TequilaMockingbird
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User ID: 3097
There's something "It's Okay To Be White" about this, where most of the propaganda value of the stunt is in the reaction.
I think it speaks to the "red tribe/blue tribe dichotomy" described by the OP and the notion of "Protestant work ethic" brought up by others downthread.
There is a real sense that the blue side seems to view hard work (and service/menial service work in particular) as beneath them. Work is something to be suffered through when neccesary and avioded if possible. Whatever you're work is, it's not something your supposed to be smiling about or celebrating. One might almost be forgiven for thinking that "Flipping Burgers" was some sort of PMC euphemism for a fate worse than death given the spit that often accompanies those words. (as an aside The Menu was a pretty good movie).
As with "It's Okay To Be White" what i think is happening here is that the media and the Democrats are being baited into expressing "true feelings" that they would otherwise conceal. ie "that it's not ok to be white" or in this case that "working and serving is for suckers" which naturally doesn't play well amongst people who actually work.
TequilaMockingbird
1mo ago
Who's "we"?
TequilaMockingbird
1mo ago
You consider Milo Yiannapoulos and Nick Fuentes to be politically incorrect technocrats?
Of a sort, yes.
Or more pointedly i don't think they nor the people people they apeal to are looking to vote Republican as much as they are looking to vote against mainstream Democrats.
TequilaMockingbird
1mo ago
Yes, i had a wire crossed.
As i touched upon downthread, I think DeSantis' problem was that he was running as the "Trump-Lite" candidate against Trump himself, and that there was no particular reason for anyone already inclined to vote for Trump (or an otherwise Trump-ish candidate) to pick him over the genuine article.
TequilaMockingbird
1mo ago
That GOP needs somebody who can unite the politically incorrect technocrats, the religious interests, and the populists.
Towards the end of Francis Ford Copella's Megalopolis there there is an interesting moment where the lynching of a cross-dressing Milo Yiannopoulos/David Fuentes analog by a bunch of very "Trump-coded" construction workers who are sick of his grift is juxtaposed with an elderly banker shooting his trophy wife when he realizes that she had been unfaithful and was only using him for his money.
I feel like there is discussion to be had about to what degree technocracy of any stripe (politically correct or otherwise) has a place in a populist party/system. And make no mistake, the GOP is a populist party and has been for close to a decade now.
TequilaMockingbird
1mo ago
But let's be honest. He'd get slaughtered in the general. High IQ white guys like Vance don't win minority and blue collar voters.
I feel like this is something the Pumpkin-Spice class tells itself to justify not even bothering to try. Reagan, Bush II, and to a lesser degree DeSantis, all being clear counter-examples.
TequilaMockingbird
1mo ago
Like @Rosencrantz2, I think people here are kidding themselves about how well we understand genetics or the mind.
Psychology is one of the "softest" and least rigorous of all the sciences, and to the degree that IQ tests are measuring a real phenomenon it seems to me that whatever it is produces diminishing returns and starts to come with significant downsides in terms of mental (and to a lesser extent physical) health as you approach the tail end of the bell curve.
TequilaMockingbird
1mo ago
But who else can?
Vance, DeSantis, Abbott, and Scott are the obvious candidates that spring to mind, and I wouldn't rule out Kushner or Don Jr. either. Unlike the Democrats, the Republicans also have a reasonably deep bench of young-ish state level officials of which i expect at least a couple to ready for promotion to the national stage within the next 4 years.
Recall that no one outside of Florida had even heard of DeSantis prior to 2016. (Sure he'd been a state rep. since 2012 but how many people know who thier own state rep. is much less who anyone else's is?)
TequilaMockingbird
1mo ago
Good point.
TequilaMockingbird
1mo ago
I think its rather "charitable" of you to assume that they are being taken for a ride rather than taking sides. This is the house of Walter Duranty we are talking about.
Insert something about availability bias here.
There's a story (possibly approcriphal) about how the british army back in the late 1800s thought that helmets might be somehow dangerous because units where the new steel pot helmets were issued tended to report significantly more head injuries than those that were still wearing berets or the soft cork "pith" helmets.
Subsequent analysis concluded that while reported head injuries had gone up significantly, overall casualties had either remained constant or been reduced, and the reason for the increase in reports was that soldiers who might have otherwise been killed/incapacitated were instead surviving to complain about thier injuries.
Theres a similar story floating around about bombers in WW2 where the Army Air Corps, wanting to increase aircraft survivability, started collecting data on where aircraft had been hit by machine gun fire with the intent of adding additional armor to the most commonly hit areas only for some bright spark to propose the opposite. A hot spot on the heat map indicated that a plane could be hit there and still make it home 9 times out of 10, it was actually the cold spots that needed the extra protection.
People shot in the gut or an extremity these days generally don't die so long as they recieve prompt medical care (bleeding and infection being the chief risk in such cases) so of course the majority of fatal shootings are going to be concentrated in the head or chest area.
Edit: There's also the issue of training and equipment, i would expect an IDF infantry man/woman to be substantially better equipped (Tavor w/ high-end red-dot vs rickety AK) and to be a better shot overall than your average Jihadi even in the absence such material advantages.
TequilaMockingbird
1mo ago
And there were prominent calls for faithless electors in 2016. So this isn't even a hypothetical, it's practically the first thing some Democrats called for when faced with a Trump presidency.
And that's the crux of the issue isnt it? (pinging @Tiber727 and others)
To me most of the complaints about Trump's "norm shattering" behavior effectively boil down to Trump treating his opponents the way Clinton and Obama treated thier opponents. The norm being shattered here is that Republicans are supposed to be stoic patricician types who cooperate when thier opponents defect, and "turn the other cheek" instead of "getting in people's faces" and "punching back twice as hard".
That doesn't make him a good politician or mean that he is going to win the election, (in fact i am almost certain he wont) but i cant really judge him for it either. Afterall, turn about is fair play.
Is "directionally true" the new buzzword that means "actually not correct, but we wish it was"?
Its the mirrior of/response to the sort of technically true but misleading brand of "facts" and "fact checking" that has become distressingly common in the current media environment.
Example: so-and-so claims that Candidate Smith is a psycho who tortures puppies. Candidate Smith responds that this is baseless slander. It was a kitten Smith tortured, not a puppy, and it was only that one time.
Smith's supporters will spill gallons of ink going about how So-and-so is a liar and thier claims have all been "debunked", but the people inclined to think that torturing small furry animals is indicative of Candidate Smith being a psycho have had thier perception reinfored rather than rebuked, making So-and-so's claim "directionally correct".
TequilaMockingbird
1mo ago
My overall concern is that Trump is a threat to democracy.
As below with "Fascism", can you define what you mean by "democracy" in this context?
TequilaMockingbird
1mo ago
Its not "pointless pedantry", its pointed pedantry, thats my point.
It isn't widespread because it is inherently ridiculous.
Is it? You were the one ascribing power to labels not I. How is my example (cats chasing cars because they have been labeled dogs) any more ridiculous than yours (gpt being "intelligent" because it has been labeled as such)?
But you did call them to be transwomen.
You're dodging the question, as above, do you think that being labeled or identifying as something make one that thing or don't you?
It seems rather hypocritical of you to go on about differences "mattering" and and being "significant" only to complain about my demand for precise language.
Yes the differences do matter which why i'm being "pedantic" even when tnat pedantry might read as "uncharitable" to you.
If you pay close attention to the people who are actually working on this stuff, (as distinct from the buisiness oriented front-men and credulous twitter anons) you'll notice that terms like "Machine Learning", along with more specific principles (IE diffusion vs regression vs AOP, Et Al) are used far more readily and widely than "AI" because again the difference matters.
Whether the A.I. is woke is what matters.
No it doesn't because you are trying to apply psychology and agency where there is none. If you're trying to understand GPT in terms of biases and intelligence you're going to have a bad time because garbage in means garbage out.
The difference between "Woke GPT" and "Based GPT" is adjusting a few variable whieghts in a .json file, ie "biases", maybe you might have seperate curated training corpi if you want to get really fancy.
You basically are acting as if there is no programming involved.
...because there isn't any programing involved. Like I said, the difference between "woke GPT" and "based GPT" is a couple of lines in a .json file or sliders on a UI.
I'm saying that the trivial differences are trivial and that people putting thier thumbs on the scales is on the people not the algorithms no matter how aggressively "the discouse" tries to claim otherwise.
It obviously is an Artificial Intelligence because that is the title of these things.
No, no it is not. Or do you also expect me to believe that slapping a dog sticker on a cat will make it bark and chase cars?
My biggest frustration with the current state of AI discourse is that words mean things and that so much of the current discourse seems to be shaped by mid-wits with degrees in business, philosophy, psychology, or some other soft subject, who clearly do not understand what they are talking about. (Geoffrey Hinton being the quintessential example of the type) I'm not claiming to be much smarter than any of these people, but if asked to build an LLM from scratch I would at least know where to start and there in lies the rub. The magic of a magic trick is in not knowing what the trick is.
Funnily enough GPT itself claims to be an artificial intelligence model of generative A.I.
And transwomen claim to be women, would you say that this makes them biologically female?
Do you think GPT do not respond in a woke manner and are not woke?
Im saying this is a nonsense question because it's trying to use psychology to explain math. The model will respond as trained.
If trained by "woke" retards it will respond the way woke retards trained it to respond. If trained by "based" retards it will respond the way based retards trained it to respond.
Again, to say that it is "programmed to be biased" is to say that you do not understand how a regression engine works.
It sounds like you're saying there are some people that actually think trump is bad enough to subvert normal processes.
I'm saying that people keep saying that Trump is so bad that it it would be worth subverting the normal electoral process to beat him. See all the rhetoric from wealthy leftists about "fortifying the election" and "saving" democracy from the people. Simply put, If you loudly advertise that you have the means motive and opportunity to do something, you're an idiot if you don't expect people to wonder if you might actually do it.
...and why that's why everything needs to be squeeky clean, because having advertised the desire/intent to subvert the processes, people are going to be hypervigilant for anything out of the ordinary, at which point "plausible deniability" may as well be "no deniability at all".
TequilaMockingbird
1mo ago
Arizona has had voter ID from 2019. Did Trump accept the result in Arizona?
This is a very poor choice of example given the widely reported issues in Maricopa county and the obvious conflict of interest invovled in the person in nominal charge of the count also being a candidate.
TequilaMockingbird
1mo ago
GPT is not merely a computer but it is an artificial intelligence programmed to be biased.
It's not an "intelligence" though, it is its just a over complicated regression engine (or more accurately multiple nested regression engines), and to say that it is "programmed to be biased" is to not understand how regression engines work.
One of the exercises my professor had us do when i was studying this in college was impliment a chat bot "by hand" ie with dice a notepad and a calculator. One of my take-aways from this exercise was that it was fairly straightforward to create a new text in the style of an existing text through the creative use of otherwise simple math. It might not've been particularly coherent bit it would be recognizably "in the style" and tighter tokenezation and multiple passes could improve the percieved coherence at the cost of processing time.
Point being that GPT's (or any other LLMs) output can't help but reflect the contents of the training corpus because thats how LLMs work.
TequilaMockingbird
1mo ago
The patricians all agree that what the plebs want is beyond the pale, because what the plebs want is fascism.
I'm curious, what exactly do you think the word "fascism" means in this context. Can you define it?
TequilaMockingbird
1mo ago
DeSantis is in the same boat as Abbott he's got more pull as a governor of an important state than he would as a candidate and has nothing to gain from running as "Trump Lite" while the original is still on the menu.
At 45 years old, DeSantis can afford to wait a few years for Trump to retire.
TequilaMockingbird
1mo ago
History would seem to contradict this take.
Isn’t one the chief complaints leveled at Trump, ever since he was a candidate the first time around, that he was/is "vulgar" and "unpresidential". I think that one of the reasons this little pr stunt has worked as well as it has is the relative lack of pretense.
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