ControlsFreak
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User ID: 1422
ControlsFreak
1d ago
In addition to another excellent comment from @FCfromSSC, I just spent entirely too long probing AI and the sources it cited concerning Zizek, specifically. I have to admit that I still find him to be too obscurant about many things, very given to vagueness and distraction rather than forthcoming about his plans and expectations. That said, at this point, I'm moderately confident that your characterization of his position is kind of weak. As far as I could drill down to it, he has some deep psychoanalysis position that the mere existence of language is 'violence' and the source of impossible-to-solve '(self-)contradiction' with reality. To that extent, perhaps he does, indeed, think that this is one "problem" that cannot be solved with his plans for social engineering. But, frankly, that's a pretty small fig leaf. Were I to take any other of the Enlightenment-themed philosophies for socially engineering mankind and simply graft onto it, "...sure, sure, after we've already solved all of our (real) problems, we'll still have 'violence' that is, like, inherent in language or something," I don't think we've done anything meaningfully different to it. Nor do I think his incredibly weedsy position on retroactive necessity of historical outcomes is particularly germane. That we are neither pre-ordained to eliminate mankind in a nuclear holocaust nor to adopt his emancipatory communism (thus solving pretty much all our problems except the apparent violence of language) (...nor any other particular result) does not seem to be entirely relevant to the question at hand.
ControlsFreak
1d ago
"They think they know how to solve all our problems." -> I respond with "no they don't".
And I argued the opposite (rather than changing the criteria). Then, you decided to claim that I changed the criteria and pick at details.
That he has replaced "revolution" with "???" in his master social plan to solve all our problems is more like retreating from the outlying harassment defense posts to the main wall than even retreating all the way to the motte.
ControlsFreak
1d ago
It is not just the subjecting; it is the underlying philosophical tradition that has persisted. FC has clearly pointed out many of those features, so you know your proposed comparison is not valid.
ControlsFreak
1d ago
Zizek denies that we know how to solve all our problems.
I mean, no? He seems to have a very particular (materialist etc.) social theory for precisely how to engineer our social relations, remaining plenty ignorant about how a contested environment could pose any challenges to the implementation of such a social theory. As FC put it, this certainly reads like "subjugating people wholesale" as "a form of manipulation by social institutions". That he has replaced "revolution" with "???" in his master social plan to solve all our problems is more like retreating from the outlying harassment defense posts to the main wall than even retreating all the way to the motte.
ControlsFreak
1d ago
Yup. Rereading @FCfromSSC's dump of links/quotes, it's kinda hard to see how it doesn't count.
ControlsFreak
1d ago
But we're still communists, we still believe in the communist project.
It is always frustrating when people are trying to retreat to a social theory motte. Unlike physical mottes, which took many years to physically build, usually in a specific physical location that is focused on a particular geographical feature, right there for all to see with their own eyes, social theory mottes are often built around hiding the ball, burying the underlying premises under overt expressions of having rid themselves of all sorts of things. I have only very casually engaged with Zizek, so I would probably just have to ask you what you think the "Zizekian communist project" still is. What's the there there? What does it actually keep? What's it built on? My initial intuition is that it may take a few rounds of interrogation, but if/when we do discover what remains of it, we can begin to answer your questions, and I have a feeling about how it'll go.
I suspect that what he wanted to say, but shied away from, is that there are ultimately two camps: those who believe in the Christian God, and those who don't.
As @FCfromSSC explains masterfully, this isn't it. I also agree with him that Hlynkism is compatible with Christianity, but I would like to expand on how the Christian position is in a sense prior to and in a sense more specific. That is, the Christian position goes all the way back to the Garden of Eden; it goes back to man choosing to eat the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Before man could decide "We know how to solve all our problems,", he had to claim the right to determine "Our Problems". Claim the right to determine what is good and evil for himself, thus defining the problems to be solved. Of course, the Christian does not think that the Enlightenment is unique in doing this, and the not-necessarily-Christian claim can be that the Enlightenment is the first time that the entire formulation took hold in widespread fashion.
I would be remiss if I didn't remark that the rationalist perspective is still somewhat reeling from utter failure to conceptualize Our Problems or The Good in a philosophically-coherent way. It's resulted in all sorts of fallbacks, but most commonly, a sort of naive anti-realism. Even this vein still possesses the Enlightenment spirit, though. They hold a moral chauvanism, often paired with a bare appeal to game theory1, as though the only impediment to We being Able To Solve All Our Problems is simply a matter of Strategic Mechanism Design, that if done 'properly' (often involving simply eliminating the Bad Guys (TM)), will vaguely result in Solving All Our Problems. This is, of course, where the Hlynka "multi-agent environment" critique sort of lives, in that you do not get to be the omniscient, omnipotent Mechanism Designer.
1 - As @FCfromSSC puts it:
Prior to the conversation with Hlynka, I was thinking in terms of plans and payout matrices, looking for a solution to the problem. Hlynka reminded me that there is no solution, that there is no plan, that we are not in control of the world; all we control is ourselves; we make our choices and live with the consequences.
ControlsFreak
2d ago
KitchenAid stand mixer. Paddle attachment.
ControlsFreak
3d ago
if we can sneak in choral works
...but then, we could go pre-"classical" and just head straight to the source: When David Heard. Even recorded by the same group.
ControlsFreak
3d ago
Gotta toss in Shostakovich's 11th and basically all of Chopin's nocturnes (but yet also his prelude in E minor).
ControlsFreak
4d ago
ControlsFreak
5d ago
Oh yay... another chance for me to share this gem of a paper.
ControlsFreak
5d ago
Russ Roberts talks about the reaction he gets when he talks about some pretty basic free market economics. I know he's told a story where he used the phrase "they edge away from you". I think it had to do with minimum wage. I may or may not have also gotten the phrase "they stare at you like you're an alien" from him, which I used here, in context of a not-even-boundary-pushing sort of take on sexuality. Perhaps the moment has passed, because the political battles have been won, but at the peak of the cultural pressure cooker, trying desperately to win the political battle, it really was the case that even the most mild doubt of the Dogmatic Position was heavily disfavored.
ControlsFreak
5d ago
Serious Eats has a good rundown. My sense is that, practically, most of the fish that you're going to be able to buy through 'normie' channels has been "super frozen", regardless of how it's presented in the supermarket. When I've tried looking into how the major commercial operations work, it seems that most of them don't even bring their catch in for processing on land. They have processing facilities built into the ship (or some have multiple 'catching ships' that just operate near one big 'processing ship' that they can deliver to much faster than going back to a land-based facility), where they cut stuff up/freeze/can/whatever, all while still at sea. Again, there are no guarantees, but my bet is that you're probably surprisingly safer just buying something from the grocery store, banking on it having been previously super-frozen, than you would even if you went and caught a fish yourself and then had to figure out what to do with it. It is surprising and counterintuitive to me that this would be so, but it is what I think is probabilistically true, since the commercial operations are more scared of running afoul of regulation, so they're probably going to just super freeze everything.
Serious Eats has some other recommendations, but I think there's usually a caveat of whether you're dealing with tuna/farmed salmon vs. anything else, and I think you're basically safe if you're doing tuna/farmed salmon. I've heard in the past that you can do surprisingly low-temperature sous vide on salmon, not changing its texture much, and I've done this myself when I've made sushi. The FDA would call this "mild temperature processing", but the literature is pretty sparse; I just checked again, and it's one of those, "This seems to be a thing that people are doing, but we don't really have good studies to know whether it does anything in that temperature range." Oh well; I guess I maybe don't know if I'll do it again the next time. Maybe I'll still do it just so I don't get the side eye from my wife (she seems to be okay with the idea that it's still "cooking" it, similar to how we sous vide other things in ways that are much much more strongly supported by the literature), and I'll hope it doesn't actually slightly increase the risk of what I think is already a very small risk. Again on this point, the Serious Eats article looks at rates of problems in Japan, and basically concludes that the risk is tiny.
I just watched some videos of fish processing on ships again. It's really like any other part of our food production supply chain; if you look at it, it sort of makes you think, "How could this possibly be safe?" ...yet probabilistically, it pretty much is. Maybe someone with more time could try to estimate micromorts or something from eating sushi... but I have no idea how just making it at home with regular supermarket tuna/farmed salmon would compare to eating out at a random sushi restaurant. Literally no idea which would even be a relatively bigger risk.
ControlsFreak
7d ago
In their joint statement, the inspectors general said the classified information had originated with the nation’s intelligence agencies, such as the Central Intelligence Agency or the National Security Agency.
Also, reading the inside baseball a bit on Comey's statement:
110 e-mails in 52 e-mail chains have been determined by the owning agency to contain classified information at the time they were sent or received [emphasis added]
I read that to imply that it wasn't just State. Also:
we also found information that was properly classified as Secret by the U.S. Intelligence Community at the time it was discussed on e-mail
Traditionally, State isn't part of the IC.
ControlsFreak
8d ago
At risk of being viewed as trying to claim that it's (R)ifferent, my understanding is that information is scoped underneath the individuals with OCA. That is, suppose there are two agencies, each with a head who has OCA. Agency Head 1 determines that Information X is classified at the Y level. This is not a complete prohibition on sharing; it just needs to be approved by the appropriate channels. That is, in order to share it with Agency 2, there is a process which concludes that Agency 1 is cool with sharing Information X with (at least some parts of) Agency 2. However, the OCA "follows" Information X. When it's written down, it contains markings which say that it was Originally Classified By Agency 1, saying that if Agency 2 wants to share it any further, they must get approval from Agency 1. This is my understanding mostly from seeing Snowden leak documents with these kinds of markings and declassified stuff with these markings crossed out.
I believe that one of the problems with what Hillary did was that they were routing information through her private server that had been Originally Classified By some other agency. Now, if every item was, in fact, Originally Classified By her at State, then there's a slightly better argument that she has the authority to do what she wants with it. It would still be a colossal fuck-up in many ways, but it would make it slightly harder to prosecute her. (FWIW, I was on record as being on Team No Indict long long long ago when all this went down, in significant part because it seemed like there would be difficulties with securing a conviction.) Similarly here, if we suppose that what SECDEF shared was completely generated by and would have been Originally Classified By DoD, then his authority is at its strongest, and it makes prosecution harder. Most of the rules are for the "little people", so unless a principal is bandying about with information that was Originally Classified By someone else (or like straight selling secrets to foreigners or whatever), they're probably not getting prosecuted. Of course, it's still a colossal fuck-up in many ways here too.
ControlsFreak
8d ago
the margin between my wife and I is obvious, because we lift together. I'm aware that her max is my warmup weight
My wife might have been, shall we say, less aware of the real physical differences between men/women... before she started lifting with me. At this point, she is basically dreaming of getting her maxes up to my warmup weight. (I've been lifting a lot longer.) It didn't take that long for her to become keenly aware and realize that we have significantly different ceilings.
Lots of jokes have been made about the lifting->right wing pipeline, but there really may be something to the idea that if you do get into lifting, it is completely unavoidable, looking at concrete numbers, to realize that one particular cultural soft lie is, indeed, a lie. It's not surprising that it leads to people questioning other parts of the edifice.
Precisely as expected. You do not have a way of making your own statements coherent/consistent in your view, which is why you haven't done so. Now you're just throwing a hilarious Internet Shit Fit for having gotten called out on it. (About three comments! That's "for a while"! Mucho Internet Shit Fit...)
It is actually you who has wasted all of our time, by making incoherent statements and then refusing to engage in reasoned discourse about them. All you have to do is explain the meaning of your sentences. This should be extremely easy, since your position is so simple, straightforward, and obviously true... so much so that you pity anyone who doesn't agree with you and think that they're smoking wildly crazy stuff. Why can't they understand your extremely simple position? ...perhaps it's because you can't even be bothered to make it coherent.
EDIT:
The same way I pity someone with a bad haircut. It's not a big deal, or a lot of pity.
Why not? Why the difference?
You dropped this bit.
The same way I pity someone with a bad haircut. It's not a big deal, or a lot of pity.
Why not? Why the difference?
They are "equally valid" in the sense that they are all subjective constructs
This is just restating that you think values are subjective, not telling me what you think it means for such subjective values to be "valid" or not... or multiple values to be "equally valid".
the very concept of objective validation is moot here ... the concept doesn't apply
Precisely as I expected. You have absolutely no explanation of what your own sentence meant; only what it did not mean. Your sentence lacked any semantic content and was incoherent in your view. Once one tries to include any semantic content in it, it contradicts the prior sentence. It's extremely bad form to use sentences that you sneakily think are incoherent.
[EDIT: Let's change the syntax to make it clear. Suppose you had said, "I know my values are just as blurf (or not) as everyone else's." Suppose I inquired as to what you meant by values being blurf or not, or multiple values being equally blurf. It's not really helpful to say that there is nothing objective about blurf. It still simply fails to tell me anything about what blurf actually means.]
Of course, if I proceeded with your attitude, I'd say that I strongly expect that if you had an actual way to make your own statements coherent/consistent in your view, you'd have produced it by now.
ControlsFreak
9d ago
Ontology is a matter of convenience. All models are flawed, some models are useful. If there are two different models of reality that output the same results for all ranges of possible inputs, then choosing between them is a matter of convenience. If, for some reason, it became relevant, you could then worry about which one had the lowest Kolmogorov complexity or something.
Objective reality is a very useful concept to have, even if establishing it is likely unreachable.
...and yet, you must pity people who actually believe it, right?
I know my values are just as valid (or not) as anyone else's.
Let's start with, "What does this sentence mean?" What does it mean for values to be "just as valid (or not)"? You seem to have not touched on this at all in your latest comment.
ControlsFreak
9d ago
Even simple sounding ideas, like "don't murder, or steal from your neighbors" will have people arguing ad-nauseum what counts murder or stealing or even a neighbor.
If I pity people who want to be the opposite of the sex they were at birth, then I pity people who genuinely believe in natural law or "objective" morality even more.
Hooo buddy, have I got some news to break to you about natural science. People debate conceptual primitives and what "counts" as them all the bloody time. I presume that you pity people who genuinely believe in natural physical law or "objective" reality, too?
I'm a moral relativist and a moral chauvinist. I know my values are just as valid (or not) as anyone else's.
These sentences contradict one another and result in something that is conceptually incoherent.
ControlsFreak
9d ago
My ears struggle with earbuds; I've tried several over the years, and I have particular features that make them hard to work for me. Both earbuds and headphones are commonly seen in the gym. Yes, mine are Bluetooth. I haven't noticed the sweat cause any problems, specifically. I've had them for several years; actually got them for free. I did replace the pads on them not too long ago (~$10 on Amazon), but I don't think sweat was significantly accelerating their deterioration. I do wear them when on a bike or stairmaster. I don't run much, but I can imagine that if you don't have a good fit, they might move around a bit when running. I do see other people running with headphones, so it seems doable. I usually charge them with my phone every night. I know I don't need to charge my phone every night, and I don't think I've ever run out of battery on my headphones (even when using them for a lot more time just doing stuff around the house all day; maybe when I was traveling and just never remembered to plug them in). I just have a habit of doing that every night, since we started keeping our phones outside of the bedroom at night, we just stash them away where they charge before we're getting ready for bed.
There are a couple exercises where I'm reaching overhead that they kinda almost get in the way, but it's almost never a problem that I can't easily manage. That reminds me, you talked about having to wait for equipment. There are a lot of strategies for that, but just having some basic flexibility in what you're doing is super helpful. As you learn more, it's easier. Pretty sure you have no chance of getting a squat rack for a long time today? Ehhh, just do split squats today and come back to what you had programmed for squats the next time (massive aside, but I preach front squats over back squats). I know some people are overly anal about their programming, but that's pretty pointless unless you're competing. It's probably better to have a variety of sort-of-similar exercises in your toolset anyway.
ControlsFreak
9d ago
I wear headphones at the gym and always have a podcast on. When my wife first started coming with me, I didn't wear them, because we were talking more, I was teaching her, etc. Now, we still talk a bit here and there, but I'm usually listening or doing flash cards or something on my phone between sets. She literally brings a laptop and sends work emails or reads books or whatever between sets. It does help that it's not a super high traffic gym (and we go when it's lighter in the morning), so there's not a lot of pressure to hurry. I've seen people who seem to be on actual voice phone calls, which is mildly bad gym etiquette, but they've all talked at low volumes, so I haven't really minded much.
I would observe that these are pretty mild concerns in my mind. Like I said, we go in the morning, and for me, it's almost as much time for my mind to wake up and just get my body going for the day. Would I instead be sitting around, having a cup of coffee, reading something, and not really doing much while I'm really just sort of slowly getting my mind awake for the day? Why not have a cup of coffee at the gym, listen to something, and also move my body/get some exercise in instead? By the end, I'm alert and ready to go for the day; in fact, I kinda feel less good during the day if I don't go to the gym in the morning. Exercise literally is a hellova drug, just one that is really really good for you.
I really feel like these mild concerns can be pretty easily overcome, even by just finding a training buddy... at least, once you've decided that you are going to incorporate it into your lifestyle. The much bigger barrier is, "Am I going to do this?" not, "How am I going to slightly improve the quality of this?"
ControlsFreak
9d ago
This one is so conceptually difficult. It's super easy to let the economist's mindset take over and view everything as "exchange" or "working". When we got married, my wife lived in the US with me but was not legally able to work for a period of time. I was also required by the government to support her. Of course, since I was working and she wasn't, she's not going to just sit around and drink mai tais all day. She made some meals, did dishes or laundry or whatever. Just stuff around the house to keep herself occupied, while also obviously doing other things, too. Is that "working"? Should we deport every single one of those people who legally come here, on a legal path to being authorized to work, if they so much as lift a finger to put their spouse's dishes in the dishwasher one time? I have to imagine that most people think obviously not.
On the other hand, there are obviously schemes in place where people essentially hire a housekeeper under the table. Distinguishing between different types of situations and what "counts" as "working" is extremely hard in general.
Nope. This is a culture sort of thing that pretty much cannot be fixed by any sort of discrete and minimal use of political power which can plausibly be granted to humans. A major reason for this is the speech/opinion vs. conduct divide.
Fundamentally, medical price transparency can be viewed as a discrete regulation on conduct. Thou shalt simply give thy patient a couple numbers that thou unquestionably has (even if thou wants to play dumb/lie and pretend that thou art incapable of even identifying the names of the numbers in question). We can easily check if you're giving your patients the numbers or not. It can be mostly checked by people who know almost nothing about medicine, using a simple bureaucratic process, which has proven itself capable in many other domains.
We don't have to care whatsoever about your opinion-based speech. In fact, if you want to be really bold, you can even persist in telling your patient that you don't have the numbers in question, so long as you still actually hand those numbers over. (I have to imagine that, in practice, even doctors would manage to conjure up some feeling of shame in going that far in telling such obvious, in your face, observable lies.) No penalty whatsoever for even the most boldly false speech, so long as you just do the simple thing of handing them a piece of paper with a couple numbers on it.
Whereas the production/dissemination of knowledge is inherently riddled with opinion/speech, through and through. In my nonpolitical field, it is my personal opinion that there are tons of papers that are just garbage... some of which I believe are simply wrong or not true. But that's just, like, my opinion, maaaaaan. I'm sure that popularizers of science outputs ("science journalists") have varying opinions on what makes for good popular science... and of course, I have my own opinions on which such institutional outlets I think have reasonable such opinions vs. those which I think have gone off the rails. But again, those are just my opinions. I may be wrong! I may be wrong within my own field! It is entirely possible (though I think unlikely, at least in the extremely narrow domains in which I hold the strongest opinions) that future developments will demonstrate that some of my opinions are, indeed, flatly wrong! I know that I have been wrong in the past (thankfully, most of the examples I can think of were very long ago while I was still a learning student, including one where a mistake was found in the review process that I was thankfully able to fix before publication). I've pointed out to colleagues where they've been wrong in some of their prior publications (and thankfully managed to convince them and maintain incredibly good working relations with them).
How could we possibly impose some external, bureaucratically-enforceable rules on that world? Yes yes, we might be able to slice off one tiny little fraction where we have indisputable proof that someone engaged in willful, knowing fraud. But I think the standard of proof needs to be pretty darn high in order to avoid catching a bunch of people who are just "innocently" wrong.
All of that is, unless, of course, you somehow want a Ministry of Truth to determine when anyone is merely wrong. But I have a feeling that such a Ministry would make haste to torch its own credibility even more rapidly than many folks are currently doing so.
[Culled a bunch of rambling about the side-hobby of trying to come up with various ideas that could help and all the problems with them. Maybe I'll post on that another time, but it's probably just distracting here.]
If you probably don't want a Ministry of Truth and basically none of the ideas for little tweaks can really cut through the inherent subjectivity in the process, it's probably simply subject to culture and commons-problems. We probably don't have much of a solution besides just watching which cultures are more prone to commons-burning. Given that the medical industry is willing to torch its credibility on simple, objective shit like numbers on pieces of paper, I'm pretty doubtful that its culture has the soul/spirit to carefully tend to its knowledge-production garden. There really is something to the virtue ethics point of view that lies and being accustomed to lying really does damage the heart/vigor to pursue the truth elsewhere in the face of likely personal consequences.
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