YoungAchamian
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User ID: 680
YoungAchamian
1mo ago
I mean, the 80s is half a lifetime away. The right wing that existed then doesn't exist today, and the lineage is rather thin as well
I mean fair but also there's definitely enough Christian conservatives on this forum advocating for a return to Christian morality even if they only make up a minority of the Right. And that's even before we get into the dissident rightists. Different flavors, but I imagine the feeling of being oppressed for having a different morality than them will be the same. I think the cultural memetic scars are also much longer lasting.
The left probably doesn't feel like they are deliberately oppressing FC. It's that C.S. Lewis quote all over. They feel they are freeing the people FC's tribe were oppressing. And if a few "bigots" need to be stomped on then so be it. I agree that they aren't deriving power from it directly but they are flexing that power, and to quote some Fantasy/Sci-fi Author I can't remember (Our that my memory invented: "Power is alive and it seeks those who will wield it, those it can corrupt to increase the power, so that they may wield it better. Power always grows in the hands of tyrants" Power is an egregor, and all entities exist to perpetuate their own growth and existence. The power they are flexing, that we feel oppressed by, will just be taken up by who ever replaces them. You can see that with the Rights return to cancel culture. After being affected by it for 2 decades, is the answer "Lets put the superweapon back in the box" no its "lets turn it on our enemies in our brief moment of power"
we're just two groups killing each other over whether bread should be buttered on top or on the bottom.
I like this phrase I'm stealing it. I despair that it will ever be so.
Not sure I want to wade into the discussion about the merit of the lefts vs rights values, too nebulous for me.
Let's entertain a hypothetical, some law gets passed that says "Saying the Democratically elected President has no clothes is now illegal punishable by jail time" I say the President has no clothes. Cops show up outside my house. I refuse to let them enter. What do they do?
In your world the distinction is that when they bust down my door and take me to jail they are the only ones inflicting violence, the law is not violent even though it backed up its authority with the social-derived power to inflict violence as an enforcement mechanism. I obviously disagree. I can infer the causality of that law and directly hold the people who proposed, lobbied, agitated for, etc. responsible for attempting to use the state's power to enforce violence for their own ends.
I feel like your rebuttal fails to understand the social reality of laws and how they are enforced. Can someone break the law and ignore the consequences? Governments that allow their power to be ignored don't survive.
The whole libertarian argument is farcical because those libertarians want the creature comforts that society provides them without wanting to pay for them. By living in society you agree to the implicit social contract. You are welcome to reject the contract and go live in a lawless place. Obviously since societies are land based, they tend to lay claim to all the land and its in their best interest to remove game-theoretical defectors.
That is (at best) unintentionally misleading, and (more often) an attempt at rhetorical sleight of hand to try to get people to accept a point they never would if you made it straight out.
idk what slight of hand you think I am doing. My explicit point is that governments are formed on the basis of a monopoly on violence and social consensus (for democratic systems) and their authority is derived from those basses. Thus any action by the government to enforce a law carries an implicit threat of violence against lawbreakers. I am open to you explaining to me how that is not the case but I have yet to see anything to the contrary
Words can never, ever, constitute violence. Violence only means inflicting actual physical harm upon people.
I agree that words alone in a vacuum can never, ever, constitute violence. I disagree that advocating for policies that lead to violent action absolves the speaker of blame. How do you think laws and policies get made? Do people not speak words when doing so? When they proposed the "President has no clothes" law was there not someone using words? If the end result is violence is there not some causal chain we can draw to such Words + Actions that directly led to that violence?
EDIT: I feel sort of confused on how my argument relates to the non-central fallacy that Scott is addressing, I'd need to go reread the blogpost. My argument is derived from a Hobbesian sense of social contract theory with observation on how people/collectives/governments actually accrue and use power.
YoungAchamian
1mo ago
It doesn't really matter. FC's point is that he is being oppressed. I shared that I feel like I am also being oppressed. A very large chunk of the country feels oppressed and that isn't good.
What's the solution? FC feels oppressed, you feel oppressed, I feel oppressed. We all support the ending the oppression. But when FC's tribe gets into power they go around oppressing everyone who isn't them. So I now still feel oppressed. The Right had the moral majority in the 80s and they went around oppressing everyone with their Christian morality. The lefties felt oppressed and did something about it, they took over. Now everyone feels oppressed by the woke feminist instead of the church lady. Is the solution really just to give it back to the right so they can go back to oppressing everyone?
It really seems like the majority of people can't live with the idea that other people want to do different things with their lives and you shouldn't go poke sticks in their eyes because they are different.
YoungAchamian
1mo ago
Kirk was not a child, he was a cynical propagandist in the job of training unprincipled partisans, ever changing his tune precisely in alignment with the party line and President's whimsy (see the pivot on H1Bs). I admit I despised him and his little, annoying gotcha act of "debating" infantile leftists, milking them for dunk opportunities. They deserved the humiliation, but the pretense of "promoting dialogue" was completely hollow, and the massive number of shallow, cow-like people in the US for whom it is convincing depresses me.
This was well put. You put in words exactly my thoughts but far more eloquently than I could. (Minus the "despised him part")
The point I am trying to make is: Experiencing schadenfreude for political, social, whatever opponents is a very human thing. People on this very forum express satisfaction watching lefties experience the comeuppance for their policy positions. I imagine those same lefties view that behavior as sociopathic, if they witnessed it. You expressing the same horror of that "sociopathic behavior" when the shoe is on the other foot rings very hollow to me.
YoungAchamian
1mo ago
I don't think assassination is a good response either, but I suppose I lack sympathy for Kirk and I find the wailing and gnashing of people on the right to be just as annoying as the wailing and gnashing of people on the left.
YoungAchamian
1mo ago
I clearly answered it when responding to you, so the accusation of dodging rings a bit hollow. Go dogpile someone else
YoungAchamian
1mo ago
Did you see the section where I said that it requires action? A normiecon mouthing off at the bar isn't taking direct action to create said law. Kirk wasn't just a random dude running around to debate people. He was actively involved in political lobbying, funding, and trying to get laws passed.
Or is it just the gay stuff?
What about religious stuff, gun stuff, free speech stuff, tax stuff. You seem to think this is some sort of gotcha, when you have clearly failed to ascertain my political tribe
YoungAchamian
1mo ago
Bad things happen, they are bad when they happen, but sometimes they must happen, but they're still bad.
So Kirk needed to callously advocate for other people to pay the cost for his beliefs and it was bad that that happened but it must happen?
I'm really not sure what your point is here.
Man this is such a foreign concept to me.
Political accountability and taking responsibility for your beliefs is foreign to you? It concerns ME that you think asking for your tribe to not pay the cost of your beliefs but the other tribe should is something that doesn't compute for you. Can you not put yourself into the shoes of the people across the isle from you? See how they view the worlds and how they feel. idk have some empathy for your fellow man.
Yeah, no. You're the one who's trying to abstract violence into it. Campaigning isn't violence. It's convincing. If you convince someone to commit violence, that person chose to commit violence, based on your speech. Depending on the nature of the convincing, that speech certainly could be legally restricted and censured. That doesn't make it not speech. You're free to play games about cause-and-effect and such, but those games don't actually change what things are.
I'm not really a Hylanka-stan so maybe one of his torchbearers can swing by and tell me if I'm using this term wrong. But to me there is a "Leviathan-shaped hole" with your understanding on politics and the dynamics of power in a society. The role of the state is to enforce violence through the monopoly it extracts from its citizens. By creating laws it is threatening violence on citizens that fail to comply. Creating laws that force people to behave certain ways is by definition using violence. You just get to call it nice words like "Vote", "Campaign", and "Lobby". So a professional political pundit who runs around trying to create laws, and drive political actions is using the state to enact his/her own tribe beliefs and force them on all other tribes that exist in that state-polity. Otherwise why would people commit violence for political means. They are just discarding the useful social tech that we've used to abstract violence away from individual control.
For example if I give speech that: "Gay-ness is an abomination before the eyes of God and we should not allow it in our government or our society" Am I inflicting violence? By your definition I am not, nothing I say is legally able to be restricted as I am not directly threatening anyone. However, say I do get this law to pass, now some faceless bureaucrat is going to punish any gay person they find because they are illegal, and they are going to do so with the full might on the state. Its back to stoning, conversion torture, or throwing the gays off roof tops. By my definition I have advocated for those policies, I have advocated for violence. So I think your definition is naive in the extreme.
Gay people upon hearing my speech AND my effort to get that speech codified into law should rightly see that as violence. Just like Christians do if I were to say "believing in religion is an abomination" AND advocated for laws banning teaching people religious beliefs. Speech does require action but that action doesn't need to be directly violent. I am abstracting that violence to the state to enforce.
The average person isn't really in a lobbying position but Kirk very much was.
YoungAchamian
1mo ago
https://www.themotte.org/post/3128/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/364548?context=8#context
Any more straw people you want to light on fire?
YoungAchamian
1mo ago
The analogy is then you advocate for cars, and think that people driving cars is worth the few deaths they cause. you get into a car and are killed by someone else using a car maliciously/or not. I'm sure a horse drawn carriage lobby would laugh at your death, as you getting the just desserts of your position.
Drunk driving would be the gun control position: that we should stop people who use cars dangerously from operating them. You say we that doing so is an infringement on the right to drive cars. You are then killed by a drunk driver. Your original analogy was too biased towards your position.
Notice I said I don't condone the celebration. But people are allowed to point it out, and appreciate the irony. That's not 300000 mil lefties thirsting for your blood or whatever nonsense you are working your head into.
YoungAchamian
1mo ago
Campaigning to use the state's monopoly on violence to enforce your beliefs is violence by another name. Just because you can abstract it away doesn't be you are absolved. Trying to enforce your tribal beliefs on others is almost always the non-material reason for war.
One of the lessons in the fable about the Sword of Damocles is about living by the ramifications of your own positions. Kirk clearly had a position that the 2nd amendment is worth a certain amount of blood. Is he willing to pay that cost? Or does he want other people to pay it for him? One is the principled position, the other is a cur not worthy of anything.
The optimal number of murders is not zero. The cost of what we would have to do to implement a zero murder society would not be worth it.
I agree with this.
I think Kirk would have disagreed that he ought to be murdered but wouldn’t want his murder to justify restrictions on gun rights.
Nobody wants to be murdered. But if you callously state that people being murdered is a worthy cost. Then by the golden rule you need to be ok with it, when you get murdered people consider that a worthy cost. We still punish murderers, because murder is not a stable equilibrium and societies that consider it so don't survive.
YoungAchamian
1mo ago
Only if your position is that its ok to drink and drive and if we need to accept that some people will die for our freedom to do so. Then if you were killed by a drunk driver would that not be a logical conclusion of your position applied fairly to all agents in the societal system?
YoungAchamian
1mo ago
I don't condone the celebration of it but is it really so far fetched to accept this as a "Sword of Damocles" situation? Kirk advocated and is directly on record for saying: "the few deaths is worth it for our second amendment rights". Live by the sword and die by the sword. If people want to advocate for positions then they need to personally be willing to pay for the consequences of those positions. Passing the cost onto other people if how we get in this mess. Note this 100% applies to all sorts of lefty positions that elite lefties want to be free of the consequences of.
Now we can't personally ask Kirk if he was willing to die for the second amendment rights but I think the charitable answer is yes. I think all the discussion about killing political opponents is worth having but all the wailing about lefties wanting to kill you rings hollow. They disagree with you and want you to pay for the cost of your beliefs just like you want them to pay the cost of their immigration or "anti-racism" beliefs.
YoungAchamian
2mo ago
Any book store that doesn't stock a copy in the scifi/fantasy section is immediately suspect.
Absolutely! Also your cover is way better than my version.
Maybe I was being a bit hyperbolic. My gripe is really that romantasy is being claimed as fantasy and is polluting IRL conversations on good fantasy books. But you sort of gave some ammo even to the hyperbolic argument. I love Joe Abercrombie, and I think Mark Lawrence is a good author. Neither of their earlier books are particularly woke. Some could even claim the opposite but as you pointed out they definitely have changed. And these are at least the upper echelon on fantasy authors. I went into the bookstore recently to grab "The Murderbot Diaries" and in that sci-fi/fantasy section I couldn't help but see how many slop authors or romantasy books absolutely filled the shelves. To the point that I had a hankering for some Steven Brust's Taltos and it was not there, crowded out for books on Fairy Magic Academy and R.F Kaung's tired racial rage disguised as historical fantasy. They had the more mainstream famous ones of course: Dune, GoT, Cosmere, and Kingkiller (Despite Rothfuss being too far up his own ass to ever finish it.) But not the greats: Pratchett, Erikson, Bakker, Wolfe, Brust, Gemmel, Cooke, etc...
Maybe I've gotten too old (figuratively, I'm in my early 30s), but I definitely remember roaming the wilderness of the library, in my youth, picking up weird, zany, interesting fantasy books based on the covers and the synopsizes, and them having actual quality and being enjoyable non-sloppy, non-political reads.
Edit:
Age of Madness trilogy (Joe Abercrombie)
I want to push back on the claimed wokeness of this one a bit, I read it when it first released, in 2021 so forgive me if my remembrance of the details are murkier. First off, the hyper-competent female character is literally a robber-baron sweat shop owner who is in a forbidden love affair with her stepbrother (The urbane prince). She is in no way portrayed as good person or even super competent (The whole riot arc in the first book?) since her "father" (Head of the CIA) pretty much runs the country and lavishes everything on her. I don't remember the young (18) country lord being racist. An arrogant bigot: Yes. He's also just a homophobe not a closet homosexual. Yes, his retainers were gay, he has a nasty reaction to it, but I don't remember ever thinking he was secretly into the retainers in any other way than a platonic male bonding way. The urbane, metrosexual, openminded prince gets the shit end of the stick by an astounding degree even if you end up rooting for him. He also bumbles through a lot of stuff and is essentially the trope of rich wastrel sons being useless. The whole burners/breakers plot is clearly mapped to activists being absolutely shit, not really wanting a functioning society and also secretly being funded by the head of the CIA to take down the big banks (Who are also trying to control society). And not in a way that maps onto our political climate neatly.
YoungAchamian
3mo ago
extent the woke has penetrated fantasy
Every extent. It's really dominant. What's made worse is that a new set of "fantasy" fans are really insistent that their magical dragon school romance with 86 interspecies love triangles is actually really fantasy!
YoungAchamian
3mo ago
I read everything and never comment. It's way easier.
YoungAchamian
3mo ago
I owe you responses to the other posts, but I am a slow & lazy writer with a penchant for procrastination, and lurking. I'll answer this first because it's a quick answer. My motivations is that I'm deeply sceptical about people and the world. This is only partly related to LLMs but starts deeper. I'm sceptical and cynical about human motivation, human behavior, and human beliefs. I'm not really interested in weighing in about "intelligence" that's a boring definitional game. I use LLMs, they are useful, I use them to write code or documents stuff in my professional life. I use the deep research function to do lit reviews. They are useful, doesn't mean I think they are sentient or even approaching sentience. You are barking up the wrong tree on that one, misattributing opinions to me that I in no way share.
YoungAchamian
3mo ago
Possibly, I can get where it feels like they are lording it over all the peons in the thread and why that would be frustrating. But at the same time I think they have some frustration about all the lay-peeps writing long posts full of complex semantic arguments that wouldn't pass technical muster (directionally). I interpreted the whole patent + degree bit as a bid to establish some credibility, not to lord it over people. I also think they aren't directly in the LLM space (I predict the signal processing domain!) so some of their technical explanations miss some important details. This forum is full of autists who can't admit they are wrong so the later part is just par for the course. No idea why everyone needs to get so riled up about this topic.
YoungAchamian
3mo ago
I think this gets into what is a "world model" that I owe self_made_human a definition and a response to. But I'd say cause-effect relationships are indeed patterns and regularities, there's no dispute there. However, there's a crucial distinction between representing causal relationships explicitly, structurally, or inductively, versus representing them implicitly through statistical co-occurrence. LLMs are powerful precisely because they detect regularities, like causal relationships, as statistical correlations within their training corpus. But this implicit statistical encoding is fundamentally different from the structured causal reasoning humans perform, which allows us to infer and generalize causation even in novel scenarios or outside the scope of previously observed data. Thus, while cause-effect relationships certainly are patterns, the question isn't whether LLMs capture them statistically, they clearly do, but rather whether they represent them in a structured, grounded, explicitly causal way. Current research, that I have seen, strongly suggests that they do not. If you have evidence that suggests they do I'd be overjoyed to see it because getting AIs to do inductive reasoning in a game-playing domain is an area of interest to me.
YoungAchamian
3mo ago
Why do you open up like this:
Having no interest to get into a pissing context
But start your argument like this:
but amounts to epitemically inept, reductionist, irritated huffing and puffing with an attempt to ride on (irrelevant) credentials
It doesn't come off as some fervent truth-seeking, passionate debate, and/or intelligent discourse. It comes across as a bitter nasty commentariat incredulous that someone would dare to have a different opinion from you. Multiple people in this post were able to disagree with OP without resorting to prosaic insults in their first sentence. I get that you have a lot of rep around here, which gives you a lot of rope but why not optimize for a bit more light instead of a furnace full of heat? It could not have been hard to just not write that sentence...
At the risk of getting into it with you again. What did you think of this when it made its rounds 2 months ago: https://ml-site.cdn-apple.com/papers/the-illusion-of-thinking.pdf
Sure it is tragic, but it doesn't mean he is owed sympathy. And the lack of that sympathy doesn't make people sociopaths any more than a lack of sympathy for illegal immigrant mothers being pulled from their homes and deported, makes other people sociopaths.
I am completely unsympathetic to both appeals for sympathy and cries of sociopathy at ones outgroup.
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