Always beware the "centre-left" menace. At least "right" types won't bother hiding their hatred, saving their dogwhistles for broadly-intelligent but politically-incompetent "useful idiots".
It's just a test.
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Always beware the "centre-left" menace. At least "right" types won't bother hiding their hatred, saving their dogwhistles for broadly-intelligent but politically-incompetent "useful idiots".
If you wanna get REALLY "reductionistic": biological stuff's mainly just an elaboration of chemical and physical stuff. Any biological function surely fulfils a more fundamental physical function, but we don't need our present biologies to do that while still having human powers or "better" ones.
You'll likely have to abandon fashionable beliefs if you haven't already (e.g. the neuroscientific mereological fallacy). Contrarian liars pick and run with some of 'em, saying crap even Dawkins wouldn't say in public. "We're mainly just gene vessels and reproduction machines! The rest is noise!"
It's much more ambitious than a handful of laughable studies. If you're serious, you'll also be reviewing philosophical controversies and combing through tons of data relevant to all that. Tip of the iceberg: www.cambridge.org/core/journal... See also: "biological reductionisms", "gene's eye view".
I'm late, but if you want what actually matters for rhetoric, politics and overall intellectual culture (which affects science whether we like it or not), you should look at the blogs and books weaponizing this stuff. The "manosphere" has mountains of this stuff, built up over a while.
Recreational drugs were already only seldom great because of powerful assholes like that, and now some ascendant TESCREAL-ish elites want to worsen it even more, monopsonising the best of the supply and leaving the worst for us just like they do with consumer tech. "Nature" means ELITE PLANNING.
They ruin transhumanist solutions to personal and political problems on purpose, all while they have intellectual stooges who circle around the Pinkers of the world and spam about "human nature" as if those Pinkers weren't "biologically determinist" enough. They don't want the poor to escape. EVER.
"No escape!" They hate anyone else's independence from them wherever it doesn't result in those others getting hurt (e.g. "they did it to themselves!") or worse. And they'll NEVER admit it's their fault and their imposition unless it hurts us more.
Lotta people look to science in the same way religious folks look to priests and guru-seekers look to philosophers: "this is how it REALLY is! this is what people REALLY want and do! this is what we REALLY SHOULD do!" Elites and elitists know to stop potential usurpers getting the "wrong" ideas.
These days?! That's been the rule at least by the backdoor for at least 150 years! Many of the most ambitious scientists have had broad political ambitions (e.g. Eugenics). And political happenings and imperatives affect research questions and implicit metaphysics in scientific paradigms.
As ambitious creeps themselves, they only ever respected other ambitious creeps, including those who wanted to focus on more direct methods of influencing (like trolling) more than building tools to support that. Social media is a giant experiment and recruiting ground run for and by them.
In fact, the few who ruined the internet are the most free bottlenecks of influence over the designs of most of the services offered through it: political and industrial elites. They were never just giving most of us what we really wanted: we PUT UP with this! We're not their most valued customers.
It's why trolling, copyright issues, spurious reports and hostile web design will always be in our faces. They KNOW about the bad actors, and they KNOW they instead hurt non-conformists and people who aren't assholes but still want what tech preachers and marketing folks promised they'd get.
I don't merely agree! Assholes designed much of the surface web chiefly to enable other assholes. Ambitious malice is one of the only motivators allowed to be compelling, because if you're good and you give people independence and cool stuff, elites hurt ya, mainly indirectly. They can't stand that.
At minimum, you can justify pluralism well by saying that it's just what works at least for now, given the data, vocab and conceptual tools researchers like to use. But why can't we unify them? Even reductionism also really helps when it's done right, as it can help with details of interventions.
It's also extremely politically convenient, particularly when those non-technical people are themselves political influencers. I wish that more honest people appreciated just how intrinsically and instrumentally satisfying it is: in the wrong hands, it's vile, but in the right hands, it's awesome!
Exactly. We all saw it when "cancel culture" only emboldened and strengthened "rightist"'s political posture. All planned. They knew it would REALLY work after 2015 (e.g. Gamergate). Only some poor "rightists" got hurt, while the big guys are now ascendant elites and their foremost rhetoricians.
I still try to talk to scientists because I know they can come up with a priori arguments that aren't total garbage. I can independently verify those. But with much else, I'd have to do a lot and talk to the right people. Billions of people are even less well-placed to do so than me!
You know how sad it is. We didn't HAVE to care until some sneering perverts told us to. Any legit resistance likely won't be organized, and it also won't likely involve centers of power that the big guys and their lackeys seized or built. Not much we can do besides persisting happily despite them.
I REALLY don't wanna look into that.
Remember the Church kid-lovers? Remember the white-collar crimes so many upper class folks get away with? THEY get what they told us we can't and shouldn't do, regardless of what we want. And they make and break new taboos, keeping their lackeys on a treadmill. There's always new blood to feast on.
As for the MLM-ness itself: they want "useful idiot" crazies to outdo each other while they sneak off and benefit. Notice how only leaders get to make and break taboos. Remember that O'Neill dude who complained about a drag queen yet joked that some pro-Harris dudes would be his concubines?
Why else are they propped up so much? If you're some powerful asshole and you want them gone, you can eradicate plenty of them. They did that with extremely dissident minority movements. Instead, mainstream freakouts about them give them street cred, especially among nerds who want something edgy.
Most popularized politics works like this. "Fascists" are mainly innovators in that, and that's the purpose that remaining and ascendant elitists have for it. "Fascists" use political, economic and intellectual support left for them at various distances, so they're more mainstream than they act.
Same here. I even try to steel-man people's points. There's only so much they can support and develop their arguments within any short section of text, or even within the same distinct article.
All a crock of shit! With it becoming a stronger and more reversible possibility, and with more people looking to do something adventurous, why wouldn't MORE want to give it a go? Guess who'll get in the way and make it more difficult for most people. "Human nature" is more than ever ELITIST DECREE.
Take the trans case. We HAVE the tech to change our bodies very profoundly, and with gene therapies on the horizon, "dude chromosomes" will matter ever less. But still the liars crow that we'll never change the relevant "fundamental" aspects of ourselves, even alleging that we'd hardly want to!
All ideological. Psyops are real and effective even if only as "performatively repeat this!" imperatives and restrictions of info. Realism is explicitly and implicitly conflated with pessimism, itself largely just elitist bragging about how they restricted our choices but with plausible deniability.
Crap. I mean that "You probably won't find a society whose main purpose ISN'T to maximally torture the underclasses for the crime of persisting independently of elites."
Are bystanders even a thing any more? I don't even think most people are so ignorant that they don't know about the intensifying mass torture. And there's no big secrets to getting clout. We can easily know where to find people who fall for popular bullshit, and even manufacture charisma.
You probably won't find a society whose main purpose is to maximally torture the underclasses for the crime of persisting independently of elites. If elites won't "fix" them, they "must suffer and die". Even "intelligence" is often a codeword for capacity to sustainably organize this torture.
Worth reminding: almost no popularized political forces want to sustainably help out the masses. At best, they'll screw us further down the line! They won't tolerate anyone's independence from them and their twisted rituals dressed up as "business" and "politics". "Conform or suffer!"
That's not enough. A sufficient chunk of the British public needs to organize against them and not let the assholes above them trap them when they push some filthy laws and enforcement through anyway. Don't forget that some of the public will always cheer it on: "haha, they deserve the torture!"
It only takes ambitious political figures and nearby nerds for the slop to re-emerge: today's "fascisms", the "intellectual dark web", the "human biological diversity" crap, the new Eugenics, TESCREAL. Largely-planned socioeconomic crises like "austerity" and the COVID-19 response give them excuses.
The crazy modern, "scientific", "historically-informed" roots of it are mainly "pragmatic" distillations of Enlightenment intellectual trends plus mysticized ecology. It's dubbed spiritual and scientific at once. University discourse has long given a home to the germs of it, waiting to spread.
Sadly, that's why assholes like that are actually VERY likeable among folks with lotsa political influence. Those people calling 'em smart are usually the same old bosses plus some ascendant elites. Why do you think they always allowed "fascism" despite the screaming about it? It's a false underdog.
Not a uniquely "leftist" disease. They just used "cool" parts of ruling ideology as at least a smokescreen for power-snatching. They made it seem "for the people" and then catered mainly to themselves: loot the place, hurt the "idiots", scram with the goods.
Plenty ultra-elitists come from the "left". Mussolini at least had Marxist sympathies. Some Fabians were into Eugenics. They often act like they're so "pragmatic" and/or pro-"productive/working people", but they always saw themselves as gods among rats like every other politically ambitious type.
If we aren't already "machines" which they design and give purposes to, they'll try to make sure we are. It's one reason why Eugenics appealed to them so much: "we can self-direct evolution!"
You're right that in the sense I used "artificial", humans are also artificial: manmade. But perhaps more importantly, they're not yet man-designed, at least as much as machines. Much of today's ideology involves ignoring that gap when talking about the poor, because again, why would elitists care?
In ordinary language, if we call something a mind, we're talking about a psychological faculty. Computer science helps with resolving patterns in how we use our faculties to manipulate things we can symbolically represent, though not exactly HOW we do any of that, or what "thinking" "REALLY" means.
Perfect fit for ruling-class mythology, or at least the parts they give to the ambitious nerds they wanna audition. Should I characterize your "Being" concept as really meaning *persisting*?
They also have properties which many consider counterintuitive, and we didn't even know they existed before modern scientific advances. It's one of the most salient intellectual triumphs under "capitalist" ruling classes, who made sure that "enlightened scientists" were on their side.
It doesn't matter to elitists, who can then say "see, it's THAT, not our fault!" when more than one person has a stubborn problem. Genes fit well as "THAT": they reflect stubborn traits, and differences and changes in them are causal bottlenecks respectively in development and evolution.
Essentialism mainly capitalizes on seemingly successful reduction: "you might as well, since it's close enough". Most approaches to ignore "noise" often cut out real details limited in scale, leaving signals of relatively constant things. e.g. look at moving averages. That "noise" can matter.
Many ambitious nerds know how important reductionism is, since they're already drawing analogies as both their work and their favorite ideologues encourage them to. And so do those who wanna engineer intellectual trends to influence all the "THIS IS WHAT YOU ARE" screeching.
Main problem: they rarely do reductionism correctly. e.g. they'll often practically terminate it at genes when any schmuck knows we can drill right down to physics, and beyond if physicalism isn't a correct bet. Good reductionism is one way to get legit scientific "master keys": first principles.
We can speak of functions in the sense that in a set of circumstances, doing X reliably leads to Z, perhaps more so than doing Y would. Thankfully, it's not controversial that such functions can transcend any one organism. Orthodox evolution scholars already talk about inclusive fitness.
These life functions aren't commonplace across the universe and often only occur over an individual's life very sparingly, but they're both straightforward iterative developments and aggregations of abiotic functions. It's only special from a physics standpoint because it's rare and often robust.
Yes, that means going near some pretty scary and ambitious nerds who did plenty interdisciplinary research and "noticed patterns". It's not just the "IDW", HBD, manosphere and anti-"woke" folks, though they're the ascendant examples now. e.g. "Centrists" and Marxists do it too!
On the general subject, researchers need to evaluate popular and politicized science works much more closely and carefully. I know it won't get rid of liars, but it will help to deal with their current lies. Otherwise, you get nasty politics imported into science, not just through govt means.
Most services given to the majority of people are being destroyed on purpose, with the industries behind them being radically redesigned to accommodate that if not outright destroyed. Look at what governments did to the hospitality industries during the pandemic which they worsened.
Can't say Blair was just the British Bush since there was more than the Iraq mess, but why do people think he was sincerely "left"? Unless the "left" really was that awful, I just don't see how!
I agree. We can at least to identify positive correlation structure in what people honestly and reliably count as merit for at least a minute a week, but we must beware how ideologists used to, currently and will twist both people's shared values and any efforts to figure them out. Not easy!
Why would it matter for them? They're mostly just assholes who deal with us distantly through paperwork and computers. They care more about their access to manufactured fantastical crap than us having anything good. They can get a computer to do enough of what they want - we're just punching bags.
If we're "just machines", then we don't have psychologies, and we only just react to stimuli as machines do. But we don't. And strictly-speaking, machines are artificial, while workers aren't. We can draw analogies, but most elitists don't care about the limits of those when talking about us.
Exactly, they're not special in any way they tell us they are. Even when they say we're not special as a species, they still say at least they and/or their living idols are better since they at least offer a new light on politically-incorrect info! They're actually not deeply dissident at all.
They couldn't even use the wars and the rationing to properly extinguish them, let alone the "austerity" they made happen since the USSR began to fall in the 70s and died in the 90s. The worst elitists HATE this, and say it's a sign we're going "backwards"!
And they pretend that the shallowest dissidents who built mountains of evidence distantly prepared to trap large portions of their audiences are the ones who are getting "canceled". They never were. The homeless, the nomadic and the disabled have almost always been worse off all the time!
Only those who repeat the lines and push mass ritual sadism the most are deemed to "think (properly)", though they never call it that, instead hiding it behind a smug "realist", "scientific" ideology that screams "scientifically, you're either with us or stupid".
Our failure to do this is why most AIs today are only like humans in superficial ways. Few want to make something that has most of a typical human's psychological powers. They don't even explicitly appreciate our powers, even though they use them in everyday life and at work!
But "thinking" seldom had a person-independent meaning before today's "naturalist" animism. We can try to decide what it means for something to think as a comprehensive extension of the usual meaning, which involves the use of demonstrated psychological powers. We partially do this with animals.
It only "shouldn't" exist by certain hasty applications of principles. There's no hard barrier that stops life forming from abiotic matter. It's mainly a matter of structure with varying and invariant parts, which fits the concept of life. Beware any attempts to change the use of the concept.
Small wonder that nerds who may or may not be in on this awful joke end up going panpsychist.
They talk of purposes where there are merely tendencies and patterns. They say that machines literally think, even though they only know what it means for a human to think. They act like it means the same as merely deciding or even just reacting in a flexible way. They LOVE this crazed animism.
It's a nasty habit to break: it makes no literal sense to say the universe is dead, since what's dead was once alive. When philosophers and scientists make mistakes like this, we still take them seriously, sometimes even steel-manning their points. We don't call out their misuse of language enough.
Now that enough of us see their scams coming, they moved to the "give up lol" "realist" bullshit which powers loads of anti-"woke" sentiment and more. Dissidents and nonconformists get hurt as usual, and it builds an illusory choice between old bait and new bait. "Pick your flavor!"
And you don't need secret knowledge to do that, though most tech manufacturers (like all elitists) wanna make it secret. They tell us they can help us, and then they ruin what they let us have and build. It worked, and we took so much bait: smartphones, welfare states, going to universities.
Beyond just means to communicate, some people have means to utterly demolish what the assholes tell us is "inevitable". Some even say we wanted their shit, but if you give any ordinary demand anyone makes, someone could at least make a VR machine that satisfies someone in the same way.
Gene therapies are already becoming popular, so now they'll move to "it was the initial developmental effects, stupid" and "if anyone knows what to do, it's some genetics experts". It's a scream of "you can't do shit, and if anyone can, it's us".
So they make shit up about bottlenecks of causal influence, functions serving other functions and more. Whatever doesn't fit the picture is "just noise", but that it's largely the same "noise" they tell us not to care about. All of this to sidestep responsibility until it's too late.
They ensured that no competent and sustainably masses-friendly "left" alternative ever broke out. There's pieces of it ripe for assembling (e.g. Wittgenstein), and the means of practically showing why things like "reactionary" "realism" fail (e.g. transhumanism), but few will ever pursue those well.
Said powerful people know what these cheerleading assholes are good for, and have given THEM the intellectual hegemony in crucial ways. They boosted the dulling of the "left", which itself partly explains "dialectics" and Chomsky's wacky but intellectually fashionable stances on "mind" and language.
The word games have long been so elaborate that they build rhetorical foundations on mountains of numbers: "scientifically, you have to protect the best!" They've always had it easy, not just because powerful people maintain most of the "harsh realities" they want us to "notice".
I wanna emphasize that it's not just a physical violence thing. They're also doing this with intellectual institutions: despite the suppression from Trump's admin, many will survive, but under new management and with a new zeitgeist planned decades before the Trump admin's specific actions were.
I think the more visible parts of "fascist" takeover don't directly involve much change among higher elites. Those guys know to play all big sides, like an investment portfolio. Much of the change is in ascendant elites, and even more so their lackeys (analogous to a company's middle management).
Not just a reason, but also a means. That creepy data harvesting they got their nerds doing was never just for tailoring ads. And they've always wanted a disconnect, excluding their control over our lives. They HATE it when we're independent.
I'm late to this, but I've been screaming that it's all on purpose for a while now. I see this as similar to the planned fate of welfare states: the demolition of institutions made to bait "the masses" and "leftists". They wanna focus on other weapons beyond philosophy. longer.blue/posts/u3bpmr...
And what exactly is Andy Marks calling "crazy leftist positions" besides "defund the police"? Does his line in the sand drift "rightwards"? Scratch a "centrist" and even a Nazi would shudder at the asshole you have to deal with.
"Right" types only barely care about having any more credibility than "leftists". They WANT the rot! So with such a weakened and sold-out "left", they have it easy attracting aggro nerds. Only many ordinary folks and the most viciously dissident people hate "rightists", and they'll get attacked.
Why can't he just shut up? Any horrible "left" ideas on Twitter had precursors around long before that, and they didn't need Twitter to spread. Does he think that "right" types will burn themselves out and lose their manufactured "underdog" status, so all the cool tryhards will go "left" again?!
Instead, it got poisoned, then elites cut it when they could find an excuse like "austerity". All planned at various distances. Elites could, if they wanted, help a buncha technicians to do good work for all, like building sustainably supportive economies. But they shriek at the mere suggestion.
There were and still are leftists who didn't want people to have to put up with that, let alone go through hell to barely mitigate some of the effects. They wanted independence. But too many before us took the bait. We got welfare states and cool tech, but none were built to keep working for us.
More generally, how about backing programs which actually help anyone who laments their both their population-typical limits and any disabilities they have to be able to do more things, including looking like that? Can't sensibly ask that of a movement designed to fail those people.
Related: many popularizers of principles dubbed scientific say that science is also about predicting and about fitting useful models to observations we deem reliable, not just about uncovering reality. We know the process is iterative, too.
I'd make many related distinctions. There's: - assumptions common to all good science - fashionable "science" assumptions - psychological assumptions - assumptions added in good psychology atop good science ... All somewhat normative and controversial. Gets messy easily. Just gotta cut confusion.
And actually, they kinda DO want cultural and ethnic dominance. It's just not much along traditional "racial" lines. Elites basically see themselves as a diverging subspecies, above the "subhumans": us. And they're profoundly modern about it, as Fascism always was. "Tradition"'s for suckers.
I'd also motivate philsci considerations with counterintuitive cases and radically contrarian proposals. Plenty of inspiration for that around: crank blogs, scary philosophy papers, pissed off engineers... all the way to "critical metascience".
That classic never lets you down. Or gives you up.
Politics, politics, politics. I would emphasize the importance of political processes in science. It's not just that research might be profoundly biased, but that good science always needs political defense against those who'd ruin it: not just profs with an ax to grind, but also govts and moneymen.
And forget justice. Most elites either have some distance between them and their violence, or will make some when shit hits the fan as planned. And there's no proportionate retribution. If you wanna hurt them, then persist despite them. They HATE that. Independence is verboten!
They deserve WORSE. They can get away with loads, which favors the growth of ruthless sadism. That's amplified by millions of lackeys who'll sacrifice themselves as long as they think someone else will get hurt worse. Any genuine dissidents are probably either tired or underground.
It bleakly mirrors the time when many socialists around WW1 pushed scammy nationalism to support that war. If you REALLY wanna support people when elites want us to slaughter each other, you'll help to pull us out of their manufactured wars and fight on our own independent side.
It's more false opposition crap. As with all politics, all popular sides not only have assholes with a strong intellectual and political resemblance to Nazis, but rarely plan to help the vast majority sustainably. So many anti-"elite" "dissidents" either don't get it or aren't sincerely dissident.
Maybe I shoulda been clearer and said "Euro elites ARE "fascists" working with Russian "fascists"". They were never so different.
I'm quickly losing sight of what you're trying to say. I bet we agree on a lot of points that are much more controversial among other people, but we just don't use the same words.
Why do you bring up borders like that? You think they can be a nationalist, maybe somewhat internationalist means of defense against a global elite? Guess who poisoned so much to make that look like a good option when it isn't and never has been! Who do you think even draws the borders?
In fact, Russia is one of those false oppositions to actual Euro and Anglosphere plans, similar to much of Islamism. e.g. the US government meddled in post-Soviet Russian elections. Much of both was to finish off the commies. They're all largely on the same team, but they'll never tell us that.
The wars hide their alliances. They get THE MASSES (especially the young men) to kill each other, while they're much more united against us. They pretend they don't want that, but they're happy to roll over for Putin and friends. So many assholes "play all sides", like in WW1 and WW2.
I bet lotsa smug Euro and Anglosphere elites see this as "those silly weird eastern Euros having a brother war with tools WE let 'em have". They don't care about Ukraine as a whole. They only care about Ukrainian elites and maybe their tech industry. It's another military base to them.