sun_the_second
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User ID: 2725
sun_the_second
23hr ago
Sure, but what is Christian metaphysics rooted in, then?
I sense an implication in your words that I am less correct than you are because my belief is less coherent. But your coherency doesn't look valuable to me because from my perspective, some guy just picked a bunch of beliefs he and his acolytes had 2000 years ago and arbitrarily declared them to lie along one axis (God).
The coherency and the sense-making of religions is artificial, even if the ones that stood the test of time were the ones that tied together the beliefs that produced the most stable, desirable and powerful societies. However, that does not give them the credit for being the source and the metaphysical origin of those desirable traits humans exhibit.
sun_the_second
1d ago
When Christian philosophy starts reaching towards "but is suffering and dog-eat-dog actually evil?", they typically lose me. Accepting that all morality stems from God requires, as I'm sure you understand, a prior belief that there is a God and he knows best for us and he wishes best for us. In absense of such belief and a reason to submit to it, I must judge human reasoning sufficient for my purposes. Not to mention of course that religion is purely human reasoning until I personally see convincing evidence of any other source.
sun_the_second
1d ago
Hm. If a particular pirate website has been active for a decade or more and consistent with their methods, do you think they're still untrustworthy?
sun_the_second
1d ago
Isn't it well within AI functionality to check links in description and parse images therein? At least the most common image hosting websites.
sun_the_second
4d ago
What is "proportionate" in this context? If I have 1 000 soldiers and the opponent has 10 000, then they kill 100 of mine, is it proportionate to kill 100 or 1 000 in response? Adjust as needed for civilian casualties.
sun_the_second
4d ago
I'm too much of an angry monkey to see the parts in this sentence that are supposed to a) strike true; b) insult me.
It would be optimal to assume any post of yours from now on is DeepSeek preprompted on your post history, and only reply with what DeepSeek spits out in response.
I might not have much to contribute most of the time, but why not inflate my wordcount and reduce the amount of effort further?
sun_the_second
5d ago
I have fed this essay to DeepSeek, here is its response.
Rebuttal: DeepSeek and the Perils of Cultural Determinism
The essay’s core thesis—that cultural stereotypes are malleable, and DeepSeek exemplifies China’s shift from exploitation to exploration—is provocative and timely. It rightly dismantles the lazy “fast-follower” trope by grounding China’s historical constraints in material realities (rice paddies, Malthusian traps) rather than essentialist myths. The linkage between agricultural legacies and cognitive phenotypes is compelling, echoing Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel but with a Silicon Valley twist. Yet, while the argument sparkles with metaphorical flair (Schelling fences! Protein folding!), it risks replacing one deterministic framework with another. Let’s dissect.
1. Rice Paddies and Neural Networks: A Too-Neat Archetype
The essay leans heavily on the “rice theory” of East Asian psychology, citing studies that tie rice cultivation to holistic thinking and risk aversion. But this narrative flattens complexity. China’s intellectual history is also marked by explosive creativity—the Mohist mechanics of the Warring States, Song Dynasty astronomical clocks, even the heterodox philosophies of the Ming-Qing transition. These weren’t mere “incremental optimizations” but radical departures. To reduce millennia of cultural evolution to crop types risks environmental determinism. If rice farming dictated conformity, how do we explain the 1989 protests, the liumang (punk) subcultures of the ’90s, or the crypto-anarchists on WeChat today?
2. DeepSeek: Vanguard or Outlier?
Liang Wenfeng’s gambit is fascinating, but the essay over-indexes on DeepSeek as a phase transition. For every DeepSeek, there are a dozen Chinese tech firms still playing catch-up in semiconductors or aerospace. Even in AI, breakthroughs like Multiple Latent Attention coexist with systemic vulnerabilities: U.S. sanctions on GPUs, brain drains, and the CCP’s tightening grip on data governance. The open-source strategy is brilliant, but let’s not ignore the elephant in the server room: China’s Great Firewall. Can a truly global innovation ecosystem thrive behind digital nationalism? DeepSeek’s success may depend as much on geopolitical détente as on its “meta-derisking” org chart.
3. The Myth of “Organizational DNA”
Liang’s critique of China’s VC sector—its allergy to fundamental research—rings true, but the essay underplays structural rot. China’s state-capitalist model excels at marshaling resources for national champions (Huawei, CATL) but struggles with decentralized, bottom-up innovation. Contrast this with the U.S., where garage startups (Apple, OpenAI) flourish in a chaotic, permissionless landscape. DeepSeek’s “unlimited GPU access” and zero bureaucracy sound utopian, but how scalable is this in a system where Party cadres still vet major tech roadmaps? The real test isn’t whether DeepSeek can innovate—it’s whether a DeepSeek-like project critiquing, say, AI ethics could survive scrutiny.
4. The West’s Own Exploitation Bias
The essay’s jab at Silicon Valley’s “Sputnik moment” is deliciously subversive, but let’s not romanticize Western innovation. Meta and Google are increasingly bureaucratic, optimizing for shareholder returns over moonshots. The U.S. AI boom was built on exploiting global talent (immigrant researchers) and capital (low-interest VC money). If China is trapped in “yoinkism,” America is mired in “griftism”—see Theranos, WeWork, or the crypto crash. DeepSeek’s rise isn’t just a challenge to Chinese stereotypes but a mirror reflecting the West’s own creative stagnation.
5. Toward a Dialectical View of Innovation
Ultimately, the essay’s greatest contribution is framing cultural traits as energy landscapes rather than destiny. But to avoid replacing rice determinism with GPU determinism, we need a dialectical view. China’s AI surge isn’t a rejection of its past but a synthesis: combining the Song Dynasty’s bureaucratic rigor (exploitation) with the hunger of a civilization that’s tasted humiliation (Opium Wars) and redemption (Belt and Road). The “lone swallow” of DeepSeek may yet falter, but its existence proves that China’s innovation ecosystem is neither monolithic nor static.
Final Thought: The essay’s weakness is its optimism. Liang’s “meta-derisking” assumes rationality prevails—that status games and open-source kudos can override decades of institutional inertia. But history shows that innovation thrives not just on incentives but on dissensus. For a thousand DeepSeeks to bloom, China must tolerate a thousand heretics. The question isn’t whether Chinese minds can innovate—they’ve already proven that—but whether the Party can stomach the creative destruction that true exploration demands. Until then, DeepSeek remains a fascinating anomaly: a Chinese unicorn that’s galloping, but still saddled.
sun_the_second
6d ago
As far as I understood, what you describe as "the correct language to use for philosophy" is only a part of "social reality" that they've learned to "no-sell".
In that, I largely agree with them. In philosophy of all areas, what should matter is communicating the concepts, not signaling that you're a real philosopher by wordceling it up like it's 1800s Germany and your name is Heisenfreuden.
sun_the_second
6d ago
Animals do iterate, they are just slower about it because their memory is strictly genetic as opposed to civilizational.
Also, what was the first society then and where did it come from?
sun_the_second
6d ago
I don't know about that. If the Fall did subtract from nature, it subtracted quite a lot, to the point where most of creation we can access is far from fundamentally good.
The Patrician took a sip of his beer. “I have told this to few people, gentlemen, and I suspect I never will again, but one day when I was a young boy on holiday in Uberwald I was walking along the bank of a stream when I saw a mother otter with her cubs. A very endearing sight, I’m sure you will agree, and even as I watched, the mother otter dived into the water and came up with a plump salmon, which she subdued and dragged on to a half-submerged log. As she ate it, while of course it was still alive, the body split and I remember to this day the sweet pinkness of its roes as they spilled out, much to the delight of the baby otters who scrambled over themselves to feed on the delicacy. One of nature’s wonders, gentlemen: mother and children dining upon mother and children. And that’s when I first learned about evil. It is built into the very nature of the universe. Every world spins in pain. If there is any kind of supreme being, I told myself, it is up to all of us to become his moral superior.”
Which is to say, the order of things in nature absent our, the humans', vigorous actioned disagreement, does not always seem very good for us.
sun_the_second
6d ago
I have some. I've read themotte, as you can guess. The mindset of "what skin off the back of upstanding citizens is it to just let them die" does not become less alien to me. I don't like the jingoist boomers of my country either, but I hardly dream of rounding them up behind the shed or draining their towns of resources until they drink themselves to death.
There are two classes that I can imagine an average and sane citizen to overlook and mentally discount in this manner, which is the habitual violent criminals and those who are so dysfunctional that they barely intersect with regular society or economy (homeless, heavy drug users, mentally disabled). Not those who like it up the ass.
sun_the_second
6d ago
Do you have no friends among "Them"? If you do, do you expect all of them to drop you at some point? If you don't, why would you expect anyone to speak for you any more than you speak for them?
sun_the_second
6d ago
The thing with existing metaphysical systems is that they, too, evolved from something at some point - unless you are one of their proponents who believe that moral knowledge was literally passed down to [First Human] from [Divine Authority]. What is the source? All I know points to "animal intuition", which I expect to only differ from person to person as much as other animal aspects of us do: not that much.
sun_the_second
6d ago
I suppose if you're so straight and white that you can't imagine ever being on the same side of history as homosexuals, immigrants and disabled, you have nothing to worry about and can continue to sneer at the lower castes. Although, as I suspect you know, there's always such a thing as not white enough.
sun_the_second
7d ago
See, your examples sound silly to me because those specific ones are implausible/debunked. Behaviour modification, on the other hand, sounds like this quaint "building a habit" thing.
sun_the_second
7d ago
Is it viable to self-host on an RTX 3060 Ti?
sun_the_second
7d ago
This still sounds like the person creating this classification thought there's only one kind of order and a universal definition of good. Needless to say, it's not obvious. Unlike the other four fairly straightforward concepts, "do what is best" is so nebulous that it can define any rule.
sun_the_second
7d ago
I was bewildered at how seriously the commenters took the ideas of alternate personalities and behavior modification; for people who declare themselves scientific and anti-superstition they seem pretty stitious to me.
These don't sound particularly anti-scientific to me. At least, not magically so.
sun_the_second
8d ago
Aristocracy: Do what is most rational.
Rational according to which goal?
sun_the_second
8d ago
Thank you, this seems promising and I will attempt if I get back to playing with it.
sun_the_second
8d ago
Even if the universe is infinite in size, as long as the speed of light is finite the slice of the universe any given civilization can access is limited.
sun_the_second
8d ago
The post above, however, discards "sympathizing with victims" as "just slave morality". In the scenario where you bend the knee in exchange for sanity, you're still sympathizing with at least one victim: yourself. Master morality as proposed by the post above ("reclaim the power from the rabble") leaves nothing for the rabble, and even the comfort of sanity is not guaranteed or promised.
sun_the_second
9d ago
Does the normie not care that the sudden increase in performance is due to the opponent being a toaster designed to throw the game, and not due to the normie doing better/being luckier, in your opinion?
Schools in my country still have cursive last time I checked.
I simply write my name in my own brand of scrawl that's so bad even my own signatures don't look alike.
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