thejdizzler
2mo ago
It doesn't though. In the linked article, there's clearly evidence that synthetic data leads to hallucinations over time.
Okay where are they going to get more training data from? They've already used the entire internet. You also aren't accounting for the fact that OpenAI lost $5 billion last year.
It's not helpful for you to say the article is low quality without providing examples.
thejdizzler
2mo ago
Why don't users on theMotte take the idea of societal collapse more seriously? It's not just things like resource depletion and climate change that could cause something like this. Rather I think there are many layers of various pillars of society going towards the shitter that I think makes some kind of collapse of Western Civilization inevitable. I'll list a few below
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Resource Depletion/Peak Oil: Although we seem to have stemmed off global peak oil for about 50 years, it seems like the peak is finally actually coming into sight. Some say 2018 was actually the peak, others say it won't arrive until 2030. Whatever the case, it is an inevitability given the fact that discoveries of deposits have been outpaced by demand for the past fifty years. Barring a scientific miracle like effective hydrocarbon synthesis by bacteria, the alternatives don't look promising. Ethanol from corn has an abysmal energy return on energy invested (EROI). Electric motors are not powerful enough to run 18 wheeler trucks, and even for passenger vehicles, we don't have enough lithium in the whole world to replace the current fleet of cars. It's not just oil: copper is being mined at extremely low-grades (because we have exhausted the high-grade deposits), uranium only has around 100 years of proven reserves, and we've already hit peak phosphorous. Further reading: Art Berman, Simon Michaux, Alice Friedman
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Climate Change/Environmental Degradation: Anyone with two eyes can see that climate change is happening. It's not just that temperatures are getting warmer, but variation seems to be increasing as well, which is really bad for parts of our civilization that require fairly regular climatic conditions like agriculture. Here in Maryland we had one of the hottest summers on record, followed by an extremely warm fall. Now we're in the middle of one of the coldest winters in the last twenty years. Even if you don't believe that climate change is happening, other aspects of environmental degradation are harder to deny. For the past few summers we've had massive wildfires across most of the Northern hemisphere, and in California during the winter. Some of these are natural, but many are the result of poor management and ecological practices. We've contaminated our drinking water with birth control, our soils have been largely stripped of nutrients by industrial farming, and microplastics are literarily everywhere. None of this is sustainable
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Pandemic risk from industrial agriculture: Although COVID was likely a lab leak, one of the initial hypotheses as to its origin was a cross-over event from bats to humans at bushmeat market. We create millions of such crossover opportunities in our agriculture system every day, and it's only a matter of time before the current bird flu pandemic, which has decimated US chicken and cow populations (spiking the price of eggs to $6 / 12 eggs) crosses over to humans. This has happened before in both 1918 and in the 1960s.
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Birthrate collapse: Everywhere that modern Western society touches seems to experience a rapid and catastrophic decline in birth rates to far below replacement levels. There's been a lot of discussion of this issue at least here, and it seems like nothing any government does is effective at turning things around. While declining populations may be good for our resource consumption/pollution problems, without some kind of reversal in birth rates, there will tautologically be a death of Western culture. A somewhat related issue is the general collapse of community in the West, which is talked about a lot in books like Bowling Alone.
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Brainrot: modern society is incredibly complex and requires a lot of smart people at the helm keeping the systems that keep us alive going. Many of these people are aging out of the workforce, and there aren't many zoomers and millennials who can replace them. Part of this is an issue of desire: few people want to run a wastewater treatment plant or work as a mining engineer when you can just grift with things like crypto and OnlyFans. But I also think we're all just getting dumber to some extent. I put a lot of blame on addictive technologies on the internet (and so does Jonathan Haidt), but I'm sure there's also crossover with the issue of environmental pollution.
There's many more specific issues I could list, but I think you get the gist. Why isn't this community more concerned about these kinds of issues, as opposed to worrying about AI (which is not profitable, or efficient). I think it may have something to do with TheMotte severely overrating the utility of human intelligence in solving large scale problems, but I'm not sure. Is there something I'm completely missing here?
Further reading/listening. DoTheMath, Rintrah, The Great Simplification.
thejdizzler
2mo ago
Oh yea I really don't think it's worth it either. And yes it's only a partial solution to the Incel problem. Sex tourism doesn't help the NEET in his mom's basement, or the man who really wants to start a family. But it does like you said, directly make sex interchangeable with everything else through the medium of money. This was the natural result of the sexual revolution, but certain people (mainly women) don't want to hear it.
thejdizzler
2mo ago
We were riding through frozen fields in a wagon at dawn. A red wing rose in the darkness.
And suddenly a hare ran across the road. One of us pointed to it with his hand.
That was long ago. Today neither of them is alive, Not the hare, nor the man who made the gesture.
O my love, where are they, where are they going The flash of a hand, streak of movement, rustle of pebbles. I ask not out of sorrow, but in wonder.
- Czelaw Milosz, Encounter 1936
thejdizzler
2mo ago
Natural Right and History by Leo Strauss for philosophy book club. Generally enjoying it, but I feel like he makes some dubious assumptions about things. Also working through Judas by Amos Oz and the last few hours of Solaris.
thejdizzler
2mo ago
Oh Houellebecq is very clear that they're partially doing it to themselves. Especially in the case of Cuba. Cubans didn't necessarily believe in Communism and the Revolution and all that, they just wanted to be not poor. So once Che left and Fidel was dead, they went right back to the same old capitalist system, just with different people on top.
thejdizzler
2mo ago
True, and maybe this is a weakness of my review: that I'm mixing the a critique of the sexual revolution with a critique of the exploitation of the global South. To steelman myself I think what I was probably going for her was a direct comparison with prostitution (why is this kind of relationship okay, whereas one more explicitly involving money is not).
thejdizzler
2mo ago
Right but unlike then we've made those things illegal or at the very least heavily looked down upon in the West. So of course people are going to look elsewhere for those kinds of things.
thejdizzler
2mo ago
So I just finished Michel Houellebecq's Platform and have written up my thoughts about it over on my blog. I thought I would cross-post here in text form to get some thoughts.
Short plot summary: Like most Houellebecq novels, the protagonist of Platform, Michel, is a middle-aged frenchman with little in the way of meaning to his life. He hates his bullshit job in the government, doesn’t have much in the way of a social network, and lacks hobbies except for perhaps a bit of cooking.1 At the start of the novel, Michel’s father dies, leaving him with an unexpected windfall. He uses this money to take a trip to Thailand, where he visits some “massage parlors” as well as engaging in the usual touristy pastimes of relaxing on the beach and visiting ancient ruins. His tour group consists of an eclectic group of other French people: the jaded Robert, the working class Lionel, a few couples of various ages, and the smoking hot Valerie. For some reason Valerie falls in love with our main character, and when they return to France the two begin a relationship.
Valerie works in the tourism industry, and upon her return to France she is put in charge of a series of failing hotel chains along with her coworker Jean-Yves. Michel has the bright idea to turn these hotels around by making sex tourism an implicit part of the vacation experience. This goes swimmingly: Valerie and Michel prepare to retire to one of their sex resorts in Thailand, until the usual suspects intervene and it all goes to shit.
I first found out about Houellebecq on the subreddit /r/stupidpol circa 2020. Stupidpol is a forum dedicated to a Marxist/Leninist critique of identity politics: the userbase loved Houellebecq’s irreverence for contemporary “woke” sacred cows like Islam and Feminism, as well as his extension of Marx’s analysis to the arena of romantic relationships highly relevant to our times.2 I didn’t get around to reading any of his books until 2023, where I read The Elementary Particles, which I enjoyed other than the stupid sci-fi subplot. Last year I read three more of his books: Submission, Whatever, and Annihilation. Although he can get a bit repetitive, Houellebecq perfectly captures my own frustrations with dating, and with lack of meaning in the modern world. Platform was no exception to this pattern. Here Houellebecq focuses on our troubled relationship with the Third World and on romance as the meaning of life.
A quick note on translation: This was my first Houellebecq book in Spanish. While my reading experience was probably slightly worse than it would have been in English, as my Spanish is not as good, there were two aspects of the Spanish edition that I liked more than its English equivalent. First: Houellebecq actually includes phrases in English in the parts of the book taking place in Thailand, highlighting the unequal relationship between the languages of the West and the East (and even French and English). Without another language to compare to, you would completely miss this. Secondly, the Spanish translation includes footnotes about the translation itself, and for identifying French celebrities and politicians an international reader might not be familiar with. I certainly appreciated these, and I hope future English editions include them.
So, tourism: It’s not a very controversial position to disapprove of sex tourism, especially in America, where prostitution itself is illegal, and puritanism still holds some cultural sway. Sex tourism is obviously exploitative and coercive of young women: they trade their beauty and their best years of their life for money in a manner that we would never allow here.
Yet even in an era before OnlyFans, this attitude is highly hypocritical in a number of ways.
To start with, all our relationships with the Global South are like this. Our cheap raw materials and manufactured goods all rely on unsafe, exploitative labor performed in the Third World. Is there really such a big difference between selling your body directly to an overweight German, or selling your body to the factory that makes his BMW? The more family-friendly aspects of tourism in dining, beaches and hotels are not really much better. Houellebecq uses the example of Cuba, which after the spent fury of the few years after the revolution siphoned labor off of essential agricultural and industrial work (which it would have needed to become self-sufficient and truly free from the American embargo) to the tourism industry to make a quick buck, leaving the country dependent on the West once again. Even the most benign form of tourism, that which encourages the preservation of historical sites, art, and artifacts has damaging effects on the coherence of a local culture. No longer are those artifacts for the culture itself to enjoy, but a product to marketed towards Americans.3
Secondly, as my Spanish tutor Rafa pointed out, we have no problem with other types of sexual tourism that don’t involve money. Rafa told me a story of one of his German friends who used Tinder Plus as an alternative to hostels in Latin America. Although all these women were consenting to this German man sleeping over and presumably having sex with them, the relationship was no less exploitative than if cash was used. Dreams of being taken away to the West, higher status in one’s local community (for bagging a Blanco), are two big non-amorous factors at play in this situation that many would find just as damaging to the individual women and the local community than if cash was exchanged.
Finally, sex tourism is the natural result of a refusal to deal with the incel-problem. The sexual revolution, and its far more damaging digital counterpart, created a “sexual marketplace”. Like other markets, this created a range of outcomes. Certain men enjoyed a very large amount of sexual success, due to their physical appearance and “rizz”, while others were completely locked out of the market. Most women did fairly well until their mid-thirties when their physical appearance began to decline. Without the marriage and traditional family formation, these two demographic groups (low-status, ugly men and older women) have had to resort to other ways to satisfy their desire for sex and personal connection. One solution is internet pornography, which is obviously bad and frowned upon, but covertly permitted. Another is sex tourism and mail-order brides.
Now don’t get me wrong, I don’t think sex tourism is good. But it’s incredibly frustrating to hear people condemn the practice (and things like it like OnlyFans) without acknowledging what the root of the problem is. Young men don’t want to be alone in their room jerking off to a computer screen, but society doesn’t present them with many other options for romantic connection. And the problem is getting worse.
This brings me to my final point about this book, and Houellebecq in general. Contrary to what many think, the man is not a nihilist. Rather, I think he believes that we derive most of our meaning in life from our personal relationships, and from Romance in particular. You can see this in the way the Michel and Valerie’s relationship4 just lightens up the tone of this book. Their once-every-ten-pages sex scenes and other tender moments seem like something that Houellebecq is happy to be writing, especially when contrasted to the rather grim tone of the rest of the book. Houellebecq is a Romantic with a capital R. Yet he also recognizes that even in the best of times that these relationships are only temporary. We no longer even live in the best of times. Hence the accusations of nihilism.
Personally I am 100% on board with Houellebecq on this. I have never been happier than when I have been in love, both romantically, and in a more general sense with the community I am surrounded by. But those kind of connections are becoming harder and harder to find in a world that is increasingly split into its Elementary Particles.
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Although he also spends quite a bit of time throughout the novel reading Auguste Comte, the father of positivism. Perhaps the French really are much more literate/cultured than we are, but I always find Houellebecq’s everyman constructions a little bit unbelievable. If you’re fairly obscure philosophy, you’ve got a bit more going on than the average dude who just likes sportsball.
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The title of Houellebecq’s first book in French translates as “the Extension of the Domain of the Struggle”, referring quite literally to Marx. Why the English translator decided to use the title “Whatever” instead I could not tell you.
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I think I understand a little better why Palestinians don’t want non-Muslims going up to the Dome of the Rock
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This is apparent in Houellebecq's other works as well.
thejdizzler
2mo ago
Maybe I'm an outlier, but this is not true at all for my community in Baltimore. Every single person I know, except for my boss who moved his parents here when their health started to decline, lives more than 18 miles from their mom.
thejdizzler
2mo ago
There are a fair number of married homeowners, but they don't generally tend to do a good job of participating in the community beyond attending mass and doing things like inviting the priests over for dinner.
thejdizzler
2mo ago
Yep, I think this is at the root of much of the problem, even more so than TV, and would explain the early data from Bowling Alone where there wasn't very high TV penetrance.
Looking back I wish I had just gone to the University of Chicago and either got a job in the city afterwards of went to grad school at Northwestern or something. Right now I'm kind of stuck between my parents living in Chicago (and wanting to move back to the UK where my sister lives), my college friends in Boston or the Bay, and others randomly scattered all over.
thejdizzler
2mo ago
Fixed. Thanks!
The newest issue of the Atlantic contains an article about our increasing social isolation titled: The Anti-Social Century (You can get behind the paywall here). The author of the article blames our information technologies: TV and more recently cell phones, destruction of third spaces like libraries, parks and neighborhood bars, national and international mobility, and a culture that chooses convience over forging genuine connections over time. In terms of solutions, the author posits that we need a national culture change towards a more skeptical attitude towards new technology like AI and deliberate attempts to be more social. He cites the rapid growth in independent bookstores and board game cafes as a cause for hope in this kind of change.
I'm directionally on board with the diagnosis and prognosis offered in the Atlantic article, but I worry about the vagueness and naivity of the solution. I had similar worries after reading a similar piece, the book Stolen Focus by Johann Hari, which highlighted the deleterious effects of phones on our attention spans. Hari spends a summer phone free in Provincetown, MA which he really enjoys, and manages to recover much of his attention span. However, upon returning to the "real world" he finds himself sucked right back into the vortex. Hari rightly recognizes that this is an issue he cannot tackle alone, and advocates for collective action on a national or international level. He draws inspiration from movements like women's suffrage, the fight for gay rights, and the campaign against CFCs. Perhaps I am cynical, but I find this level of optimism to be hopelessly naive for a number of reasons.
Firstly, those examples which I just listed were examples in which the forces of capital were neutral (CFCs, gay rights), or in fact in favor of the so-called revolution (women's suffrage). In this case, like that of the fight against climate change, or degrowth, capital is fundamentally against a system that would free our attention, as such a system would reduce profits.
Secondly, I'm not sure democratic change will actually work in this scenario. As we saw with prohibition & the failed war on drugs, people like their vices. I'm not sure my generation would be in favor of something like banning TikTok. Hari even states that his first week on Cape Cod was pretty difficult psychologically without the soothing mind-wipe of scrolling. Faith in democracy also misses the forces of capital arrayed against the interests of the common people who have so clearly been gaming our electoral system since the Civil War. If we can't stop Big Pharma from price gouging insulin, what makes the author think that we could upend the entire media ecosystem?
I think change fundamentally has to come from a level in-between the individual & the state (or global culture). I think many cultural critics miss the very existence of this level of culture, possibly because it has almost totally vanished from our world as an element of social change. I'm talking here about the family, the local community, and to some extent, the parishes/church.
Yet I think this new Atlantic article, and my experiences over the past few years has revealed how frustrating trying to affect change at this level can be. There might well be an explosion of board game bars and independent bookstores, but at least where I live in the US, even thriving institutions have problems with inconsistency and high turnover on the scale of years which makes it very difficult to build real community. A couple examples from my personal life might be helpful.
1). I'm pretty involved in the running community here in Baltimore and in some senses the running scene has never been better. Races are packed and the casual running clubs are seeing more people come out than ever. But the more serious running teams are doing very poorly. We can't get people out for organized workouts, or for important team races. It's very hard to build team camraderie or real friendships in this kind of environment where everyone is a flake.
2). With my local church the problem is similar. Plenty large mass attendence, but people my age aren't interested in the other ministries that the church offers: working with soup kitchen, church garden, and food pantry to help feed the homeless, book clubs, or even social events, many of which take place right after mass. In addition to the flakiness present in the running scene, there's also a geographic transience: many people are here for school or temporary work, and are not inclined to work towards any kind of more permenant community.
There are similar vibes in many of the other hobbies I take part in: gardening, swing dancing, reading: a trend towards pick-and-choose attendence of events, rather than attendence out of any sense of obligation to a particular community. I'm clearly guilty of this too: I would probably be a stronger running club participant or parishoner if I didn't have so many hobbies, although I like to think I lack the worst of the scrolling/TV vices.
I'm kind of at a loss about what we can do about all this. A big part of the problem is clearly the phones,which hopefully the upcoming Tik Tok ban will help with, but I think there's also a large element of constant geographic mobility at play at here too. I grew up in Chicago, went to college in Boston, and currently am doing my PhD in Baltimore. At each stage of life I built or was part of a community, which, in the case of the first two, I have gradually lost. The thought of the same happening with my friends here fills me with dread, but staying in Baltimore is not a rational economic prospect, and also requires that most of my friends here don't leave themselves. But if not going to stay, why would I ever want to sink my roots in deeper?
Any thoughts/advice appreciated. I also think there's a lot of value in online communities that I have found here at the Motte, in my philosophy book club (university friends), and on Substack, and I'm immensly grateful for their existence, but I don't think they can even come close to fulfilling many of the needs that meatspace does. But that's a whole seperate post.
thejdizzler
2mo ago
This sounds like Kim Stanley Robinson's Aurora which I have been meaning to read for a while.
thejdizzler
2mo ago
No this is the first Lem book I've read. Would you recommend?
thejdizzler
2mo ago
Just finished In the Land of Israel by Amos Oz I found this in a Free Little Library in Baltimore where I live and picked it up because I lived in Israel in 2019 and heard good things about the author, Amos Oz who is a famous fiction writer in Israel. This isn't your usual Amos Oz book, or even a work of fiction. Rather, it is a group of roughly transcribed interviews of Jews and Arabs across the territory of Israel, including the occupied West Bank, in the aftermath of the 1982 Lebanon War, and the phalangist massacre of Palestinian refugees in Beirut (for more on this war I would recommend the Israeli film Waltz with Bashir: I have never seen an animation style like it, and it also follows a similar interview format to this book).
These interviews serve to highlight the diversity of opinion and culture among the Jews and Arabs of Israel and the occupied territories. The book opens with a description of the ultra-orthodox demographic takeover of the old city of Jerusalem, follows a winding route through the newly occupied West Bank (where Jewish settlements have already sprung up), the Galilee, and endsin the city of Ashdod on the Medditerranean Sea. Oz is an anti-nationalist former Labour Party member who favors a two (and eventually one) state solution, but he honors the opinions of all the people he interviews (even the crazy, unnamed Z who advocates for explicit genocide against all Arabs, not just the ones in Palestine) by transcribing their words truthfully, and not distorting their arguments with his own judgements. Everyone, including the afformentioned Z, came off as rational under the strokes of Oz’s pen, and at least somewhat sympathetic.
This book should shatter your conceptions of the entirety of Israel or the Jewish people as some kind of elite mastermind class controlling global events or a people who want to take over the entire Middle East. There are certainly some Jews who advocate for that: the citizens of the newly minted Jewish settlements in Judea and Samaria, as well as Z, certainly do so. Others, like the Ultra-Orthdox in Jerusalem have no interest in such worldly things, or frankly anything other than studying Torah. Kibbutzniks, like Oz and the “Cosmic Jew” he interviews in the last chapter of the book, are more distraught about the influence of American money and weapons on destroying the original agrarian character of the Zionist movement, while still others, many who live in Tel Aviv, basically just want to party and be secular Westerners.
In the 40 years since this book was written, many things have changed. There is now a wall between Israel and the West Bank, settlements have sprung up all over Judea and Samaria, and slowly but surely all the people of Gaza are all being killed. Yet the same divisions exist in Israeli society (or did in 2019 when I was there), and none of these fundamental problems are any closer to being solved. This, I think would sadden Oz. It certainly saddens me: Israel is a beautiful country, and its seems like the biggest threat to its continued existence is not Hamas or other Arab countries, but civil war.
Now I'm reading Solaris (or really listening to it) by Stanislaw Lem. One of the most genuinly creepy science fictions stories I've read. It's about a research station on a sentient planet where the planet communicates with the researchers by reflecting their worst memories back at them in a manner that's impossible to avoid. In Spanish I'm reading Las Palabras Rotas by Luis Garcia Montero. It's a mixture of poetry and prose that's reflecting on how certain words have become corrupted by our politics and needed to be reclaimed personally, if not on a societal level.
thejdizzler
2mo ago
Great will try this out!
thejdizzler
2mo ago
Any suggestions on how to get started? I looked into Zettlekasten a little and it seems to be pretty impossible without some kind of digital note taking system which I don't want to do
thejdizzler
2mo ago
What chapter books are you reading your kids? If I ever find a woman who will tolerant my weirdness, I'm planning on reading Harry Potter, the Hobbit, the Wizard of Earthsea and probably some others from my childhood.
thejdizzler
2mo ago
About 75% of my books come from the university libary unfortunately, so no marking up for me there. Sounds like I need to get cracking on that other 25% though.
thejdizzler
2mo ago
Couldn't have put it better myself. I once dated a philosophy PhD student, and while she had a very deep understanding of the nitty gritty in her specific subfield, her understanding of other (very important mind you) philosophers was very much a paragraph level hot take. Pissed me off to no end.
thejdizzler
2mo ago
The first three books are going to be very hard. I took some highschool Spanish and basically took a break for ~7 years before starting to get serious about the language in 2020. The first thing I read was Harry Potter and it was decidely not fun until book 3. If you're interested, I keep a pretty detailed log of my spanish learning here. Here is the first post in the series, which may be the most useful to you.
This could be. Dystopian AF
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