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"...Perhaps laughter will then have formed an alliance with wisdom; perhaps only 'gay science' will remain."
User ID: 342
A reading from the scriptures:
The more a psychologist – a born, inevitable psychologist and unriddler of souls – turns to exceptional cases and people, the greater the danger that he will be choked with pity: he needs hardness and cheerfulness more than anyone else. The ruin, the destruction of higher people, of strangely constituted souls, is the rule [emphasis mine]: it is horrible always to have a rule like this in front of your eyes. The manifold torment of the psychologist who discovered this destruction, who first discovered and then kept rediscovering (in almost every case) the whole inner “hopelessness” of the higher person, the eternal “too late!” in every sense, throughout the entirety of history, – this torment might make him turn bitterly against his own lot one day and try to destroy himself, – to “ruin” himself. In almost every psychologist, you find a telling inclination and preference for dealing with normal, well-ordered people. This reveals that the psychologist is in constant need of a cure, of a type of forgetting and escape from the things that make his insight and incisiveness, that make his “craft” weigh heavily on his conscience. It is characteristic of him to be afraid of his memory. He is easily silenced by other people’s judgments: he listens with an unmoved face to how they honor, admire, love, and transfigure what he has seen, – or he keeps his silence hidden by expressly agreeing with some foreground opinion.
Perhaps the paradox of his condition becomes so horrible that the masses, the educated, the enthusiasts, develop a profound admiration for the very things he has learned to regard with profound pity and contempt, – they admire the “great men” and prodigies who inspire people to bless and honor the fatherland, the earth, the dignity of humanity, and themselves, “great men” who are pointed out to young people for their edification . . . And who knows if this is not just what has happened in all great cases so far: the masses worshiped a God, – and that “God” was only a poor sacrificial animal! Success has always been the greatest liar, – and the “work” itself is a success. The great statesman, the conqueror, the discoverer – each one is disguised by his creations to the point of being unrecognizable. The “work” of the artist, of the philosopher, is what invents whoever has created it, whoever was supposed to have created it. “Great men,” as they are honored, are minor pieces of bad literature, invented after the fact; in the world of historical values, counterfeit rules. These great authors, for example, this Byron, Musset, Poe, Leopardi, Kleist, Gogol, – they are, and perhaps have to be men of the moment, excited, sensual, and childish, thoughtless and sudden in trust and mistrust; with souls that generally hide some sort of crack; often taking revenge in their work for some inner corruption, often flying off in search of forgetfulness for an all-too-faithful memory, often getting lost in the mud and almost falling in love with it until they become like the will-o’-the-wisps around swamps and pretend to be stars (then people might call them idealists), often fighting a prolonged disgust, a recurring specter of unbelief that makes them cold and forces them to pine for gloria and to feed on “faith in itself” from the hands of drunken flatterers. What torture these great artists and higher people in general are for anyone who has ever guessed what they really are! [...]
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1d ago
Mars rock
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3d ago
Out in the world, life continues.
...but not for Charlie Kirk.
"Just don't worry about it lol" is a really tone deaf response right now.
A couple things came to mind while I was reading this.
First: on a purely limbic/affective level, I am quite unfazed by the fact that leftists who are getting fired over their Kirk posts are now getting to experience a small taste of what they have visited upon rightists for the last decade. I'd be lying if I said I didn't derive some satisfaction from it. The fact that all your PI could muster up was "this is a dangerous environment to be posting this kind of thing" shows that he didn't particularly disapprove of the post in question, nor did he nor the lab member in question feel any particular remorse over the post, and the totality of these facts does absolutely nothing to endear me to their cause.
Nonetheless. I am in fact capable of distinguishing my own personal emotional biases from my higher order propositional beliefs. I know that my own emotional instincts are in fact not a reliable guide to what is virtuous and just. I actually believe in freedom of expression as a principle, unlike my enemies. And so, if it were in my power to do so, I would ensure that no one is fired for statements that mock Charlie Kirk or celebrate his death, and I would immediately reinstate the positions of anyone who has been fired for making such statements. You should be free to say whatever you want about Charlie Kirk; and freedom of speech actually does mean freedom from consequences.
Someone will inevitably reply to this comment and say, "well it's nice that you think that, but what about all the other rightists who don't think that?" And you're right. I have nothing to say about what other people think or do. I can only speak for myself. Take it or leave it, do with it what you will.
It feels like we rapidly are descending into an authoritarian anti-free speech environment
I would implore you to reflect on the fact that this is how rightists have felt for the last 10 years.
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3d ago
Frankly, I don't want people posting here who aren't smart. The stringent moderation has helped us cultivate a high-quality community. If people are getting filtered by the rules, then that's a feature, not a bug.
But those people can't provide coverage of everything here.
Quality over quantity. If something is genuinely newsworthy, then someone will write a sufficiently effortful post about it eventually (where, again, sufficiently effortful typically means 4-5 sentences). There's no rush.
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3d ago
Writing a five (5) (五) sentence paragraph with your own original analysis is not a "hoop".
@urquan wrote a very detailed post within hours of the original shooting. It's not an insurmountable barrier. You just have to, you know, do it.
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3d ago
Economically: Middle-middle.
Culturally: Hobo in the woods.
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3d ago
Political assassinations existed before discord so I’m not sure why discord would get the blame here.
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3d ago
"Can you and will you keep the faith after you feel certain the faith has failed you? In other words, does this sensation go beyond your ego, when 'you' (in quotes) feel certain it's been extinguished? Does your resolve go far enough outside your ego that you will continue when 'you' feel totally certain it's over? And when I say you feel totally certain it's over, I mean you wake up in the morning and you feel on every level like it's done. Including on that outer level. That's the fucked part of it. You will feel abandoned. You will feel certain you're defeated on every level. Does that sensation or that trust in this deity go far enough that you will remain at your post after you feel totally, pragmatically and mystically, certain, that there is no more post? Or another way to think of it, are your instincts stronger than your instincts? Will you continue to believe after you've stopped believing?"
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3d ago
TheMotte freaks out at tattoos but is ok with this??
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4d ago
His arguments were often not all that sophisticated; he did a better job as an avatar of free, heterodox expression in academic settings, than as an advocate for any particular position.
That arguably makes him more dangerous.
Very few people actually listen to sophisticated arguments (I myself can only stomach so many in one day). It is the middle managers of culture who take sophisticated arguments, extract what is valuable from them, and repackage their insights in a manner that's rhetorically appealing (which then inspires the men of action, who actually bring about concrete changes in circumstances).
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4d ago
By "childish" I meant: the abdication of all responsibility, the demolition of any barriers between you and the immediate satisfaction of your desires. Turning the cosmos into an eternal playroom. Traditional Christian "folk" conceptions of Heaven are childish for the same reasons.
Undoubtedly I chose the word for its normative connotations, but I certainly don't think that being childish is a bad thing in every instance. I think that traditional notions of "being an adult", "being a man", etc, are essentially scams, and I take a childish attitude regarding them, and I frequently encourage others to do the same.
This is a story idea. It's super abstract.
There's nothing childish about stories, insofar as it's a story that structures a vision and a mode of life. Stories are how meaning is revealed.
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5d ago
People who have seen it are suggesting he was shot center mass in the neck, and is likely dead.
I saw it and yeah he’s dead. Press F.
Frankly I doubt this will escalate into anything unless the shooter had very clearly stated political motives. If the pictures of the suspect are accurate then it was a white boomer. Very much could get swept away as a “crazy guy with a gun”.
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5d ago
This is but a straw man.
It's not a straw man. It's the view I hold. "If I can't be the king, then somebody should be the king." Gracious in defeat, committed to principle rather than pride.
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5d ago
@Magusoflight you said that the main thread right now is "wildly boring"; please let me know where this post ranks on the boring/exciting spectrum, and if it's not up to snuff, I'll try to incorporate your feedback into future posts.
The Tyranny of Transhumanism (paywall'd, but it's short, and I'll quote the relevant bits):
When Vladimir Putin joined Xi Jinping last week for a massive military parade in Beijing, the geopolitical message wasn’t exactly subtle. Ostensibly, the parade was a commemoration of the 80th anniversary of the Allied victory in World War II. But Xi’s decision to invite the leaders of Russia, North Korea, and Iran, while snubbing the United States, Britain, and France, made clear that he is thinking more about future alliances than historic ones.
As is often the case with carefully stage-managed propaganda events, the most revealing moment happened by accident. Chinese TV cameras picked up a conversation between Xi and Putin as they walked to the reviewing stand, in which they talked about the prospect of technology making human beings immortal. “There’ll be constant transplants of human organs, and maybe even people will grow younger as they age—even achieving immortality,” said Putin, 72, through a translator. “It could be that in this century humans might be able to live to 150 years old,” replied Xi, also 72.
Coming from Silicon Valley billionaires, such an exchange would be unremarkable. The idea that technology will soon be able to abolish death has been mainstream in technofuturist circles for decades. Still, there is something clarifying about hearing aging tyrants talk about the allure of immortality.
From the tech world’s perspective, the abolition of death looks like the apotheosis of progress: After conquering so many forms of suffering, science and technology will now do away with mortality itself. But if Xi and Putin were able to achieve immortality—or even just live until 150—no one could call it progress. On the contrary, it would mean historical arrest. The tyrant’s dream is to stop things from changing, since for him any change can only be for the worse—in the same way that, for a man atop a pyramid, moving in any direction means going downward. When a country settles into this kind of malign stasis—as in today’s Russia and China, where it is quite inconceivable that the ruler will ever leave office voluntarily—the only consolation is the knowledge that even the tyrant is less powerful than death.
It should be clarified that, as a matter of empirical fact, there is no such thing as true "immortality" or "stasis". Entropy comes for us all in the end, and the expansion of the sun in approximately eight billion years will, at minimum, force a change of environs for whomever remains on Earth at that time.
Nonetheless, in contradistinction to the majority of transhumanist aspirations which are of a fundamentally childish nature, there is in fact something to be said for the image thus outlined: the immortal Xi, who stands as the silent and watchful observer, a grim reminder of eternity. (I have specifically chosen Xi's name here as the metonymic signifier of dictatorial immortality rather than Putin's as a token of good faith, and to demonstrate that I'm concerned with structure here rather than content; I have publicly expressed my own harshly critical views of China in the past.)
Of course, in order for the narrative to work, in order to establish the appropriate mise en scène, it can only be Xi who is immortal, and not any of his subjects. He precedes you, and he will outlast you. You will not live to see your great-grandchildren grow to maturity; but Xi will. He measures the seasons of his life by the empires he has seen rise and fall; for you, the turning of the leaves and the thaw of Spring are all that is needed. He stands as the lone pillar that structures a great many ever-changing forces and events, an isolated outpost of stability, made all the more enigmatic by his remoteness from ordinary affairs such as "birth" and "death". You'll never get to find out how the story ends. But he will.
This would, at least, be the portent of a new drama; this would at least give the poets "something to sing about". If nothing else, it represents a vision, instead of the horror of and the recoil from vision. To have a vision is to make a choice, to accept the structural role of sacrifice, to say "yes, that is mine" but also "no, that is foreclosed"; it cannot be otherwise. I am not in any way opposed to the pursuit of immortality. But I am opposed to stasis, to the leveling of difference, and to the "end of history".
The formula of an authentic anti-egalitarian politics is: "if not me, then somebody". We might go one step further and say that, just as the communists have their "heroes of the revolution", so too the anti-egalitarian hero is the one who brings about the state of inequality. The Übermensch, far from being a victorious conqueror, may indeed be the man who, upon noticing that everyone has finally become equal, takes it upon himself to make the sacrifice, to abase himself, to accept a lower station, in order to restore the distinction of rank between man and man.
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5d ago
When was your last top level post in the CW thread and what was it about?
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6d ago
Same reason there’s a lot of intransigence on politics and religion: it’s a moral issue. It’s also closely linked to questions of willpower and akrasia for a lot of people, which is a particularly touchy subject. “The only reason you want to promote food X is because it aligns with your sinful and gluttonous lifestyle. I on the other hand am able to control my baser impulses, which is why I walk the path of true righteousness and eat food Y.”
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7d ago
Before AI, the hard part was finding information.
??? Before internet, maybe.
Why would AI trigger a flood of personal theorizing?
It won't. The average human is spiritually, cognitively, and creatively empty.
Vast majority of people still haven't produced an original artistic work even with the availability of AI art tools. They have no motivation or desire to do so. So it goes too for the construction of "frameworks".
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8d ago
Even if you’re immortal, some people might still feel the presence of a God-shaped hole if they feel that their lives lack meaning.
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10d ago
I literally didn’t know we had a Patreon.
The “Profile Views” button says “this page is only available to patrons”, can I actually view that if I become a patron?
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11d ago
The community overall is majority women. But the people doing hour long deep dives on Marx’s or Nietzsche’s type and how their cognitive function stack influenced their work, are all men. So in that sense it has a more masculine bent than astrology does.
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11d ago
I read GEB in high school and it was one of the first books that turned me onto philosophy. It's not "deep", but as a popularization it does its job well.
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11d ago
They're pretty well aware of how insane their claims are. But, philosophers justify insane claims for a living.
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11d ago
The easiest way to get away from pseudobabble is to state a testable hypothesis.
Well, no, not really.
We can give multiple examples of statements that are clearly meaningful and aren't "pseudobabble", but which admit of no possibility of empirical verification or falsification, even in principle.
We can start by asking what happens when you turn your statement on itself: does "the easiest way to get away from pseudobabble is to state a testable hypothesis", make a testable hypothesis? It of course depends on exactly what you're trying to say here, and what you mean by "pseudobabble". If your statement was only intended to express something purely subjective, something like "I have no interest in statements that don't make testable hypotheses", or "I have no use for statements that don't make testable hypotheses", then it perhaps could be defensible (although even then there are significant difficulties). But if your statement was intended to express something objective -- that is, you were offering an objective criteria for distinguishing "pseudobabble" from non-"pseudobabble" -- then we run into some real problems. What is the empirical test for empirically verifying the statement "statements that don't make testable empirical predictions are 'pseudobabble'"? You could point to past successful empirical predictions made using claims that make empirical predictions, and the lack of successful empirical predictions made by claims that don't make empirical predictions. But this would just be circular. If someone hasn't already accepted the assumption that empirical verifiability is a guide to meaningfulness, they're going to be unimpressed by a track record of past successful empirical predictions.
Let's consider examples of inaccessible past information. There is a fact of the matter regarding what color shirt you wore on March 1st, 2009. There are probably no reliable records of what color shirt you wore that day, nor does anyone alive have a reliable memory of what shirt you wore that day; if there are reliable records of that day, just pick a different day for which there are no reliable records. This is not a "pseudobabble" question to ask. But there is (plausibly) no way of empirically verifying what color shirt you actually wore that day, even in principle. So, here we have another counterexample.
I am aware that the idea of fully simulating the past, starting from the universe's initial conditions, is a hot topic of discussion in AI spheres. It seems at least possible to me that due to a combination of time/energy constraints, inability to know the initial conditions with enough precision, and possible indeterminacy, there may be no way of actually fully simulating all past events with perfect accuracy. If you agree that this is a conceivable possibility, that's all that's needed for the counterexample to work. We may or may not be able to know what color shirt you wore on March 1st 2009, but it seems that even if we can't, that doesn't thereby make it a "pseudobabble" question. So the meaningfulness of the claim is not dependent on its empirical verifiability.
For a more grandiose example: there may be regions of the multiverse that are causally isolated from our own such that we can never empirically verify their existence, or empirically verify certain concrete facts about those regions, even in principle (could be a parallel universe, could be regions of our own universe that are beyond the limits of the observable universe, take your pick on whichever strikes you as the most physically plausible). But the question of the existence of these regions is not "pseudobabble". They could simply... exist. And there doesn't seem to be anything wrong with that. Your inability to verify the existence of these regions has no bearing on the meaningfulness of the claim that they do exist. (You could imagine, for example, a sentient inhabitant of one of these regions claiming that talk of anything beyond his own region of spacetime is "pseudobabble". Well, you know that your own existence is not "pseudobabble"!)
For an even more grandiose example: you have no way of empirically verifying that you are not the only consciousness in existence. It's possible that you're the only conscious being who actually exists, and the rest of the universe is just your hallucination. But the existence of other consciousnesses is not "pseudobabble". When you see someone who is not you prick their finger and experience pain, there is simply a fact of the matter as to whether or not there is a conscious experience of pain happening for some consciousness at that time. You have no way of empirically verifying it, but it's still not a meaningless question.
If you're still largely unfamiliar with his original works, then you have a very special and unique experience waiting in store for you. For those who only know Nietzsche through reddit /r/atheism soundbites, the beautiful subtlety of his thought is reduced to caricature. Few other thinkers in history so reward careful and prolonged meditation, and few others were so thoroughly opposed to quick and easy answers. (Jung described Nietzsche as a "devious mind who laid many traps for unsuspecting intruders" in the catacombs of his soul.)
One thing that all readers of Nietzsche can agree on is that questions of nobility, of distinctions of rank, of ascendancy and degeneration, were at the forefront of his mind, so you'll find plenty to reflect on there.
Academic commentaries on Nietzsche are largely useless. Just dive in and enjoy the ride.
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