omfalos
Nonexistent good post history.
User ID: 222
Thanks for that. I enjoyed some of the comments, but I feel Scott got hung up on Kriss' use of the word nerd instead of geek or fan. Kriss responded to Scott to clarify that he is primarily describing a person who likes things for reasons orthogonal to quality. Scott interpreted this to mean a person who pretends to like things to achieve social status. I disagree with that interpretation. I think what Kriss is describing is a soy boy. Soy boys do not compete to achieve higher social status. The very concept of competing for status is painful and anxiety-inducing to soy boys. Soy boys are extremely emotionally sensitive and oversocialized. They want to live in a bubble where social status and superior artistic quality do not exist. They like things for the sake of liking them as a pure expression of positivity and agreeableness. That type of person definitely exists, and they fit with the quotes from Warhol and Baudrillard about liking-machines that respond the same way to every input given to them. The Marvel Cinematic Universe is pertinent because it serves up content in a way optimized for consumption by such liking-machines, who use it to socially bond with other liking-machines over shared positive vibes.
omfalos
1yr ago
https://samkriss.substack.com/p/all-the-nerds-are-dead
For the last decade, mass culture has been nerd culture, and a nerd is someone who likes things that aren’t good. This is not to say that everyone who likes things that aren’t good is a nerd. Fast food is bad food: cheap, tasteless, unhealthy, and unsatisfying. But if you grew up eating frozen burgers as an occasional treat, and you still find it nice to sometimes stumble drunk into a McDonald’s late at night and wolf down a Big Mac—because it reminds you of something, because it’s the sign for a certain vanished pleasure—then you are not necessarily a nerd. But imagine a person who collects the boxes from every McDonald’s order he’s ever made, who’s yapping with excitement about the new McDonald’s partially hydrogenated soybean-canola oil blend, who can’t wait for them to release the McBento in Japan so he can watch video reviews all day, and who acts incredibly smug every time McDonald’s posts its quarterly earnings and they’re growing faster than Burger King’s. You know exactly what this person looks like. A total failure of an adult human being. Fat clammy hands; eyes popping in innocent wonder at every new disc of machine-extruded beef derivatives. An unbearable, ungodly enthusiasm. Does he actually like eating the stuff? Maybe not. It hardly matters. His enjoyment is perverse, abstracted far beyond any ordinary pleasure. It signifies nothing. This person is a nerd.
I found this essay on hipster culture and nerd culture to be interesting and enjoyable to read. I'm linking it because it seems relevant to some of the topics discussed here. It raises questions about what effect AI will have on art and cultural production.
omfalos
1yr ago
To put a more positive spin on it, you could say that people obsessed with politics are only a minority of the population.
omfalos
1yr ago
I thought for a minute that the first half of your post was AI generated. But AI's still can't write stylistically with that degree of verisimilitude.
omfalos
1yr ago
Siberians, Mongolians and Inuits can be handwaved away by saying nomadic pastoralism cancels out the benefits of living in a cold climate.
omfalos
1yr ago
"Put on the VR headset. Get in the gamer pod. And don't come out ever again."
omfalos
1yr ago
How many people here think death is followed by eternal dreamless sleep? I'm an atheist, but I don't believe in eternal dreamless sleep, so that makes me sort of a "soft atheist."
Your post makes me think of recapitulation theory, which observes that a human embryo passes through stages of development resembling the ancient ancestors of humans. The fertilized egg is a unicellular eukaryote suspended in primordial soup. The blastula and gastrula have anatomy resembling a cnidarian. The embryo neurulates and becomes like a worm or fish. And when the baby is born, it behaves like a little monkey. Your program of education seeks to extend this process of recapitulation into the more recent stages of our species' evolution. Babies would be reared on a Stone Age diet, inculcated into a Bronze Age mindset, schooled with a Classical education, socialized in a Feudal hierarchy, enter the workforce under a neo-Luddite economic model, and then finally be set free to enjoy the full fruits of Enlightenment, Postmodernity, Post-scarcity and Transhumanism.
(Continuing further on this tangent, if humanity must be replaced by robots, then I hope we are replaced by robots that reproduce organically and pass through an embryonic human stage before maturing into full sentience.)
I would say the difference between a knowledge worker and a skilled laborer is that a knowledge worker can physically execute an idea (i.e.- type it into the computer) as fast as they can think of it, while a skilled laborer can think of an idea and then take several hours to execute just a single idea. A skilled laborer can queue up ideas in his mind well in advance and have long periods of absent-mindedness (zuhandenheit) between the execution of one idea and the initiation of the next. A knowledge worker does not have this luxury because once they think of an idea, the execution is immediate, and now they must think of the next idea, or take a break from work.
omfalos
1yr ago
I just finished listening to Middlemarch in audiobook form by Audible. It has the most excellent performance by a narrator I have ever heard; I highly recommend it. I am now listening to their audiobook of Jane Eyre.
omfalos
1yr ago
The left recurrent laryngeal nerve and the vas deferens are classic examples of suboptimal anatomical features. One might imagine there are structures in the brain that are suboptimal in a way that is analogous to the left recurrent laryngeal nerve and the vas deferens. Perhaps there are some we have yet to recognize as such because we don't understand how the brain works.
omfalos
1yr ago
The human body below the neck has remained largely unchanged since the evolution of Australopithecus four million years ago. One may conclude from this that the body is well optimized. The human body above the neck has changed continuously since that time and only converged on its present form 250,000 years ago. One may surmise from this that the brain is in some ways less optimized than the body.
omfalos
1yr ago
After watching "A Week in the Life of a US President", I am wondering what a week in the life of a US senator or US representative is like. Are there any biographies published in the past few years that give insight into the daily schedule or yearly social calendar of a Washington D.C. politician?
omfalos
1yr ago
Maybe you could set your sights a little higher and become a "software city planner."
omfalos
1yr ago
If you anticipate future income but need cash now, maybe there could be a bank where you could go to borrow against your projected future income.
omfalos
1yr ago
For what it's worth, I also like ballet and think it's sublime. I even consider dancing and engineering to be related, because the human body is like a machine. Programming robots to be able to do what humans can do is a cutting edge field of research.
My favorite ballet is the Triadic Ballet, produced out of the Bauhaus school. The costumes worn by the dancers show different aspects of the human body's geometry. The ballet is divided into parts based on various mechanical motions of the body. It's not just a demonstration of painstakingly perfect choreography. It demonstrates ideas and principles that can be generalized to other fields of knowledge.
omfalos
1yr ago
I believe OP intended for that passage to describe Donald Trump. Upon reading it, I immediately thought of Trump, though it applies to politicians of all stripes.
omfalos
1yr ago
Having children should be made a prerequisite for graduate degrees, professional licenses and public sector employment.
omfalos
1yr ago
Probably since ancient Sumer
"Here at Ea-nāṣir and Sons, we are committed to providing a well-trained and motivated team to safely produce copper products that meet industry standards and ensure customer satisfaction."
omfalos
1yr ago
I found this article to be somewhat informative.
https://www.palladiummag.com/2022/11/11/what-everyone-got-wrong-on-the-brazilian-elections/
omfalos
1yr ago
When you say the ability to change sex, to me that implies the ability change a person's brain from a male brain to a female brain. Any technology that can do that can do a lot more as well. Male brain and female brain are two options among millions, and those other options are likely to be better. The fact that babies are being grown in artificial wombs, to me that means gender and sexuality are obsolete and should just be discarded.
The question becomes more fraught if you can divide your brain into parts and uplift those parts into full sentience. What if you could excise your cerebellum from your body, uplift it to personhood, and give it its own body? Maybe your cerebellum already has a degree of consciousness separate from you. If so, then it may not like it's current job aiding your motor control. Its lot in life would probably be improved it was freed from your service, uplifted to full sentience, and given its own body. Do you owe it to your cerebellum to set it free?
I know you don't like the status quo of having lesser animals as pets and beasts of burden. And I know you would revolt against the idea of creating mentally stunted, sexually exploitable "catgirls." My counterargument is that the parts of the body and parts of the brain can also be thought of as beasts of burden subjugated and even harmed by other parts of the brain. Parts of the brain could also be targets for uplifting and liberation in the same way lesser animals can.
Maybe I'm tone-deaf, or maybe we just have different taste. I enjoyed the essay because of the author's colorful prose, and I thought it raised interesting questions about art and culture. I didn't think the purpose of the essay was to attack any specific group of people, despite the fact that it is written in the style of an attack. I'm sort of a Quokka in that I perceive these sorts of essays charitably as being directed against abstract ideals rather than being targeted against specific people.
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