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[silverspawn]

Random thought: if the universe did contain magic that people frequently interact with, "it only occurs when you believe in it" would be one of the better mechanisms to hide it. Tons of people would report never having encountered magic and thus not take it seriously, and thus continue to not encounter magic.

It would still not work for several reasons, though, one of them being that everyone who does believe in and encounter it could just make a video.

[silverspawn]

Got through two episodes of She but now my suspension of disbelief is broken and it cannot be repaired. This still counts as a drop.

10/n Chambers

[silverspawn]

I don't get why a serious mystery or thriller has to start talking about sex. Is this some kind of weird signaling? But I've never seen a good show do this.

11/n Capitani

[silverspawn]

enough with the crime shows already. Policework really isn't that interesting. Also, I said drama.

12/n Bordertown

[silverspawn]

Dropped by virtue of not having english subtitles, doesn't count

13/n Black Summer. I think a Zombie apocalypse, which doesn't have to be bad

[silverspawn]

That was 12/n of course.

Doesn't seem terrible so far! I appreciate the long ongoing camera shots.

[silverspawn]

Is this adults affectionately calling each other "baby" thing actually something real people do in the real world? It sounds so goofy to me.

[silverspawn]

Alright, not bad. This feels like a better way to do the zombie apocalypse thing than The Walking Dead. It's still all setup though, unclear how good the show is going to be once it gets into a real plot.

I remember that I was super into the first two episode of sense8, which were all kicking off their different storylines. Alas, once the reel plot started rolling, it became clear that the writing underneath all the setup was pretty bad.

[silverspawn]

Yeah this show is really good. See Netflix it's not that difficult.

[silverspawn]

It's a bit like playing a totally broken bastard mafia setup but taking it completely seriously

[silverspawn]

Netflix Retrospective

Chronological List

Maid, Crash landing on you, Christine, The Craft, Geisha,  Brand New Cherry Flavor,  Army of Thieves, Lost in Space, Colony, Kiss me first, Invisible City, Master of None, Ares, Betaal, In the Shadow of the Moon, Kate, Night Teeth, Daredevil, Russian Doll, Mank, Feel Good, The Witcher, Annihilation, Between, Love Death Robots, Ragnarok, Oats Studios, Another Life, Sweet Home, Mortel, Salvation, Black, Osmosis, Katla, Frequency, The Barrier, Sabrina, The Order, Goedom, Ad Vitam, Good Morning Veronica, She, Chambers, Capitani, Bordertown, Black Summer

Judgment

Really good (2): Brand New Cherry Flavor, Annihilation

Not really good but worth watching (3): Kate, Osmosis, Black Summer

Arguable (4): Russian doll, Mank, Colony, She

Not worth watching (37): rest

Awards

Most WTF: Oats Studios

Worst Exposition: The Barrier/Another Life

Most unintentionally unnatural: Sabrina

Worst Plot: Kate

Worst Picture: Oats Studios

Best Picture: Annihilation

[jotheonah]

In 5 days it will be 10 years since I joined this site.

Maybe I will celebrate by actually playing a game of Dominion.

[Jimmmmm]

In 5 days it will be 10 years since I joined this site.

Maybe I will celebrate by actually playing a game of Dominion.

Wow! Didn't realise it had been that long.

[Jimmmmm]

We're about 6 months out from the 10th anniversary of the start of f.ds Mafia I.

[jotheonah]

We're about 6 months out from the 10th anniversary of the start of f.ds Mafia I.

Dibs on modding 10th Anniversary Mafia.

[faust]

Apparently this is now where people talk when it's night (/between games).

[silverspawn]

In 5 days it will be 10 years since I joined this site.

Maybe I will celebrate by actually playing a game of Dominion.

Dangerous plan. "Playing a game of dominion" is a bit like "sleeping for just another five minutes".

[silverspawn]

In the last two days, I've again experienced feeling more existential dread while doing something about it than while slacking off. But now I feel like this actually makes sense since doing something about the existential dread means confronting it in some way. It's also not that big of a deal, existential dread has become a pretty familial feeling.

In surprisingly unrelated news, Eliezer Yudkowsky thinks almost all alignment research has negligible probability of being helpful and it's very unlikely that we we will not all die in the next 49 years. I've been fairly unaffected by reading this, mostly because it's like not surprising that he thinks this if you actually paid attention to what he's been saying? Also 'everyone dies' is not that scary given my philosophical views. I worry more about the future having a lot of suffering, which is way way less likely, at least according to EY.

Also, Elon Musk has a chance to redeem himself if he manages to rename OpenAI to ClosedAI.

the notion of "open AI" continues to sound to me like "what is the worst possible strategy for making the game board as unplayable as possible while demonizing everybody who tries a strategy that could possibly lead to the survival of humane intelligence", and now a lot of the people who knew about that part have left OpenAI for elsewhere. But, sure, if they changed their name to "ClosedAI" and fired everyone who believed in the original OpenAI mission, I would update about that.

[silverspawn]

An unrelated thought dump on objectivity.

There's this debate about whether or not quality of art is objective. Is a critique just a statement about personal preference or about an objective reality? But this is a completely ill-defined question. It disappears entirely if one is just more precise about the specific claim.

E.g., saying "this and this album/movie/book is good" isn't 'objective' or 'subjective', rather it's totally ill-defined because 'good' is totally ill-defined. One can define 'good' in various ways, and the claim becomes totally different depending on the definition. E.g., 'good' could mean "I like it" or "most people like it" or "it made a lot of money" or whatever. Each one of these can make it into a claim that has a proper truth value, but they're all different and it's totally unclear which one is the proper translation of "this movie is good".

It's absolutely possible to make critiques of media that refer to a property of the thing rather than to yourself. E.g., I haven't defined what poor exposition means, but this could be done. Like, "take hundred random people who've never seen a movie, show them a snippet of this movie and a bunch of snippets of real life filmed by secret camera, let them guess which one is real and which one isn't; the more reliably they can do this, the worse the exposition is". This is totally impractical, but that doesn't matter; as long as it can be defined somehow, it's a real thing. When I say that Another Life has bad exposition, this isn't only a statement about myself; it's largely a claim about the show (not entirely since I haven't thought exactly about how I would operationalize it, but largely). As such, it can be true or false. Maybe I'm wrong about it being bad exposition; either way the point is that it's not a statement about me.

On the other hand, my shitting on Oats Studios is primarily a statement about my preferences. Even in that case, I could have said something about the show itself if I had wanted to, but in fact I wasn't doing that. I was mostly just reporting on how ridiculous the show seemed to me. Both things are possible and can be interesting.

The main point here is that neither of these two options requires the concepts  'subjective' or 'objective'. Those words should be tabood; they're a lossy abstraction that allows people to talk about this topic without really saying anything. All one needs to do is make any individual claim precise. The idea of a "subjective" claim doesn't ultimately make sense; if a claim is about yourself, well you're a part of the universe just like everything else, so it's just another claim. All statements are either ill-defined or self-referential or have a truth value. (I think we had a debate about this before and some people doubted it, but they only found counter-examples that are self-referential. All real paradoxes are in this category.) "Objective" and "Subjective" aren't useful categories in this debate.

The problem in practice is that no-one thinks about this clearly. People usually either come out at 'everything is subjective' or 'quality is objective'. While none of  these really means anything, I tend to find the former more tolerable. At least people understand what it means to talk about their own reactions, and certainly that's better than people who think their opinions are "objective" even while those opinions are stored in ill-defined ways like "this show is good". But at the same time, the idea that  it's impossible to say things about the thing itself is just plain false. It may be impossible to prove anything interesting about the thing itself, but only in the same way that it's impossible to prove anything outside of math. The idea that objective properties don't exist is disproven by any correlation between what different people think about a thing. Lots of people like Game of Thrones, hence there is some property of GoT that causes this. It may be difficult to define, but it exists. Ditto with basically every other piece of art.

[silverspawn]

In the end the problem with debate is so often that people think in terms of things that aren't well-defined. "All critiques are subjective" is totally ill-defined, and people who go around saying this are extremely unlikely to translate it into a well-defined claim if you ask them. And if they do it's probably going to be something trivially true like "there's a nonzero connection between the kind of person you are and what you will say about a piece of art". This of course doesn't at all justify how they treat their ill-defined "all critique is subjective" opinion in other contexts.

[silverspawn]

Relevant question: how much of philosophy is about debating claims that are ill-defined? It's not 100% but it's a lot more than 0%. May be more than half.

[silverspawn]

I wish to be awarded style points for this move

[silverspawn]

It doesn't matter how much fat I use when cooking or how much sugar I eat, my body refuses to put on even a little bit of weight

[Awaclus]

It doesn't matter how much fat I use when cooking or how much sugar I eat, my body refuses to put on even a little bit of weight

Have you tried alcohol?

[silverspawn]

No.