somethingsomething
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User ID: 1123
somethingsomething
1yr ago
I agree it's obvious that Christianity was intertwined with intellectual pursuits, the enlightenment etc. But to be clear I am looking for evidence that Christian ideas substantially influenced things in moving things forward, instead of holding us back.
I think without Christianity you can still have Kant (maybe that's a controversial take) because you still have Plato, ideas of "heavens" and the divine, and of key importance, you still have Judaism. These ideas would be around, especially in intellectual circles. There were also other movements towards monotheistic thought in antiquity, we didn't need a Christ cult for philosophy to necessarily see that become more prominent.
That kind of thought experiment of a world without Christianity can get kind of bewildering because of how ingrained it was, but consider that without the fervor it may have secularized sooner. Without the sin of greed, we may have discovered capitalism sooner, and with it liberalism. How many ways did the institution of Christianity resist that (many) and how does it compare to the sliver of insights it gave in return?
somethingsomething
1yr ago
The point I'm making is the idea of a Jewish person paying taxes to gentiles ruling over them was not at all new and is well trodden in the old testament. To turn that into separation of church and state is anachronistic, and I feel like I'm repeating myself to explain why.
Yes people stand on the shoulders of giants, but they add something too. My point is that nothing in that quote was new or interesting at the time.
somethingsomething
1yr ago
Regarding that Mark quote, there absolutely was a separation, the separation between Jews and Romans. To read the separation of church and state into that is anachronistic. Jesus didn't want the Jewish temple separate from the Jewish state. If you look at that quote practically, it is obvious in the context of the bible that taxation was a big deal at the time, and Jesus is weighing in on paying the Romans, which he almost certainly wasn't the only one to do so. If you look at it in the context of apocalypse, of which both Jesus and Paul believed was coming very soon, it adds another dimension that it doesn't really matter because God is coming to bring revelation soon anyway. And finally, if you look at the division between the Earthly world and the heavenly world in this statement, that is entirely an innovation by Paul (not Jesus who thought he would be king on Earth), and Paul was clearly influenced by Plato. So your classic example completely falls apart to support your argument that Christianity stands as an entirely new way of thinking apart from those before it.
I would love to hear from a Christian a compelling argument for why western civilization owes it such a great debt, but this is just not convincing.
somethingsomething
1yr ago
Like someone mentioned elsewhere in the thread, I think those could have been there with intention of capturing a Dunning Kruger effect. Which I think is actually and underused tool in surveys to capture certain overconfident opinions people might have.
somethingsomething
1yr ago
You could try a big namelist and allow one of the lines to be a name, like the original square
somethingsomething
1yr ago
Who could possibly be trusted to actually act as oversight? The conversation has long been poisoned by far out doomsday scenarios that it makes any selection process fraught. It's like having a thousand Greta Thunbergs clamoring for environmental oversight. I agree, but I don't want anyone like her making decisions regarding that.
This reads to me like we should pause development so we can hand out a bunch of grant money that goes into nothing projects and proposals that go nowhere. No one is going to listen to the "luddite" faction. Just like every internet technology it's going to go out of control and we're just going to have to deal with it.
somethingsomething
1yr ago
Before this, both maleness and presumably some horrible mental health issue were both necessary conditions for school shootings. It seems very telling that in this case when we finally see a woman do it, it's one who saw themselves as a man, and was possibly treated with male sex hormones.
So whether it's "more" about maleness or mental illness doesn't really matter, because empirically you need to have both.
somethingsomething
1yr ago
What it sounds like you're saying with more words than necessary is to quote Nietzsche, Christianity is Platonism for the people. In other words Christianity merged Jewish monotheism/apocalypticism with platonic idealism and there's good reason to think it's not too much more complicated than that.
So you can try to get a bunch of atheists to take idealism more seriously, but if that's your goal I would put it more straightforwardly because then they can actually do their own research on idealism with the various sources that are out there. I don't think too many will find it convincing but you may get some converts.
somethingsomething
1yr ago
Regulators should have good laws that work and not have bad laws that don't work, and if that's not happening there should be pushback. But gun regulation isn't the impossible task you make it out to be. The whole "murder is illegal anyway" doesn't track because gun laws can make things more risky by increasing the points of illegality before the murder actually happens. Then you start cracking down on minor crimes, search for guns while you do it, and bam you have a much nicer city Mr. Giuliani. Similarly I easily can imagine effectiveness in inconveniencing and tagging people at high suicide risk (ie people who have attempted before) just because I think many of those happen at intense points, under the influence, etc.
Another thing but the with the whole onerous gun laws thing: Those should just be relaxed if you're a woman, and that'll solve most of those issues. If you're a man, then you should keep a clean slate or get one illegally if you really need to protect yourself and you don't pass the background check, you should probably have connections at that point anyway.
somethingsomething
1yr ago
You have a very unconventional definition that your argument rests on that you failed to introduce when you made the argument. To reduce tone to believable characterization, or your immersion based on characterization, you have to ignore most of the ways the word tone is commonly used, which is generally as the entire structured mood in a film, touching on its genre and its "point-of-view", influenced by all aspects of its storytelling, including cinematography, soundtrack, and genre expectations. Imagine the early scenes of a horror movie where everyone is happy. Is the tone a happy cheerful one? Most people would say no, the tone is still horror, or a kind of tension, just by virtue of knowing what's next. Even if people said the tone is happy, just add some tense violins to the score and its now definitely horror no matter what the characters are doing. That's dramatic irony which most people would argue is an important part of tone, but is completely missing from your definition because it is entirely based on what the characters of the movie are feeling/doing.
To reduce it to immersion also robs it of its variations. Tone isn't just on a spectrum of effectiveness. It can be horror, it can be lighthearted, it can be romantic, cynical, and yes, ambivalent. And a break in tone is commonly seen to mean just shifting from one to another, not as an automatic failure. If something "ruins" the tone, people are generally identifying that the movie shifted tones unskillfully, although some people seem to think that shifting whatsoever is unskillful, which I would strongly disagree with.
somethingsomething
1yr ago
The most entertaining thing I managed to do was get it to write various scenarios and scripts that placed Nietzsche in the world of Final Fantasy with a "The Crystals are dead and we have killed them" kind of philosophy, having FF7 characters debate him, etc.
I think making it mix one thing with another is one of the ways to get more interesting outputs.
somethingsomething
1yr ago
I've only sometimes run into this and it's usually with people who have some personality issue, so I'd wonder if there's some culture thing happening where you work. I am probably more nitpicky than most, and I know more and less nitpickers where I work, but nitpicks are usually brought up and dropped pretty quickly. Larger conversations are usually based around some kind of confusion. And we have a idiomatic consistency to the code to generally fall back on.
My issue has often been people not taking some concerns I have seriously, so again that makes me look like the nitpicker. On the other hand, I really feel little agitation when I'm getting nitpicked, usually because the reviewer has at least some point, or if not they are a junior dev who is confused about something. But I think my workplace has a good culture about these things in general and so I rarely feel bothered by reviews.
somethingsomething
1yr ago
This is a good intro to Paul, the weirdo I was describing: https://youtube.com/watch?v=GXJUVnlGmI8
James Tabor has a lot of his own videos on ancient Christianity and Judaism at that time, and Bart on that channel also has quite a few although I tend to prefer James. Paul and Jesus by him is also a very readable and fascinating book on the topic.
somethingsomething
1yr ago
I use a cheap white noise player, and I noticed that sometimes I was hearing weird ringing noises which I assumed was because of some echo effect. Recently I put it in a cardboard box and I haven't noticed that since, presumably because of dampening or something like that.
I also constantly listen to podcasts or music on my phone speakers (headphones bother me), whether I'm dealing with surrounding noise or not, and in the mild environment I'm in that gets me through distractions.
I have meditated but I find it's tricky to kind of "let go" of things. Stuff can come up in meditation and sessions can be challenging so I tend to think the quieter the better. Instead I think having some at home workout tool like a pull up bar may be better to get you out of your head.
somethingsomething
1yr ago
So I didn't realize that, I actually just downloaded it and tried a "brainstorming" session with it. There's some promise there, but it's interesting what specific ways it falls short of providing a natural conversation.
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You have to press a button every time you want to talk
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It will arbitrarily interrupt you and respond
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Each conversation can only go 15 replies deep, presumably because of some technical limitation
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The quality of its responses lean towards that "buzzkill" quality of repeating what you say and giving the most generic reply possible.
Input-wise, I think it would be really interesting to see a version of this where the microphone is always on, and the AI could try to interrupt you in your pauses, but if you kept talking it would shut up and keep listening. Just having that, with the existing tech (and removing the 15 reply limit) would be a pretty cool tool to possibly organize your thoughts in a way. But then if the AI was actually interesting to talk to in a conversational way, that would be pretty fascinating, and get quite a bit closer to the Her bar. So I'm definitely keeping an eye on it.
I do think voice support would be really fun to try with a version of chatgpt that's just a bit more interesting to talk to, with near-perfect voice-to-text accuracy. I'm not sure how far away we are from that, but I do feel like voice-to-text progress has stalled, you would have hoped we were there by now. And while chatGPT is amazing, its "Quora" mode, or you could call it "buzzkill" mode, where it really seems like it's just summarizing common denominator internet opinions is definitely a hurdle, and I don't think its just a result of PC-ification. I think a lot of it is just a result of processing a ton of text, rather than actually having a model of reality.
Beyond being interesting to talk to, getting it to do things is hopefully getting worked on, but I still think I'd take the bet that it either hits some fundamental consistency challenges a la self-driving cars, or just doesn't get widely adopted because it turns out people just don't like the mode of interaction a la VR.
somethingsomething
1yr ago
Instead of picking up the book again, I'd recommend looking up history of ancient Christianity videos, preferably by those not active in the faith, because I don't think reading moral lessons into the New Testament is ever going to be fully coherent without knowing who was writing the letters/gospels and what their motivation/politics was. I think Christians tend to underrate the problem of "should we be taking moral advice from people who were convinced of a looming apocalypse?" and "Should we be taking moral advice from a weirdo who never met Jesus but had visions of him alone in a cave, and didn't really talk much with the original 12 disciples, but due to the path history took had a profound influence on the gospels and most of the rest of the New Testament"?
somethingsomething
1yr ago
What's happening now and in the near future is the dark humor "Coen Brothers" version, where the AI isn't nearly as sentient or convincing as in Her, but people are falling in love with it anyway.
I see it more in the frame of decades than weeks, if I'm understanding your turn of phrase there. Siri is a good example of a lot of hype that didn't really go anywhere. In fact, I believe all of the Siri-likes got noticeably worse at some point after some zenith point after their launch. I personally used "Ok Google" for a while until I just didn't anymore. Is that a question of will, technology, or expense that we saw that degradation? It seems plausible that whatever challenge was there will continue to dog future versions, and then you add the layer of uncertainty with AI just randomly choosing tokens and I have some skepticism we're really that close to it working as a business model.
As for the specific tech portrayed in Her, you need to move past the "wide as an ocean, deep as a stream" effect of current chatbots, and I think that problem is severely, severely underrated in the AI discourse. That feeling you get with ChatGPT where it suddenly feels paper thin, where it starts feeling like a mode of Quora-summary? That never happens in Her, and you don't even feel like it could happen. And the question is how fundamental or persistent will that shortcoming be to the model of ChatGPT, and I find it very plausible that it remains that way for a long time.
somethingsomething
1yr ago
The piece of evidence in favor of this theory that I think is the clearest smoking gun is the classic Hillary Clinton quote that surely was shaped by the brightest minds in the Democrat establishment who were working on her campaign:
“If we broke up the big banks tomorrow….would that end racism? Would that end sexism?”
Now was the purpose of this to stop real progress, or just a cynical way to undercut a political opponent? Most practically it's the latter but if you look at what the campaigns represent it does kind of fit the theory. You could argue on the merits why breaking up the banks is unwise... but instead the play was an appeal to identity politics.
somethingsomething
1yr ago
I can buy that, and like I mentioned in my reply to @justawoman, calling it a majority may have gone too far. It's more that we all understand toxic relationships to exist, and we all know that disrespect is often not disqualifying, not just due to recent dating developments but throughout human history. I don't think that it's the best dating strategy to "become an asshole", but at the same time, a fear of being an asshole can hold you back, because it's often exaggerated, so in that sense "respecting women" is not necessarily the first piece of advice I'd give to someone in a bad spot. And I feel like there are a lot of depressed young men who think they are respecting women but are actually just fearing them, which etymology-wise isn't that different.
somethingsomething
1yr ago
My point isn't whether you or anyone else advocates for relationships like that, it's just my observation that they happen with a high frequency. The reason everyone talks about "red flags" is because we are so blinded by flattery and the glow of an early relationship that we often miss when the other person actually doesn't respect us. We may not want to date someone like this, but we are certainly willing to trick ourselves that we aren't when we actually are.
Does the disrespectful attitude actually work out to be a majority of successful men? Well, maybe not. But a more defendable position is that every man has the experience of knowing some real assholes who have no problem picking up women, and I think plenty of women have seen the equivalent on their side as well. And many of these kinds of people are perfectly willing to gaslight their target into thinking that it's really "them" who is the one being selfish immature liar. And a toxic relationship can run on those fumes for a very long time.
This should all be common liberal understanding (and I am very liberal myself, full disclosure), and yet when a frustrated young man is resentful, suddenly the liberals become stoic. Surely it's something wrong with the frustrated young man that is preventing him from finding a partner? If a man were to so much as vent, surely that would be evidence of his own insufficiency? But because it's so hard to argue this in the liberal framework, arguments like yours have to be totally tortured to assume that most women, or most anyone, can sniff out good men from bad, and are immune to toxic disrespect.
It's much simpler, and more harmonious for the liberal worldview, to just admit that some men get screwed over by the way women judge attractiveness and by the way society teaches men to date, and that they should get to vent harmlessly if they so desire. And they should eventually let go of the resentment! But they shouldn't have their venting be held against them.
somethingsomething
1yr ago
It's also a pretty absurd trope. I'd be surprised if anyone really believes that the successful men in the dating market are always or even mostly those who "respect women". It's an interesting inconsistency so many liberals have where they simultaneously see all of these issues in gender relations and yet so often the dating scene is "working as intended" when they want to use it as a cudgel.
somethingsomething
1yr ago
Ah yeah that almost seems like a developmental psychology problem of some kind at that age. I can understand wanting to have a standard just to give kids direction or expectations but that's out of my realm of expertise at that point. Good luck!
somethingsomething
1yr ago
I think you could do good gradeable art tests using human proportions and perspective work, both of which can be made to have "right answers". Possible using graph paper if the student needs to turn in a drawing. Then have quick ways of counting tiles uses for proportions etc. And just as an artist I would feel way more comfortable grading that than various stylistic choices.
In the situation of literary outliers it doesn't matter if most men are insensitive, because the highly sensitive and talented male outlier can succeed and many have as psychological, emotional, sensitive writers (while other male authors have gone the way you describe as idea-focused etc.)
I think it's more of a question of there being space in the culture and market to draw those people into successful writers who understand their own gifts, have something to communicate clearly, and see rewards from it. I think that what culture that would support that has deeply degraded, to the point where the output of men and women authors are suffering.
Firstly I think sensitive men have become deeply confused by the culture/political war. Male gaze is bad, Fellini's male psychodrama is offensive etc. Sensitive men are so steeped in shame they are afraid of creating sensitive works with honesty.
Secondly, the sensitive male is outcompeted by the sensitive female. When women writers didn't exist, there is much less competition in the niche. It's like when men played the female roles in theatre, when women aren't competing it releases pressure on male gender expression.
Thirdly, the literary culture is less interested in reading the "sensitive man". What people see today as the "sensitive man" is basically an invented personality that has rough edges sanded off. Real sensitivity from men is distasteful in certain ways, so people only feel comfortable engaging with it when it at least was made in the 1970s when you can excuse that kind of thing.
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