atomised
2yr ago
You shouldn't feel bad about not caring much about the politics of a country on the other side of the world from you, and whose political system you don't understand. But you would do well to not embarrass yourself by publically rolling around in your own ignorance.
atomised
2yr ago
But I think that they're a bit similar to latent diffusion models: they are more efficient, due to compressing the trappings of a social network into a lower-dimensionality space
Isn't this a property of autoencoders in general and not just diffusion models? Nice analogy though. I think the question of 'why are imageboards so powerful' is pretty fascinating. It's remarkable their reach; I was on facebook the other day for one of those annoying things that can only be done on facebook, and was recommended a page, the title of which was in the format of the "For me, it's X" meme, which I'm quite sure was a 4chan invention. It's a well-known trope that 4chan is the petri dish from whence memes spring, and yet even so I think normies would be surprised if they really knew how much of their culture and idiom was concocted in such a tiny corner of the internet.
atomised
2yr ago
I share your intuitive revulsion to state-sanctioned suicide of a physically healthy young person. Yet doesn't euthanasia, at least for the non-paraplegic, require you to drink the latter-day hemlock yourself? In which case, does this not require an approximately similar amount of courage as downing a pint of vodka and swallowing a handful of barbiturates? And yet the latter would be acceptable to you, simply because it is not done with the sanction of the healthcare system? I am not sure the difference is truly as great as you profess.
atomised
2yr ago
The xkcd Free Speech comic [1] from April 2014 was very influential and memetic - as much so as any Stonetonss comic - on Reddit and Reddit-adjacent parts of the internet back when those websites were much more pro-free-speech than they are today.
atomised
2yr ago
This is a bit of a semantic argument but I feel obliged to tell you are America-brained. No-one else in the world thinks that a loosely regulated, globalist, capitalist economic system is 'leftist' because of high government spending and land-value taxes. I do agree that the strain of neoliberalism you see in the Biden administration and on the /r/neoliberal subreddit is not quite that espoused by Reagan and Thatcher, though.
atomised
2yr ago
The trifecta of classic neoliberal economic policies - low taxation, market deregulation, and globalisation - describes large swathes of contemporary western politics, including the present government of the United Kingdom.
atomised
2yr ago
Well as someone with leftist inclinations I would raise the point that neoliberalism remains, in the grand scheme of things, a fundamentally right-wing ideology, since it supports loosening the regulations on private businesses and dismantling direct state involvement in the economy.
This is not really an argument, this is just a list of things you dislike.
It's funny to me when people say that the left can't meme. In one sense I get it: the edginess and nihilism that characterises imageboard meme culture is mostly not compatible enough with progressivism for them to create something like the soyjak. And yet, consider that the 'tolerance of tolerance paradox' went from being an obscure philosophical musing to an almost globally enforced rule of the internet in less than a decade. In memetic warfare terms, that's a victory on the scale of desert storm. A similar argument applies to 'stating ones pronouns' and 'the power plus prejudice definition of racism'. These might not be memes in the same way soyjak is a meme, but they are memetic ideas nonetheless and they have won big time.
P.S. There are a few good leftist memes in a format recognisable to the average reactionary shitposter. 'le pol face' is probably the best example.
P.P.S. All souffles collapse, even expertly made ones.
atomised
2yr ago
Huh. That probably says more about Reddit mods than it does about neoliberalism to be fair, though.
atomised
2yr ago
I doubt they ban Republicans for being too much in favour of economic liberalisation.
atomised
2yr ago
Go to the neoliberal sub on Reddit and they'll tell you themselves that they're 'economically centre-right'.
atomised
2yr ago
Even if we assume the high-end of your range, and say that for the foreseeable future training a near-state-of-the-art deep learning model from scratch will cost around half a million dollars, that's still cheap enough to be considered fairly democratic. A lot of people and organisations have that sort of money, many of which exist outside of the Cathedral. And as you say, you can do a lot by tuning an existing model, which is feasible for hobbyists.
atomised
2yr ago
And Bill Clinton was forced to adopt Reagan’s Neoliberalism which is now considered a leftist politicial philosophy.
The fact that it is the predominant economic paradigm in America, with the consequence that it has many adherents within the Democratic party, does not make trickle-down neoliberalism a 'leftist political philosophy'. You would be laughed out of every economics faculty in existence if you claimed such a thing.
atomised
2yr ago
Well, you did said it was akin to rdrama's banners, which are consciously chosen. But even if we accept that 4chan slur-users are unwitting or subconscious implementers of an anti-normie immune system, their conscious actions are obviously those of people who enjoy using slurs, so they fall into the contingent originally described in the comment above.
atomised
2yr ago
For every person on 4chan who uses slurs as a tactical normie-filter there's three people who just enjoy being shocking and hateful.
atomised
2yr ago
What the discussion presupposes is not that the EU is inherently malignant, but that joining the EU is undesirable for Poland
I disagree. The clear subtext of the original comment is that the EU is inherently malignant.
One can respond to such a question by saying "you seem to believe that joining the EU would be bad for Poland, but I don't think it is in fact bad for them", and go from there.
Yes, just as one can say: 'actually, we don't all agree that xyz' in response to explicit-style consensus building. The problem is that to do so cuts against the grain of the discourse, requires sticking a shovel into the ground instead of simply building constructively, and so is more arduous and less likely to be well received even if done in good faith.
atomised
2yr ago
Laying out an array of controversial opinions and then inviting other people to discuss questions which are only coherent if one a priori regards those opinions as true is absolutely a form of consensus-building. It's not as explicit as saying 'we all agree that...', but it's equivalently powerful, because it still essentially obliges the subsequent discussion thread to conform ideologically to the root comment, lest the whole debate lose its consistency. The question 'Did Poland really need money so badly that it had to join the EU?', and any responses to it, are trivially incoherent unless you assume that the EU is an inherently malignant entity.
In fact, this form of consensus building is more potent than the syntactically explicit form ('we all agree that...'), since though it is equally able to enforce conformity among respondents, one cannot as easily demonstrate with a quotation the manner in which debate is being ring-fenced.
The stated purpose of this community is for defending ideas. That is to say, users are expected to present earnestly held views, along with a reasoned case explaining why they believe them to be true. The OP has instead chosen to reel off a sequence of searingly controversial opinions—an explicit defense of white nationalism, as well as an implied condemnation of homosexuality—with markedly little effort to avoid polemical and ideologically weighted language ('tsunami of ... immigrants', 'drink the corn syrup'). To the extent that they prompt discussion, they do so by posing questions which invite only those respondents who agree with their stances on race and sexuality.
As a result of this framing, the implied terrain for debate is not 'is it important that Poland be a white ethnostate?' or 'is it right for Poles to oppose homosexuality', but rather 'given that Poland is relatively successfully defending itself against non-whites and gay rights, why would they undermine this by allying with America and the EU?'. It's frustrating and dull to unpick this sort of pre-discursive stage-setting, which is why most people who disagree with white nationalism or anti-homosexuality will simply roll their eyes and pass over comments like OP's. Thus, the entire thread is doomed to become an ideologically homogeneous round-table discussion that may raise some interesting points about the realpolitik of national alliances, but that—ironically for a culture war thread—will scarcely tackle the contentious underlying issues.
This is why consenus-building is disallowed. I'm happy to lay my cards on the table: it won't come as a surprise that I don't personally like white nationalism. Yet I value the fact that the Motte does not censor such viewpoints. It is critical, though, that when one presents controversial ideas, one does so according to the principles of the community, since laxity in this regard will induce an echo-chamber before you can say 'globohomo'.
I went to Poland and it looked like what Western Europe should look like. The urban areas were clean and seemingly safe. Indeed the people living there are mostly European or Slavic.
This assumes as axiomatic that we all agree with white nationalism, which is consensus building.
atomised
2yr ago
This is really bugging me and I think someone here will know: I'm trying to find an article, I think written by one of the Scotts, which mentioned the existence of an obscure monk who invented the concept of algorithmic runtime complexity in the 1900s and was completely ignored for being way too far ahead of his time. Can anyone link me to it?
atomised
2yr ago
I'm not totally sure what you mean by the 'red pill' in this context but I will try and answer. I do not see orthodox 'Third Positionism' coming back into vogue: besides the stain of historical association, it is anachronistic - politics from an age when modernity was symbolised by screaming-fast newspaper presses and the broadcast tower at Alexandra Palace.
American right wingers don't even know what socialism is for the most part so it's barely worth listening to their opinions. However it is true that far-right parties have always been, let's say, undogmatic about economics. They just don't find it interesting. They care only about power: power over people, power over institutions.
Not true. Even if we assume that neoliberal capitalism is unassailably efficient, the inefficiencies induced by a socialist system would in many cases not be very great and could be protected with relatively modest tarriffs. And of course for many (perhaps most) industries, a regulated market is the best solution, as well evidenced by the real world.
Khmer Rouge and Ancapistan are two ends of a very long spectrum.
Interesting post, much of this mirrors my thinking in the last few days. The members of this grim little cabal are rationalists in the first degree, each one of them a type specimen. And though they claimed to be effective altruists - and would have been proudly lauded as such up until two weeks ago - it turns out they're degenerate gamblers and crooks whose amoral recklessness has hurt millions of people. It is statistically nearly certain that some victims of FTX will kill themselves, if they haven't done so already.
You can't delegate morality to mathematics. All it leads to is arrogance, and the 'freedom' to always be able to justify your own behaviour to yourself, even when your actions are those of a base criminal. Rationalism is not a wholly failed project; effective altruism is an important and useful dogma - but these ideas must be alloyed with traditional morality to be effective at inducing virtue.
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