@Primaprimaprima's banner p

Primaprimaprima

Bigfoot is an interdimensional being

2 followers   follows 0 users  
joined 2022 September 05 01:29:15 UTC

"...Perhaps laughter will then have formed an alliance with wisdom; perhaps only 'gay science' will remain."


				
User ID: 342


				
				
				

			

		

	














	


		


			



	

		

			

			

				

					

						

							
						

						

							
							

								
Primaprimaprima


								

								

								
								
								

								
							
					
 
				


				
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being

				
				
				

				

					2 followers  

					follows 0 users  

					joined 2022 September 05 01:29:15 UTC
				


				
					

					
"...Perhaps laughter will then have formed an alliance with wisdom; perhaps only 'gay science' will remain."



				

				

				

				

				

					

					

					
					
					

					
User ID: 342


					
					
					
				

			


					

						
					



		

	

 











			
			

			
			

			




	


		

			
‎

			

				
				

					Hour
					Day
					Week
					Month
					Year
					All
				

			


			
‎

			

	
	

	 Hot Bump Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
	



		

	






	

		
		

		
		
	

	

  







		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of November 11, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


I think we have plenty of evidence that Trump admires dictators and wants to become one and will work towards becoming one.




So why didn't he become a dictator during the first four years he was president?  I've never heard a good response to this one.  He was already president for four years, and yet we still have democracy.  He's a known quantity.




Now it's very interesting that at least lots of his voters appear to either not mind this, or to see something else in him, and does this fact give me pause? Sometimes, but ultimately 99% of people I esteem and respect in the field of ideas/politics/philosophy oppose Trump so this makes it pretty easy for me to conclude that his supporters are the ones with faulty judgement.




Consider the following: I am a Trump supporter.  Based on the above, I presume that you would thereby see my judgement as faulty.  But the feeling is not mutual.  I don't see your judgement to oppose Trump as incorrect; I just think you're a different type of person than me and you have different values, so of course you would think differently.  You see me as faulty, whereas I just see you as different; and difference is not in itself a bad thing.  Does this fact give you any pause?




An additional dimension is that 'democracy is in peril' is not only about elections. It's also about the ability of ideas to face off against one another in a somewhat mutually comprehended arena.




I think the left has had a profoundly more deleterious effect on intellectual discourse over the past 10+ years than anything Trump has ever done.




Of course people in this forum just think Dems lie more cunningly




I don't think the left is bad because they lie.  In fact I don't think of them as being particularly untruthful at all, not anymore than the right is anyway.  If I had to enumerate all my complaints with them, "lying" would not make the list.  Rather, I think they're bad first and foremost because they can't tolerate dissent.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of November 4, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


life extension, replacing workers, treating disease




But all of these problems are reducible to text generation. In some sense every conceivable problem is, because solving the problem means writing out the solution, in language.


For “solving” medicine, just have the LLM print a formula for the drug you want. A lot of remote work just is text generation in a sense, but for physical labor, a sufficiently intelligent LLM would be able to accelerate progress in robotics significantly.


Whether LLMs can actually achieve these things though is an open question.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of October 28, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Not a problem! I’m happy to continue the conversation at any time if you ever want to.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of November 4, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
OpenAI Shifts Strategy to Slower, Smarter AI as GPT Scaling Limits Emerge, OpenAI's upcoming Orion model shows how GPT improvements are slowing down


Paywalled, but here's a summary from reddit:




"Some OpenAI employees who tested Orion report it achieved GPT-4-level performance after completing only 20% of its training, but the quality increase was smaller than the leap from GPT-3 to GPT-4, suggesting that traditional scaling improvements may be slowing as high-quality data becomes limited






    

  • Orion's training involved AI-generated data from previous models like GPT-4 and reasoning models, which may lead it to reproduce some behaviors of older models
    • 







    

  • OpenAI has created a "foundations" team to develop new methods for sustaining improvements as high-quality data supplies decrease
    • 







    

  • Orion's advanced code-writing features could raise operating costs in OpenAI's data centers, and running models like o1, estimated at six times the cost of simpler models, adds financial pressure to further scaling
    • 







    

  • OpenAI is finishing Orion's safety testing for a planned release early next year, which may break from the "GPT" naming convention to reflect changes in model development
    • 







“Some researchers at the company believe Orion isn’t reliably better than its predecessor in handling certain tasks, according to the employees. Orion performs better at language tasks but may not outperform previous models at tasks such as coding, according to an OpenAI employee. That could be a problem, as Orion may be more expensive for OpenAI to run in its data centers compared to other models it has recently released, one of those people said.”




This is one of several articles/posts/tweets coming out of the LLMsphere over the past couple of weeks that are renewing concerns over LLMs hitting diminishing returns.


Of course this is just speculation until OpenAI actually releases Orion (or whatever they end up calling it).  And really we would need several models past Orion too to actually extrapolate a pattern.  But this does fit with my subjective impression that the leap from GPT-3 to GPT-4 was not as big as the leap from GPT-2 to GPT-3, and the leap from 4 to o1 was not as big as the leap from 3 to 4.  The fact that they're considering again releasing a new model without calling it GPT-5 is also telling.  They know how psychologically important the "GPT-5" moniker has become at this point and they won't give that name to a model unless it really represents a major leap forward.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of November 4, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


I can't imagine there being another round of top-down enforced lockdowns.




I can!




But, really, your assumption would be conspiracy




Sure!




not the much simpler explanation that public health is bad when you cut funding for public health?




This phrasing makes it sound like the response to Covid arose naturally from "the facts on the ground".  But the response to Covid was a political and ideological choice.  We could have chosen differently.  There was no direct unmediated causal link between the actual effects of Covid and the measures we took in response.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of November 4, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
If we get another pandemic under Trump and another round of global lockdowns, I will update heavily towards thinking that Covid was intentionally planned and the new one is too. Because that would just be a little too perfect.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				U.S. Election (Day?) 2024 Megathread
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
No. They’ve still won it. Reports of a pendulum swing are greatly exaggerated.


I don’t think most people voted for Trump as an explicit anti-woke vote. My impression is that the modal voter was voting mainly on the economy, with maybe a smattering of other more “procedural” considerations in play (the assassination attempts, the lawfare, etc). I don’t think wokeness was really on the radar this election cycle for most people.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				U.S. Election (Day?) 2024 Megathread
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Oh sure. I agree completely. But if we’re stuck with universal suffrage, then the least we can do is require that people actually go to the damn polling place if they want their vote to be counted.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				U.S. Election (Day?) 2024 Megathread
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
The voting process should select for higher agency / lower time preference voters. That’s a good thing; those are the people who should have a bigger influence on politics. It’s outside the Overton window to require an IQ test as a precondition of voting, but thankfully it’s still within the Overton window to have some very simple and reasonable measures like, requiring that someone physically travel to a polling place, or requiring that someone procure a mail-in ballot for themselves. Any slight barrier to entry is better than canvassers going door to door and telling people “just sign on the dotted line, please” in order to harvest votes.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				U.S. Election (Day?) 2024 Megathread
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
It’s not just the fact that turnout overall was higher in 2020. It’s specifically the fact that Harris underperformed Biden by 15 million votes and Trump underperformed his 2020 results by 3 million votes. Why the massive difference for the Dems but not for Trump?


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of November 4, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Popular vote counts for Democrat candidates since 2008, per Wikipedia:




Obama 2008: 69,498,516






Obama 2012: 65,915,795






Clinton 2016: 65,853,514






Biden 2020: 81,283,501






Harris 2024: not yet finalized, but currently at 66,415,077




What is the steelman for why I shouldn't take Biden's anomalously high vote count in 2020 as evidence of fraud?  I never looked too closely into the details of the 2020 fraud claims, and I'm sure that this issue has already been discussed at length previously, but it seems like it would be reasonable to revisit that discussion in light of Harris's vote count dropping back to be more in line with the historical average.  (The votes are still being counted, but we can safely assume that her total vote count won't go too much higher than 70 million.  Biden got over 10 million votes more than that.)


Trump's vote total of 74,223,975 in 2020 was also elevated compared to what would historically be expected of a Republican candidate, but it seems less anomalous in light of the 71,352,277 votes he's received so far this year.  Whereas Harris has drastically unperformed Biden while simultaneously performing more in line with other Democrat candidates.


It's not exactly a formal statistical analysis, but this does somewhat increase my credence that there was substantial fraud in 2020.  It just doesn't pass the smell test that there were ~15 million people who were that excited to vote for Biden, who had largely never voted Democrat before, and then they all just failed to materialize again in 2024.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				U.S. Election (Day?) 2024 Megathread
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
We’d be waiting potentially for weeks for an official call. So the major news networks use statistical modeling to project a winner within a reasonable timeframe.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				U.S. Election (Day?) 2024 Megathread
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Fox and other major networks have called Georgia for Trump. Thank God that one’s not going to stretch out into the week (I hope). Good sign that we might get a quick resolution in the other swing states.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				U.S. Election (Day?) 2024 Megathread
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
It depends on how contested it is. Often we basically know who won by around midnight on election day, so about 16 hours from now. But famously in the 2000 election, no one knew who the winner was for weeks because no one could agree over who won the state of Florida.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of November 4, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/moral-non-naturalism/




Most often, ‘non-naturalism’ denotes the metaphysical thesis that moral properties exist and are not identical with or reducible to any natural property or properties in some interesting sense of ‘natural’.




				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of November 4, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


What is "anti-empiricism"?




It's a bit difficult to define, because the idea I had in mind is a loose federation of beliefs and attitudes, and doesn't really have any specific criteria.  In terms of concrete beliefs though, I would say that the core of it would be something like an openness to entities and propositions that we don't (or can't) have direct empirical confirmation of, like God, souls, ghosts, UFOs, etc.  In more rarefied territory, it would be an affinity for philosophical positions like: hostility to logical positivism, belief in abstract (non-spatiotemporal) objects, belief in non-naturalistic moral facts.  But independent of any concrete beliefs about the existence or non-existence of specific entities, I think it's also a psychological disposition to see things as being suffused with meaning and significance.




And is this an example of it?




Not really.  Lots of people are recalcitrant in the face of new evidence when it contradicts their deeply held beliefs.  That's more of a human trait than a left-right trait.  But, if someone just has an overriding commitment to making sure that children have access to puberty blockers for some reason, I don't think there's anything metaphysically there that doesn't fit into a purely materialist/naturalist worldview.


"Anti-empiricism" is in no way intended to be an insult of course.  I personally have a strong anti-empirical streak.




I'm still hoping to get some replies written to your recent posts on art, BTW. Keep up the great work.




Thank you!  I really appreciate that.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of November 4, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


Tucker Carlson appearing on Joe Rogan experience speculated that UAPs are real, but are not alien visitors from other planets but supernatural in origin and always has been here.




Honestly based.




Why are apparently cooky beliefs entertained by top influencers on the right?




The contemporary American right is an accident of history, an odd amalgamation of people that hold disparate and often mutually contradictory beliefs.  So generalizing about them as a group is difficult.  Nonetheless I speculate that there are (at least) two factors at play here:


    

  1. 

    I believe there is a "religious temperament" that predisposes one to not only literal belief in the supernatural, but also anti-empiricism in general, more "speculative" modes of thinking, etc.  An appreciable number of these people find themselves on the right for various reasons (the phrase "the religious right" exists for a reason).
    

    2. 

  2. 

    Leftism is the socially dominant ideology in elite culture, so the right naturally attracts contrarians who are attracted to odd ideas for their own sake.
    

    3. 



				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of November 4, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I was considering writing a post on this exact topic, but I refrained, because I wasn't sure how to press my vague discontent into a substantive thesis.


I'll be happy when we can go back to weekly threads that don't contain the term "prediction market".  I've always found the LW/SSC fascination with monetary betting to be somewhat crass.  (I'd be inclined to speculate that "make all your beliefs pay rent" is only a few steps away from "make all people pay rent".)


It's sometimes claimed that intelligence just is pattern matching.  So, trying to successfully predict a major one-off event like a presidential election could then be seen as the ultimate IQ test, the ultimate test of one's ability to reason in an uncontrolled and data-scarce environment.  And I can see why that would be an intriguing challenge to take on.  But pattern matching has its limits, and ultimately it just feels obvious to me that there's not much that can be said in terms of election forecasting besides "well, we'll see when we see".


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Quality Contributions Report for October 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


You even pulled the stupid language games trick here--"my last top-level post"




By my count, out of his last 100 comments, 23 were about Israel.  I think that's a reasonable level of engagement with one topic.




throws in a completely unnecessary qualifier to determining whether you're a little too focused on something for the community's comfort.




I mean, if community comfort is the issue - not a single one of @coffee_enjoyer's posts has ever made me uncomfortable, and in fact I value his presence here highly.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of October 28, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


He talks about how previous generations of award-winning books were written by people who had actual practical "lived experience" of the things they were writing about (e.g. Hemingway actually fought in a war), often without having ever attended college.




I think the valorization of "lived experience" for writers and artists (which, in practice, typically means the valorization of a specific kind of experience, to the exclusion of others - traveling to distant places, exposing oneself to physical danger, etc) is misguided.


Consider this post, which linked to this graph, where people were asked how many unarmed black men they thought were killed by police in a single year.  About one in five "very liberal" respondents said that the number was 10,000 or more - but the actual number is nowhere near that high.  Now imagine that someone has the "lived experience" of watching their unarmed black male friend get shot by a police officer.  Perhaps he hears one or two anecdotes from friends that they also knew people who had similar experiences.  We can imagine that this experience might affect him greatly; we can imagine that he might start to think that this experience is more common than it really is, and he might go on to write an award-winning book about it, and this book might produce more people like those 1-in-5 Very Liberal respondents who think that police shootings of unarmed black men are much more common than they actually are.  In this case, we would want his lived experience to at least be tempered by some "book learnin'".  Otherwise, he might go on to write a book that was quite politically deleterious.  There are some truths that can never be arrived at even with a lifetime of "lived experience" - there's no getting around the need for data, abstract reasoning, the need for knowledge of other people's experiences so you can find the common patterns.


Or consider all the things that are in principle impossible for anyone to have direct experience of.  If you want to, say, write a book that deals with the historical connections between contemporary wokeism and Stalinism, or maybe the French Revolution - you're going to need to read other books for that.  Eventually, historical events become so distant that no one alive could have experienced them.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of October 28, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Thank you for taking the time to reply, I really do appreciate it.




I think this is an instance of the Motte of a Motte-and-Bailey that is commonly deployed in defense of every academic discipline that operates according to "humanities rules". Motte: "This is just a bunch of guys shooting the shit. Sometimes they even produce interesting things that I personally enjoy. Why do you, an outsider who doesn't even appreciate any of this, barge in and try to impose rules such as your 'epistemic standards'?"




Sorry if I didn't emphasize this enough, but I did say that you had to evaluate every work on a case by case basis.  What I meant that "guys shooting the shit" is a helpful way to approach some continental works.  I don't think it's the best way to approach all continental works.  Derrida's Voice and Phenomenon lays out some claims and arguments in the philosophy of mind that, I think, can be phrased in simple and accessible terms.  Foucault's Discipline and Punish is a pretty down to earth history of the development of the western prison system over the last several centuries.  They're just, like, normal books.  Nothing too mysterious going on.


I do think that Lacan goes off the reservation sometimes, to the point that the commentaries and secondary sources on his work are sometimes better than the original works themselves.  But that doesn't mean that everything he wrote is bad, and it certainly doesn't mean that every work of continental philosophy is bad.




Bailey: "These people are the world authorities on philosophy. We pay them to do philosophy and all philosophers agree that they are the most influential and insightful philosophers, so we should defer to them in matters of philosophy."




"Deference" to an "authority" is a concept that's about as antithetical to philosophy as you can get.  For every single claim in the history of philosophy, you can find examples of someone asserting the opposite; for every canonical philosopher, you can find another canonical philosopher who thought the first guy was an idiot.  Even if you were to just focus on continental philosophy alone, I really can't emphasize enough just how fragmented it is.  Philosophy just is debate and disagreement, in a way that no other field is.  I mean it when I say that if you walk into an English department (which is where continental philosophers usually hang out in the US) you can find people who think that Lacan was bullshit and evil, Sartre was bullshit and evil, Derrida was bullshit and evil... who is the authority to defer to?  No one would be able to agree!


Analytic philosophers I think are quite scrupulous about this, to a fault.  Because of continental philosophy's greater focus on specific figures rather than isolated positions and arguments, it's more common to get people who are "fans" of one figure or another, and I acknowledge that sometimes it looks like they're treating them as an authority figure.  Although I don't think that's really what's going on usually.  When someone says "Marx said X" for example, it should be read as more like "X is a claim that was developed in Marx's work, so you should refer to his works if you want further justification for it" or "I believe X is true, but I didn't come up with it, Marx did", rather than "you should believe X because Marx said so".  More like citing your sources, rather than an assertion of authority.  Even if someone did start treating their favorite philosopher like an authority figure, they wouldn't be able to do so without major cognitive dissonance, for all the reasons mentioned above; they'd have to explain why there are a lot of other philosophers who think their favorite "authority" was wrong about everything.


I can't personally vet the psychology of everyone who talks about philosophy.  Maybe there are some people who really do believe "X is true because Y said so".  But, that doesn't reveal anything in particular about philosophy itself.  That just reveals that that particular person is dumb and wrong.  It would be like saying that data fabrication is a part of science because some scientists have fabricated data before.




As a result, there are Lacanians and Deleuzians sitting in IRBs and ethics boards and asking to be persuaded, in their terms, before I am allowed to use my funding to perform scientific experiments




I would be legitimately fascinated and highly interested if you could provide specific examples of that happening.




we defer to them in questions of what arguments are acceptable in politics and school; and ultimately they are what anchors the chains of trust and authority that we use to determine which political movements are legitimate (at risk of pulling clichés from the bingo board, the argument that the druggie who runs off with five pairs of sneakers as he torches the store is misguided but has his heart in the right place ultimately leads back, via many chains of simplification for political expediency, to some humanities tract full of "poetic language") and which ones are to be treated as threats.




I think you're overestimating the real world impact of academic philosophy here.  I think it would be kinda neat if it actually did have that level of impact.  But I don't think it does.


I believe (and please correct me if I'm wrong; I'm not trying to put words into your mouth) that you see a direct causal link between continental philosophy on one hand and contemporary wokeness on the other.  It's a claim that I've seen repeated in various forms on TheMotte on multiple occasions, and I've always disagreed with it, for 3 main reasons:


    

  1. 

    Broadly speaking, I don't think that people hold the political positions they do because they read a book, or even because they talked to someone who read a book.  I think people believe the things they do because they want certain things (wealth, power, various types of freedom, etc).  The desire and the need for something concrete comes first, and then they look for an ideology later to justify it.  So, for example, I don't think that DEI exists in the US today because of humanities academics.  I think it exists because that's naturally the sort of thing that arises when you have an ascendant coalition of racial minorities and a demographically declining racial majority.
    

    2. 

  2. 

    The "big names" of continental philosophy are not particularly woke (there's little in their work that would be recognizable as modern wokeness, anyway) and in fact I think there are resources in their work that could be a benefit to anti-wokeness.
    

    3. 

  3. 

    Regarding the point about obscurantist language - do you think that's somehow necessary to leftist politics?  If they were forced to only use simple words then the whole thing would collapse?  Because I think that's clearly not true.  You can easily put all the key tenets and arguments of wokeness into simple language.  To reiterate the point above, woke people are woke because of the intrinsic content of the positions, not because they were hypnotized by a humanities tract.
    

    4. 



				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of October 28, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


The rabbit from Zootopia is hot and a little uppity. She absolutely wants and deserves to get gangbanged by a bunch of foxes. No trauma involved at all!




Beauty is in the eye of the beholder!


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of October 28, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


Defining art in the way you do is like defining marriage as a convenient way to save on rent




That's exactly what it's not!  That would be a utilitarian definition of marriage.  I am offering what I believe to be a thoroughly anti-utilitarian conception of art.


What is the work of art to you when it no longer has a use?  When it doesn't teach you anything, when it doesn't help you do anything, when you don't gain anything from it?  Do you only value it as long as it still has a functional purpose, as long as there is still some benefit to be gained (such as, knowledge of beauty and truth)?  That's the real question.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of October 28, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					




I'm somewhat sympathetic to the claim that we've passed the point where any individual drawing/painting can constitute a "significant enrichment to human culture".








Well now you're putting words in my mouth, which I don't appreciate.




I wasn't trying to attribute that claim to you at all.  I'm sorry for the confusion.  That's a claim that other people have made, and I brought that up to give some context about my thoughts on painting as a medium.




I'm saying that creepy fetish art will never make human culture even a little bit better and have a good chance of making it slightly worse.




Right, and I disagree, for the all the reasons I outlined in the OP.  I think that sexuality is privileged as an artistic subject matter, and therefore a pornographic painting is no worse off than a landscape, a still life, etc.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of October 28, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


but the obscurantist language only really seems to serve the purposes of instilling delusions of the speaker's intelligence




I think reading and writing big words is fun and enjoyable.  And it rarely matters to me if the original author had a high opinion of their own intelligence or not.  (Undoubtedly many posters here have big egos because of their intelligence as well, but that doesn't hinder my enjoyment of TheMotte).  So I think the poetic language is a good thing, up to a point (you can always take anything too far, of course).




hide argumentative flaws and open up "you don't get it" as a defense against those who point them out.




Yeah, there definitely are people who will just sneer with "you don't get it" in response to any criticism, and that can get very obnoxious.  But at the same time, there are people who actually just don't get it!  And they refuse to even give the text a chance, while at the same time passing sweeping judgements on it, and that can get equally obnoxious.


I had this exchange on HN recently, where people took a sentence from an analytic philosophy paper and were saying that it was bullshit.  But that was just because they didn't know the definitions of the (frankly, basic and common) terms being used.  Once I explained the definitions, people agreed that the sentence actually made sense.  When you have this sort of interaction repeatedly when discussing philosophy, where people say "I don't know what that means, but I know it's bullshit", it starts to wear on you.  At least take the time to understand what's being said and what the context is.


Now, I wouldn't defend all works of continental philosophy.  Some of it probably is bullshit (or, more politely, "poetry"), although that in itself isn't unusual - Sturgeon's Law, 90% of everything.  But you really have to evaluate every work on a case by case basis.  Derrida is often held up as the archetypal example of postmodern bullshit, but if you look at something like his Voice and Phenomenon for example, and you cut away some of the poetic verbiage, I think that book is actually making claims and using arguments that analytic philosophers would basically accept as reasonable.  And there's been tons of work in the last two decades on the "analytic rehabilitation" of the earliest continental figures like Hegel, Heidegger, Nietzsche, etc.


I think it's helpful to think of continental philosophy as a sort of 20th century version of TheMotte for French academics.  They had their own memeplex, their own points of reference, there was a whole context surrounding it that isn't immediately obvious if you're approaching it for the first time in 2024.  These guys all knew each other, they went to the same seminars and published in the same journals; sometimes they were writing "serious" arguments, and sometimes they were just shitposting at each other.  A lot of times on TheMotte we'll have someone come along and say "y'know, I've just been thinkin' about this thing" - about leftists and rightists, about men and women, about whatever it is.  And then they make some sweeping claim, that may or may not be particularly well supported empirically, but often enough it still makes you go "y'know, I think that guy might be onto something".  And that's often the sort of value I get out of continental philosophy.  Plainly there's some sort of value in this activity that we do on TheMotte, because we all keep coming here.




Therefore, there is no """"objective"""" reason to prohibit mother-son incest.




That wasn't the conclusion of the argument; that was a premise in the argument.  What I quoted was clipped out of a much lengthier chapter about the relationship between psychoanalysis and ethics.  He wasn't trying here to demonstrate that there is no objective reason to prohibit mother-son incest; he was basically just assuming it, with reference to Lévi-Strauss's work as support.  Rather he was using the distinction between father-daughter and mother-son incest as an illustrative example to show how there are some domains of human activity that are governed by market logic, and some that are not, and psychoanalysis is interested in the latter.


You can of course challenge his premise, and claim that he didn't support it well enough.  But that just goes without saying; philosophers attack each others' premises all the time.




It's all arbitrary systems of rules! By the way, arbitrary systems of rules are cool.




Well, yes?  That's literally his position.  He would say that the Law is baseless and arbitrary, but that in no way implies that we should get rid of it.  The subject who refuses to allow himself to be "duped" by the Law and steadfastly "sees it for what it is" is psychotic.  And being psychotic is a bad thing.  (Deleuze and Guattari thought that being psychotic was a good thing, which precipitated their big break with Lacan.)




Unfortunately, the working mode of continental philosophy made it impossible for continental philosophy to consider it - the authors themselves would never write it, because ticking boxes like this would signal self-doubt and weakness that is entirely at odds with the image of the infallible sage that descends from his mountain to pronounce deep wisdom




I do agree that there's a cultural aversion in continental philosophy to showing doubt and uncertainty about your own arguments, and I think that's a bad thing.  Analytic philosophers are just better in this regard.




and if one of the students pointed it out, he would presumably just receive a pitying smirk from Lacan, and perhaps a remark about how he is clearly yet to grasp the difference between the signifer and the combinatoire or something.




Not entirely off base (especially if we're talking about Lacan specifically, and how he actually dealt with his students - it's well-documented that he was a bit of a dick), but at the same time, I think you're underselling the amount of disagreement that actually exists in continental philosophy.  No matter how great a continental philosopher might think his favorite guy is, he's still acutely aware that there are lots of other people who all think his favorite guy is bullshit.  The Derrideans and Deleuzians think that the Lacanians are all closet fascists because they still believe that there's a unified human subject with transhistorical properties, and the Foucaultians think that the Derrideans have an inflated view of the power of philosophical discourse, and the Marxists think it's all postmodern bullshit that's distracting us from the real material struggle of the working class.  So would the other students all come to correct the student who pointed out an objection?  Maybe, but they could just as easily say "yeah, you're right, that stuff is all crap, you should read this instead".