SamoyedFurFluff

I literally said in my first post that I am speaking in a board game context.

This isn’t a work context. This is a board game meetup, lol. Do you not have friends outside of work?

I think you’re missing my point here, which is that “no politics” is an impossible standard for any given social group even if the social group isn’t itself a political movement. There will need to be some measure of baseline politics, like trans people are welcome, jokes about Indian people being smelly are fine, gay people shouldn’t bring their partners around, “retarded” is/isn’t cool to use. Etc.

So forcing everyone to change their meeting place to a venue with a unisex bathroom only is not political, but a trans woman using a woman’s bathroom is political?

Also, Helen still wants to be called Helen and still wants to be referred to as a she. By this logic, everyone must go by they/them? Or what?

I don’t see what you mean. It really isn’t considered civil to let men use the female restroom when a male restroom is available outside of circumstances like taking one’s young children to the restroom. If one sees a trans woman as a man, it is uncivil for “him” to parade at being a woman.

It is also super normal for couples to roleplay being couples, gay or not. What do you call civil here, to let a (in the mind of an Anti-homosexual conservative) illegitimate couple pretend as if it’s on the level of a legitimate one? Or it’s maybe uncivil for the illegitimate gay guy to come in and force the rest of the group to sit in discomfort with his sexuality?

In my opinion “maintain civility” is equally as fraught as “no politics” because different people have radically different opinions of what these mean. Often times when it comes to “identity politics” it’s mutually exclusive.

That’s incredibly messy, for example, a friend of mine was recently forced out of the country because her Ukrainian refugee visa was revoked. Are you saying this community member cannot be sad or angry about this, because that’s too political? We have to be like damn this is the last board game with Nancy but we can’t talk about why because that’s Polticial?

Here’s the thing though: Helen is presenting herself to be called Helen. That’s inherently asking other people to call her Helen and imposing on people to allow a person they see as male to enter a female bathroom! For people who see being transgender as a political issue, being asked to call a trans person by their name is bringing politics into it because theyre being imposed on to recognize a trans woman as female for bathroom purposes.

Thats what I mean when i think “no politics” gets weirdly messy. Like to me it’s not political to let Helen use the female bathroom, but that’s not a given. I’ve also seen situations like, is it political if David brings his boyfriend to the DnD group and they role play a gay couple? What about if Emily, an IRL conservative, says she’s not being political when her lawful good paladin tries to break up the gay couple in the game, because being gay is evil in her DnD religion?

Inquiry: what do you define as politics?

Example: is a trans person in your community political for using their preferred pronouns? Going to their preferred bathroom? Is a gay person political for mentioning their same sex spouse? Is an immigrant political for discussing their immigration process (“sorry can’t make it I have an apt with the embassy”)? Is tits or gtfo political?

I’m not trying to be contrarian this is simply my experiences running like a board game group or something. It’s easy to say no politics but then someone’s normal (eg. My name is Helen, where’s the woman’s restroom?) can cause someone to refuse (“that is clearly a man”!) and now you have a mess on your hands as an organizer.

Objectively we’ve only become smarter (IQs have increased), stronger (fitness records continue to be broken), etc. since infant mortality shrank. If you believe otherwise please provide evidence.

Doesn’t one major fund reducing investment in fossil fuels and increasing investment in renewable energy precisely migrate towards the notion of helping solve demand and encourage technological breakthroughs and innovation?

Generally, academia has always had a measure of bias to it. However the bias was never so blatant and never so against producing an environment where good research could feasibly be created. The vast majority of research is non political increments of existing non political increments where the main conflicts are personal beefs among flawed individual PIs and maybe being asked what fig leaf one offers to ensure that the funding doesn’t just go to a bunch of white wealthy straight men. Once you have funding you can be set for years to focus on your work, assuming you don’t do something dumb like make sexist or racist remarks, and even then your funding is generally secure you just might not get a new round 3 years later(probably will though because controversies die pretty fast).

I know a lot of hay and media exists about how academia is yadda yadda biased and anti intellectual. But of course a lot of that is cherry picked examples of controversial figures or individual missteps among individual institutions. This is a bit like taking a classroom with one rowdy asshole and then declaring the whole school must use physical violence as discipline from now on.

I believe the evidence claimed is that there aren’t better outcomes for smart kids. Schools that claim they have better outcomes just selected for kids that would always have better outcomes. Like if I claimed my basketball team has better outcomes because I got to make sure all my players were above 6 foot. These 6 foot players don’t necessarily benefit from being in a team with other 6 foot players, but I’m saying people should apply for my team because I’m doing so much better than the team that can’t make those weeding out decisions. I’m intentionally conflating the success of my capacity to select for success with my capacity to coach a team.

I think games don’t have to be fun. There’s plenty of games where fun would be super inappropriate and yet the games are very popular. This applies to a lot of psychological or survival horror games. I think better is that a game must be compelling. There must be something encouraging you to play more, more so than any frustration or conflict the game introduces.

Then we are at an impasse, because here is a guy who has been accused of rape actively doing a speaking gig, so…

Note that I was not speaking on the guilt or innocence of any specific person, just pointing out that when it comes to committing sexual violence the incentives to make accusations don’t appear to actually mete out as is claimed because the people who are accused rarely, if ever, have any actual negative consequences.

There really isn’t that much incentive to accuse a much wealthier man of rape. Famously, justice is rarely (if ever) metered out when the accused person is wealthy and influential. This guy (allegedly) violently raped a woman on his boat and he still gets a speaking gig, so.

If you’re so confident it’s a solid way to get ahead, please go ahead and try it yourself.

I really like Ray Nayler’s work, who intersects his real experience in international politics with science fiction technology. His Tusks of Extinction uses the sci-fi notion of brain transfer and bringing back mammoths to explore the economical pressures behind poaching. His “Where the axe is buried” explores surveillance state technology with political bodies that feel like real modern nations.

No, sorry, a lot of the original post I was responding to was my bafflement that artists are supposed to be gatekeeping their strategies or techniques when it’s very evident to me that the art that moves me the most really didn’t gatekeep anything, and in fact the opposite. I’m not particularly anti LLM being involved in the creative process, I just had no idea wtf you were talking about with gatekeeping artistic intent. I also think these pieces fundamentally don’t work if the story they were telling was fiction. There are fictional stories like Pose that speak to very similar cultural moments but Pose is not Paris is Burning and that distinction is fundamentally important to the place of art in society. I’m very baffled that you’re seemingly saying as long as I am lied to about what I think is true, thats the same as a real work existing.

Man this approach and philosophy about art baffles me because the greatest and most moving works of art to me couldn’t possibly be created by an LLM. For example “Electric Fan (Feel It Motherfuckers): Only Unclaimed Item from the Stephen Earabino Estate”, which is the only item remaining when the artists lover (Stephen Earabino) died of AIDS and his family threw out everything he ever owned leaving just the box fan. It’s just a box fan but there’s so much loss and pain in that installation. Same as “"Untitled" (Portrait of Ross in L.A.) ", which is just a pile of colorful candy that audience members are welcome to take from, whose original weight is the ideal weight of a Ross who diminished and died of AIDS.

There’s no gatekeeping in the processes of these works, no secrecy, not even really whatever you’re talking about. These works would in fact be utterly diminished by being produced by an LLM because they’re trying to capture the stories of real, existing people who had real, painful experiences. I have no empathy with a machine but I have all the empathy of a man who loved a man whose family hated him so much when he died they wouldn’t even leave his lover with anything more than a box fan and so he decided to declare the box fan to be art.

Iirc this is an attorney who cannot quit his job because he’s actually a military lawyer, and subject to military law (quitting is a dereliction of duty and comes with criminal consequences). It’s likely he was voluntold and is now stuck in an unwinnable situation.

Millennials are not the younger generation anymore. That refers to Gen Z and alpha.

The thing that makes me nervous is the statement that they plan to use AI. AI? The thing that is mathematically incapable of perfection, on finance information, for which perfection is table stakes? Not to mention all the privacy issues (although that boat has sailed).

I think if I produced inappropriate images that are identifiable as a specific child victim, who obviously cannot consent to have inappropriate images generated of their likeness, I believe images and photos are a distinction without a difference.

I don’t think this is part of humans because so many of us genuinely chafe against the system. I think it’s because of power and hierarchy and signaling. It’s like when you play board games with a friend and then they turn it into a competition and then it’s not fun anymore. At least with a board game you can walk away. But if it’s your child’s future on the line you will be just as competitive even if you don’t want to be.

So long as there are humans who want to amass power in some way and treat it as a zero sum game, there will be other humans forced to play similarly. Prisoners dilemma.

I think somewhere along the way something has gone terribly wrong in the way we allocate capital to incentivize behavior. Somehow as a society we incentivize (aka distribute capital to) the people who educate our next generation and the people who care for our elders less than the people who smoke weed on podcasts and talk for hours into a camera or a microphone…

Can you name a few topics that you feel benefit from taking an abhorrent position as a way to understand the truth? I also deeply seek open ended conversations about incredibly thorny subjects but I almost never purposefully take a position to I consider abhorrent in order to do so. For example while I am curious about and want to understand antisemitism as a political movement, I don’t see how actually adopting antisemitic beliefs even as a thought exercise would make me understand them more. I find I much more benefit from trying to develop a framework of analysis based on a mix of books from experts (which help as a kind of a meta study crystallized into a person with deep expertise in a subject) and witnessing individual antisemetic acts to see if they fit into the metanarrative by the experts— if they don’t, why not, etc.

In my experience honestly this isn’t common. People really hate disagreeing IRL and can often sniff out when a disagreement is happening that’s just a form of trying to control the environment unnecessarily due to one’s personal issues. However it is important not to be too tolerant to straight up antisocial behavior that uses “don’t be political” as a form of self defense too. I’ve definitely had to kick out guys who did shit like treat women in the group like unwilling romantic targets even after being turned down, or guys who take being turned down personally and then tried to call the woman a fat cow over it who then also tried to use “stop being sensitive and political” as a cover for just being a poorly socialized male.

Have you considered pro-AI proponents all do these things also? It’s an ugly culture war but from a relatively neutral observer I am seeing gross behavior on both sides. (Eg. Making disgusting porn of real people, mocking the dead’s art and likeness…)

I would think using contraceptives is not in the same category as drugs or liquor, though.

What are you talking about, alcoholism is a classic rampant poverty addiction?