domain:alexberenson.substack.com
RenOS
Dadder than dad
11mo ago
I'm recommending people to read the first book, but nothing else. It presents a really interesting and unique setting and through focusing on and exploring that setting it manages to be good. By his second book, the novelty wears off and you begin to see more and more how silly his character writing is, the story writing is mediocre but salvageable, as is the prose.
Twelve. Don't try to use the British "fanbase" or UK broadcast as a language-friendly gateway to understanding Eurovision. Although we all watch it, there is some combination of the British not quite "getting" Eurovision and treating it as an opportunity to point and laugh at the wacky Continentals, and us being jaded because the politics of the voting means that we don't normally stand a chance. Part of the problem is that this causes us to not take the national contest to choose a song seriously (given the quality of our domestic pop music scene, we send shockingly poor acts), but the worst bit is that it makes the British broadcast and the culture of watching it with drunken Brits unfortunately cynical. The most obvious symptom was Terry Wogan's commentary from 1971-2008 - he started drinking when the curtain went up, got ruder and ruder about the songs as he got drunker, and then said the quiet part out loud at every opportunity when it came to complaining about biased voting.
Thirteen. The host (who is normally the previous year's winner) is responsible for meeting all the costs of the event, and gets very little back from the broadcast. (the ESC is shown ad-free on state-owned broadcasters in most EBU-member countries). For small countries which do well, this leads to a different sort of jadedness where the national broadcaster is trying to ensure that their country loses deliberately for financial reasons (but is generally not able to say this to its viewers, who like winning). Ireland is the most famous example where eventually the cynicism got through to the viewers.
If you want an English-language introduction to Eurovision that captures what Eurovision-watching should be, I recommend the Australian broadcast. But the best way to watch it is as a noob to join an existing Eurovision-watching party hosted by someone who grew up in Continental Europe.
Fourteen. The culture of Eurvision-watching is gay in every possible sense of the world, including the old-fashioned one of being gratuitously, flamboyantly happy.
Fifteen. The final scores at the end of the voting are never read out (in English or French), so "nul points" as a metaphor for getting no votes at all is a "Beam me up Scotty"/"Play it again, Sam" misquote.
Folamh3
11mo ago
Having once worked for a company involved hosting a previous edition of Worldcon, for me the more pressing question is - will there be a culture clash between most Worldcon attendees and the Chinese, who I suspect have far stricter standards of bodily hygiene?
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
11mo ago
Yes, like with many things about Europe (such as the popularity of EU on the continent - the debates and the attitudes are quite different as in Brexitland), it's not a good thing that America's premium window to things is the British opinion. Wogan greatly aided in the creation of the quintessential British Eurovision attitude, ie. affected cynicism and oh-aren't-we-better-than-the-Eurotrash attitude before the votes and barely disguised bitterness when the crap British acts get nul points for being crap.
Southkraut
Rise, ramble, rest, repeat.
11mo ago
We're post-scarcity for the most hollow, superficial, devoid-of-meaning kinds of beauty. I get that my view is mine alone and others needn't share it, but when I look at AI art I feel cheated - there are the visual cues of an artist taking care to weave meaning and presentation together, but in truth it's just a surface-level regurgitation of previous works and lacks all sense or intention.
It's like being presented with something resembling, at a glance, a meal, only to discover that the taste is all artificial flavoring, there are no nutrients whatsoever, and the whole thing is a uniform sludge that falls apart at the fork's first touch.
Is this beauty? I'd say we're still a long way away from it. Making beauty may be the last thing the AIs learn to do rather than the first. So far all they are capable of producing is mimics, and a closer look just leads to disgust.
Southkraut
Rise, ramble, rest, repeat.
11mo ago
A bunch of interesting points, but what's going on with the headline?
The Far Left's White Supremacist, Violent Rape of Language
Are you just fishing for clicks there?
This post is below the standards for posting here. You can't just say this guy got it all wrong. Whom should we read? What did Lakeman get wrong?
Tenaz
11mo ago
Was going to mention that. I don't see any ads on fandom.com.
FiveHourMarathon
You can get anything here except red ink
11mo ago
This is going to lead to hilariously inept adventures.
FiveHourMarathon
You can get anything here except red ink
11mo ago
Thanks for the recommendation!
ShariaHeap
11mo ago
I'm loaded with cognitive biases against AI, though I've swallowed the bitter pill of it's ever-possible potential. But I think among those images it's notable that some genres are easy to imitate.
Let's dispense with corporate Memphis which is surely about as good as Microsoft clipart from what the wiki shows.
Midjourney does futurist, fantasy and animation guff very well, the house I find particularly evocative and it is a great blend of realistic and fantasy. The mock stop motion animal style is pretty good though a hint of something not quite right is there (particularly the cat). Least good are the humans-something uncanny creeps in, though I said I was biased. Doesn't help they have that HDR style which has been overdone in the last decades. Particularly bad is the Indian girl, though the blue hair girl 'passes' as far as I'm concerned but then it's quite low res in the face and additionally cliched Californian type art.
But all of this is to say it won't be that long before it's as good as the real thing in most styles in in imitation and enough variation in the imitation will create enough novelty to be considered as good as genuine art today.
So, what then? Surely it will just become over commodified, lose peoples interest and become devalued. People will play with it for a while and get bored, but otherwise we will become more attentive to the actual art (and not the image). Art and sculpture still require humans hands, though bit by bit I guess they'll succumb with various printing technologies. Then we will move to arts that require living, breathing humans. Drama, dance, ballet and live music will become more popular and people will reconnect with the 'vibe' of humans and life. Of course AI will come for that,and some of us will be captured by the addiction of non-reality and give up on caring about the really real. But others will be drawn to greater contact, with AI providing the contrast needed to point in the direction of the true.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
11mo ago
Hey. Ireland always threw us a few pity points. Norway and Austria are the global leaders of nul points.
FiveHourMarathon
You can get anything here except red ink
11mo ago
No, if anything people with singularly strong unattractive traits become Romantic rather than Cynical.
The guy with a huge dick becomes cynical about his strength. "Women only love me for this thing, they don't love the real me."
The guy with a micropenis romanticizes it. "Women would love me, I'm wonderful, except for this thing."
You know what this showcase reminds me of? The Emergent art from A Deepness in the Sky. It looks high effort, like one of these mandala coloring books for adults. If I buy a picture like this from a "local artist", the primary reason is that it is a form of concentrated labor, "someone spent a lot of hours to make this" is the message. Photoshop has already devalued this kind of art a lot (which is why there was evidently so much of it in Midjourney's training data), with Midjourney and similar tools able to crank it out in literal seconds the devaluation is almost complete.
Highbrow art went through this crisis literally 150 years ago. Claude Monet painted this in 1872; when Ivan Shishkin painted his innumerable stalks of rye, he was already looking dated. Today you can ask a hyperrealist painter to do a landscape, and you will be able to examine every blade of grass under a loupe, but the painting won't have a "punch".
I'm not saying that AI art is useless. Just using it to replicate human art is a waste of time. However, this music video is great. It doesn't try do something humans did, it throws thousands of AI-generated images at you in a fever dream. It's not totally novel, when I watched Big Time for the first time I thought I was hallucinating, but it's sufficiently unique that it doesn't feel like one of these "stained glass" films you can glue to your windowpanes.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
11mo ago
Yeah, that's one of the reasons why ESC songs tend to be mediocre - of course it's even more pronounced if you are Russia, but even being the biggest artist in Finland and not even getting through the semifinal, which is what happened in 2004, is going to be embarrassing. (Though the same artist later got caught for child porn, so losing the Eurovision currently ranks quite low on the list of things for which he is remembered anyway.)
ShariaHeap
11mo ago
Yep but it will be one of the first cabs off the rank for AI. People will 'rip it', ie train a model using all his work to create new works, not for sale, which would break copyright but just for themselves and friends. He will still command good prices initially as his meme-print grows but because of the ubiquity and virality of memes, success will inevitably erode value ultimately. Can only have one Warhol period and we've had it.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
11mo ago
Zero. Eurovision is BIG. Super Bowl live TV audiences are generally 110-115 million. Eurovision has an official audience (based on ratings data from EBU-member countries) of around 140 million and an estimated total live audience including streamers in non-participating countries of 180 million. The biggest annual sporting event for TV watching is the UEFA Champion's League final which runs 200-400 million depending on who is counting and how globally popular the competing teams are.
(For comparison, less-than-annual mega-events like the FIFA world cup final, the Olympic opening and closing ceremonies, and major British royal weddings and funerals probably run around a billion viewers, but it becomes increasingly hard to keep count).
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
11mo ago
Yes.
The Experience Machine is a dumb philosophical quandry IMO. If reality and illusion are identical from the observer's perspective, what's the difference? What is valuable about a painting? The structure of its molecules? The pattern of light it produces? That's nothing without an observer to see it. Surely it must be the product of the thoughts and emotions that it inspires in those who view it. If you can remove the light and the molecules but keep the thoughts and emotions, then nothing of value is lost.
Ioper
11mo ago
This is like saying "why do people want money or status?". Power gives you the ability to accomplish things, whether that is furthering your career, helping people, grifting, avoiding work, furthering a cause etc.
What you don't want is responsibility. Power frequently comes with some responsibilities and you have to weigh whether the power is worth the responsibilities, just like you have to weigh whether paycheck is worth the responsibilities.
doglatine
11mo ago
I had exactly the opposite take — first book okay, second book good, third book excellent.Liu can’t write characters or plausible motives for shit, but his ideas are absolutely wild. Book 1 is mostly badly written characters doing stuff. Book 2 is badly written characters doing stuff with a great reveal at the end. Book 3 is Liu coming up with insane genius explanations for string theory, matter-antimatter asymmetry, entropy, etc..
On respect
Recently, my wife attended an online lecture organised by her professor and held by an acclaimed researcher, on the topic of augmented and virtual reality. She is part of the (social) psychology department. The lecture was late in the day - 18:00 - so we all listened to it at home while at the dinner table (though we eventually turned on the TV for our daughter so she doesn't get bored).
Fellow academics might already guess were this is leading - we thought the topic was something interesting about how AR/VR can be used, unexpected challenges, etc.. It featured a small part of this, but a large part was about gender norms and how totally inexplicably people continue to behave the same way in VR as they do in RL, down to minute details such as the way they move, despite now finally having the freedom to shed their skin!
Clearly, this is evidence of the insidiousness of their oppression: They have internalised it so much that they can't even process the possibilities. It ended on a hopeful note however, that when we educate people better, all differences may eventually stop existing and people can be free in the VR.
But this is also just background for what I want to talk about: What struck me was the experience. In my field, genomics, genetic disease risk factors, etc., if I make a talk only about possible biological explanations, you can be sure that someone in the audience will ask "did you control for [social/environmental risk factor]?" If I'm advising a PhD student on a study design with a big data set like UKBB, I'll tell them to control for a long list of social/environmental risk factors. If the database has sparse information on this account, I mention it as a limitation. Even internally, I think this is important, this isn't something I only do because I'm challenged.
In other words, I genuinely respect social explanations.
Contrast this talk: The possibility of biological differences between sexes/genders isn't even mentioned. Nobody in the audience challenges that glaring oversight. My wife agreed that this is how it works in the department in general; If her colleagues talk about their social research, and my wife mentions the possibility of biological explanations, people look at her as if she just pissed on the ground. At most a hushed agreement, sure, maybe, it's a possibility, to get it over with. Needless to say, since she worked in the neurology department beforehand, she has to hold her breath quite often. She wanted to make a comment on it during the talk, but there are smarter ways to make enemies. She asked something anodyne instead, to show interest, make a good impression.
There is this idea that social sciences are not well respected among other scientists. I claim it is the other way around: The social scientists actively try to ignore other fields, insulate themselves and include non-social explanations only if pressed (which they are rarely), and grudgingly.
They do not respect any science except their own.
Also, assume I wrote some boring hedging about "not all social scientists" etc. I guess you could claim that this is just "boo outgroup", and I admit part of the reason this was written is me venting, but I think it might be an important observation: What does respect for a field mean? People may talk shit about social scientists, but in general they agree that the field is important to study. They're just unhappy with the way it is done.
RenOS
Dadder than dad
11mo ago
Admittedly I stopped somewhere towards the end of the second book (I don't even remember whether I finished it, just that I put it aside with the thought "these characters are worse than most YA fiction"). Maybe I should pick up the third book after all?
Azth
Enoch Powells Friday night masseuse
11mo ago
Yup pretty much, although not necessarily unite in totality. Just a larger populist movement is possible drawing from.all the population than half, and that if its ire is directed at government and property ownership systems instead of the other half of the population then this is something to be avoided at all costs.
no billionaire I'm aware is aligned with the Dissident Right
Peter Thiel appears to be. He has definitely thrown money at Moldbug, and he backed Trump until it became clear that the candidate on the ballot was Trump-the-reality-TV-star and not Trump-the-real-world-CEO.
But I don't think the Dissident Right is aligned with Peter Thiel for the obvious sexual morality reasons.
Robert Mercer was a key early investor in Breitbart, which I think counts as dissident right, though obviously of the populist rather than the elitist variety. He tends not to boast about his political spending, and I doubt his opponents know everything he is doing - I would not be remotely surprised if he was throwing a few million at high-IQ dissident right projects on the quiet.
Very few people had heard of Harlan Crow before he turned out to own a Supreme Court Justice, and most people don't buy a Supreme Court Justice as their first politician, so I suspect he has other things going on that we don't know about, and given his taste in landscape art I imagine some of them are dissident right aligned.
In general, anyone doing high-IQ dissident stuff seriously is going to be doing so secretly for the obvious reasons (Moldbug also strongly recommends this), so I don't think the absence of declared billionaire support means an absence of actual billionaire support.
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