teleoplexy's profile - The Motte
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User ID: 2992

teleoplexy


				
				
				

				
0 followers   follows 0 users   joined 2024 April 15 17:32:16 UTC

					

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User ID: 2992

I agree, they can't be substituted and the examples I gave are specifically the exceptions to the rule.

Most of the games, yes. But some of games can certainly put you in the head of someone else: Disco Elysium, Mouthwashing, Pathologic series, Omori, Signalis. They are much more of an exception to the rule, though.

I disagree, the only thing that it requires from you is that you are Russian and lived in Russia. It’s actually funny how every review for it that I’ve heard from non-Russians is negative, but Russians love it. In general, I’m a bit baffled that foreigners try to read Sorokin because it’s akin to trying to understand an inside joke without any context.

I'd be happy if you could provide any examples - news articles, maybe even social media posts. The reason I'm asking is I've been to community development meetings in multiple cities in Canada and I've never seen anyone but nimbys opposing new builds and rezoning changes. The main concerns I've heard in those meetings is that high-rise buildings bring crime, put less tall houses in their shadow, change the character of the community, pose threat to children due to the increased traffic.

Is there a concrete example where self-defined Canadian marxists/communists/socialists have been against building new housing?

Sorry for sidetracking (great post btw) - I've just realized that you are FTTTG. Loved your "Contra DeBoer" essay, I still link it everywhere DeBoer and trans issues are mentioned together.

The meme-ness of it is the main reason I'm opposed to widespread normalization of trans minors. I've seen multiple young people (my relatives even) playing around with the idea of transitioning based on the social and online groups they were in. All of them stopped being interested in gender when separating from those groups. One push from a gender-related medical specialist and I can totally see any of them cementing gender beliefs into their identity.

Also curious about Trump County, CA

I'm not against these tools. I think those are actually pretty cool and useful. However, whatever Adobe does with Photoshop and the examples you give are to me the motte. When it's used as a tool, I have no qualms with it. When it makes artist's life easier without compromising the artistic vision it's amazing, it's the best outcome. The bailey in the argument against AI art is twofold:

  • It is currently most commonly used to generate slop using a single prompt. It is already a huge problem, to a point where indie search engines add an option to filter it out. The OP is asking why is there outrage against the AI, and the reason for it are not the tools that you and I agree are impressive. The problem lies in the lazy one-prompt slop, which I had in mind when writing the post.
  • The future promise of the technology is generating full blown songs, pictures, videos just by using a prompt and without compromising on quality. This future, once again, is not an ideal outcome for me because even if the future GenAI doesn't compromise on quality, the one-promptness of it will still compromise the vision.

For me art is about communication and connection. I'm often looking to understand what an artist says to me. More often than not, I like art is interesting to me on an emotional level, rather than rational or entertainment value level. I feel like I'm connecting with the artist.

Consider A Crow Looked At Me by Mount Eerie. This album deeply affects me when I listen to it. It's a visceral experience - I'm a husband and this album conveys grief and loss a husband experienced when his wife died. It reflects the personal experience of Phil Elverum. Don't get me wrong, AI could have written the same album, it probably will make an equally or more emotionally impactful album in my lifetime, but an AI haven't experienced what Phil Elverum has experienced. To me, the value of this album is not in a crystalized commodity of musical album, that AI could produce. The value resides in the personal message from Phil to everyone who has experienced loss. Each part, the lyrics, the music of this album was tortured out of him by himself. His work has some kind of unquantifiable emotional value. A statistical model can approximate these feelings and produce an average representation of grief, but a masterful artist expresses those emotions directly. AI doesn't "understand" the assignment in the same way a human does.

As another example, let's take Rothko. His pieces are banal at the first glance. Plain color on a big canvas? I mean, I could do this myself, unironically. But, regardless of how hard it was to make his various Untitleds, I still care about Rothko's intentions - like when he tried to make rich people depressed while they eat in Four Seasons restaurant.

After visiting the location of his future artwork, Rothko stated that he hoped to "ruin the appetite of every son of a bitch who ever eats in that room."

Rothko stated that “He achieved just the kind of feeling I’m after - he makes the viewers feel that they are trapped in a room where all the doors and windows are bricked up, so that all they can do is butt their heads forever against the wall."

The stated intent is funny to me, it's absurd. He miserably failed in his endeavor to make rich people depressed - they just ignored the murals, to Rothko's dismay. But those murals represent something tangible. A prompter can try to approximate the intent, but I'm not interested in a statistical approximation of what makes rich people depressed, I'm interested in what Rothko thought could make rich people depressed because it tells me something about Rothko. It's interesting to me how he approached depression, what he viewed as depressing, why did he view it like that. AI art won't tell me something about the prompter because by its nature, it's a statistical representation of what the average output to a given prompt looks like.

There's lots of art that's soulless, lots of art that exists solely to make money - and that's great! A lot of projects by good artists are financed by doing the dirty money-making work: the gaming example of it would be Josh Sawyer conceiving Pentiment in 1990s, but only being able to make it in 2022 as an ostensibly pet project. I like Josh Sawyer's other projects, but Pentiment is great in part because it's was a pet project that he cared a lot about. There's nothing like Pentiment because it's the result Josh Sawyer's passion. Lots of artists work in the advertisement industry to make ends meet and make art that they care about in their free time.

I'm afraid that if AI art makes life more difficult for the Taylor Swifts and the Marvels and the Corporate Memphisers and Ubisofts of the art sphere (the purely money focused business endeavors that result in entertainment art), artists that I care about will suffer by an extension as the field becomes less lucrative for everybody.

TL;DR:

  • There's entertainment-value-only art and thoughtful art. I don't claim that the latter is better than the former, or vice versa. I just happen to like thoughtful art more.
  • When I'm interacting with thoughtful art, I'm looking for the artist's intent and for the feelings that authors try to convey through their art.
  • Putting your feelings through generative AI is a statistical approximation of your feelings, rather than a more valuable to me direct representation of those feelings. I'm trying to connect with the author through the art and I think that this connection can't be established through an AI lens.
  • Author's intent can't be purely conveyed through AI art.
  • The part of the art industry that AI aims to colonize subsidizes the art that I care about.

I still think there are uses for AI art. If it could replace Marvel or Corporate Memphis designers or any decorative-only, illustration art, furry porn, I wouldn't shed a tear for what we've lost. But, if it happens to also choke the part of the art industry I care about, the advent of AI is unacceptable to me.

Do you believe that Times Opinion only interviewed pro-Hamas doctors? The Times Opinion team oversaw the whole questionnaire and polling process.

It's very easy for me to believe that some Americans are to some extent pro-Hamas. It's even easier for me to believe that the Americans who ended up volunteering in Gaza are pro-Hamas.

What's the Motte's perspective on why Trump's "fake" (contingent) electors scheme not a great deal? Truthfully, I'm not very familiar with the US electoral system, so I'd be grateful for any and all corrections.

As far as I understand, this is not the first time when an alternative slate of electors was submit - 1960's Hawaii election seems to be another example and it became a precedent of when it's permissible to submit an alternate slate. From what I'm seeing, though, the differences between this example and Trump's scheme are

  • The election hasn't been certified yet in Hawaii, while it has been certified in all of the states for which alternate elector slates were submitted.
  • There was legitimate uncertainty who won - famously, the difference in Hawaii was 110 votes, while Trump's lawsuits were predicated on widespread fraud during the election. Apparently, Eastman knew that those lawsuits are dead in the water. In this case, I'm not entirely sure what's the steelman case for Pence not certifying the election, and what was the purpose of the alternate slates (other than to overturn the election, that is)

Canadian elections are almost all culture war nowadays, though...

Congrats! First one for me too, honestly didn't expect it.

Sidetracking a bit - I’m really impressed by ublock origin efforts to fight Youtube ads. And they don’t take donations to boot. A group of indie devs really managed to put up a good fight against Google’s anti-blocker department.

NYT has released an article about unmarked graves in Canada.

They quote Tom Flanagan about lack of concrete evidence for child graves:

“There’s, so far, no evidence of any remains of children buried around residential schools,” Tom Flanagan, professor emeritus of political science at the University of Calgary and an author of “Grave Error: How the Media Misled Us (and the Truth About Residential Schools),” said in an interview.

“Nobody disputes,” he added, “that children died and that the conditions were sometimes chaotic. But that’s quite different from clandestine burials.”

The arguments by Mr. Flanagan and other skeptics have been roundly denounced by elected officials across the political spectrum who say evidence clearly suggests that there are many sites of unmarked burials.

Chief Rosanne Casimir of the Tk’emlups te Secwepemc Nation, who made the announcement about the Kamloops site, said: “The denialists, they’re hurtful. They are basically saying that didn’t happen.”

Why are the denialists hurtful, Chief Rosanne? Wouldn't it be great news if there are no unmarked graves?

“We’ve had many conversations about whether to exhume or not to exhume,” Chief Casimir said. “It is very difficult and it is definitely very complex. We know that it’ll take time. And we also know that we have many steps yet to go.”

“We have to know for sure,” she added, “that we did everything that we can to determine: yes or no, anomaly or grave?”

So, the current course of action is to continue not knowing for sure.

“Will every one of those anomalies turn out to be an unmarked grave? Obviously not,” Mr. Lametti, a former law professor now practicing law in Montreal, said. “But there’s enough preponderant evidence already that is compelling.”

The article conveniently omits which evidence is compelling.

The comments seem like a breath of fresh air:

So having read this article, I’ve learned that native children were in the past treated horribly by the government, and that today there is a vigorous debate about how to remember that. But the article doesn’t tell us whether there is actual evidence for mass graves.


The ground penetrating radar results showed disturbances that could be bodies, or tree roots, or something else. There's simply no way to tell unless there are excavations.

When these results were announced in 2021, the country was led to believe these were likely children's graves. Flags were lowered for months. It was reported as a deeply shameful fact, and it really undermined people's pride in their country.

Shockingly, no one in authority has tried to actually get to the bottom of what actually lies underground. If these were clandestine graves there should be criminal investigations. If these are tree roots, then this should be a very cautionary tale against preliminary investigation results being taken as fact and then used for political purposes.

All of the above is totally separate from the real and well documented suffering of Indigenous children wrongly taken from their parents and placed in those awful schools. But it does their memory no credit to make unproven claims in their name.

And now we come to the comment, due to which I started writing all this:

It is sad this is the most recommended comment, which is simply refuted in the second sentence of the article.

Racism abound.


Quote from the article:

While there is a broad consensus in Canada that children were taken from their families and died in these schools, as the discussions and searches have dragged on, a small universe of conservative Catholic and right-wing activists have become increasingly vocal in questioning the existence of unmarked graves. They are also skeptical of the entire national reconsideration of how Canada treated Indigenous people.


Another comment:

Same old rightwing playbook. Deny, obfuscate and rely on sophistry to prove that nothing is real unless they agree with it.


There are so many known and proven ways, in which First Nations were harmed. I can't imagine my child being taken away from me to be reeducated in some way in general, let alone experimented on. Taking away children from their parents causes a visceral reaction in me. I can't imagine the pain and which downstream effects this would cause to a community.

Setting all of the compassion I feel on the personal level aside, why do we need to invent new ways for the indigenous people to be oppressed? Is it acceptable to just lie for victimhood points at this point? Why do liberals seem to be content with this state of affairs?

It all comes down to this, and it's a very cynical and bitter conclusion: it's profitable to lie. Would, for example, this documentary* be made? Would the feds give $27 million to National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation? Would provinces pledge more money for searches? (god knows which unreliable methods would this money be spent on in the future. Divination? Remote viewing? Not out of the question apparently).

And the same tired tactics are used to browbeat the skeptics into "believing science", again. Who cares that for now ground scanning radar found exactly 0 buried kids? It doesn't matter, Catholics killed kids. It's plain and simple, champ. Just be more centered. Do better. Be less racist. Catholic churches on fire be damned. What's one church against maybe existing child remains?

Chief Nepinak from the CBC article above:

“I think the vocal majority in the room, in the community engagements, wanted certainty. They wanted to find the truth. They wanted people held accountable,” Nepinak said. “And to that end, you know, we prioritized that, that voice.”

Apparently, it's easy to exhume, even if the act of doing so violates religious beliefs. And now Pine Creek First Nation knows for certain: no unmarked graves where the ground scanning radar found the anomalies. Tk’emlups te Secwepemc Nation, on the other hand, would prefer to not know.


* This documentary is stunningly scare on content. Julian Brave NoiseCat shows us a lot of tears over the dead children, lying in those unmarked graves. A lot of interpersonal trauma. People hurting other people - there's a scene where he confronts his absentee father about spending the childhood without him. They find a survivor of residential schools who recounts a story about putting a newborn baby, who was the result of an indigenous girl being raped by a priest, in an incinerator. Of course there's no evidence outside of this single account. The whole RAPE BABY INCINERATION is mentioned in passing. One of the main characters is an activist woman, who's trying to uncover the whole truth about the residential schools for 50 years and the only thing that she now clings to is... unmarked graves. Widespread evidence of abuse is so widespread, one person can apparently dig for 50 years and come up with nothing.

Toronto is a Soviet-looking city considering that it isn't actually in Russia

Heavy disagree, honestly. Lived in Moscow and Toronto. Toronto is possibly nothing like Russia

The reason why term "Cultural Marxism" is perceived as a conspiracy from the perspective of orthodox Marxists, isn't because "Cultural Marxism"/Wokeism doesn't exist. It's a conspiracy because calling the phenomenon in question "Cultural Marxism" muddies the waters for orthodox Marxists. Plain and simply - it makes their lives harder. Because of this new term they have to go around and say: "We actually disagree with wokies! They are not real Marxists! There are no [orthodox] Marxists that I know of that call themselves Cultural Marxists. We are also against Wokeism". And because of this inconvenience, the insistence on the lineage when they reject it, they deem this a conspiracy by the CIA against orthodox Marxism (every failure of Marxism and roadbump it experiences in its way is a CIA conspiracy, to be clear).

My comment was written in order to refute this statement directly:

middle managers try to show the plebs who exactly is running the show

But yes, the end result is pruning the workforce, which might have or might not have been the end goal, but there's no corroboration of this being intentional. We can try to infer and I agree that it's likely.

Inside scoop: the RTO enforcement came from Andy Jassy directly. There were no discussions with middle managers. The AWS management in fact, put up some group resistance during 3-days-per-week policy announcement. I remember seeing email chains, discussions, calls for data-driven decisions, even a lot of dissent coming from org directors. This was done hush-hush, without collaborating with the very public employee movement.

I used to be a blank-slateist, both about race and gender. Fully believed that absent racism and childhood inequality in education and nutrition, etc., we'd see proportional representation of black and white and Asian and Australian Aboriginal Nobel prize winners.

I have since come around to the HBD position, though not the ethnostatist "hard" HBD position that says, essentially, that some people are incapable of functioning in an advanced society and we can't/shouldn't live together.

What changed your mind? Life experiences? Books (if there are any, I'd appreciate if you could list them)? Something else?

Could you please elaborate on realizations that you find most important? I'm curious about God and communism, for example!

I once believed that political solutions to problems are viable, and now I believe that they are not, and that you need cultural solutions first in order to meaningfully affect the political

Could you give a couple of examples?

The one I can think of: regulating social media and news outlets is the political solution to a cultural problem.

Sidetracking the thread a little bit, but given that OpenAI and its competitors hit a brick wall in progress recently, what keeps you optimistic about ASI? Admittedly I'm not following the field very closely, but are there any interesting breakthroughs that I've missed that you think get us closer?

"Normies" as defined by "not rationalist/everybody else" isn't obvious to me. In general, the word is used differently in different contexts and for me the default meaning is "a normal person who isn't too online". This is useless for the context of trying to convince people to accept that communism is bad because everybody is online.