domain:theintrinsicperspective.com
Jiro
9m ago
We have specific rules (that are different) for Armies and Navies. Which set of rules applies to the Air Force?
You figure it out, by deciding which one it's more similar to based on the Founders' intentions. Obviously this process has some uncertainty, and it leaves room for decisions that may ultimately be arbitrary. But it doesn't leave unlimited room; you can't just say "it doesn't mention the air force so we can't have one at all", just like you can't say "television doesn't involve any printing presses. It obviously doesn't count as the press."
This is an after-the-fact naming convention, trying to shoehorn something into the Constitution that isn't there.
By this reasoning if by some quirk of English we had actually called the Air Force the Flying Navy and not just made it up, the Constitution would allow an air force after all. This can't be right either.
And you haven't really addressed freedom of the speech/the press, and I think that's a much bigger problem for your idea than the Air Force is. Do you seriously think that the government should be free to censor radio and television all they want until we pass a Constitutional amendment that covers them?
This seems like focusing on the wrong part of the story.
So why are the initial numbers even reported if we know the algorithm they use will be wildly inaccurate?
Biased estimators can still be useful. If you know an estimator is consistently high, you can account for that in your planning. On the other hand, if political leadership is putting their thumb on the scale to make themselves look good (or salve dear leader's ego), trustworthiness goes out the window. It's one thing to be wrong occasionally, it's another to be bullshit.
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
20m ago
I had a gay student some years ago (pre-Obergefell) who dated like a mid-20th century Baptist. He didn't want to have a bunch of anonymous group sex, he wanted to find his soulmate and get married. He went to a gay bar once, and the third time someone that night greeted him by grabbing his crotch, he left and swore never to return.
I have some friends in this category. They’re miserable.
I have no idea what the actual ratio of "just the sex, please" men to "approximately the sociosexual desires of a rural church girl" men is, in the gay dating pool.
My understanding is that “I don’t have sex until we’re committed” is incredibly rare among gay men, though not nonexistent. Even very monogamous gay men apparently are very sex-forward. Perhaps this shows how small biological differences can be amplified by culture and market dynamics.
It is mildly funny to me, in a “this is ironic” way, that sending dick pics is the cardinal sin of straight flirting — we even had a longtime user quit the motte because people weren’t sufficiently condemnatory of it — but in gay dating you’re shamed if you don’t send one. There seems to be something in the male nature that just goes, “here’s my penis.”
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
21m ago
Turok, you really don't learn. You don't deserve the courtesy of a long and detailed explanation of why you're being banned. In fact, you seem to be expecting it, and are relishing the opportunity to be a martyr. So be it:
Permabanned.
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
27m ago
If you care to write that thesis, I will read it. With an eyebrow raised, of course, but I read most things!
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
27m ago
· Edited 23m ago
So, to be clear, you made this post not because you want to share something that you think is an interesting observation that you made about the US Right, but (per your P.P.P.S.) because you think that your claim is an insult (seeing as how you gloss it yourself as "calling [the reader] a resentful prole" and group it with a bunch of other standard slurs) and applies to the abstract representation of a member of this forum ("the mottizen")? At face value, I figure your claim is at least wrong because this [ought to/would] be seen as "egregiously obnoxious" and earn a ban no matter the particular choice of insult.
Contrary to what you seem to think, this also doesn't particularly imply that your insult is spot on or hits a nerve; to think otherwise is the same sort of delusion as that of the hobo who screams at passersby that they are all cucked by the lizardman conspiracy, gets himself arrested for public disturbance and hauled away screaming about how this proves the lizardmen are afraid of his message.
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
27m ago
You noticed eh? So did I. I was asking Claude where good places to share my post might be, and even it noted that I would likely get plenty of pushback on /r/Avatar. If the goddamn LLMs have a dim opinion of a subreddit, I wasn't surprised in the least. I still went ahead because eyeballs are eyeballs.
I was tempted to add in many of the criticisms you've raised yourself, but I decided against it in the end. I think it's enough that Avatar's setting undermines its own messaging, and that those who don't see that will never see it. Those who have any capacity for critical thought are more likely to be like you or me.
In my experience, it's only the niche subs that actually have people with IQs above room temperature. I'm content with having >0 net up votes on my post on /r/Avatar, that's more than I expected!
oats_son
34m ago
I find the juxtaposition of treatment of this post between /r/scifi and /r/Avatar to be pretty funny. /r/Avatar is pretty hostile to anyone analyzing a movie in an unintended way. I guess you broke their magic. /r/scifi, meanwhile, is both somewhat weary of Avatar and also open to good scifi.
I think Avatar fans are something else. Anti-capitalism and anti-imperialism is one thing, but for anyone to take it seriously, you'd need a good alternative. Avatar proposes that we give up all our stuff and just go anarcho-primitivist but in a super idealised fantasy world. That's kind of retarded. I feel like a lot of them also treat this movie as gospel about how the West treated the natives, but the natives in this movie don't fight each other or brutally take each other's land. It falls short in so many ways. I guess the anti-colonialists lack material in pop culture, so they have to go for stuff like this. I really, really don't like the whitewashing of history, especially by people who hate the west and hate capitalism and want to evict everyone from America so they can leave it to the natives. Does James Cameron want that? Probably not, I just wish he would come out and say that.
ControlsFreak
35m ago
I really want to not strawman this. There are many sources one could go to, but this sort of 'old work that has been thoroughly commented on' is prime domain for LLMs.1 I asked a well-known LLM about it, specifically asking it to separate the content that was in Marx's writings versus later thinkers' take on the topic, so as to hopefully keep them from being muddled together. It indicated that it thought that there were four central aspects to alienation.
Alienation from the product of labor: The worker creates goods not for personal use or fulfillment, but as commodities owned and controlled by the capitalist. The product stands apart, becomes “something alien, as a power independent of the producer”. Workers do not recognize themselves in what they produce.
My interpretation is that this is, right off the bat, the most dangerous form from the standpoint of genuine well-being. My interpretation is that one of the problems is that it seems like we could swap in/out the phrase "owned and controlled by the capitalist" and have two independent intellectual constructs with two different implications. It is not clear to me how this ownership/control is essential to the theory, as my understanding of other aspects of Marxism (particularly commodity fetishism) seem to think this concern still applies without this clause.
My understanding is that there is one independent intellectual construct here that is primarily focused on whether you are producing goods for your own use or (possibly to trade) for the use of others. As such, there is more of a sense of, "I need to make this product in such a way as to satisfy the desires of others." In my mind, this is actually a beautiful part of markets, specialization, and trade. One must think about, and care about, others. What they want. What they care about. It is perhaps a double-edged sword, and I think that's what they're getting at. When you're caring about others, you're not necessarily being primarily self-motivated. It is somewhat incidental to the process, but markets/specialization/trade make it more front and center; you're also self-motivated to produce a good product that others will want, because you can then trade it for things that you want. As the old joke goes (at a country scale, but sort of related), there are two ways for the US to produce cars. They could either build their own cars, or they could grow corn, ship it to Japan, and magically ship back cars. There is a possible kind of mind which simply feels a subjective aversion to producing things for others or not producing some of their own things.
I would submit that we should consider how much we should shape society around those particular kinds of minds. How would we do it? It seems to be already allowed for one to not engage in such things. One can already decide to go be a subsistence farmer, living only on the fruit of their direct labor, not producing anything for the purposes of trading with others. Further, if they want to trade, they can already produce the specific types of goods that they prefer, with exactly the characteristics that they desire. Others might not like those products so much. Then what? Do we subsidize it by buying those items with the public purse? What do we do with those items? Do we force others to buy those items? Moreover, if it's not good enough for people to generally have the option to engage in this behavior, I think perhaps people might think that there is a problem if the rest of society is humming along with markets/specialization/trade; it's just somehow some sort of mental block for the people who would prefer to be self-sufficient. What then can be done about this? I'm not sure what the answer is other than to just ban the rest of society from doing these things. Force them to all be self-sufficient, so those particular types of minds won't feel like they're doing something 'weird' and 'different'. Perhaps this could bring some comfort to those types of minds, but I obviously think it must be weighed against the effects that it has on the folks who have different types of minds.
Up to this point, this is distinct from @orthoxerox's description of small business ownership. In small business ownership, you're still ultimately making goods (or services) to meet the desires of others. You are still trying to figure out what they want in significant part.
The second central aspect identified by the LLM is:
Alienation from the process of labor: The act of working is not freely chosen or self-directed. Workers follow someone else’s schedule and perform repetitive, monotonous tasks in conditions set by the employer. Marx writes: “in his work he does not affirm himself but denies himself … does not freely develop his physical and mental energy”
This lines up more closely with orthoxerox's description of entrepreneurship. In fact, the first thing that came to my mind is how closely it lines up with, of all things, the IRS's definition of the distinction between "employee" and "independent contractor". As an independent contractor, you're supposed to be able to substantially manage your own schedule and the process for how the work is to be completed. Note, however, that it is definitely distinct from the first aspect. In either entrepreneurship/independent contracting, one must still be thinking about how to make the product something that the customer desires rather than immediately being a thing that one desires oneself. An independent contractor still needs to come to some agreement with the customer as to the general parameters of the finished product. These can be more or less specific, depending on the customer's disposition. Some entrepreneurs joke that they no longer have one boss, they have a thousand bosses (their customers).
I can see the appeal of both of these aspects. There is something nice about doing things in the way that you want to do them, for your own use. Yet again, we must consider whether or not we can influence these balances and what the consequences are. Perhaps we do add challenges to being an entrepreneur/independent contractor that could be reduced. I'd be open to suggestions. I think we try to subsidize at least entrepreneurship to some extent, but not as much independent contracting.
I also think that there was something to Marx's concern, at the time he had that concern, that is a bit less concerning now. It was the rise of the industrial age, and actual factories were suddenly economically dominant. They're not anymore (much to the President's chagrin), and I think the balance is already significantly shifted, naturally. Should we just make it harder for companies to hire 'employees' in some way, possibly encouraging/requiring that they make most of their deals be with 'independent contractors'? Obvious tradeoffs are obvious, and doing things like mandating some sense of, "X% of your 'employment' headcount/budget must be independent contractors" seems like it would be pretty damaging to productivity (but I don't know this for sure), and I'm not entirely sure how much mental benefit it would bring to individual minds.
It would probably render a fair number of business models nonviable, and I guess we'd have to figure out whether the loss of entire domains of goods/services is worth the benefit of some more people becoming independent contractors, as well as what is likely a significant reduction of standard of living that will come from all those former employees having to figure out what else to do and trying to find other gigs. Knock on considerations that are at least worth a sentence include the difference between having to market yourself to a company/companies for an employee-type role versus having to otherwise market your contracting service to whatever sorts of customers you'll want to take on. Some may substantially contract with one company, in a way that is kinda sorta like an employee, whereas others may diversify more. Without getting more into details, I'd say this is kind of a wash, but I could be convinced otherwise.
The third aspect identified by the LLM is:
Alienation from species-being (human essence): Marx argues that what distinguishes humans is conscious, creative, purposeful activity. Under capitalism, labor is reduced to a means to survive, not an end in itself, thus depriving humans of their essential life activity and reducing them to animal existence
This one is pretty mind-boggling to me. In what system is labor not at least "required" as a means to survive? I guess UBI? Whether or not labor is "reduced" to a means to survive seems to be entirely a matter of subjective disposition... especially in an era where we're so rich. The vast majority of our labor is not really just for managing to survive; it's to increase our standard of living, to have nicer things in life that we like.
That does still leave a fair amount of it being not an end in itself. But I'm honestly not sure how much of labor can almost ever be an end in itself. One almost always has some other end in mind. E.g., I grow some herbs of my own. I control how I do it (aspect two) and it's for my own consumption, so I'm doing it in a way that produces only what I desire (aspect one), but the end of the labor involved is not the labor, itself. The end is that I want tasty herbs on tasty food, the labor of watering the plants is still a means to that end.
If I had to try to rescue at least part of this, I'd say that it's more related to the second aspect, in the desire for some amount of autonomy, being able to use one's own conscious, creative, and purposeful powers. Modern studies of motivation do, indeed, confirm that many people desire autonomy, alongside things like competence.
One conclusion could be to just reiterate the above discussion of independent contracting, but another would be to observe that our current capitalist system sort of already has a weighing of this factor built-in. Employees prefer jobs with these sorts of things; the research has shown it. It's also shown that this causes them to choose such jobs over others, all else being equal, or even with things like pay being less. Some folks even root sentiments of things like "kids these days don't want to work" with examples being things like picking strawberries or whatever, in the fact that it's harder to recruit employees into lower-autonomy positions when they have options to take higher-autonomy positions. It could have been a historical contingency that low-autonomy work became ever and ever more economically-dominating, but, uh, it didn't? It really seems like, by increasing productivity through specialization/trade/markets, we've opened up new opportunities for people to choose more autonomy.2 I'm really not sure that if we tried engineering society to start with, we could have gotten to this historically-contingent end point.
The final aspect identified by the LLM is:
Alienation from other people: Workers relate to one another as competitors or as mere cogs within a larger machinery, rather than as collaborators in collective, self-realizing activity. Social relations become transactional and estranged
Again, I find myself thinking that this is quite subjective as a mental disposition, and it's quite contingent depending on the specific community in which you choose to collaborate (one of the ways of choosing could be which employer you work for). Do you see yourself as thinking, "I'm collaborating in (maybe something sounding mundane like) the manufacturing of coffee pots, and together we bring joy to millions of folks who just adore the smell of their fresh coffee every morning"? Or do you think, "I'm just a cog here, and I'm only here to get a paycheck"? Maybe, "I'm collaborating in making sure that this industrial part is up to spec and safe for operation, protecting the lives of others who are using this to, I don't know, run a tractor to grow food, putting dinner on people's plates with their family every night"? I've known people with both dispositions. I've probably had both dispositions at different times with the same job.
I'm likely to be happier at the times when I have the positive disposition. My own sense is that the negative disposition mostly comes up when there's some other thing happening that is pulling me toward a generally negative frame of mind. I think it's unlikely that entrepreneurs/independent contractors are completely free from this sort of disposition ever popping up. I'm really not sure what type of labor could ever be immune. But perhaps that's due to the particularities of my own subjective mental dispositions, and I'm just genuinely missing how other minds experience this.
I don't know that I have the time right now, or the interest, in getting into the LLM's description of later thinkers' gloss on this. I find them sort of less interesting, anyway. In summary, I'd say that there are genuine correlates to human psychology captured by the general picture. I think some components are just wrong, but others are at least relatively close to something not absurd. Again, I think it was a possible historical counterfactual that these aspects could have just continued to get worse and worse, but they, uh, kinda didn't? I'm really not sure how any of them are really inherent to capitalism, per se, rather than being some human psychological factors that are part of the human condition and which interact with a whole set of legal, political, and economic factors that shape any given time/place. They're good to keep in mind when you're thinking, for example, of whether you can shape a job offering in a way that offers more autonomy, because the market has shown that it does, indeed value that. I think the most extreme versions, where we're just like, banning trade or forcing everyone to be subsistence farmers or something, are extreme and extremely harmful. And I'm not really sure how this leads to any serious, concrete proposals that have much of a hope of making things better, given the tradeoffs. I think that the general policy of allowing markets/specialization/trade still leads to significant increases in productivity, standards of living, and the ability of individuals to find the best tradeoffs for where they are on the spectrum of subjective, mental dispositions.
1 - TheMotte's rules on use of LLMs are not currently codified in the sidebar, AFAICT. There may be some explainers buried in the comments somewhere, but I have not saved them. My vague recollection is that basically just raw posting LLM output is poor form, but I think that the type of thing I'll be doing here might be acceptable. My use is for brief summary to try to make sure I'm at least in a reasonable ballpark, as a jumping off point for my own commentary. I also anticipate the LLM-generated content to not be the bulk of the content of my comment.
2 - Or less? I know actual people who say that one thing they really like about their job is how it's repetitive and they don't have to think about it. I sometimes like such things in small doses, but I believe them when they tell me they actually like it all the time. Also coming to mind is Einstein's working at the patent office, saying that it sort of kept him going with relatively repetitive stuff, giving approximately the right amount of 'spare brain time' to be useful. I guess too much, and he might have just procrastinated and found other useless things to soak up the void, but too little, and he wouldn't have had the mental space to think about what he wanted to think about?
iprayiam3
43m ago
What if Star Wars is actually about post-singularity retirees cosplaying as greasers and long-haul truckers?
Iconochasm
2. Bootstrap the rest of the fucking omnipotence.
46m ago
Have you ever had a conversation with a tattoo covered WWE fan, or a southern preacher?
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
47m ago
The whole "without evidence" tic is pretty played out at this point. Of course, Trump does have evidence -- the revisions are higher than usual. It's pretty bad evidence (so "without concrete evidence" is true), but it's enough to make "without evidence" naked editorializing.
BLS has been putting out these numbers monthly for many years; I am sure if they proposed delaying the releases two months there would be all sorts of complaints about that too.
cjet79
53m ago
I think bad luck on his part. Or maybe he is just predisposed to noticing a particular type of bad thing in his life.
It's not been my experience or the experience of most people I know.
AlexanderTurok
Alt-MSNBC
59m ago
I think low fertility is a real problem but like 70% of it is just resentful losers looking for the one thing they can say to feel superior to more successful people.
Saving this post to talk more about internal dynamics in the red tribe.
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