptical; I can't recall one in my lifetime. Institutional U.S. policymakers don't want to be called crusaders or lose any more support in the Muslim world, and I don't think I have ever seen that policy come back to bite them domestically. Ted Cruz told a gathering of mideast Christians that he would never support them unless they supported Israel, and he only got a little pushback from the very online set.
I'm not sure why this is. The explanations I've seen floated are mostly bogus stereotypes of American Christians.
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