crabkin

As if box office is a proxy for quality. I seriously question whether your comment is made in good faith to begin with, are you intentionally misunderstanding me?

Their assertion that "It's up for best picture because to preach, not because it's actually good," just flat out doesn't hold under scrutiny. Why? Consider that there is a lineage of people who are essentially writing statements using a language "of the screen," people like Hitchcock, Bergman, Tarkovsky, Kubrick, Scorsese, to name a few. No matter what the film is ``about," the person crafting the film must grapple with the same things: how do I order the events? How does this work psychologically? Is this coherent? Does this say what I want it to? And such concerns scale down to very practical problem-solving on the day-to-day so that the vision may be best served.

Whether you agree with the values the film espouses or not, it succeeds as a work of cinema, full stop. That's true even if it was never shown in a theatre. People who work in the film industry know that, which is why the Oscars isn't precisely a "what is the wokest film" contest every year. Therefore if you assert it's just "preaching" correctly that is basically reducing something that has enormous value in terms of craft into just "messages;" ironically, you are doing so because you can't see past "messages."

The obvious political stance of One Battle After Another notwithstanding, given how much the film succeeds as an exercise in using the language of cinema to tell a compelling story, it comes across (ironically) as idealogically motivated to say the movie isnt nominated in part for its merits with regard to craft and construction.

No doubt it appeals to people at the Academy in its persuasion, but if we were to strip it down to film technical aspects it would no doubt still be a frontrunner for film of the year.

Well are people not part of the universe. And not all people "care about what we do" all the time but it seems most people care or have cared some of the time. Therefore the universe, seeing as it as expressing itself through its many constituents, but we can probably weigh the local conscious talking manifestations of it a bit more, does care.

"I am not saying they are good or bad, just that the concept of good and bad are not given to us by the universe but made up by humans." This is probably not entirely true. People developed these notions through something cultural selection, I'd hesitate to just call it a Darwinism, but nothing comes from nowhere. Collective morality is like an emergent phenomenon

Don't really think so. I love Pynchon and there's not really a character I'm latching onto when I read that. McCarthy and Pynchon both fetishize a sort of violence. I find McCarthy's writing going there many times for shock value or aesthetic reasons and it makes me take him less seriously. Other people have mentioned Tarantino and I think that is apt.

There's some video Shkreli going over how federal sentencing guidelines are. He is going to get close life.

Idk if I'm autistic or not, so apart from that I feel like I could have written this.

to be fair Dennis and Carl could put out some amazing work, like the Carl produced all i wanna do or dennis penned Forever. But I don't think it negates your point just wanted to add to it.

I'd be pretty surprised if good verbal communicators aren't usually good writers. I think politicians persuade people not by the clarity, conciseness, or coherence of their speech, but by the substance of their speech. If communication itself could be abstracted from the substance of what is communicated, then it wouldn't be true I think to attribute the success of certain politicians to their ability to communicate so much as their ability to choose what to communicate.

A writer has to be interesting though, every piece of writing we consider well written has a quality of gripping the mind. I'd argue then, that politicians though they may not be in the habit of writing long academic style treatises or "interesting" articles, perhaps it can be argued in the past they largely did, still if they are in part elected on the basis of their speech, must possess the same ability in writing.

If you don't believe me then how is it that Trump's tweets are works of art, "I have never seen a think person drinking Diet Coke,"The Coca Cola company is not happy with me--that's okay, I'll still keep drinking that garbage.", etc... Crude, in bad taste, whatever you say. Another example is Obama, who honestly has a gift for writing in the conventional sense.

GPT-4 can answer test questions, but could it have come up with what Einstein published in 1905 if it had all the information about the world up to say, 1902?

Music is abstract. When we talk about visual art we can almost always be on the same page. If I say I need garden gnomes parading around a Bavarian village, the amount of variation between my internal idea and what a visual artist returns will mainly come from the lack of terms I use regarding aesthetic sensibility. Will they return something abstract or neoclassical? I would then be more specific etc...

For music we could present such an image but it would then suggest I'd argue much more possibilities. We could narrow down by genre you would suppose but even then there are too many possibilities: genre's are not as strong categories as are the stylized "era's" of visual art, I would also claim. Moreover, we can "port" a fundamental structure like a melody over all sorts of strains of music. In visual art, any motif is bound to be changed depending on the era and the style we'd put it in, that is, I think that in music, there are elements that are stronger in visual arts and elements that are weaker in music, and vice-versa, with regard to a description we could give in English. It's probably more natural and more possible to ask about what a sort visual representation should be than what a piece of sound should be.

It's interesting how we can generate images I'd argue in stunning faithfulness to some prompts but we don't seem to be very close to the same standard, for some prompts, at generating music.

been at higher rates for like what a year, year and a half? We had low rates the whole time he was in charge before that.

I don't disagree. It's not a perfect analogy. The Mormon's I describe are a lot like Sedevacantists except that they aren't openly out "against" the official church.

Having been a seminary class president, scout, priesthood holder, just not a missionary or really active member, born and raised in Utah, I will tell you one interesting contradiction about Mormons is the extent to which they disown their past and at the same time still have many ideas from that time circulating around in a particular way. I would think it's similar to say how some Catholics may be down with the whole thing right now and yet still aren't "up-to-date" with the Catholic church's official position on things, for instance post Vatican II. Some not all.

I would doubt that this sort of prophesy is a genuine front-of-mind-concern today by the people running this operation at the church. Preparing for the second coming could be a more sincere answer coming from them, but if such an event were to occur I think it would make money worthless, so that doesn't make sense to me.

There is a segment in the 60 minutes piece where they clearly show a church document, which shows something like 1.3 billion dollars being invested from Ensign Peak, the church hedge fund, into City Creek, a mall in downtown SLC, that Nielsen (the whistleblower) says his boss showed him.

In Utah it was well known and a topic of conversation so to speak that the church had invested so much money into a commercial venture. There also a segment in 60 minutes about the church bailing out an insurance company they control using these funds. It can really get under your skin coming from Utah, where I saw kids from my high school go off to central Africa essentially to convince people to pay tithing to the church, which we'd ostensibly see as not so bad given that it will help people. If it is the case, and if you've ever met some rich boomer Mormon dudes I can assure you it doesn't take a lot of convincing, look how they run our legislature, that the church took people's money, made a hedge fund, and now starts businesses which benefit... only they really know the completely details of... then it does not take much to feel outraged.

But I also the think the church at the very highest echelons consists of what are probably some very distinguished people who've seen a thing or two or feel a higher calling, that also does not seem far-fetched. I'd imagine being in charge of all that money is really something, having a little bit of a persecution and chosen-people complex is also something, as usual there are interesting social dynamics with Mormons.

[0]https://youtu.be/k3_Fhq7sEHo?t=212

IQ is a number that measures something. We do some retrofitting to make it normal. In theory, 1 in 30,000 people will have an IQ of 160 or higher as you say. But I think that's giving too much credit to the measure, and to g. Which is just working memory times application of logic or something like that. I personally think IQ is intellectually bankrupt.

nothing beats simplicity when it meets possibility

You are naive if you don't think your tax dollars right now are going to a million things in a million different ways that don't benefit you, and that it's not intentional. In the end such decisions aren't made by convincing people like you or me they work in our favor or the American people's favor. I won't try to convince you. You didn't understand what I meant by "you already know" and you didn't respond to anything I said, just kept parroting your line of reasoning.

Addresses the second question. It's impossible to answer your first. And if you're looking for short answers to those sorts of questions, well then you should already know ;)

Such a project will take care of our citizens. Maybe not "first" because technically it takes care of ALL people first, and therefore no one is "second." The US gov would be in a unique position to do it owing of course to the pool of talent and resources it can draw from. I don't have a clue where you live, but I live in the Mountain West and the water wars are constant issue on peoples minds. Not to mention, changing climate will induce immigration. Where do you think people will immigrate if they can? If your argument is about "American's first" with falling birthrates and neoliberal supremacy and whatnot, you're going to have a whole lot of new neighbors if their climate gets worse, because America first.

I have good relative pitch but my friends with a more "restricted" sense of pitch shall we say seem to be less open minded, have a tougher time appreciating some of the music I love despite its disorder or imperfections. I don't have any problem appreciating what they like.

It's a 4-D projection/Rubik's cube manual about personal development, the logos, and the formation, nurturing, and triumph of a society, despite going up against what seems to be impossible odds. Simply calling it mythology or tying it's value as history or any other ill-conceived standard of truth and guidance we have now is missing the point.

I think that people in general don't read "enough", or maybe can't "enough." By that I mean, recommendations based on other people's reading habits aren't going to be as fine tuned as say, recommendations based on people's music listening habits.

While I can empathize with these thoughts, I hear them from people who I think have brilliant ideas, like Karl Popper N.N. Taleb, something about this sort of definition of intelligence and the strictness of forms I think it implies rubs me as presumptive and confused as the claims its critiquing.

For instance, what about the subconscious? The subconscious must play a strong role in problem solving and creativity, which is how I notice intelligence, anybody I think who has written a piece of music or struggled with a proof can attest to that. But are there abstractions at play when the unconscious is in the driver seat? And if the unconscious speaks in abstractions, are they the same "form" abstractions the conscious mind is so familiar with? Consider some different form of abstraction, informed by and tooled by information and methods you are not privy to.

Moreover, if humans did have unlimited short term memory size, suppose we had to find what numbers are divisible by a prime, how many of us would be checking numbers individually in our head and not using Fermat's Little Theorem? Suppose such memory allows us to discover new methods of compaction, wait then, we are playing the same game again and perhaps that would lead us to the presumption that we do it because our working memory is not "good" enough. Then "intelligence," which we outside of ourselves can only perceive in the ways it is demonstrable, and what motivates it, seems less then about the journey to compact information into coherence, producing objects for an inventory and thereby producing some super-order of workshopping, and more about heuristic success in pragmatic material terms. These are terms I'd argue out of the scope of "conscious" abstraction, hence the rejection of such ideas/thoughts on account of their supposed duplicity. But I don't know if the same can be said for the unconscious.

It seems to me then that so called compression, conscious abstraction, is more than an evolutionarily-devised-resource-scarcity-solution, it's baked in, *ontologically*. We are, in part, motivated to look for solutions not necessarily on account of our limitations but because we can imagine solutions. I do anticipate your eye roll.

I would posit then, part of what is at play for what I'll term demonstrable intelligence, is the degree to which the conscious mind has strength in itself as an abstraction workstation and how much access the "unconscious" mind seems to grant it to other spheres of tooling. In this sense, not only is the success of abstractions and their varieties relevant, but those very attributes of the abstractions are informed by the diversity and complexity of a little something else.

So sure, the map is not the territory and the cat is in my mind and not necessarily a reflection of the material reality, but I think we exaggerate the problems in abstractions/forms because we are unsatisfied with the whole enterprise of consciously accessing the territory in the first place.

are electrons made out of... electron? surely electrons are made out of electron-stuff. If they are not composed of any sort of thing, then they don't sound like any of the things in real life which we can say, up until electrons, are composed of something more minute. If "materially" it's not turtles all the way down I wonder what that means.

I've done psychedelics upwards of 50 times over the last 5 years and while I think they are dangerous, and that their real purpose and origin may be different than what we are taught, I still think they are valuable drugs. Invaluable even. I just can't conceive of a place in our culture where we could do them like for instance we do adderall or prozac. I know they do studies but to me it seems like an experience that comes to you and then goes away when you don't need it. Very difficult thing to explain unless you've "been there." I don't think you necessarily need drugs to get there but it vastly vastly makes it easier. Just like I don't think you need a train, car, or plane to travel across Eurasia but walking there sure takes a whole lot of something else.

Relevant video. I agree with your observations I think they are pretty interesting. Chomsky has an interesting bit here about how the epistemic implications of statistical models like these imply a shift in our values apropos to science and it's aims. For instance, as I understand it he communicates how before we would have considered some theory that made an accurate predictions as satisfying some standard of validity, now it seems people are aiming to see who can simulate the whole thing to the highest precision even if they do it black box style. I also like seeing Steven Pinker squirm a bit, so here's the vid.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=92GOS1VIGxY&t=10s

Yes they seem to take the view into account, but this sentiment as if the question is settled and we aren't anthropically-projecting, or whatever the term is, is premature. Just because two processes produce a superficially similar result, does not make them the same process. What you just described after conceding that though the brain may be a statistical inference machine it still seems like magic.

It is telling that you talk about all those things happening in "real time." Ask any super-regarded philosopher, from Plato to Wittgenstein (yes I'm excluding Dennet et al), and that would be quite the hoot to point out.

Not sure if you're subtly being critical of my use of the word. However I do have something to add to your thought. Richard Feynman has a really interesting quote, I'm paraphrasing, but he says it's hard to learn some things initially because everything is named slightly wrong. At the time I was also reading some Wittgenstein and that got me thinking about words and what they correspond to. I really do think they simply just correspond to the multitude of contexts they exist in now. For instance, if you look up the definition of words, you get more words, and then for those words, other words. It's turtles all the way down, it's all circular. The only grounding is the situation where the noises are made and then consequences follow, that's what I think characterizes them, and so atomic words are meaningless, they only have any discernible meaning in time and place in configuration with certain other words and with certain people.

I think using a word like the matrix in a strict sense when it comes from a movie about just about all the evocative ideas in Western thought is ludicrous. It's pedanticism on steroids.

The thing is that the matrix as it is in the movie is allegorical, and for some reason I feel like you know that. I think there is a difference between knowing something and understanding something, right, and to me the realization that there is so much artifice, and not in a metaphorical sense I think, in a very tangible and I'd go so far as to argue certain sense, implicit with living in a society with culture. With universities, with arts, with expectations, with great-men, with money, and buildings, and other things, I just find words do not do justice to just how visceral having the realization is. I think reducing it to a pretty neutral, vanilla term like civilization just doesn't do it justice. It is the matrix, it's like a whole library of being in people's brains that we don't even recognize as simply a set of routines, habits, and biases, we think that's all there is. Sure, it may now be manifesting into something more quantifiable, but it's been with us for a long time.

Society, culture, this hierarchal and quasi-performative game we play, where we take on roles and portend certain things which cycle on and off, is a matrix. Any situation I would think where there is a center and then merchants and then banks and then institutions suddenly starts by the constellation of these things generating a thing we call reality, a thing we call time. I sound schizo, but I am speaking about something I am not parroting, it is a realization. Try living in the desert for a few days or the some wilderness in general and then come back to suburbs and the city.