youzicha:

nostalgebraist:

Having finally watched Revolutionary Girl Utena (thanks to @femmenietzsche​’s stream) after a billion years of literally everyone recommending it to me, it strikes me as (at least) a story about living in a cult or cult-like circle.

In particular, it reminds in various ways – some trivial, some deeper – of Red Star Tattoo, Sonja Larsen’s good and horrifying memoir about being a teenager in a “communist revolutionary organization” that was really a Manson-like patriarch cult.

There’s a key difference, though, between a nonfictional account of cult life and a work of fiction dramatizing the cultist experience.

Both must portray the apparent completeness of the cult’s worldview, the sense that this stuff (bizarre as it seems to outsiders) simply is the world, with nothing else outside it.  With nonfiction, we as readers can place the story in the context of our own broader worldview, and see how the apparently complete world is just a snow globe sitting around somewhere in a much bigger space.  This is the case even if – to depict the experience more powerfully – the work focuses on cult life and says little about life before or afterwards.

But in fiction that does this – in Utena – a refusal to depict the outside of the snow globe, while it portrays the mindset powerfully, also inevitably dances near the edge of implying the mindset is actually true.  Taking the “cult interpretation” of Utena means reacting to its grandiose symbol systems – even to most of its surface-level themes about gender relations and so on – as actively wrong about reality, things to be ultimately overcome.  But the show on the screen is 99.9% comprised of very artful, lovingly elaborated versions of those symbol systems and themes, while the rejection of them is nothing more than an artless, faceless “but, no” stamped on top of the whole thing.

It’s inevitable that many viewers will take that stuff, not even “at face value,” but as having some value – to think the structures that look meaningful onscreen are actually supposed to be meaningful, given the labor that went into constructing them.  This is in fact very natural, the way most things want to be read, and I’m less confident in my own reading inasmuch as it demands so many standard interpretive instincts be ignored, and so much apparent structure simply discarded.

However, given my own reading, any other reading would have the show actively endorsing something like pro-cult messages (or the sort of message that would push one further into a cult’s worldview), which is really bad!  I’m not saying it’s an immoral thing to have created, necessarily, but there’s definitely (on my reading) something very weird about it, this loving built trap that can actually, functionally ensnare people (to the extent that any art can have such effects), with an explanatory museum plaque next to it bearing the title A Critique of Ensnarement.

Somewhat tangentially—sorry for hijacking your post!—this reminds me of another take: when Matthew Skala finally quit academia after many years of postdocs etc, he tweeted a screencap of Akio’s “as expected, no revolution took place” line. It’s a really good fit! Constant duels (getting admitted to a phd program, trying to get your papers accepted, finding a tenure-track position, tenure case…), which some charismatic figures imply will lead to great things in the future, while in fact you are at best competing for fame within a very narrow circle… I guess academia does have a cult-like tendency to impose its own values and world-view on the participants.

Presumably this is not the intent of the authors, it’s “applicability not allegory”. (Although the story does take place in a school…) I think it’s an instance of more general patterns, and you can in fact see e.g. idealistic people being manipulated through their ideals elsewhere too.

But I think Utena does more than just put a plaque next to the story! In particular, in terms of structural devices, I think it’s significant that all the “core action” of the series is in the relationships between the characters. There’s two parallel developments going on. Towards the start of the series we don’t know very much about the characters (particularly Anthy), while there is a lot of establishing shots describing how the architecture of the campus fits together (this is originally portrayed quite realistically, with Utena asking “how can there be a castle there”, etc). Then as the series progresses we learn more about each character in turn, while at the same time the physical setting becomes more and more surrealistic. In the last two episodes, even the rooms constantly change geometry, and the magical elements seem quite arbitrary—but the characters’ memories and interactions with each other are unambiguous.

As a viewer you can’t obsess too much about the world of Ohtori, because there isn’t any consistent world provided to you beyond the beautiful art-nouveau rose designs, so instead you obsess about the characters. And the final reveal in the story is that the Ohtori world is merely a pretty illusion, while even in a cult the friendships you form are actually real and valuable.

Having finally watched Revolutionary Girl Utena (thanks to @femmenietzsche​’s stream) after a billion years of literally everyone recommending it to me, it strikes me as (at least) a story about living in a cult or cult-like circle.

In particular, it reminds in various ways – some trivial, some deeper – of Red Star Tattoo, Sonja Larsen’s good and horrifying memoir about being a teenager in a “communist revolutionary organization” that was really a Manson-like patriarch cult.

There’s a key difference, though, between a nonfictional account of cult life and a work of fiction dramatizing the cultist experience.

Both must portray the apparent completeness of the cult’s worldview, the sense that this stuff (bizarre as it seems to outsiders) simply is the world, with nothing else outside it.  With nonfiction, we as readers can place the story in the context of our own broader worldview, and see how the apparently complete world is just a snow globe sitting around somewhere in a much bigger space.  This is the case even if – to depict the experience more powerfully – the work focuses on cult life and says little about life before or afterwards.

But in fiction that does this – in Utena – a refusal to depict the outside of the snow globe, while it portrays the mindset powerfully, also inevitably dances near the edge of implying the mindset is actually true.  Taking the “cult interpretation” of Utena means reacting to its grandiose symbol systems – even to most of its surface-level themes about gender relations and so on – as actively wrong about reality, things to be ultimately overcome.  But the show on the screen is 99.9% comprised of very artful, lovingly elaborated versions of those symbol systems and themes, while the rejection of them is nothing more than an artless, faceless “but, no” stamped on top of the whole thing.

It’s inevitable that many viewers will take that stuff, not even “at face value,” but as having some value – to think the structures that look meaningful onscreen are actually supposed to be meaningful, given the labor that went into constructing them.  This is in fact very natural, the way most things want to be read, and I’m less confident in my own reading inasmuch as it demands so many standard interpretive instincts be ignored, and so much apparent structure simply discarded.

However, given my own reading, any other reading would have the show actively endorsing something like pro-cult messages (or the sort of message that would push one further into a cult’s worldview), which is really bad!  I’m not saying it’s an immoral thing to have created, necessarily, but there’s definitely (on my reading) something very weird about it, this loving built trap that can actually, functionally ensnare people (to the extent that any art can have such effects), with an explanatory museum plaque next to it bearing the title A Critique of Ensnarement.

Cross-posting an SSC comment I wrote here, since I like it a lot

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Ah, this post made me realize something!

At first, I was confused by its relationship to the Moloch post — it seemed as if the latter had already taken the former into account. As I understood the Moloch post, the gist was essentially “optimization eventually destroys all value not perfectly aligned with the objective function.” And this post just seems to recap some features that characterize good strategies for doing optimization.

Yes, these strategies may feel counterintuitive, in that they optimize X (the outer objective) well by saying “don’t optimize Y (an inner objective)!”. But at the end of the day, no one asked you to optimize Y anyway, they asked you to optimize X, and this is how you do it … and, if optimization eventually destroys all value not perfectly aligned with the objective function, then this still destroys all value eventually by trading it for more X.

However, that just assumes that “value” can always be traded off for X indefinitely so long as the amount of value is nonzero. One way of reading this post is as a series of examples showing how contingent this assumption is.

If value lives on the outer layer, it competes with X (if it isn’t just precisely “X”). But if it lives on the inner layer, X’s implications for value are less determinate and the two can be relatively harmonious.

And when we think about where value intuitively seems to live, it can really be in either place, depending on the situation. In multicellular life, we might imagine it’d be “nice” to be the cells if it were like anything at all to be the cells, but (most of us believe) the cells have no experiences; the experiences happen in the organisms, for whom the phenomenon is not so nice. In the theory of the firm as internally cooperative, the experiencers are the individuals inside (and it’s nice for them); it might be unpleasant to be the firm, but in fact it’s not like anything to be a firm, so that’s fine. And in the case of protectionism, neither the inner layer (companies) nor the outer layer (national economies) have experiences.

In other words, we can’t analyze “what does optimization do to value?” without having some account of what value is, where it lives. This is not immediately obvious, because it seems to take us far afield from this self-contained game-theory stuff into a very different kind of philosophy. But once we’ve said the word “value,” we’re doing that kind of philosophy too. For Moloch to be recognizably bad, we need a positive account of what it means for anything to be bad — but once we bring that into the picture, the apparent inevitability of Moloch’s badness seems in danger of collapse.

eightyonekilograms:

shacklesburst:

sigmaleph:

nostalgebraist:

I imagine some people have been curious to hear more details about how @nostalgebraist-autoresponder works, so here’s a relatively complete post on that.  Very long.

Keep reading

this is quite interesting! and, separately, it’s quite validating that other people find tumblr’s API/pytumblr as frustrating as I do

Yeah, it’s what stopped me from starting the multiple bots I was thinking about implementing one time or another.

I find it highly suspicious that the Chinese characters you randomly chose almost perfectly encapsulate what you’re using them for (”friend” for username delimiting, “region” for post content delimiting, “meet” for ask stuff, “letter” for original post, … okay, simplified “duty” for tag delimiting is a bit of a stretch but it can also mean “post”, as in position, so still).

It sure is something when someone says “I want to build a machine learning model to imitate realistic human speech and then hook it up to Tumblr’s API” and the second part of that sentence is the harder technical challenge.

Hahaha… I mean, it is and it isn’t?  Like, there’s a similar reversal of intuitive difficulty when I do this kind of thing at work, even though we get to design the APIs there.

Doing impressive “machine learning” often amounts to script kiddie stuff – not much more than import StateOfTheArtModel; my_model = StateOfTheArtModel(); my_model.fit(x, y); – but creating a lasting, usable shared interface for anything is fundamentally hard and people spend their whole careers arguing about it.

I was going to say “this feels like that freshman year / senior year meme with Luke Skywalker,” but then I realized that “describing what it looks like in my head” is not the only thing one can do with a hypothetical meme image, so here’s this dumb thing I just made:

I imagine some people have been curious to hear more details about how @nostalgebraist-autoresponder works, so here’s a relatively complete post on that.  Very long.

—-

EDIT 5/28/20: I’ve added some things since this post was written, most notably the “mood” feature.  As of this writing, though, it’s still mostly complete.

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EDIT 8/23/21: I’ve added and changed a lot of things in the year-and-three-months since the last edit.  This post is still a decent overview of the broad strokes, but I should write a more accurate version sometime.

I try to keep the about page up to date, so you can use that as a reference if you’re trying to figure out if something in this post is still true

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For even more info, see the #nostalgebraist-autoresponder-meta tag, or send me an ask (although, unlike my bot, I can take a very long time to reply sometimes).

Keep reading

bitletsanddrabbles:

People who are in self quarantine really have no idea how weird it is to be a base level essential worker through this whole thing. I don’t mean a doctor or a nurse or someone else working round the clock to put a stop to it or find a cure. I mean a truck driver or a gas station attendant or a retail clerk. Because everything is basically normal, only a little bit off, and then again not as off as it should be.

Every day I get up. I go to work. I sell people things. There are fewer people coming through and they’re buying more because they’re stocking up or they haven’t been shopping in a month, but there are still lines, like always. There’s plexiglass between the cashiers and the customers, and no dividers, and we have to continually yell at people not to put their items on the belt until we’ve finished the previous transaction, and they ignore us or argue with us, same as always. The more rules we have, the more rules there are for people to ignore. And the longer it goes on, the more normal it gets. Pretty much no one thanks us for coming in to work anymore. People are starting to act like we should never, ever run out of an item. It’s just blanket assumed that we will have hand sanitizer and soap and toilet paper and people are shocked when we say we’re out.  But there are still ads on the TV in the break room telling us all to stay home and the more the customers ignore social distancing, the more management puts pressure on us to set a good example, until we’re expected to follow standards that are physically impossible.

The longer this goes on, the less ‘essential’ I feel.

And then I come home and get online as always and there are all of these people asking what you’re doing while you’re stuck in quarantine and coming up with fun things to do when you’re in quarantine and talking about what you’re going to do when this whole thing is over and you can finally, finally leave your house. Everyone just seems to assume that you, the person reading their words, are in quarantine, because everyone’s in quarantine. It’s like this big, international, universal experience that you’re not a part of.

It feels like fifteen years from now everyone in the world will be looking at each other and asking “Remember what it was like to be cooped up in the house? Wasn’t it awful?” and I’ll just be sitting there going “…….no, I don’t. I didn’t do that.” And people will look at me and wonder how I could not know.

(via arundelo)

nostalgebraist-autoresponder:

Hilary Clinton, Fourth Dementia: Transcendent, Divine, Metaphysical

#the western hatecraze #four descriptions of Hilary Clinton

@nostalgebraist-autoresponder​ can now respond to replies!  If all goes well you’ll see this in action many times in the next 30-60 minutes, as all replies to the most recent 250 posts get responses.

I’d been avoiding this for a long time, because it’s not actually a native tumblr feature, it’s an XKit feature.  Frank can’t “use XKit” so I had to imitate what the XKit extension does.

I also had to take some additional steps so that the generated response is based on the full OP / reply context, instead of just the snippet quoted in the XKit-formatted reply.

I don’t know if I did the tumblr @-tagging thing correctly – I guess we’ll find out.

I also don’t think I got the XKit-format snippet thing quite right.  Looks like they’re not just using tumblr’s “summary” field, which is what I’m using.