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[silverspawn]

banning video games was definitely the best decision I've made in a while. I used to have stopped anyway, why did I start again?

This is the story of how all habits fail. You extend great work into adopting them, then when you have them, they become effortless, at one point you make exceptions without realizing it's a big deal, and a month later they're lost. This phenomenon is almost never talked about, and idk why, it's like one of the most important things I would tell my 10 yo younger self

I really want to make this a permanent ban

[silverspawn]

Maybe I should start making a list of all the absurd things people say when confronted with the possibility of having to change their mind. The current item would be "a physical computer can simulate 5 billion consciousnesses at the same time, all of which are every bit as vivid as a human (yes, literally)". (Also it's actually a water computer which runs much slower than a regular one.)

I also should have gotten suspicious when the person in question exclaimed that they would be delighted to change their mind and randomly offered a 100 dollar donation to a nonprofit of my choice as bounty. I think people who actually change their mind sometimes generally don't think they'll be delighted about it, and don't offer monetary rewards to further disincentivize themselves against it

[silverspawn]

The real 200 IQ move would have been to immediately counter that I will be the one donating 100$ if they change their mind, but I didn't think of that.

[silverspawn]

Tomorrow I think I'll watch something more lighthearted, like a horror movie. Just torrented It Follows and it looks like it's not in German woo

Ah yes, the movie about a person who's in a debate and just about to utterly destroy their opponent by debunking the opponent's invalid argument, until the horrifying realization hits.

No, that plot description wasn't correct

[silverspawn]

Fun movie, but idk about the Horror part; it seemed more like a comedy. Anyway 6/10, great soundtrack.

[silverspawn]

Do you have any evidence that the speaker was punished because people disagreed with the speech?

Isn't this the allegation?

Following that, he got removed as president (but he had also previously been embroiled in other controversies). Notable that according to Wikipedia, he still got majority support of the student body at time of removal [...]

I read this as "Tim thinks he got punished for a bad speech", and hence read your reply as making a counter-point -- but it doesn't seem like it should matter to me, hence the comment. I don't have any evidence not in the book.

[silverspawn]

Let's make a bad consciousness takes bingo. (Posting this is probably a bad idea but it's therapeutic for me.)

1. Consciousness means X, not Y!
2. How can you not see that B is true omfg (where B relies on A, which is an assumption the person doesn't realize could be false)
3. Consciousness has nothing to do with self-awareness!
4. Since you are not conscious in dreamless sleep...
5. It's confused to talk about consciousness itself rather than the algorithm that makes you talk about it
6. Your theory needs to have observable differences to be coherent!
[TBC, 19 more rows]

[faust]

Do you have any evidence that the speaker was punished because people disagreed with the speech?

Isn't this the allegation?

I don't see punishment here. What we have is that Summers got some bad press, and that subsequently he got voted out of office. Is either of that punishment? I don't think it makes sense to frame a somewhat democratic decision as punishment, or would you claim that Trump being voted out of office is an instance of him getting punished for bad speech?

I guess there is a broad sense of the word in which you could say that he got punished, but if that's what we're operating with then I don't think there's anything bad about that. Freedom of speech is not freedom from criticism.

[silverspawn]

(by posting I mean adjacent to the sequence)

7. Since qualia is inherently mysterious...
8. As a physicalist, you have to explain away consciousness
9. no one has any idea how to solve the mind/body problem
10. Apparent properties like the redness of red don't have to be explained at all

Do you have any evidence that the speaker was punished because people disagreed with the speech?

Isn't this the allegation?

I don't see punishment here. What we have is that Summers got some bad press, and that subsequently he got voted out of office. Is either of that punishment? I don't think it makes sense to frame a somewhat democratic decision as punishment, or would you claim that Trump being voted out of office is an instance of him getting punished for bad speech?

I guess there is a broad sense of the word in which you could say that he got punished, but if that's what we're operating with then I don't think there's anything bad about that. Freedom of speech is not freedom from criticism.

Well... I agree that this incident isn't very relevant since it's from 2005, this is probably not the point where it's worth digging deeper

[silverspawn]

11. You're only saying that consciousness is real so you can have an unfalsifiable notion of morality [arguing by psychoanalyzing others? cmon why do I even have to list this? but I do, people do it]

12. Demanding a reductionist explanation for qualia to consider the concept

[faust]

Chapter 6: How to Conquer a College (Part 4)

The remaining part of this chapter is focused on education. Here I am to begin with at least somewhat sympathetic to Urban's arguments; I have seen some questionable uses of diversity statements and such.

Anyways, I do not know the details of the US college system and how things work there on a broad level. Some of the examples mentioned here are problematic, and I believe that they are sometimes observable, but how often? The pattern I notice is that Urban will take the most extreme example of some bad practice and then make a sweeping generalization to conclude that it is handled like this everywhere.

Some paper states that it is not good to permit fundamental dissent in Social Justice classrooms, and this is taken to mean that any course on diversity and inclusion forbids criticism. UCLA filters applicants first by diversity competence, and this means that it is impossible to get a job anywhere in academia if you don't believe in SJF. There is some honestly quite funny criticism that "Albert Einstein would not have gotten a job today". It's true that Einstein, if time-traveling to the modern day, probably wouldn't meet diversity competence criteria. But guess what? He also wouldn't have sufficient knowledge of modern-day physics!

I can only speak on this as somone employed in German academia in a STEM field, so I can't speak to the situation in liberal arts in the US. But I will share my observations: In my time, I have seen two female PhD candidates leave university without a PhD, and zero males. The head of our department was heard saying that women shouldn't be employed in Postdoc or beyond. When I go in research conferences, attendees are still overwhelmingly white, indeed I have yet to hear a talk from a black speaker. It is my experience that diversity statements serve mostly a fig leaf to cover up these systemic issues: "We can't be that bad because we say diversity matters to us!" The only noticeable difference when going to a US university for a conference is that you tend to get stickers with pronouns to put on your name tag. I also had a mandatory "Ethics in Research" class once while visiting at a US instition, and that was very tame and basically boiled down to "how to not upset your future employer".

Given all that, I find it hard to believe that SJF is the dominant ideology on US campuses. It's only anecdotal, sure, but so is Urban's account. I would need some more convincing.

Towards the end, there is a stupid little argument that "colleges have a monopoly" on higher education which is like saying that gas stations have a monopoly on providing gas. You can just open a new one, you know?

Anyways the next chapter is going to be the most fun yet. I do think that on campuses, there is sometimes overreach in Social Justice efforts. But society at large... I'm interested in how he's going to defend that claim.

[silverspawn]

Politics needs to wait again, I have movies to talk about

[silverspawn]

So YMS really loved The Lighthouse, but it seemed more of a sequence of crazy shit to me. I mean it's not cliché, but is weird random shit better than cliché random shit? I might just not get it. 5/10 though close to a 6

I never watched the second half of Magical Girl, and I don't think I will, so I'll just drop it and give it a 6/10 based on the firs thalf. The show is incredibly powerful, but I also feel emotionally violated.

Trying to watch Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, one of the last two Kaufman movies, but half an hour in, it's... not very good?

Then I went to Wikipedia and it looks like his script got changed significantly, and he said he's unhappy with it, so maybe this shouldn't count as a Kaufman movie at all. it feels way less meaningful. Probably not gonna bother finishing it then. So far I'd give it a 3.

[silverspawn]

Oh also Like Someone in Love, a very odd, very slow, and very purposefully directed Japanese Movie. I think there's stuff I don't understand about it that would make it better. Provisional 7, may get higher

[silverspawn]

I think my least favorite proper Kaufman movie is  Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, which is probably an 8.

[silverspawn]

So I'm not sure how much I like Kaufman's novel. Though I'm still not that far in and plan to continue.

The most unique thing about it is the neverending monologue of the main character. I'd say this makes it a far more "honest" first-person perspective than any other book I've read, at least when it comes to the regular status-obsessed person in modern society. I like that it exists, someone should portray this, and I could see myself referencing it as "look, that's what it feels like". I think he exaggerates it at certain places, but nonetheless, he gets at something important that everyone else pretends isn't there. It's just... not necessarily fun to read. It's one thing in a 2 hour movie, but another in a 1000 page book.

There was one scene -- I guess this is technically a spoiler in case anyone intends on reading the novel -- he runs into a burning truck to get something, it doesn't matter what, and he still goes on dumb internal tangents relating the current situation to movies he's seen while he's almost losing his life (he ends up in a coma for 3 months). Referencing movies is something he does constantly before that point. I do remember Kaufman talking about how Hollywood and entertainment culture in general are screwing with our brains, so this is clearly his way of caricaturing/commenting/expressing this.

[silverspawn]

I mean there are other books where the main character narrates a lot, but I've never seen one where the monologing is this narcissistic and unfocused and blatantly stupid; like ever other instance I've read feels like looking at what our brains actually spit out through rose-colored glasses

[faust]

Interlude: The Digital Cudgel

Much here I can agree with. However of course Urban makes a distinction between "high-rung" use of public shaming - speaking truth to power - and low-rung use, and we'd probably disagree on where that line is. And the framing of this is always "something the left does". The smears in the examples are always "racist" or "bigot" and never "groomer" or "degenerate". This leaves a bad taste in my mouth.

[faust]

Chapter 7: How to Conquer a Society (Part 1)

Okay, so this comes with a bunch of examples. Let's go through them and see where I can agree/disagree.

1. (McNeil/New York Times) Soft disagree. Urban presents the criticism of McNeil's behavior in vague term, then proceeds to quote extensively from McNeil's own account of events. Seems pretty one-sided to me. He also stresses the use/mention distinction fro slur, but at the same time refuses to mention the slur himself, which is a bit odd. Maybe he's aware that even mentioning the slur is problematic?
2. (McSomething, didn't check) Agree. People do stupid things when they are teenagers, and if they realize that it's fine. I wonder if Urban applies the same leniency to youth criminal offenders.
3. (NYT op-ed by some senator on BLM) Hard disagree. This is an op-ed calling for the violent suppression of speech, and Urban just labels it as "controversial". This is going to be a recurring theme, right-wing misinformation is always "controversial" and left-wing stances "biased" and "unscientific".
4. (Google memo) Undecided. I'm not a fan of people being fired that easily, but that is a broader concern over employee's right in the US. Legally, it doesn't seem that Google did anything wrong. This is unfortunately another way Urban's biases creep in here: a court ruling against some SJF topic is mentioned in defense of his position, but court rulings in the other direction are ignored.
5. ("Irreversible Damage") Hard disagree. Again a book that is labeled "controversial", but it's really a package of unscientific hate speech (yes I know I'm being very SJFy right now). Notably nowhere has the book been banned, just taken off recommendation lists. Let's see if Urban has anything to say about the right wing banning books by law. Somehow I doubt it.

To be continued!

[faust]

Chapter 7: How to Conquer a Society (Part 1) - continued

6. (JAMA podcast) Disagree. It is certainly unprofessional for an academic outlet to host a podcast with some non-expert on a topic (and worse, someone who probably has the power to force himself into this), offering no account of the opposing view. Taking it down was warranted. Whether this should justify the resignation of those two people, I don't know. Probably depends on how involved they were in letting this happen, and I don't have info on that.
7. (Wang paper on diversity) Disagree. This really should have been in the previous chapter, it's just more or less a repeat of the math paper incident mentioned there. Again (and this will reappear later) whether a paper passing peer-review is evidence of its quality or evidence of the failing of the peer-review process is always up to Urban's whim.

So we are 1.5/7. Not great. The one case that I agree is bad isn't even an instance of a particular opinion being suppressed. Urban goes on to ominously speculate about the thousands of cases we might never learn about, great stuff. If I don't have enough evidence, I just imagine some more. Then he states how the biggest media outlets are now firmly under the sway of SJF, and I can only wonder: Has he ever looked at the US media landscape? The biggest megaphone is Fox News, not exactly an SJF bastion.

He talks about how certain terms appear more often in news media and research, and like, yeah, so what? There always have been trends to academic research. Graphic 43 is given as evidence, and yuck, you have to shudder at the deliberate distortion of the y-axis ranges to make the graphs overlap more neatly. (You can also see there that some trends have already stopped.)

In the final bit of this part on the "speech control" section is about some paper on black infant mortality Urban takes issue with. The criticism he produces seems quite trivial to me, and he even acknowledges that the authors have mentioned all of these shortcomings. So I'm not sure what the big problem is. For Urban it's "incredibly shoddy", but his criticism isn't enough for such a strong conclusion. The real problem, though, is the evil media that have sensationalized this study. Wow, who has ever heard of such a thing?! I'm sure media outlets always include the standard deviations  in the headline for any study that isn't SJF-related...

[faust]

Chapter 7: How to Conquer a Society (Part 2)

Okay, we get to what Urban calls "forced listening", in 2 parts. The first is a big section on diversity trainings in companies. Urban tries very hard to frame this as employees being pressured to agree to progressive stances, or else. But what the or else is - unclear. He can list a grand total of one case where some claims to have been fired for disagreeing in such an environment, and that's not even from the US and also not independently verified. So he relies a lot on exaggeration. Whatever. There is a delicious irony in accusing major corporations of spreading far-left ideology.

As Urban says himself, these trainings are done mostly for legal or PR reasons, and noone cares if they actually do anything, so the market is ripe for fraudsters. One of them, Robin DiAngelo, is his main source. She is made out to be the definite representatives for SJF and anyone working with buzzwords that DiAngelo also uses is guilty by association. Aren't those golem tactics?

Then we get to the education sector. This part is very hard to factcheck because a lot of it relies on anonymous sources. Urban always assumes that these are good-faith actors, firmly rooted in his "liberal games" mindset. But we have no evidence for this. I have seen a lot of evidence of bad faith actors in the education culture wars however, like far-right people wihtout children registering in a different district just so they get admitted to the school board meeting, or something to that effect.

Urban proceeds to mention lots of school material that he brands as SJF because some buzzwords are used that may also be used by people like DiAngelo. Again, guilt by association. This goes as far as thinking that it's a gotcha if you find that a school is dedicated to antiracism. Critical race theory in particular is again lumped in with SJF and anyone who has anything to do with CRT is therefore bad.

To his credit, Urban does cite an opposing voice towards the end, and I pretty much agree with what she says. But this is put under the "twisting words" header, so uh kind of bad faith framing. I wish we would learn how Urban thinks topics of race should be addressed in the classroom. He always claim that both sides should be presented, but what if one side has the science on their side? Should climate denialism also be taught in physics classes? Of course Urban would debate that the SJF have the science on their side, but we never even get to this question, it is just treated as obvious that both sides should always be presented no matter how accurate they are.

[silverspawn]

Mhh.  So the big disagreement factors into smaller disagreements about the individual pieces of evidence. I don't remember any of them well enough to have a resposne off the cuff, I just remember that I didn't see any of these glaring issues you mention while listening.

[silverspawn]

[silverspawn]

ok much weirder than the prompt is that this seems to be the only joke GPT-4 knows. Really didn't expect it to tell me the same thing on several tries. Especially bc it also told me this when I specifically asked for a stupid joke. That joke isn't very stupid.

[Awaclus]

ok much weirder than the prompt is that this seems to be the only joke GPT-4 knows. Really didn't expect it to tell me the same thing on several tries. Especially bc it also told me this when I specifically asked for a stupid joke. That joke isn't very stupid.

Have you asked it to tell a different joke? It seems extremely surprising if it really doesn't know any other jokes, whereas it could just be rigged to always tell this one for some reason, e.g. in an effort to avoid accidentally telling an offensive joke.