Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
"...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
1mo ago
The important part was this:
and either carrying on the project in a highly sequestered environment or shutting it down completely.
Obviously the safest thing would be shutting it down altogether, if the risk is really that great. But, if that's not an option for some reason, then at least treat it like the Manhattan project. Stop sharing methods and results, stop letting the public access the newest models. Minimizing attack surface is a pretty basic principle of good security.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
1mo ago
I don’t think that most doomers actually believe in a very high likelihood of doom. Their actions indicate that they don’t take the whole thing seriously.
If you actually believed that AI was an existential risk in the short- or medium-term, then you would be advocating for the government to seize control of OpenAI’s datacenters effective immediately, because that’s basically the only rational response. And yet almost none of them advocate for this. “If we don’t do it then someone will” and “but what about China?” are very lame arguments when the future of the entire species is on the line.
It’s very suspicious that the most commonly recommended course of action in response to AI risk is “give more funding to the people working on AI alignment, also me and my friends are the people working on AI alignment”.
For what it’s worth, I don’t think that capabilities will advance as fast as the hyper optimists do, but I also don’t think that p(doom) is 0, so I would be quite fine with the government seizing control of OpenAI (and all other relevant top tier labs) and either carrying on the project in a highly sequestered environment or shutting it down completely.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
1mo ago
Does it require a special explanation? It’s not actually that uncommon of a view. Well, I suppose it’s uncommon among normies, but it’s not uncommon in online AI circles. A lot of AI hype is driven by a fundamental misanthropy and a desire to “flip the table” as it were, since these people find the current world unsatisfactory.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
1mo ago
has strong opinions about this case
I would say so, yes.
the rights of the accused
I do care deeply about the rights of the accused.
check their assessment of the Rittenhouse case
It's great that he was acquitted.
or whether Kavanaugh is a rapist
Plainly he is not.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
1mo ago
and expected us to share your judgment of its quality.
No, certainly not. I'm aware that my tastes are unusual. If the works I've shared here aroused curiosity in even just a couple of people then I would be quite happy.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
1mo ago
If your artistic output is taken as inspiration for torture chambers designed to inflict psychological damage on prisoners of war, then something has gone seriously wrong.
Your modus ponens is my modus tollens. His work may have been used as inspiration for a torture chamber; but Klee was obviously a fantastic artist regardless. So we can conclude that that is no great indictment of him.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
1mo ago
Why must "real" art be traumatic?
Let me first clarify that I have no interest in policing the boundary between real art and not-real art. I find little use in the distinction between "art" and "entertainment" as well. I think there are simply good and bad works. Even "lowly" works can have many interesting things to appreciate. But there are nonetheless higher and lower works, greater and smaller works - and something about what I said rings true about the greatest works, I believe. It speaks to art's authentic purpose, its highest aim that all the minor tributaries flow into.
Art is the attempt to elucidate the unnameable. It reaches beyond the limits of discursive thought - the logos gives way to Kant's thing-in-itself, Wittgenstein's "the mystical", Lacan's das Ding. All religious and esoteric traditions recognize the element of dread that is inherent in any attempt to transcend this limit. There is the warmth of God's infinite love, yes - but also the vertigo of contemplating God's infinite mind. "And he said, Thou canst not see my face: for there shall no man see me, and live."
Contra the later existentialists, Kierkegaard quite perceptively noted in The Sickness unto Death that existential dread is a religious attitude, not an atheistic one. If the world has no meaning and death is the end, then you have nothing to fear, right? You just die and that's it. It's eternal life where things start to get scary. Now the salvation of your immortal soul is on the line. Now there are stakes. Thus there is no religious cosmology that one can seek final refuge in - the traumatic core of reality persists in either case.
Art remains for us a regulative ideal, an unrealized potential, a mere sign. We are still waiting for an art that will fulfill the promise of art. The history of "aesthetic feelings" hitherto is not an ideal to aspire to, but a dream from which one must awaken.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
1mo ago
There's no accounting for taste!
Something about man-made structures that appear to have been dropped in the middle of nowhere just really does it for me. I love the Viaduct Petrobras for similar reasons.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
1mo ago
Why did you fail to quote the most important part?
The Franks, in Peter Eisenman's House VI: The Client's Response, claim that they nonetheless love living in such a poetic structure, which they inhabit with their children.
How did architecture become entirely centered around philosophical navel gazing? We'd all be better off if architects put down the continental philosophers and started again with firmitas, utilitas, venustas.
Again, don't you see the tension here in these two sentences?
What you've suggested here - architecture should be beautiful, architecture should serve a function - is itself a non-trivial philosophical program that must be argued for rather than assumed. Architects can't operate in the absence of philosophical commitments altogether, because this is impossible. Instead, you're asking that they adopt your own philosophical commitments without reflection. Phrased in this way, your recommendation no longer seems as manifestly self-evident.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
1mo ago
There's no cognitive dissonance because there's no evil here, anywhere.
Eisenman's buildings range from "fine" to "pretty darn cool" in my view. "...Architecture that similarly alludes to a deeper or alternate view of reality" in a Lovecraftian fashion is also cool. Rad, even. I want more of that. Sign me up. This isn't even some complex "well we have to understand the dialectical nature of suffering and how even negative emotions can be valuable" shit. This is just very straightforwardly an architect who makes cool buildings that he thinks are cool and other people think are cool. There's no malfeasance here, no shenanigans.
To me, your question sounds akin to someone saying "how exactly can you support Harry Potter books pushing Satanic propaganda on our children?" It's hard to provide an answer because I disagree with the entire framing.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
1mo ago
And I have the most rapport with right-leaning political views, because first of all, liberal views have never built anything of any value, because they can't get their act together.
Seems a bit silly to suggest that he's part of a grand Marxist conspiracy now, doesn't it?
I find this public process about what monument we should build in downtown at the WTC site an aberrant one, because since when does the public choose? I would think that what you just said to me would lead one to believe that we ought to listen to the voice of the people as to what we should build, and I'm not convinced that you're not the liberal in the room and I'm not the conservative.
Conveniently, he echoed my own thoughts on the issue!
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
1mo ago
an architect might respond that he should be unconstrained by the ressentiment of the plebs when he is exerting his own will upon the built environment at massive scales.
This is roughly the position I would endorse, yes.
It's ironic that on the one hand Eisenman is being accused of being a socialist, and on the other hand we have multiple people arguing that Eisenman has a moral duty to uphold a certain traditional standard of beauty in the public commons, even if this runs contrary to the intentions of his private financial backers. Should we put all architectural decisions up to a public vote, to ensure that no buildings are ever constructed which the majority would find offensive? If I found the appeal to democracy to be persuasive, then perhaps I would be more likely to be a socialist! But I am not a socialist, and I have no particular fondness for democracy. I will celebrate any opportunity for an artist to carry on his work while unconstrained by the demands of mass taste.
As for Eisenman's work itself, it's maybe not perfectly aligned with my own taste, but it's also not nearly as grotesque as some of the people here are making it out to be. I think his House VI is quite lovely, although admittedly that's largely due to the juxtaposition of the structure with the environs rather than due to the intrinsic properties of the structure itself.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
1mo ago
It seems to me that it is far from uncommon for people to be 'high-decouplers' regarding the linguistic/semiotic/philosophical/epistemological observations of the postmodernists and deconstrutionists like Foucault and Derrida, and their political and economic positions.
I don't think much decoupling is actually required. Both Foucault and Derrida had a relation to orthodox Marxism that was complicated at best, and both have been criticized by more strictly doctrinaire leftists as being "conservative" (not in the Fox News sense of course, but in the sense of providing insufficient support to the cause, and being liable to interpretations that could aid the enemy). So it's not surprising that people from all over the political spectrum could take inspiration from their work.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
1mo ago
What if music challenged you?
Great idea! You'd be missing out on a lot of brilliant music if you avoided everything that was challenging.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
1mo ago
I don't care one iota about the self actualization of architects or about Heidegger. Architects should be seeking to make beautiful, harmonious buildings.
Isn't there a certain tension here?
Why should architects care what you think if you don't care what they think?
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
1mo ago
the reality is that I find the overwhelming majority of porn 'actresses' so incredibly visually unpalatable that I'm unable to enjoy the material.
I'm glad I'm not the only one! The typical woman in mainstream studio porn looks terrible. I'm not big on most celebrities either. I find "average" women to be far more arousing. I always just attributed this to my own sexual deviance though, not to IQ.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
1mo ago
My apologies, I haven't watched the video yet. Did he say why he wants his buildings to cause pain?
It's reminiscent of a quote from my favorite Freudo-Marxist podcast: "real art cuts into you; it takes something away from you". And this immediately struck me as quite correct. The greatest aspiration of art is the experience of the mystical, in Wittgenstein's sense of the term - the that-which-must-be-passed-over-in-silence. This is a fundamentally traumatic experience - it is the discovery of what is most uncanny in what is most familiar.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
1mo ago
I certainly don’t think so!
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
1mo ago
barrages them with anti-male propaganda
You'll get that if you interact with the fandom. But as for the works themselves, a lot of yuri anime/manga will strenuously avoid depicting or even mentioning men as much as possible. The recent Mahou Shoujo ni Akogarete for example appeared to take place in a world entirely without men. This was never an explicit plot point and no one in the show ever pointed it out. There were simply... no men, anywhere in the world, as though it were taking place in a parallel universe that had just always been that way. Is it anti-male propaganda if you simply ignore men entirely?
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
1mo ago
I think it's correlation rather than causation. i.e. I think both are caused by some underlying independent cognitive/personality trait. I was having sexual fantasies about being a woman years before I started watching anime or interacting with the online anime community (and certainly long before I knew what futa was!).
I can certainly agree though that both autistic and trans people are overrepresented among anime fans and in other adjacent socially reclusive hobbies.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
1mo ago
It seems like most of the posters here couldn't imagine themselves being into astrology or anything adjacent. I on the other hand went through a brief period in college where I was obsessed with MBTI, so I have a bit of an insider's perspective. But it's admittedly very difficult to articulate why I find MBTI (and perhaps even astrology, to some extent) appealing. I simply know that I do.
It's easy to think of a lot of explanations that have negative connotations. It provides (illusory) order in a fundamentally chaotic world, it appeals to self-centered people with the promise of unveiling hidden truths about oneself, it's a form of Sartrean bad faith that keeps us from having to confront the yawning abyss of our freedom. But I don't feel like any of these explanations actually strike at the core of what's going on. I don't think an affinity for astrology/MBTI/whatever is a bad thing - merely a different style of cognition, one might say. The most positive gloss I think I can put on it is that it's correlated with being the type of person who structures their experience in terms of narratives. You have a story that has a place for not only yourself, but other people as well. You evaluate things in terms of their narrative weight; you see people as more than arbitrary collections of traits and properties. People don't have a birth date and a death date - they have an origin and a telos. This sort of cognitive profile doesn't necessarily have to lead one to being interested in astrology specifically, of course. But I think that's the personality type (heh) we're dealing with.
And this sort of narratological personality is certainly not exclusive to women. Carl Jung, of course - his work was the inspiration for MBTI for a reason (even though the actual content of MBTI bears little resemblance to anything he wrote). Nietzsche's work too is replete with this kind of typological thinking.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
1mo ago
How can you be pro-trans without also being pro-anime?
What exactly do you think is the connection? And what are your thoughts on the converse of this statement?
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
2mo ago
Makes you wonder how often a religious vocation was used to mask symptoms of what would now be called autism. Or homosexuality.
Yes, I think this is what it actually comes down to for a lot of people. The claim is that our current course of AI development will lead to the extinction of humanity. Ok, maybe we should just stop developing AI in that case... but then the counter is that no, that just means that China will get to ASI first and they'll use it to enslave us all. But hasn't the claim suddenly changed in that case? Surely if AI is an existential risk, then China developing ASI would also lead to the extinction of humanity, right? How come if we get to ASI first it's an existential risk, but if China gets there first, it "merely" installs them as the permanent rulers of the earth instead of wiping us all out?
I suppose there are non-zero values you could assign to p(doom) and p(AGI-is-merely-a-superweapon), with appropriate weights on those outcomes, that would make it all consistent. But I think the simpler explanation is that the doomers just don't seriously believe in the possibility of doom in the first place. Which is fine. If you just think that AI is going to be a powerful superweapon and you want to make sure that your tribe controls it then that's a reasonable set of beliefs. But you should be honest about that.
Only minor quibble I have with your post is when you said "doomers are merely trying to stop AI from escaping the control of the managerial class". I think there are multiple subsets of "doomers". Some of them are as you describe, but some of them are actually just accelerationists who want to imagine themselves as the protagonist of a sci-fi movie (which is how you get doomers with the very odd combination of beliefs "AI will kill us all" and "we should do absolutely nothing whatsoever to impede the progress of current AI labs in any way, and in fact we should probably give them more money because they're also the people who are best equipped to save us from the very AI that they're developing!")
More options
Context Copy link