Primaprimaprima
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User ID: 342
Primaprimaprima
11hr ago
The “culture war” itself has cooled down and become entrenched to the point that you don’t always have new exciting “culture war” topics to talk about every day. So people just default to talking about US politics at large.
Primaprimaprima
2d ago
“Your result: Neither (24% German, 36% autistic”
I’m definitely not normal, and certainly possess some autistic traits as well, although I don’t feel like I entirely fit in with the autists either.
The style of discussion prevalent on TheMotte certainly selects for autists.
Primaprimaprima
6d ago
Fundamentally, men are not allowed to actively and consciously attempt to improve themselves for sexual gain. It’s like women getting plastic surgery, except it’s even worse and more frowned upon. This explains the intensity of the negative reactions to not only Clavicular but to the “manosphere” and “TRP” communities in general.
There was an old 4chan post about how if you need to consciously devise and work towards a strategy to “get women”, you’re already fucked. Normal men don’t have to do that. They just go about their lives and socialize with people naturally and meet women who are attracted to them. I think that’s basically true. If you’re looksmaxxing or doing pickup artistry or anything of the sort, it’s because you’re markedly below average (in terms of sexual value) in some fundamental way. Women understand this (at least subconsciously) and thus are repulsed by looksmaxxing/PUA/etc. There’s a chance that the techniques might actually work and trick them into sleeping with a man who has inferior genes, which would be bad. Women don’t want to sleep with a man who had to work for it; they want the natural winner who just did everything correctly from the start. Women will scream and howl that this isn’t true, but, it is true.
People don’t hate Clavicular because he’s “superficial” or any dumb rationalization like that. They hate him because he’s trying to start an organized movement to upend the natural sexual order. Culturally speaking, we’ve long since been inculcated with the idea that economic upstarts are to be lauded; sexual upstarts, not so much.
Primaprimaprima
8d ago
1997 is around when we got our first computer. We were kinda poor. Plenty of other families I knew from school didn't have one either. They didn't truly become a normal household appliance until the early 00s.
Primaprimaprima
9d ago
The creators of Gladiator originally intended to depict the gladiators doing celebrity endorsements for products, but worried that audiences would find this silly and anachronistic, even it's historically accurate and well-documented.
Wait what? Say more about this?
Primaprimaprima
9d ago
It's ultimately a lie, but it's a lie in the same sense that all nostalgia is a lie.
Be careful not to prove too much here. If all nostalgia is just based on one's subjectively biased viewpoint and is never grounded in anything objective, then that would imply that nothing ever gets objectively worse for anyone. But that can't be true. Sometimes the past actually was just better.
There's something about vaporwave that's deeply resonant for me. I was a small child in the 90s, but I do still have a number of distinct memories of those years.
I do think that vaporwave captures something essential about the dreamlike quality of those years (as I experienced them). You might naturally respond with, well, all of your experiences are a bit more dreamlike when you're a small child. And you'd be right. Although, if we want to analyze things in terms of "objective material conditions", the 80s and 90s presented a very brief and very unique window when consumer computing technology was becoming widely available, but technology (and the world at large) hadn't yet been thoroughly demystified by the infinite free information we have available on wikipedia/youtube/LLMs/etc. The computer was like a portal to another dimension, filled with bright promises of the future; there could be anything in there. If the kids on the playground told you that you could unlock Mew in Pokemon RBY, and you didn't have internet at home, you really had no way of knowing if they were telling the truth or not except for just exploring the game yourself. Part of what vaporwave is trying to evoke is the early mystique and promises of consumer technology, and the failure of those utopian promises to materialize.
As you were intimating, part of what vaporwave is trying to accomplish is to get you to construct your own nostalgic relationship to the past, rather than simply accurately presenting the 90s as they actually were. Listening to Floral Shoppe alone in your room? Kind of whatever. Listening to Floral Shoppe while walking around the dead mall 20 minutes down the street from the house where you grew up, where you used to spend so much time with your parents when you were little, virtually the only person in the whole building in the waning hours of a Saturday evening in August, a once vibrant shopping center full of families and children, now almost abandoned, every shop boarded up except for the GNC which is the final holdout? One of the most ethereal and otherworldly experiences I've ever had.
Primaprimaprima
11d ago
Do you think the land where all those pointless holes were dug and filled in is worth more than the next plot over, identical in every measurable way, where they weren't?
With all sincerity, yes. That would be quite an interesting backstory!
Primaprimaprima
11d ago
Or do you think that AI art has no historical and social context?
It’s a valid point and I recognize that these things operate on a sliding continuum. All we can really do is exercise our judgement in each individual case.
Primaprimaprima
11d ago
I can’t remember any specific names now, but many of the comments I’m referring to would have been made between mid 2022 and early 2023, when ChatGPT was brand new (or even prior to it). I don’t think we have much of a problem with bot posts on this forum anyway. Many accounts here are longtime users who were posting years before modern LLMs existed.
Primaprimaprima
11d ago
I mean, photography is the OG method of cheating at art, and even though photography has long been accepted as a "legitimate" medium, it never achieved the same level of prestige as painting.
Primaprimaprima
11d ago
it makes some psychological sense that you would pinpoint consciousness as the strongest argument here, given your prior statement about finding no phenomenon "to be as interesting as other people"
Damn you actually remembered that...
That still holds true! Although I don't think it's actually that relevant to the issue here. You can simply introspect on your own consciousness and realize how mysterious it is and how difficult it is to explain in material terms. No need to bring in the consciousness of other people.
But it's unclear why this has to imply the existence of a God, just because something isn't yet understood and possesses weird properties does not mean you have to invoke a deity to explain its existence.
There are multiple strategies for making the argument more precise. The paper I linked to argues from concordances between physical states and states of consciousness, for example (a bit analogous to the fine-tuning argument actually; they argue that conscious experience is "finely tuned").
Primaprimaprima
11d ago
Yeah I should have found a different way to phrase that. By "pre-modern" all I really meant was "prior to about 1600", not "backwards and unsophisticated" or anything like that. There's a mild revival of interest in Platonism too, for example.
Primaprimaprima
11d ago
Even I'm a little (pleasantly) surprised at how vehement the anti-AI-art backlash is. During the early days of DALL-E 2, there were people on this very forum swearing that the only people who could possibly care about whether art was made by a human or not were professional artists themselves who were worried about losing income. Or maybe ideologically motivated leftists; but certainly no one else. But even on forums that have nothing whatsoever to do with AI, art, or politics, I commonly see people expressing their disdain for AI art, scrutinizing any art that does get posted for signs of AI use, etc. AI is simply not "cool". At least some people do care about how art gets made. (Others don't, of course. It's an issue that people at large are genuinely split on.)
I fully acknowledge that experiments like the twitter experiment you linked to do make the anti-AI crowd look silly. But I'm willing to bite the bullet and say that it doesn't matter in the end. If you take two pixel-by-pixel identical artworks, one made by a human and one made by an AI (or at least, the kinds of AI we have today, using the methods that today's AI systems use -- this isn't a simple chauvinism in favor of carbon over silicon as an underlying substrate), the AI image is simply worse, because (very briefly and roughly) human effort has intrinsic value, connecting with other humans has intrinsic value, the total historical and social context of an artwork has intrinsic value, etc. So it's perfectly fine for people to update their assessment of a given artwork when they learn more about its provenance.
There's a certain type of mind, over-represented among the singulatarians, that's deeply uncomfortable with the entire notion of power relations and social status on a fundamental level. You can see this on full display in Scott's recent posts about artistic taste, and how uncomfortable he was that anyone would allow themselves to be blinded by extraneous (social) factors that are unrelated to "the intrinsic properties of the artwork itself". If it can't be codified in a system of clear and repeatable rules, then it should be extinguished by the light of reason. If the AI can do exactly what Monet does, then the AI should be held in exactly the same level of esteem as Monet, whatever level that ultimately works out to be; continuing to ascribe a special aura to Monet that is not extended to the AI would be arbitrary and irrational. You would just be saying that Monet is "cool" because he's already cool, basically. But status games are eternal. You can redistribute wealth, you can redistribute opportunities, you can democratize access to the means of production; but you can't redistribute coolness. Not until we develop the ability to directly control people's minds, I suppose. Maybe we will soon enough.
Primaprimaprima
11d ago
Let's talk about the existence of God. The OG internet debate culture war issue. Not about the ethical value of a Christian life, or the enduring influence of Christianity on the intellectual tradition of the West (although we also can't declare a priori that those considerations are irrelevant). But just, the simple question of God's existence.
The existence of God is possibly the culture war issue that TheMotte has the highest degree of internal disagreement about, given that we have a pretty healthy mix of both Christians and atheists here. But we rarely address the issue directly. Possibly because both sides assume that these arguments and debates have been exhausted already, and both sides are intransigently locked into their current positions, so it's better for everyone to just maintain a quiet detente. But given that there's something of a renaissance of religious (or just generally pre-modern) thinking going on, we may increasingly find value in revisiting some of these questions.
Reasons for believing in God can be divided into roughly two camps, which I'll call the rational arguments and the extra-rational arguments:
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The rational arguments are (purportedly) valid arguments such that, if you accept the truth of the premises, you are then compelled to believe in the existence of God under threat of irrationality. This includes many of the classic apologetic arguments: the cosmological argument, the ontological argument, the fine-tuning argument, etc. Although apologetics and the philosophy of religion have historically paid a great deal of attention to arguments of this sort, I think it's pretty rare to find a religious believer who claims that their belief rests on the force of these arguments alone. Even if rational argumentation alone could get you a good deal of the way towards a fully Christian theological doctrine (e.g. via considerations like Lewis's trilemma), there seems to be a general sentiment that purely rational belief is missing something crucial if it's not backed up by personal faith and experience.
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The extra-rational arguments include everything else: faith, either of the "garden" variety or of the "Kierkegaardian leap of faith" variety ("I believe because it is absurd to believe"), religious experience, either of a single life-defining event or in the more general sense of a sort of continuous and ongoing direct perception of God's existence, belief on pragmatic grounds (perhaps because you think you'll simply be happier if you believe, or it's better for the social order, or you believe because of Pascal's Wager style considerations, although maybe you could argue that Pascal's Wager blurs the lines between "rational" and "extra-rational" argumentation...)
Regarding the rational arguments, I think that arguments from consciousness are probably the most compelling. Consciousness is really spooky and mysterious. It seems spooky and mysterious in principle in a way that nothing else in (material) reality is. Perhaps this is an indication that other spooky and mysterious things are going on too, like God. (That's obviously a very crude way of phrasing it, but I think that captures the basic intuition common to this family of arguments.)
I get the impression that most Christian Mottizens are believers essentially due to some sort of personal experience or personal revelation (please correct me if I'm wrong). This makes me curious though: why do you think that you had this experience, or are perceptually attuned to this truth, etc, while so many other people (namely atheists) aren't? Why are some people capable of simply "seeing" or "realizing" this truth, but not others? (I'm assuming that there's something intrinsically inarticulable about your faith that makes it not amenable to rational argumentation). I'm not trying to do a "gotcha" here, I'm just throwing out some debate starters.
I am an atheist, although not a particularly ardent one. It would be cool if there were compelling reasons to believe, although I don't think that I have any sufficiently compelling ones right now, and I'm also aware that I have an intrinsic bias towards wanting to believe, which means I need to apply a certain level of heightened scrutiny in order to counteract that bias. I would rather the universe not be a boring place. The total intellectual dominance of materialism for going on two centuries now has gotten rather repetitive (which is part of what drives my interest in any and all exotic ontologies, like Kastrup's analytic idealism). I would rather not believe that we have everything figured out, that we have the final true picture of reality in our grasp; at the very least, it would be nice to introduce some epistemological uncertainty into the mix, the presentiment that there might be something new and unforeseen on the horizon. But we also have to prepare ourselves for the possibility that reality might actually just be that boring.
Primaprimaprima
13d ago
TheMotte has never recommended you a winner? Ever?
Why do you think that is?
Primaprimaprima
15d ago
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/6ddcsdA2c2XpNpE5x/newcomb-s-problem-and-regret-of-rationality yeah I may have been wrong, my bad
Primaprimaprima
15d ago
Which side in the Newcomb debate is supposed to have the hangup about free will? Yudkowsky for example is a two boxer, and I don’t think he would perceive himself to have any psychological obstacles regarding free will in this case.
Primaprimaprima
18d ago
I think it's pretty clearly a good thing to have non-zero "enemies for life". I don't think you can have a functioning morality or conception of justice without this component of moral reasoning, and I think life without functioning morality or a conception of justice is not a good life.
Conveniently, I was just thumbing through Nietzsche again due to my discussion with coffee_enjoyer:
"To be unable to take his enemies, his misfortunes and even his misdeeds seriously for long – that is the sign of strong, rounded natures with a superabundance of a power which is flexible, formative, healing and can make one forget (a good example from the modern world is Mirabeau, who had no recall for the insults and slights directed at him and who could not forgive, simply because he – forgot.) A man like this shakes from him, with one shrug, many worms which would have burrowed into another man; actual ‘love of your enemies’ is also possible here and here alone – assuming it is possible at all on earth. How much respect a noble man has for his enemies! – and a respect of that sort is a bridge to love . . . For he insists on having his enemy to himself, as a mark of distinction, indeed he will tolerate as enemies none other than such as have nothing to be despised and a great deal to be honoured!"
Regarding the broader art world:
I watched an employee of the state at a prestigious educational institution provide affirmation and encourage mutual validation to a series of young artists that their shit art was deep and meaningful because their output flattered their collective biases, and then watched her lead that same group collectively tearing down the one artist whose shit art did not flatter their collective biases. What conclusions would you draw from that experience?
I don't deny that there's a great deal of grift, corruption, and political bickering in the "high art" world; but, I don't think anything in my post committed me to denying that either.
I have no particular attachment to the particular art institutions that we're stuck with now, and I agree with you that art could survive and flourish without them.
Primaprimaprima
18d ago
Why should it start there? Bullshit political signaling seems obviously endemic.
Because the alternative is to simply think, as you already said, that your opponents are your "enemies for life" and there's nothing to be done about it. Then the discussion is truly just reduced to nothing but political power struggles. Sounds a bit... postmodern, doesn't it?
I take Scott at his word that his immediate, honest experience of the Chesterton poems is that he experiences them as surpassingly beautiful. That doesn't mean that I think that someone's "immediate perceptual experience" should be taken as an unanalyzable, unquestionable primitive. We could then go further and ask why he has that experience, how he came to be the type of person who has that experience, how it stands in relation to his other beliefs and his other psychological traits, etc. And someone could of course perform a similar analysis on me to determine how I came to hold the views that I hold. But the important thing is that, on a certain level, I really do take Scott's word for it that he just likes the poems because he likes them. I'm not coming into it thinking that he's just saying that he likes those poems because he has a political angle. I think everyone should extend that same level of charity to everyone.
Primaprimaprima
18d ago
Christ withstands His culture’s priests and academics (scribes), empire, false accusations, and so on to obtain Glory. This is modeled by the believer who “carries his cross”, denies himself, loses his life to find it.
Part of Nietzsche's critique of Christianity (and Buddhism, and stoicism, and etc) is that a lot of things that appear to be or are alleged to be examples of "self-denial" or "self-overcoming", actually aren't. In the majority of cases on Nietzsche's view, followers of various religious and philosophical traditions are just doing what they were naturally going to do anyway, just with some elaborate post-hoc rationalizations to make it sound more impressive. You need to look at each individual action in each individual case to determine whether it's actually coming from a place of strength or weakness.
For example, a guy who's already having no luck with women, and who then proudly declares himself to be MGTOW because he wants to "focus on himself", inspires no confidence. It's not an accomplishment, he's not "denying" himself anything, because he already had no ability to procure the thing he's allegedly denying himself in the first place. Similarly, showing mercy and love to your enemies is only impressive if you actually had any other options available to you. Refraining from crushing your enemies is only a display of strength if it's actually difficult for you; that is, if it's more difficult for you than simply crushing your enemies would be.
The Cross model can produce a JS Bach, who explored the limits of mathematical-music science while keeping beauty in mind, while his culture already moved on to different musical fashions (the fugue was not in vogue).
He never said that it was impossible for Christian civilization to produce great individuals, or that there were no great individuals who were Christian. Otherwise, he would have had to fully discount ~2,000 years of European history, which he plainly didn't. He did think though that by the time he arrived on the scene, Christianity had already completed its own self-overcoming, and it was time for it to be transcended (at least as far as higher individuals were concerned).
To this day, not a single good thing has ever come from Nietzsche or Nietzscheans.
Nietzsche produced the most beautiful prose writing in history (and it's barely even a contest). That's already a pretty staggering accomplishment, even before you get to the actual content of his thought.
Primaprimaprima
18d ago
I'm not sure if I can pick something about your linked work where I can say the same? Can you elaborate on that a bit?
I like the color scheme. I like how strangely ambiguous the image is: the figure floating in a strange artificial space (or maybe a "space" that's not-actually-a-space), he looks like he's looking at something, expectant about something, but we don't know what. The image feels "compact" in a way that's oddly comforting.
Primaprimaprima
18d ago
Nietzsche never grasped Christianity.
How so?
Primaprimaprima
18d ago
You're kind of just doing what I warned against in my post though. "No one could really be into this stuff. We all know what 'beauty' is, after all; so artists must just be screwing around because they don't have anything better to do". I explicitly disagreed with all these points. You're still incredulous that people could be pursuing "modern art" because of their own intrinsic interest in its own intrinsic aesthetic value.
Obviously something historically unique did happen in the late 19th/early 20th century that changed the trajectory of high art. But that was due to many competing factors and isn't just reducible to "linear perspective was solved". Nor were modern artists the first artists to do anything weird/experimental: see for example Hieronymus Bosch.
Yeah. I mean that was sort of just a matter of timing. We really started talking about AI a lot in the summer of 2022 because of DALL-E, right before the migration away from reddit.
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