Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
"...Perhaps laughter will then have formed an alliance with wisdom; perhaps only 'gay science' will remain."
User ID: 342
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
17hr ago
Yes. I'm just a big fan of pajamas or anything pajama-like on women.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
18hr ago
our society has become overly permissive
We permit some things and forbid others. Same as every other time and place in history.
increasingly there's a broad sense that all lifestyles are equally valid
That depends on what you mean by "lifestyle" and what you mean by "valid". Out of all the choices that one might make, which ones contribute to your "lifestyle" and which don't? (Your choice of what brand of detergent you use presumably doesn't, but your choice of who you sleep with presumably does). And what would constitute an "invalid" lifestyle? Is it merely, something that is discouraged by your immediate family? Something that is unable to provide a living wage? Something that is outright illegal?
Based on the repressive response from the powers that be, we can surmise that the organizers of the Charlottesville Unite The Right rally did not have a lifestyle that was judged valid by our society. Alex Jones appears to not have had a valid lifestyle either.
Ok, maybe there's still a lot of red tape in politics you might say, but when it comes to sexuality it's all fair game. You can be trans, you can be gay, it's all fine. Well, I have a (straight cis male) friend in his 30s who's dating a 21 year old college student. He doesn't advertise her age much, for obvious reasons, and she's kept his age a secret from her friends as well. They both know what the reactions would be. Is his lifestyle valid?
there's nothing wrong with following the path of least resistance (in terms of effort expended), at all times in every sphere of your life
On the contrary, I think that the hyper-competitive middle class striver mentality is alive and well. This depends to some extent on what social circles you run in, of course. But I've posted on TheMotte multiple times (and again just this week, in fact) about continued cuts at universities to all non-STEM programs. That's what undergrads want anyway, they want what's going to get them a good-paying white collar job. Are these the actions of a society that encourages "doing whatever you want"? Or are these the actions of a society that places a very high premium on economic productivity?
Where before the expectation was to dress formally in the office, now "smart casual" rules the day
Sure, you can dress smart casual... as you work nights and weekends (and respond to emails and texts even when you're not "working") to get that big project over the finish line. You wouldn't want to not be a team player, right?
If modern Anglophone has a telos, it's "umm, let people enjoy things??"
It's more like, "be very afraid" - be very afraid of climate change, and systemic racism, and Covid, and... ...how exactly is anyone supposed to have time to enjoy anything with these cataclysmic threats constantly lurking in the background?
Disney and Marvel adults are contemptible
Perhaps. But my reasoning would probably be different from yours. If they are contemptible, it would be because they're simply stupid and empty people, not because there's anything intrinsically wrong with Star Wars or Marvel per se.
Grown adults who don't know how to cook proper meals and eat fast/convenience food for every meal should feel ashamed
I doubt that, say, King Louis XIV knew how to cook for himself. He had people to do it for him. Should he have been ashamed of himself?
("Hard work", "grit", certain senses of "self-reliance" - these are all specifically middle class virtues. They are not universal across all times and places and all cultural strata. The nobility have their virtues and obligations as well, but they are distinct in important ways.)
women wearing snuggies in public
I find that hot so I'm all for it.
there's no longer much of an expectation for people to live and present themselves "authentically"
I see nothing but authenticity everywhere I look. Antifa and BLM rioters, pro-Palestine student protesters, the entire institutional network of leftist apparatchiks - I think that all of these people are perfectly authentic, and they are earnestly dedicated to the causes that they claim to be dedicated to. If you want to analyze the substance of what it is that is being authentically revealed - that's another matter. But you can't accuse them of concealing anything.
Sorry if this comes off as overly critical. But this isn't the first time that I've heard this idea (that our problem is that we've become "too permissive"), and I think it's just a completely deleterious and misguided narrative that presents a significant misdiagnosis of the situation.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
1d ago
I’m not a lawyer, but I am extremely suspicious about claims of the form “oh yeah [X profession] is a bunch of bullshit, it’s actually really simple and easy but they make it more complicated than it has to be”, because people say it about my own profession (programming) all the time in cases where I know it to be false.
Do you have any examples of legalese that you think could be profitably and straightforwardly simplified?
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
3d ago
Do you genuinely believe that the briefing is about actions that civilians have taken in response to the drones and not about the drones themselves?
Again, I’m not sure if there’s really a precedent for that sort of thing.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
3d ago
So why is the House Intel committee receiving a classified briefing on the mass hysteria? Is this standard procedure for mass hysteria?
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
3d ago
As a discipline so untethered by constraints
It... depends on what you mean by that. In some sense, yeah, philosophy is more radically free of constraints than any other discipline, in the sense that any foundational premise or assumption is always fair game for critique. If you're a physicist and you think Einstein was wrong, you're a crank. If you're a mathematician and you want to be an ultrafinitist then at best you're engaged in a non-standard project that has little relevance to the work of mainstream professional mathematicians (and at worst you're a crank). But in philosophy, if you want to argue that philosophy itself is dumb and not worth doing and is incapable of generating truth or knowledge (as, arguably, Nietzsche and Wittgenstein held at times), then you're not a crank. You're just doing philosophy, and philosophers will praise you as an insightful and original thinker if you're capable of supporting your position.
But in another sense, it's just as constrained as any other discipline. With few exceptions, the vast majority of Western philosophers past and present have taken themselves to be addressing questions that had correct and incorrect answers, and their goal was to arrive at correct answers and support their positions with arguments and evidence (yes, even the "postmodernists" - the "relativism" of Foucault and Derrida was greatly exaggerated through misreadings of their work).
And, when it comes to breadth, someone like Scott, Cremieux, or even a top 4chan autist is going to have far more of it than a philosophy professor at Oxford.
My use of the word "breadth" may have been misleading there. I meant "breadth" insofar as you can bring a wide range of relevant knowledge and references to bear on a specific question or problem you're addressing. Not in the sense of, you can give me hot takes on a lot of different topics that may or may not be related to your specialty.
To give a concrete example, the work of Ted Sider and Trenton Merricks addresses, in far more meticulous and thorough detail, the problems that Scott outlined in The Categories Were Made For Man.
The modern information network has created polymath monsters
"Polymaths" almost always grossly overestimate their competence.
Academia is so stilted that it rarely produces novel thought at all. Who are these radical new idea-smiths, sharpened by years of formal training?
I linked the work of François Kammerer regarding illusionism about consciousness elsewhere in the thread. It's not uncommon for people in internet debates to express skepticism about the hard problem of consciousness, but they tend to be unfamiliar with the existing academic work on the problem, and frankly they usually don't understand what the problem is even about in the first place. Contemporary defenders of illusionism both understand the problem, and they appreciate the severe uphill challenge that illusionism faces, but they still defend the position, which is interesting if nothing else.
Todd McGowan's work on reinterpreting Lacanian psychoanalysis in light of his Zizekian reading of Hegel (part 1 of a brief overview and part 2) made Lacan's work a lot more interesting and accessible than Lacan himself did, and it had a significant and enduring impact on the way I interpret my own actions and the actions of other people.
Chris Cutrone managed to convince me that the Marxist tradition was more intellectually interesting than I previously assumed.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
4d ago
There's been a lot of interesting work on illusionism about consciousness in recent years. I don't agree with illusionism, but defenders of the position have made strides in showing how such a seemingly implausible position can actually be coherent, and they've helped clarify exactly what's at stake in debates over materialism.
We don't need credentialed elites to tell us the answers to these questions.
So, shifting the focus to philosophy specifically, since that's where I'm more knowledgeable.
A couple points do have to be conceded. Philosophy is simply easier (in certain ways) than STEM subjects, and you can have cogent thoughts about philosophical questions with much less training than you can about scientific questions. It's not uncommon for bright undergraduates to anticipate the major positions and lines of arguments when they're first presented with a philosophical problem.
It also has to be pointed out that the modern research university, and with it the concept of the "academic philosopher", is itself a somewhat recent historical invention. Although institutions of higher learning in some form date back to antiquity, not every canonical philosopher has had institutional support - Spinoza was a lens crafter, Kierkegaard was independently wealthy, Nietzsche held a PhD in an unrelated field and did most of his writing after he left the university. So we know that good work can happen even in the absence of universities.
Nonetheless, in my experience the difference in the quality of thought and breadth of knowledge when you compare credentialed professionals to enthusiastic amateurs is striking. The credentialed professionals are simply better - which makes sense, because if you pay someone to do something for 40+ hours a week every week for years, you'd expect them to get good at it. If you value these questions as highly as I do, and you value high-quality work on these questions, then there is a tangible ROI in paying people to work on this stuff full time.
I love TheMotte dearly, and obviously you can tell from my prolific posting history that I derive a great deal of value from this forum, but I don't come here expecting to be exposed to completely radical new ideas. Which is to be expected; we're just like, a bunch of dudes, there are no requisite technical/academic qualifications for posting here. Most of the things I've encountered in my life that really blew my mind and changed the way I think either came from credentialed sources, or they came from sources that credentialed people recognized as being worthy of attention.
The current dominant ideology inside academia promotes a nihilistic view of the world
It depends on who you're talking about? I suppose the anti-natalists and transhumanists could be plausibly accused of being nihilist, so if that's part of the "dominant ideology" then sure. Wokeists and Marxists in the general case though are definitely not nihilists. You can disagree with them and call them evil, but they're not nihilists. They think that what they're doing is extremely meaningful
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
4d ago
you think that growing the economy through pursuing advances in science and tech leads to decrease in well-being of the population
My more direct fear is that critical reflection on questions such as: what is "well-being"? to what extent is "well-being" worth pursuing? does it make sense to have a single unified metric of "well-being"? - will cease. Such reflection is naturally at home in humanities departments.
You can argue that we don't need state funding to think about such questions. But a culture that sees no value in the humanities in general is unlikely to find value in these questions in particular.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
4d ago
there is no fundamental conflict between Big Tech and the Woke.
Yeah. If I had written a longer post I would have gone into more nuance, but, the relationship between big tech and woke is very complex. One of my principle criticisms (but certainly not the only one) of big tech is, indeed, their complicity as a vehicle for the dissemination of wokeness.
Unfortunately we do have to be constrained by reality to some extent in terms of political strategizing. I’d like to just say “I’ll support the Good People, where the Good People are the ones who would just do whatever I would do if I was the God King”. But there’s no guarantee that there will be any organized constituency that matches those exact values. So we have to make do with what we have.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
5d ago
Amid cuts to basic research, New Zealand scraps all support for social sciences:
This week, in an announcement that stunned New Zealand’s research community, the country’s center-right coalition government said it would divert half of the NZ$75 million Marsden Fund, the nation’s sole funding source for fundamental science, to “research with economic benefits.” Moreover, the fund would no longer support any social sciences and humanities research, and the expert panels considering these proposals would be disbanded. [emphasis mine]
In announcing the change, Minister of Science, Innovation and Technology Judith Collins said the fund should focus on “core science” that supports economic growth and “a science sector that drives high-tech, high-productivity, high-value businesses and jobs.”
Frankly, they're going in the wrong direction. A great deal of technology developed over the last 30 years (social media, generative AI, frankly the internet itself) is either neutral/mixed at best or actively harmful at worst. If anything we need to be putting the brakes on "high-tech, high-productivity" jobs. Diverting funds to university social science departments would be a good way of slowing things down, at least. Despite my substantial disagreements with the wokeists, I'm willing to fund them if they can act as a counterbalance to a complete takeover by utilitarian techbroism.
I don't trust big tech to honestly evaluate the impacts and effects of their own products. We need a neutral, or even outright adversarial, independent body to investigate issues like say, the effects of social media on teenage mental health, and the university seems as good a place to do it as any (it might be objected that such research falls under the heading of "psychology" or maybe even "economics" rather than "social sciences" - but I doubt that the people in favor of these cuts would be particularly friendly to psychology or economics departments).
There are certain legitimate and even pressing research topics (e.g. psychological differences between racial groups, impact of racial diversity on workplaces, etc) that fall under the heading of "social sciences", but which are unfortunately impossible to investigate honestly in today's climate of ideological capture. The ideal solution to this would be to simply reform social sciences departments and make them open to honest inquiry again, rather than destroying them altogether.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
7d ago
the whole purpose of art and the mark of a truly "great" artist was to construct a complex idea or emotion and be able to communicate it to as wide an audience as possible.
Although I think this is somewhat of an oversimplification - people have been making weird shit for a long time, and I doubt that an author like say, John Donne, would have conceived of his project as "communicating complex ideas to as wide an audience as possible" - I do agree that the self-conscious elitism of early 20th century modernism, and the degree to which it stressed art's own self-consciousness, were genuinely historically novel. In spite of modernism's alleged "overcoming" by "postmodernism" (more and more people are beginning to question if the two are really distinct at all), these tenets have permeated culture and continue to influence art today.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
7d ago
Words to live by: If you're watching it, you are the target audience.
The majority of people who watched Jersey Shore did so "ironically", self-consciously. They outnumbered the people who watched the show "uncritically" by a significant margin. The show's producers were quite aware of this fact and played into it. The people who thought they were "above it all" were actually exactly in the target audience the whole time. There's ultimately no such thing as watching anything "from a distance"; you're always involved, you are always the target.
The point being that, to the extent that you have consumed the products or patronized the activities of these degenerates, you are complicit in their degeneracy. They cannot be dismissed as a mere aberration or mistake, because you are in a symbiotic relationship with them. The degenerates can proliferate because they've found a stable ecological niche; legions of people are willing to pay for their services. The strategy will persist for as long as it continues to be evolutionarily effective.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
7d ago
Contra Scott on Taste
Recently, Scott posted an exploration of various conceptions of artistic taste on ACX:
Recently we’ve gotten into discussions about artistic taste (see comments on AI Art Turing Test and From Bauhaus To Our House).
This is a bit mysterious. Many (most?) uneducated people like certain art which seems “obviously” pretty. But a small group of people who have studied the issue in depth say that in some deep sense, that art is actually bad (“kitsch”), and other art which normal people don’t appreciate is better. They can usually point to criteria which the “sophisticated” art follows and the “kitsch” art doesn’t, but to normal people these just seem like lists of pointless rules.
But most of the critics aren’t Platonists - they don’t believe that aesthetics are an objective good determined by God. So what does it mean to say that someone else is wrong?
We've discussed some of Scott's other recent posts on art here previously, but we've yet to discuss this one in particular.
Most of the possible conceptions of taste (taste as an arbitrary system of religious rituals, taste as fashion, taste as linguistic grammar) outlined in the post rely on the implicit assumption that the principle goal of "taste" is to sort artistic works into two buckets: those that pass the test, and those that don't. It is assumed that what distinguishes the man of good taste, if there is such a thing, is his ability to discern the genuine masterpieces from the kitschy frauds. My goal here is to challenge this assumption.
Scott dismisses a Platonist account of aesthetic quality due to concerns about the observed variance in aesthetic preferences across individuals. But I would go further and suggest that, independent of concerns about its coherence, strict Platonism is not even a desirable model for aesthetic quality; it is not something that I wish to be true. I'm not in the business of policing what works others are allowed to enjoy or appreciate, and I don't think that such business is proper to the faculty of taste. I'm reminded of the following passage, excerpted from a discussion about the feasibility of an account of reality that includes fundamentally, ontologically distinct levels of emergence:
We indeed claim that if the world were fundamentally disunified, then discovery of this would be tantamount to discovering that there is no metaphysical work to be done: objective inquiry would start and stop with the separate investigations of the mutually unconnected special sciences. By ‘fundamentally disunified’ we refer to the idea that there is no overarching understanding of the world to be had; the best account of reality we could establish would include regions or parts to which no generalizations applied. Pressed by Lipton (2001), Cartwright (2002) seems to endorse this. However, she admits that she does so (in preference to non-fundamental disunity) not because ‘the evidence is … compelling either way’ (2002, 273) but for the sake of aesthetic considerations which find expression in the poetry of Gerald Manley Hopkins. Like Hopkins, Cartwright is a lover of ‘all things counter, original, spare, strange’ (ibid). That is a striking motivation to be sure, but it is clearly not a naturalistic one. Similarly, although Dupré’s arguments are sometimes naturalistic, at least as often they are in service of domestication. He frequently defends specific disunity hypotheses on the grounds that they are politically or ethically preferable to unifying (‘imperialistic’) ones. (See especially Dupré 2001, and Ross 2005, chs. 1 and 9.
That is indeed the exact word I would use! It feels "imperious" to think that we could ever draw up a table of all the good and bad works of art, once and for all. I too am a lover of all things "counter, original, spare, and strange". Let a thousand flowers bloom, and see what grows.
In spite of all this, the concept of superior and inferior works remains indispensable. We must ultimately pass judgement on a work, by means of reference to specific properties of the work. But these judgements are always held in indefinite suspension; they are part of the patchwork of an ongoing emerging narrative that we author, and are not intended to be "the last word".
To Scott's list of models for taste in his original post, I would add "Taste Is Like A Method": a method of thoughtfully and critically engaging with a work. Or, more poetically, "Taste Is Like An Invitation": an invitation to feel a certain way, to perceive things in a certain way, to be a certain type of person.
To give a paradigmatic example of the exercise of the faculty of taste as I conceive of it, this passage from Barthes' Mythologies does nicely:
Current toys are made of a graceless material, the product of chemistry, not of nature. Many are now moulded from complicated mixtures; the plastic material of which they are made has an appearance at once gross and hygienic, it destroys all the pleasure, the sweetness, the humanity of touch. A sign which fills one with consternation is the gradual disappearance of wood, in spite of its being an ideal material because of its firmness and its softness, and the natural warmth of its touch. Wood removes, from all the forms which it supports, the wounding quality of angles which are too sharp, the chemical coldness of metal. When the child handles it and knocks it, it neither vibrates nor grates, it has a sound at once muffled and sharp. It is a familiar and poetic substance, which does not sever the child from close contact with the tree, the table, the floor. Wood does not wound or break down; it does not shatter, it wears out, it can last a long time, live with the child, alter little by little the relations between the object and the hand. If it dies, it is in dwindling, not in swelling out like those mechanical toys which disappear behind the hernia of a broken spring. Wood makes essential objects, objects for all time.
What makes this an act of tasteful discernment is not the particular judgement that was rendered; there is no "law of taste" that says that one must prefer wood to metal. Rather, the "taste" here consists in the process of perception and reflection itself; the ability to take an object that would normally be overlooked in the course of "sensible" work and draw qualities out of it that were previously unperceived.
You're allowed to like anything you want... if you can tell a good story about it (and I suppose we would need meta-taste in order to evaluate someone else's tasteful appreciations; and meta-meta-taste, and so on. This leads to either circularity or infinite regress, but so be it. There is no knowledge anyway without at least one of circularity, infinite regress, or the bald assertion of truth). If you like a Kinkade because it "looks pretty", then obviously you haven't put in much effort. There's no indication of an authentic aesthetic experience there; we are right to demand more of you. But equally, you have to tell a good story before you condemn something as well. The sophomoric art student who dismisses Kinkade because it's "plebeian kitsch" is just as unthinking and mired in unexamined prejudice as the philistines he criticizes. Taste, if it is anything, is a cultivated habit of mind; not a list of correct answers.
In light of my preferred conception of taste, most of Scott's discussion of the alternative conceptions is obviated. However, I wanted to additionally respond to a few points made near the end of the post:
Taste seems to constantly change. In 1930, all the sophisticated people said that Beaux-Arts architecture was very tasteful. In 1950, they’d laugh at you if you built Beaux-Arts; everyone with good taste was into International Style. This is very suspicious! Human universals don’t change that fast! Rules about what is vs. isn’t “jarring” don’t change that fast! Only fashion changes that fast!
Certainly taste does vary across time and place, although I think the degree to which it varies is at least somewhat exaggerated. People still like Mozart, and Shakespeare, and da Vinci, despite us being separated from them by hundreds of years.
When we see how the sausage gets made, it often involves politics or power struggles. For example, the principles of modern architecture were decided by socialists arguing about whose style seemed more “bourgeois”. Now capitalists who normally wouldn’t dream of caring what socialists thought call the winners of those fights “tasteful” and the losers “kitsch”, and claim to feel this viscerally in their bones.
There is truth to this, but it's not entirely a bad thing. Art is intimately bound up with politics, and that is as it should be. Art is a domain where we should be exploring messy human problems that don't have clear, universal answers.
The few scientific experiments we have - hoaxes, blind tests, etc - are not very kind to taste as a concept. Consider eg the Ern Malley hoax, my article about wine appreciation, and the AI Art Turing Test.
This is certainly correct. But once you accept a conception of taste that isn't predicated upon being able to distinguish "genuine" from "kitschy" works, then the relevance of these experiments is lessened.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
8d ago
So where’s all the money going?
Whenever someone has a proposal for healthcare reform, the response is “actually that’s not the main driver of costs”. The money’s not going to insurers, their profit margins are slim enough as it is. It’s not going to doctors, they only make up 8% of the pie. So who’s actually getting paid? The money can’t be disappearing into thin air.
Not trying to do a gotcha here. I’m genuinely uninformed on this topic and willing to hear you out.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
9d ago
Was this art, in your view?
There's nothing intrinsic to the content or the surrounding circumstances that prevents it from being art.
I don't really have a strict criteria for separating art from non-art. It's not a problem that I consider to be very important. Probably some criteria of intentionality would be useful (so one can distinguish between say, a random urinal at your office and Duchamp's Fountain) and I don't know if the requisite intentionality was present in Philips's case. Neither the content of her act itself nor her reaction to it afterwards really help or hurt the case for it being art.
Do you think her choices have made her life better?
Depends on how much and what kind of attention she's getting. In the short term, I wouldn't be surprised if it was better, because the news coverage will drive traffic to her OF.
In the long term, she may have to deal with reputational damage if she tries to go into something other than porn. But I don't view that as particularly just, so it feels weird to describe it as "her choices making her life worse". That feels akin to the woke mob canceling someone for wrongthink and then asking them "do you think your choice to engage in wrongthink made your life better or worse". The "consequences" of the original choice would have been perfectly manageable if not for the wilful external interference.
Have you considered that this type of thinking may be a contributing factor to the increasing political instability we’re seeing?
No one wants to be told “sorry, you’re actually unimportant and nothing can ever change because… taps sign The Economy”.
Eventually, there will be people who start saying “fuck your economy”.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
11d ago
I do think there’s something to the “right and left have switched polarities” theory. The people who go the hardest for wokeness today would have been the strictest Christian moralists if they were alive in the 1600s.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
11d ago
Right. Well, if my kids are going to become woke Maoist third worldists, then I can't really stop them, nor do I have any desire to. The whole point of being anti-woke is that people should be free to think for themselves. If I set limits on what my kids are allowed to think, then I'm no better than the wokeists.
I think the influence of external propaganda on political belief formation is not quite as big as is generally supposed anyway. Many years ago I stumbled on /r/shitredditsays when it was relatively new. The whole concept of "SJWs" was quite new and I was like, hey this seems kinda fun, I could get into this. You get to call other people racists and sexists and then feel morally superior to them. You're doing a good thing AND earning social credit in the process. That seems like a great deal. I imagine that's how most people initially get involved in social justice.
So I genuinely tried to be a leftist and integrate myself into the community for like a month, but I just couldn't do it. I was too viscerally disgusted by the behavior I saw there and I quickly turned on them. I tried to make myself believe in the content I was reading, but I couldn't. There was something about it that intrinsically disagreed with me.
I think that if someone is intelligent and independently-minded, they're going to believe what they're going to believe. And if they're not, they're just going to get swept up by the socially dominant ideology regardless, so why fret?
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
12d ago
Disclaimer, I don't have kids yet, so this is all hypothetical, and people are famously bad at predicting what they would do in a hypothetical.
I did a moderate amount of drinking and drugs (and in fact I still do!) and I turned out fine, so setting hard limits for my kids here would be hypocritical and seemingly unnecessary.
I also personally know a couple people who either died or fucked up their lives pretty significantly due to drug-related issues. So I know that there can be serious consequences and I don't take the issue lightly. But at the same time, I know that outcomes this severe are uncommon, assuming no exacerbating circumstances. Everything carries risk. I'm not going to ban my kids from driving just because they might get in a car accident.
As for the political content that reddit is worried about, that's just the stuff I myself watch/read anyway, so stopping my own kids from watching/reading it would be even more bizarre and hypocritical.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
14d ago
On one hand, allowing countries to subvert foreign elections seems obviously bad
Is there a steelman for simultaneously believing that a) we should have relatively porous borders and lax immigration controls, and b) foreign interference in domestic elections in the form of social media posts is a bad thing? Because surely there are many individuals who have expressed support for both positions.
If the Russians first crossed the southern border illegally and then started trying to drum up support for right wing populism, would that be ok and democratic? Now they're just undocumented residents instead of foreign nationals, right? You could say "no that's still election interference", but then it just seems like you're saying "advocating for the side I don't like is election interference", which is a bad look.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
15d ago
It would be ridiculous to study from a Calculus book written by Newton or Leibniz, wouldn't it?
This is certainly a valid point, and there's a real phenomenon there that needs to be investigated. However, Marx is a particularly poor example to illustrate @ArjinFerman's original point ("Just talk about their ideas, if they're so great"), because people do in fact talk about his ideas, much more often than they read his original texts. Phrases like "class struggle", "proletarian revolution", and "capitalism in crisis" are deployed frequently without specific reference to Marx's name or one of his texts. There have been plenty of avowed socialists who never read Marx. So clearly his ideas have taken on a life of their own beyond the confines of his original writing.
As for why there's still continuing interest in Marx's original texts themselves: think of philosophy like a giant thread on TheMotte. When you pick up a book written by a contemporary Marxist philosopher, you're reading a big post full of quote replies that's 20 levels deep, and it's replying to a bunch of other people, who were ultimately replying to Marx's OP. When you're trying to get up to speed on a long conversation with lots of back-and-forth arguments, isn't it better to read the whole thing yourself so you have the full context in all its nuance, instead of relying on someone else's paraphrase? Because that's what we're dealing with here: it's a dialogue between people about politically fraught issues, rather than a mathematical or scientific treatise.
If you wanted to understand someone's views on, say, abortion, would you rather read a paraphrase of their views, or would you rather read their own explanation of their views in their own words? Philosophy intrinsically deals with issues where the definitions of the principal terms are vague and contentious, and attempts at paraphrase and simplification are prone to distortion by preexisting biases. You probably wouldn't want to rely on a committed pro-choice advocate to give a sympathetic gloss to a pro-life article, especially when you can just, you know, read what the pro-life person said in the first place. Even another pro-life advocate might introduce inaccuracies into a paraphrase that the first pro-life advocate might reject, because despite being on the same side, they might not share the exact same conception of central concepts like "life", "murder", and "personhood". The contentious nature of the issues makes it harder to substitute out the original texts.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
15d ago
I'm planning a longer post responding to Scott's comments about taste, so I'll have more to say there, but I just wanted to remark on this briefly:
…so much as that it cemented a new romantic vision of the Artist. The Artist was a genius, brimming with bold new ideas that the common people could never understand! The Artist defied the norms of bourgeois society! The Artist was part of some official collective with their own compound in a trendy part of the city! The compound produced manifestos explaining why their vision of Art was better than everyone else’s!
I think this is a variation on a story that many people repeat uncritically. The story goes something like: "for thousands of years, being an artist was just like, a job, like any other. People knew there was nothing particularly special about art as such - they would have laughed at our modern snobs. The artist was just some dude who went to his 9-to-5 and made stuff because people thought it was pretty or funny, or because a rich king asked him to, or whatever. And then one day in the 1800s, for absolutely no reason whatsoever, ~10 German guys decided that artists were actually Geniuses and they should be revered as such, and this was called Romanticism, and lots of people fell for it and we've been dealing with the fallout ever since".
I think the cracks in this story start to show when you look at the historical record. The idea that there's something distinct about art as an activity that sets it apart from more "mundane" types of work is an ancient one. Greek and Roman poets and sculptors certainly did try to create works that would live on and be passed down to posterity; they were aiming at a certain kind of "immortality". Plato said that there was a quarrel between philosophers and poets over the correct approach to wisdom and virtue; there was no analogous quarrel between philosophers and saddle makers. Aristotle saw fit to dedicate an entire book to poetry and drama, but not an entire book to woodworking.
This is of course not to say that conceptions of art and The Artist haven't changed over time, or that there's nothing historically distinct about the Romantic conception of art. Only that the purely deflationary narrative, the claim that any distinguished status for art is a historically recent invention, is at best incomplete and lacking in nuance.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
16d ago
Take this screenshot from the ad, does this not look like a scene from Midsommar? Why are all the participants women? Why are they all White?
Oh, where's that old SSC post about all the "weird" things that seem to disproportionately attract white people? Cycling, bird watching, cosplay, whatever the examples were. Special interests in general seem to be an inherently "white" thing.
The creativity of the European mind means it's also more creative in finding new ways to destroy itself. (Although of course the generalized culture of anti-whiteness we have in the West today isn't helping.)
Fittingly, the ad itself gives me strong Midjourney/Sora vibes. Lots of disjointed static shots with minimal action.
I’d wait for mass layoffs at OpenAI before we take any claims of “AGI achieved internally” seriously.
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