this is the funniest cover ive ever seen, its like “uh oh! brendan fraser forgot to turn off the oven and also killed someone”
why … would they do this
when then could just do stuff like
or
These are good covers IMO! Arguably better than some of the other editions (especially Dover Thrift Editions)! They are also really cheap books because Wordsworth Classics uses “low-quality paper” and doesn’t put a bunch of essays and stuff in the back
I thought you were my friend, Wordsworth Classics
Dave Sim is not into pegging, thank you very much!!!!
(from Cerebus #273)
is Dave Sim aware of the existence of the prostate
I assure you, many boys being fucked in the ass welcome themselves to many, many orgasms
this is literally “have you considered that sex between a man and a woman with the same rights as him is INHERENTLY GAY? because once you think women are equal to men you might as just ADMIT YOU’RE PRETTY MUCH GAY. also the biggest threat to society is the ‘homomaniacs’ insisting that EVERYTHING IS GAY’”
I have seen people making fun of this argument but I thought they were strawmanning.
it’s ‘roles’, not ‘rights’. and destroying gender differentiation, whether or not it makes sense to say it’d be gay per se, would make probably a majority of the population miserable and unsatisfied
there are in fact parts of the country where (because words are more legible than actions and no one will or can say anything else) the default assumption is that gender roles are outdated and men and women both are and ought to be the same. and the few people who are clueless or lazy enough to listen to the words instead of the actions end up burning out and going hard in the other direction, because that shit made them miserable.
Good point about the rights vs. roles thing but uh
“whether or not it makes sense to say it’d be gay per se, would make probably a majority of the population miserable and unsatisfied”
What do the two parts of this phrase have to do with one another?
[in the locker room]
A: dude, B is fucking gay
B: fuck you
C: excuse me, but whether or not it makes sense to say that B is gay per se, he probably makes a majority of the population miserable and unsatisfied
You’re just running up against the awkward fact that you’re adjacent to a bunch of people who basically agree with Dave Sim.
I mean, I know, but there’s “agree with Dave Sim that perfect interchangeability between the genders is not a good goal” (reasonable, especially because I’m not sure how many people really believe in perfect interchangeability anyway), and “agree with Dave Sim that ‘perfect interchangeability between the genders’ is totally gaaaaay, and that this is important.”
Of course there’s an obvious left/right aspect to the way I posted this to make fun of it – realistically speaking I probably wouldn’t have done quite the same thing with an equally silly left-wing argument, and maybe that fact riles some people up. But I don’t think it’s too hard to see that whether or not this passage is arguing for a good conclusion, it’s a terrible argument, and maybe that is a good reason to avoid defending it (with friends like these, who needs enemies)
if you are talking about severnayazemla’s argument, you didn’t get it because you left off a sentence. “and destroying gender differentiation, whether or not it makes sense to say it’d be gay per se, would make probably a majority of the population miserable and unsatisfied” the argument: destroying gender differentiation may or may not be “gay”, but destroying gender differentiation would make most people miserable and unsatisfied.
like when you start shitting on people, appealing to their sneerability, and get-a-load-of-this-guying because you didn’t read a sentence that was right there, it is time to consider whether you’re being a dick.
and the obvious left/right aspect would be that, were this a left-wing argument, right-wingers suspect that you would not be saying “whether or not the conclusion is good you should obviously agree the argument is terrible and thus you should not engage with the idea”, you would be saying “whether or not the argument is terrible, you should obviously agree the conclusion is good and thus you should engage with the idea.”
they’d appear to be right in this suspicion. like, that is pretty much exactly the thing you did when talking about The Social Justice: it didn’t matter that the argument was terrible, and terrible in a way that dave sim never approached, the core idea was still good and worthy of acceptance. it’s fair to be riled up over that or call you a hypocrite, because you are being a hypocrite about it.
I didn’t leave off a sentence, I left off a phrase. This did not change anything; the thing you call “the argument” is precisely what I took myself to be responding to.
“The argument” has the form “X, while it may not be Y, is at least Z [a bad thing].” Where Dave Sim said “X is Y, and that’s bad.”
My objection was that Y and Z don’t have much to do with one another, and so this isn’t any kind of defense of Dave Sim. He’s saying he, like Sim, disapproves of X. But he disapproves of it for a different reason, and while we could potentially have a nice conversation about that, it has nothing to do with the reason I found the original quote risible.
In particular, note that “Y and Z have nothing to do with one another” is an equally good objection to any statement of the form “[something], while it may not be Y, is at least Z.” You don’t have to include the particular X to see the inherent problem with this sort of remark. Here’s a crude example with less controversial (and more clearly unrelated) terms inserted:
DS: “murder is bad, because it causes oranges to ripen less quickly.”
NB: “what the fuck [posts screencap of this statement on tumblr]”
SV: “murder, while it may not cause orange to ripen less quickly per se, involves the destruction of human life.”
NB: “wait. That isn’t a defense of the original statement at all. If you have typed the phrase ‘while it may not cause oranges to ripen less quickly per se, involves the destruction of human life,’ something has gone wrong, because the two parts of that have nothing to do with one another.”
BA: “but NB, you left off a phrase! SV’s entire statement was ‘murder, while it may not cause oranges to ripen less quickly per se, involves the destruction of human life.’ That’s different.”
NB: “But not any better. My point was that whatever noun phrase goes before that ‘while’ there, the sentence is not going to make sense. As in fact it doesn’t, when the noun phrase happens to be ‘murder.’”
As for the social justice thing, I may well have done what you accuse me of doing (I certainly don’t think I’m above that), but I can’t think of a specific example. I have defended “social justice” ideas by saying that although there are bad arguments for them, there are also good arguments for them; I have also repeatedly criticized social justice arguments I think are bad. I’m not seeing the inconsistency here. Do you have a specific example of something I’ve said that you think is analogous?
Your defense is very reasonable and not what I read in your original post at all; “What do the two parts of this phrase have to do with each other” reads far more easily to me as “the statement YOU made is incoherent” than it does as “Your statement may be valid but is not related to Dave Sim’s.” Even knowing that was what you intended, it still reads easier the other way.
And for SJ… you’ve repeated bad arguments for them, such as saying that “privilege” means and is correct in meaning that the difference between what a white man gets and what a black man gets is like the difference between temperature on Earth and on the Sun; this was a terrible argument and was wrong and when people were like “okay what the fuck” you just kind of brushed them off as only differing on details and not really impacting the validity of the point.
I guess I’m having a hard time understanding what you originally imagined I was saying. I said “what do the two parts of this phrase have to do with one another?” and, in fact, the two parts of the phrase did not have much to do with one another. And this was a relevant fact, as I detailed above.
It seems on like your original reading, I was saying “Y and Z have nothing to do with one another, so therefore X isn’t Z.” Not only does does this not make sense (as you said above), it’s also hard to imagine why I might have thought it made sense. If I wanted to argue that X isn’t Z, why would I have said “Y and Z have nothing to do with one another,” when Y is clearly irrelevant to the “is X Z?” question? Why would I have not outright stated “X isn’t Z”? It’s the kind of bad argument which is not only wrong, but which doesn’t even have a plausible line of thought behind it.
And if there’s not even a plausible (but wrong) line of thought behind it … then why is it plausible that I might have meant that? I’m not a Markov chain. My statements at least reflect lines of thought, if not always correct ones.
On SJ: that’s very much not what I said. I said I disagreed with the “temperature of the earth vs. the sun” idea in the very same post in which I brought it up (”I don’t think it’s that stark”).
I very clearly brought up this idea in a merely descriptive fashion – I was simply saying that it was something that some people think (”In some versions of SJ … “). The reason I brought it up was to explain to bgaesop why he gets such intensely negative responses from some people when he uses phrases like “female privilege.” (The broader point was that “privilege” refers to the difference in the mean rather than any more specific difference, so unless you think women are favored over men in the mean, “women have female privilege” is an incorrect use of the privilege terminology. I brought in the “temperature of the sun” idea to explain why some people would view “women are favored over men in the mean” as not just incorrect, but ludicrous. Which some people in fact do, and I think I am right about why they do; meanwhile, I explicitly said that I do not agree with these people.)
There seems to be a pattern here in which you round off my statements to worse versions of themselves that are also more politically extreme or partisan/in-groupish. A while ago you said that you could tell when a topic has become a culture war issue because all of a sudden political partisans start lying about what people on “the other side” said. I’m not saying you’re lying here (I think you are just misreading and/or misremembering), but if you want to continue talking to me about this stuff, I think you should consider whether you are doing the culture war thing and reading (and later remembering) my statements as caricatures of themselves.
dave sim’s claim that nondifferentiation of roles is harmful doesn’t rely entirely on whether it’s gay, as is shown by the fact that he stops talking about homosexuality somewhere in the second paragraph. what i said is that it doesn’t necessarily matter that he thinks it’s gay, because he thinks it’s harmful, and he’s right. i am agreeing with dave sim. i also agree with hitler that smoking is bad for health and interstate systems are useful things for countries to have. if i thought smoking was good and interstate systems were bad, i could quote hitler saying the opposite and go “haha look, hitler thinks this thing……..u dont want to agree with hitler, now do u?????”, if i were a dickless shitmaggot
everyone here agrees that there are some people who strongly identify with a gender that doesn’t match their biological sex at birth. but the implication of that is that there are probably people who strongly identify with a gender that does match their biological sex at birth, and i’m not sure if it’s even possible for anyone to say that without being considered a ‘wacky crackpot’.
DS: “murder is bad, because it causes oranges to ripen less quickly. it also causes the destruction of human life.”
Not sure we really disagree here – I don’t really like the “agreeing with Dave Sim???? lmao get a load of this guy” attitude either. Sim has said a whole lot of stuff, after all. (I unironically urge everyone to take a look at his commentaries on Fitzgerald and Hemingway sometime, they’re really good, even though they were written into his decline.)
I don’t actually think that “complete lack of gender differentiation” is a good goal to strive for (except in exceptional cases, but with humans, “except in exceptional cases” is pretty much always true). I still found the Sim passage hilarious for a number of unrelated reasons.
For the record, the larger essay I excerpted this from is much more “about” homosexuality than “about” gender role differentiation – he is responding to a commentator who claimed he was gay (claimed? implied? I dunno, I haven’t read the original text). The response is a very negative review of the guy’s book, with a focus on “does it make sense for this guy to claim I’m gay” and “why would he claim I’m gay if it doesn’t make sense,” etc. The quote in the screenshots is from a tangent in which he’s saying that feminists like to allege that any man who doesn’t want to sleep with feminists is actually gay, but in fact in his opinion the feminist ideal for heterosexual couples is much more “gay” than not wanting to sleep with feminists. He brings in non-differentiation of gender roles not to “argue for” a position about it, but because it’s part of his view of what feminism is, so it’s relevant to his argument for the claim “feminist heterosexuality is actually kinda gay”
Dave Sim is not into pegging, thank you very much!!!!
(from Cerebus #273)
is Dave Sim aware of the existence of the prostate
I assure you, many boys being fucked in the ass welcome themselves to many, many orgasms
this is literally “have you considered that sex between a man and a woman with the same rights as him is INHERENTLY GAY? because once you think women are equal to men you might as just ADMIT YOU’RE PRETTY MUCH GAY. also the biggest threat to society is the ‘homomaniacs’ insisting that EVERYTHING IS GAY’”
I have seen people making fun of this argument but I thought they were strawmanning.
it’s ‘roles’, not ‘rights’. and destroying gender differentiation, whether or not it makes sense to say it’d be gay per se, would make probably a majority of the population miserable and unsatisfied
there are in fact parts of the country where (because words are more legible than actions and no one will or can say anything else) the default assumption is that gender roles are outdated and men and women both are and ought to be the same. and the few people who are clueless or lazy enough to listen to the words instead of the actions end up burning out and going hard in the other direction, because that shit made them miserable.
Good point about the rights vs. roles thing but uh
“whether or not it makes sense to say it’d be gay per se, would make probably a majority of the population miserable and unsatisfied”
What do the two parts of this phrase have to do with one another?
[in the locker room]
A: dude, B is fucking gay
B: fuck you
C: excuse me, but whether or not it makes sense to say that B is gay per se, he probably makes a majority of the population miserable and unsatisfied
You’re just running up against the awkward fact that you’re adjacent to a bunch of people who basically agree with Dave Sim.
I mean, I know, but there’s “agree with Dave Sim that perfect interchangeability between the genders is not a good goal” (reasonable, especially because I’m not sure how many people really believe in perfect interchangeability anyway), and “agree with Dave Sim that ‘perfect interchangeability between the genders’ is totally gaaaaay, and that this is important.”
Of course there’s an obvious left/right aspect to the way I posted this to make fun of it – realistically speaking I probably wouldn’t have done quite the same thing with an equally silly left-wing argument, and maybe that fact riles some people up. But I don’t think it’s too hard to see that whether or not this passage is arguing for a good conclusion, it’s a terrible argument, and maybe that is a good reason to avoid defending it (with friends like these, who needs enemies)
if you are talking about severnayazemla’s argument, you didn’t get it because you left off a sentence. “and destroying gender differentiation, whether or not it makes sense to say it’d be gay per se, would make probably a majority of the population miserable and unsatisfied” the argument: destroying gender differentiation may or may not be “gay”, but destroying gender differentiation would make most people miserable and unsatisfied.
like when you start shitting on people, appealing to their sneerability, and get-a-load-of-this-guying because you didn’t read a sentence that was right there, it is time to consider whether you’re being a dick.
and the obvious left/right aspect would be that, were this a left-wing argument, right-wingers suspect that you would not be saying “whether or not the conclusion is good you should obviously agree the argument is terrible and thus you should not engage with the idea”, you would be saying “whether or not the argument is terrible, you should obviously agree the conclusion is good and thus you should engage with the idea.”
they’d appear to be right in this suspicion. like, that is pretty much exactly the thing you did when talking about The Social Justice: it didn’t matter that the argument was terrible, and terrible in a way that dave sim never approached, the core idea was still good and worthy of acceptance. it’s fair to be riled up over that or call you a hypocrite, because you are being a hypocrite about it.
I didn’t leave off a sentence, I left off a phrase. This did not change anything; the thing you call “the argument” is precisely what I took myself to be responding to.
“The argument” has the form “X, while it may not be Y, is at least Z [a bad thing].” Where Dave Sim said “X is Y, and that’s bad.”
My objection was that Y and Z don’t have much to do with one another, and so this isn’t any kind of defense of Dave Sim. He’s saying he, like Sim, disapproves of X. But he disapproves of it for a different reason, and while we could potentially have a nice conversation about that, it has nothing to do with the reason I found the original quote risible.
In particular, note that “Y and Z have nothing to do with one another” is an equally good objection to any statement of the form “[something], while it may not be Y, is at least Z.” You don’t have to include the particular X to see the inherent problem with this sort of remark. Here’s a crude example with less controversial (and more clearly unrelated) terms inserted:
DS: “murder is bad, because it causes oranges to ripen less quickly.”
NB: “what the fuck [posts screencap of this statement on tumblr]”
SV: “murder, while it may not cause orange to ripen less quickly per se, involves the destruction of human life.”
NB: “wait. That isn’t a defense of the original statement at all. If you have typed the phrase ‘while it may not cause oranges to ripen less quickly per se, involves the destruction of human life,’ something has gone wrong, because the two parts of that have nothing to do with one another.”
BA: “but NB, you left off a phrase! SV’s entire statement was ‘murder, while it may not cause oranges to ripen less quickly per se, involves the destruction of human life.’ That’s different.”
NB: “But not any better. My point was that whatever noun phrase goes before that ‘while’ there, the sentence is not going to make sense. As in fact it doesn’t, when the noun phrase happens to be ‘murder.’”
As for the social justice thing, I may well have done what you accuse me of doing (I certainly don’t think I’m above that), but I can’t think of a specific example. I have defended “social justice” ideas by saying that although there are bad arguments for them, there are also good arguments for them; I have also repeatedly criticized social justice arguments I think are bad. I’m not seeing the inconsistency here. Do you have a specific example of something I’ve said that you think is analogous?
Your defense is very reasonable and not what I read in your original post at all; “What do the two parts of this phrase have to do with each other” reads far more easily to me as “the statement YOU made is incoherent” than it does as “Your statement may be valid but is not related to Dave Sim’s.” Even knowing that was what you intended, it still reads easier the other way.
And for SJ… you’ve repeated bad arguments for them, such as saying that “privilege” means and is correct in meaning that the difference between what a white man gets and what a black man gets is like the difference between temperature on Earth and on the Sun; this was a terrible argument and was wrong and when people were like “okay what the fuck” you just kind of brushed them off as only differing on details and not really impacting the validity of the point.
I guess I’m having a hard time understanding what you originally imagined I was saying. I said “what do the two parts of this phrase have to do with one another?” and, in fact, the two parts of the phrase did not have much to do with one another. And this was a relevant fact, as I detailed above.
It seems on like your original reading, I was saying “Y and Z have nothing to do with one another, so therefore X isn’t Z.” Not only does does this not make sense (as you said above), it’s also hard to imagine why I might have thought it made sense. If I wanted to argue that X isn’t Z, why would I have said “Y and Z have nothing to do with one another,” when Y is clearly irrelevant to the “is X Z?” question? Why would I have not outright stated “X isn’t Z”? It’s the kind of bad argument which is not only wrong, but which doesn’t even have a plausible line of thought behind it.
And if there’s not even a plausible (but wrong) line of thought behind it … then why is it plausible that I might have meant that? I’m not a Markov chain. My statements at least reflect lines of thought, if not always correct ones.
On SJ: that’s very much not what I said. I said I disagreed with the “temperature of the earth vs. the sun” idea in the very same post in which I brought it up (”I don’t think it’s that stark”).
I very clearly brought up this idea in a merely descriptive fashion – I was simply saying that it was something that some people think (”In some versions of SJ … “). The reason I brought it up was to explain to bgaesop why he gets such intensely negative responses from some people when he uses phrases like “female privilege.” (The broader point was that “privilege” refers to the difference in the mean rather than any more specific difference, so unless you think women are favored over men in the mean, “women have female privilege” is an incorrect use of the privilege terminology. I brought in the “temperature of the sun” idea to explain why some people would view “women are favored over men in the mean” as not just incorrect, but ludicrous. Which some people in fact do, and I think I am right about why they do; meanwhile, I explicitly said that I do not agree with these people.)
There seems to be a pattern here in which you round off my statements to worse versions of themselves that are also more politically extreme or partisan/in-groupish. A while ago you said that you could tell when a topic has become a culture war issue because all of a sudden political partisans start lying about what people on “the other side” said. I’m not saying you’re lying here (I think you are just misreading and/or misremembering), but if you want to continue talking to me about this stuff, I think you should consider whether you are doing the culture war thing and reading (and later remembering) my statements as caricatures of themselves.
(via brazenautomaton)
Mostly this is “games I liked when I was a teenager,” but
Chrono Trigger
Final Fantasy 6
Xenogears
Metal Gear Solid 1-3 (haven’t played any of the others)
Alpha Centauri
Escape Velocity
Touhou 8, 10, 14 (these are the only ones I’ve played)
Analogue: A Hate Story
Touhou 11 was the best Touhou game
also, none of these games really address what you said your problem with games was about being able to reload and make different decisions, leading me to think that it wasn’t really your objection
By “Touhou 10″ I actually meant Touhou 11, I forgot which one Subterranean Animism was
Earlier I said I was pessimistic that games would ever overcome that problem I talked about. It should not be surprising that when asked for a list of games I like, I don’t mention any that overcome that problem. If there are any games that do that, I have not played them
(Note that none of the games above really try to “make gameplay interesting” a la investing choices with moral weight etc., except arguably Analogue. This fits with my claim that most attempts to “make gameplay interesting” are failures.)
good, Subterranean Animism Supremacy
I guess I agree with your point but not how you phrase it; attempts to “make gameplay interesting” are mostly “having good gameplay”. People who do things like investing choices with moral weight are trying to make the game focus on, or derive value from, something other than its gameplay. Trying to make games more like movies, which doesn’t work. People mock games because the story isn’t “good”, by an arbitrary standard constructed solely for the purpose of maximizing the ability to mock things, but that’s not the point: moreso than any other medium, a game isn’t about the story, it’s about the storytelling. Games like Half-Life or the Metroid Prime series have very, very basic stories, but the storytelling is top notch, and that matters far more.
Basically – people who try to “make gameplay interesting” are addressing a problem that doesn’t exist because they think they shouldn’t play to the strengths of the medium, they should try and be something else. I don’t think anyone’s really done “weighty moral decisions” right, though Fallout 3′s “The Pitt” came closest, and I’m not sure that doing it right would add very much.
I think I agree, but I want to clarify what I mean by “making gameplay interesting.”
If games are in some way a unique medium for storytelling, with qualities that other mediums don’t share, then (of course) in some way the gameplay has to help tell the story. That is, if the game is essentially “a movie” plus “some fun abstract challenges,” and those two don’t really interact in any meaningful way, then even if the “movie” part is good, and the “game” part is good, you’re not really using the capabilities of the medium for storytelling. You’re just packaging together two good but essentially unrelated things.
So, then, you can use the gameplay for storytelling. And there are various pretty easy ways to do this. Like I mentioned in that post I linked yesterday, you can affect how the player feels about the story by forcing them to complete tough challenges before experiencing especially important parts of it. You can convey viscerally that some entity in the story is powerful or dangerous by connecting it to an especially difficult gameplay challenge. You can have the player explore a environment and wonder why various aspects of it are the way they are, where the answers to those questions are parts of the story. (Many games do this last one. Just among games I’ve played: Xenogears does it in places, and Analogue, Portal and the Myst games do it a lot. Come to think of it, Myst should really have been on the above list)
But a thing about these techniques is that … well, they just don’t allow for that much variation, relative to the room for variation in most artistic media. Metaphorically, they’re a toolbox rather than a palette. If you’re plotting a story or writing a sentence or painting a picture, the range of choices you can make is gigantic and all of your choices interact. Whereas if you’re designing a game, it’s more like you just choose one of these tools and deploy it. There are certain “tools” that I’ve seen over and over again, like “oh, they said this guy was really powerful and it turns out he’s a tough boss,” or “hmm, I wonder what happened in this mysterious abandoned place, time to learn about it from scattered journals and/or videos.” It’s not that these are cliches – there are cliches in everything – but that the designer really just does not have much room for creativity beyond choosing which of these things they are going to deploy.
If you’re designing a character, you can choose everything from their hairstyle to their deepest fears to the song that gets stuck in their head at odd moments to their romantic history (or lack thereof) (in whatever level of detail you want) to their exact relationship with each member of the platoon they were in when they served in the military 20 (or 40 or 10 or 3) years ago to … And every one of these features interacts with the others and changes, however slightly, how the character will be received. (Of course this applies to game characters as much as characters in any other medium.)
If you’re designing the gameplay of a game, you can take certain elements of the story that can be conveyed through gameplay, and link those up to the gameplay in certain basically predetermined places. Increasing scope of story can be plugged into “characters gain powers and numbers go up.” Events that would affect the physical environment can be plugged into “the game environment looks a certain way and the player wonders why.” There are a finite number of these tricks, and there isn’t much you can do with them, beyond choose which ones you’re going to use.
What this means is that it is possible to use gameplay well for storytelling, but that it’s hard to make it interesting – in the sense of “novel, but also well-done.” The audience reaction to storytelling through gameplay is less like “I liked that character/painting/song in all its detail” and more like “ah, a successful use of Tool #5 and Tool #7, nicely done.”
To “make gameplay interesting” would be to break out of this, and do things with storytelling-through-gameplay that work, but that aren’t just deployments of standard tools.
I don’t think this has really been done.
Not reblogging this post because it’s huge and I don’t want to talk about the main topic: http://drethelin.tumblr.com/post/129204978108/brazenautomaton-vichtenaar
@nostalgebraist @veronicastraszh @vichtenaar and anyone else who agrees: I would like to know why you think that the SJ model of privilege is correct
The SJ model of privilege, as I actually encounter it, is this:
People are made up of category memberships. For instance, I am white, cis, male, bisexual, an (erstwhile) sex worker, and lots more. For any given one of those categories, there’s this sort of binary privileged/oppressed dichotomy (even for things like heterosexual/homosexual/bisexual, somehow).
Whichever one has the privilege (white, man, straight, cis) has things better in every way that matters than the oppressed group (PoC, woman, queer/trans). These category memberships overlap and interact and so you might be in a unique situation by being a gay black man, for instance, which is called intersectionality.
But nevertheless, it does not make sense to speak of women/PoC/queers having privileges over men/white/straights, only men having privilege (singular) over women. To suggest that such a thing as (a) “female privilege” is absurd and laughable, for some reason.
I think this model is fundamentally broken.
The idea that privilege is a monolithic thing that goes only one way is absurd. Men are more likely to get hired than women; that’s clearly a masculine privilege. Women are less likely to be the victim of violent crime; that is equally clearly a feminine privilege. To insist otherwise seems to me to be absurd, Emperor’s got no clothes style stubborn foolishness. There are a lot of issues that affect men worse than women.
I feel like I should write more, but I can’t think of what else to say that isn’t just “Look! The Emperor hasn’t got any clothes!”
Reblogged because I fixed the formatting and tagging might work the second time around: queenshulamit veronicastraszh nostalgebraist vichtenaar
I don’t endorse the view you describe, but it isn’t what I meant when I talked about the “SJ model of privilege.”
When I talk about the “SJ model of privilege” I am basically referring to the notion that there are statistical differences (i.e. not universal, but common) between what it is like to belong to one group and what it is like to belong to another, and specifically, that the nature and even the presence of these differences tends to be difficult to discern without directly interacting across group boundaries (which can include, say, reading something by someone of another group).
The part that seems most important to me is the idea that these differences are not obvious – the famous “invisible knapsack.” That when one wants to imagine what it is like to be a member of a different group, one faces a giant lack of information unless one takes time to investigate the testimony of that group. That you’ll miss important things if you just ask “what would I do if I were in their shoes” without paying close attention to the million little ways you’d get treated differently if you were in their shoes.
The idea of one-directionality is much less important to me. I agree with you that a lot of people seem kind of obsessed with this, when really the differences are statistical – maybe the mean points in one direction or the other, but not every single instance does.
But I do think the mean tends to point heavily in one direction, much of the time. And that it’s hard to get a real visceral sense of just how much of a difference this makes to everyday experience, because the difference is composed of a huge number of distinct details which are hard to learn about in the first place, much less collect in one’s mind and make sense of simultaneously. And that if one wants to attempt this task, one definitely has to communicate across the gap between groups in some way, rather than just speculating.
And that’s really all “the SJ model of privilege” – in the sense of the thing I endorse – means to me. The obsession with one-directionality is not something I like either, but I can kind of understand where it comes from, as a consequence of 1) “there’s a difference in the mean if not in every single case” and 2) “appreciating this difference is often harder than people realize.” But no, I don’t endorse that part.
Huh. That description… doesn’t match up with nearly any of the SJ stuff I see. It sounds fairly reasonable, so of course I want to poke some holes in it now.
I’m going to focus on feminism and gender issues, for obvious reasons.
The idea that “people in group X are bad at imagining what it’s like to be in group Y” seems like a symmetric relationship. I don’t see anything there indicating it would be hard for men to imagine what it’s like to be a woman, but not vice versa.
Yet in SJ stuff, I see precisely that, all the time. The idea of “female privilege” is, in SJ circles, a terrible evil concept or a joke. Despite the health issues, violence, homelessness, suicide, basically every single thing I can think of being worse for men than women, apart from some economic things. I mean, can you find a single article by an established SJ blogger talking about female privilege as a real thing?
This seems like it must mean that the model you describe above is either missing a crucial component or is just not actually what the SJ model of privilege is. I think it’s the latter.
Well, as I said, the means are different. It’s not just that neither side can imagine being each other; neither side can imagine being each other, and also, when you aggregate it together, one side has it noticeably worse off. If you don’t agree with that, you don’t agree with the “SJ concept of privilege.“
The word “privilege” is specifically used to refer to this difference in the mean. In some versions of SJ, the difference in the mean is taken to be so vast that pointing to the cases that buck the trend is sort of perverse – like getting told the sun is hotter than the earth, and quibbling about microscopic moments at which tiny bits of the sun contain relatively little molecular motion and might be said to be “cold.”
I don’t think it’s that stark, but the idea of “privilege” is something like that – it refers to the difference in the mean, usually taken to be large.
The reason things like “female privilege” are treated like “terrible evil concepts or jokes” is that they are taken (rightly or wrongly) to be to be denying the direction of difference in the mean – which is usually taken to be large, and sometimes taken to be so huge that reversing it can only be some sort of absurd sophistry, like trying to claim that the sun is actually cold.
But okay, you say, even if the different mean is large, there may be individual trends that point in the opposite direction. Sure. And I don’t deny that some people seem quixotically devoted to the claim that there can never be any individual trend, not even one, that points in the opposite direction from the difference in the mean. And that’s silly.
But since “privilege” refers to this difference in the mean – taken to be this big, dominant consideration that is sort of the “to first order” picture of what’s going on – looking at trends pointing in the opposite direction, and calling them “privilege,” is just not using the terminology correctly. People think you’re talking about the trend in the mean, and to certain people that looks like you’re trying to say the sun is cold.
It’s isn’t really anything more than a semantic miscommunication. Unless you actually think there isn’t much difference in the mean, or that it goes in the other direction.
No, SJ and feminism are wrong about which “side” has it “worse” (inasmuch as you can aggregate things like “won’t be paid as much since they won’t ask for it” with “is less likely to be murdered”). Men have it obviously significantly worse than women in almost every way, and SJ/feminism is an insane, denying-the-emperor-is-naked woman supremacy movement (not female supremacy; note their treatment of trans women vs trans men).
I don’t think you’re grasping the degree to which I think the SJ model of the world is wrong. I can’t think of a single thing it gets •right•.
Okay, then this is the real, non-semantic point of difference, and it’s huge.
Issues like “female privilege” are semantic. You disagree with the SJ worldview in a much more substantial way. I’m not going to try to argue you out of this for now – maybe at some point, but it’s a huge issue and I have stuff I should be doing – but the big difference here is the one about which side you think gets the short end of the stick, not the ways in which concepts like “one side gets the short end of the stick” are conceptually structured or talked about in words.
Earlier you said that what I was saying seemed to make much more sense to you than SJ usually does. What I was describing was the standpoint theory-esque aspects, which a lot of people really do object to. It doesn’t seem like that is your objection at all. It’s probably worth breaking this down into the part you do object to and the part you don’t.
Needless tetchy quibbling: there is something that seems not-quite-right to me about the standard line you hear that “Lolita is actually a book where a clever author makes a monster seem superficially appealing, people who romanticize it are missing the point”
Let me be clear – this is a great improvement over the disturbingly common idea that the book’s story is supposed to be romantic or sexy. Nabokov has clearly said he intended Humbert to be a monster (if you care about authorial intent), and it’s pretty clearly how the book presents itself if you read it with any care at all.
But, at the same time … Vladimir Nabokov was weirdly fixated on adult men being attracted to prepubescent or barely pubescent girls. If you read more of his work, particularly the less famous stuff, you’ll keep noticing it popping up out of nowhere, for no apparent reason. I don’t think there’s any evidence that Nabokov was actually a pedophile himself, but he had this strange need to insert pedophilia into his works, often in seemingly spurious ways. In the case of Lolita, the whole novel is structured around a condemnation of pedophilia, so readers can finish the book and feel like their hands are clean – just a good novelist taking on the bad guys, nothing to worry about.
But then you read his other stuff and there are just … fragments of Humbert, everywhere, lacking justification, lacking “the point” that everyone imputes to Lolita.
The “Lolita isn’t romantic” PSAs are fine as far as they go, and are a very necessary first-order correction. But sometimes they slip over into saying “Nabokov was trying to do [this and that],” and I always want to say “are you sure?” Nabokov’s motivations are pretty mysterious, and I don’t think the standard lit-class “the book is ironic!” analysis fully captures the weirdness there. It’s a weirdness I don’t think anyone quite understands.
I think this is just the danger of trying to distill a complicated book down to a few sentences.
Humbert is a monster, but one that can be urbane, charming and funny. A lot of the effect of the book (for me at least) was in that tension (charmingly narrating horrifying things). I don’t know a way to simply describe why the book is so interesting without glossing over lots of subtlety, so I tend to point to that one thing.
There are a lot of instances in his other books where it doesn’t look like an attempt to achieve that tension, though – like, the otherwise positively portrayed male protagonist will mention offhand that he thinks a 12-year-old is hot at some point, and you’re like “what?”, and then the book goes on as though nothing had happened.
I mean, something like that comes up in … practically every one of his novels that I’ve read? At least in Bend Sinister, Invitation to a Beheading, Pale Fire, Ada or Ardor, Transparent Things, and Look at the Harlequins! I don’t think there was any of it in The Eye or Pnin or The Real Life of Sebastian Knight but I could be forgetting something, and anyway that’s 6 books with vs. at most 3 books without.
I don’t know why he did this, and I don’t think “tension” can be the answer because many of these characters are positively portrayed otherwise, or so negatively portrayed (Charles Kinbote) that another blemish doesn’t add much.
(ETA: I should mention that Ada or Ardor is a special case, because the pedophilia theme is much more central, and much more connected to the characters’ other flaws, to the point that it’s more like Lolita than the other examples mentioned)
I’ve only read two and a half books by Nabokov, and none of them are Lolita, but this seems right to me. Especially since Nabokov seems super interested in culturally forbidden sex in general, and not just when it is ironic and undercut by other elements in the story. Charles Kinbote’s homosexuality is a pretty fundamental element of Pale Fire. A good two-thirds of the action in The Tragedy of Mr. Morn is driven by sex and sexual desire and jealousy. And if you removed forbidden sex from Ada or Ardor, you’d have almost nothing left.
#i’m definitely eager to figure out what is up with this#why he is so interested in forbidden sex#and really forbidden sex#not just romeo and juliet forbidden#but where his actual original audience#would have forbidden it#is it just for complex interesting characters with some psychological interest?#why is this so fundamental for him?#did he just read a bunch of freud?#it doesn’t feel really freudian#anyway#nabokov is so good#is my nabokov tag#this is not reason i like him#pedophilia cw
It definitely wasn’t reading a bunch of Freud, at least not except perhaps in a “protesting too much” way – he openly hated Freud, disparaged him in interviews, and inserted anti-Freudian diatribes into his fiction on the flimsiest of pretexts.
(Note and warning: this has turned into a big infodump. For a number of years for me Nabokov was … well, I think the phrase “special interest” is in the right approximate territory)
I think the standard interpretation is that Kinbote’s homosexuality is the result of straight-up homophobia on Nabokov’s part – which we know some things about, because he had a gay brother. So Kinbote’s homosexuality may just be unironically intended as part and parcel of his broader personal failings, and the way he represents a sort of “broken outsider” who contrasts with the healthy, normative lives of John and Sybil (if not Hazel) Shade. (IIRC, in Kinbote’s own mind it is in line with a noble Zemblan tradition, presumably a reference to classical aristocratic pederasty.)
The role of forbidden sex, and generally of “lurid” elements, in Nabokov’s fiction is a peculiar thing. On the one hand, it’s pervasive. On the other hand, Nabokov was a happily married man of few vices who prided himself on his almost aggressively normalcy, as in this typical pronouncement:
I pride myself on being a person with no public appeal. I have never been drunk in my life. I never use schoolboy words of four letters. I have never worked in an office or in a coal mine. I have never belonged to any club or group. No creed or school has had any influence on me whatsoever. Nothing bores me more than political novels and the literature of social intent.
We can make a stab at understanding this apparent paradox if we look to his aesthetics (but in a moment we’ll see that this isn’t the full story). Nabokov’s aesthetic sense, as expressed in interviews, his class lectures, and elsewhere, could be approximated very crudely as “form is everything, content is nothing.” There’s a very weird moment in his lecture on Madame Bovary where he raves about how great it is that Flaubert could great wonderful art out of the lives of people he simply despised.
More specifically, his sense of what constitutes good artistic “form” seems to involve (1) a lot of reversals, symmetries, and other very abstract (even mathematical, or perhaps musical) sort of stuff, and (2) in somewhat the opposite direction, an interest in particular in fine detail, and the sense that a lot of the quality of art lies in the quality of specifically selected/observed details, whose precise qualities are all-important. His frequent negative comments about “general ideas” (compare “the literature of social intent” above) tie into this – he thought that every detail chosen by an artist was important, and that interpretations focusing on themes or messages denied this by suggesting that any given set of details might as well be replaced by some other set so long as that other set “fit the theme” equally well. This resulted in some truly odd choices of interpretive focus, such as his interest in determining exactly what species of insect Gregor Samsa became, or his insistence that his students become familiar with the layout of the train station in the climactic scene of Anna Karenina.
(A literary critic once proposed that Nabokov might have been on the autism spectrum, noting a passage from his autobiography that sounded like a description of sensory overload in childhood, and ever since then I’ve been unable to stop thinking about this idea, particularly after reading this paper and thinking about it in relation to Nabokov’s refusal to generalize along axes where most people would – insisting that it matters what species Gregor Samsa was, rather than just looking at the thematic content shared across all instances of “becoming [insect species X].”)
To return to the original question, one obvious (if flawed) explanation for the focus on “lurid” material is simply that Nabokov didn’t care about his material at all, and took a sort of perverse pleasure in making his formally exquisite art out of disturbing, bizarre, shocking, or tawdry materials. It’s reminiscent of Frank Zappa, who wrote formally complex music and considered himself primarily a modern composer, but who included vocals in his music because (he said) no one paid attention to music without vocals. His lyrics themselves tended to be puerile, inane, and gross, and one way of interpreting this is to figure he just thought “hey, if the lyrics don’t matter, why not have some juvenile fun with them?” Likewise, one can imagine Nabokov thinking, “hey, if my sublime structural masterworks can be about anything, why not make them about child molesters and murderers?” It certainly makes the point about content not mattering, in a sense.
(When a critic suggested that Lolita was “the record of Nabokov’s love affair with the romantic novel,” Nabokov replied that it would be more accurate to say that it was a record of his love affair with the English language. Silly critics, assuming I actually care about my shocking subject matter! I just care about, like, words, and patterns, and taxonomies, and stuff.)
But this model of Nabokov’s aesthetics is incomplete, because actually he was quite a snob about content. Let’s look at a few of his classic disses. On Finnegans Wake:
Ulysses towers over the rest of Joyce’s writings, and in comparison to its noble originality and unique lucidity of thought and style the unfortunate Finnegans Wake is nothing but a formless and dull mass of phony folklore, a cold pudding of a book, a persistent snore in the next room, most aggravating to the insomniac! I am. Moreover, I always detested regional literature full of quaint old-timers and imitated pronunciation. Finnegans Wake’s facade disguises a very conventional and drab tenement house, and only the infrequent snatches of heavenly intonations redeem it from utter insipidity. I know I am going to be excommunicated for this pronouncement.
This presents a huge problem for the “content doesn’t matter” model, since apparently he thinks the form of FW is great, but the underlying story is “regional literature … [about] a very conventional and drab tenement house,” which is apparently enough to damn it. A strange contrast to his comment about Flaubert making good art about people he hated. Elsewhere Nabokov derisively refers to “Faulkner’s corn-cobby chronicles,” which seems to be another “regional literature” issue. About Dostoevsky, he said: “his sensitive murderers and soulful prostitutes are not to be endured for one moment – by this reader anyway.” (Sensitive murderers? V. Nabokov, let me introduce you to one H. Humbert.)
[Edited to add: I clearly misread the quote above – Nabokov calls FW “formless” so he’s clearly not saying the form is great! Thanks 91625 for the correction.]
A first pass at this would be that Nabokov was basically an aristocratic snob with respect to content, and could deal with morally bankrupt characters but not low-born or provincial ones. Among other things, this fits with his love of Tolstoy and the high social class of many of his own fictional protagonists, although it still doesn’t explain the Madame Bovary thing (isn’t Madame Bovary a sort of “regional literature”?).
I’ve gone on at great length about all this in part because I’m infodumping about a fixation of mine, but also because I find that it’s hard to begin trying to make sense of Nabokov’s content choices without getting all of this stuff firmly in mind first. With all that legwork done, we have a few candidate explanations:
(1) The “Frank Zappa” theory: content really doesn’t matter (as long as your characters are of noble birth, natch), so might as well make it as wild and shocking as possible to confuse and troll the critics. Meanwhile, your true kindred spirits will read your stuff and just groove on all the cool patterns and perfectly selected details.
(2) The “aristocratic vice” theory: in some sort of weird rebellion against corncobby chronicles and soulful prostitutes, Nabokov wanted to restore to the world of literature the sort of bad behavior his sort of characters got up to, like ill-advised duels, dissipated revels in palatial high-class bordellos, and inbreeding (there’s incest in the Veen family tree well before Van and Ada).
Then there’s another theory which is my personal fave, but requires yet more legwork. Clearly Nabokov’s work was heavily influenced by his nostalgia for his (apparently) idyllic Russian boyhood, which was disrupted by the Russian Revolution. (Everything changed when the Literature of Social Intent attacked.) We can generalize from this to a sort of story about a boy who once lived in content-free Eden, happily playing with patterns and noticing specific details, until he was thrust suddenly into a generalization-obsessed Twentieth Century, baring down on him with its Marxisms and Freudianisms and Social Consciousnesses and inviolable Einsteinian formulae (Nabokov refused to believe in special relativity – too close to a general idea, too Twentieth Century? See also Nabokov’s interest in Lewis Carroll, an odd childlike man who opposed the cutting-edge mathematics of his day). Adulthood and generalization are twin evils. Children get it – they’re new to the world, data-collectors rather than theory-appliers, who can see new bits of sensory information as just what they are, rather than as interchangeable bits of a general mass. (”The larger the issue the less it interests me. Some of my best concerns are microscopic patches of color.”)
The adult world, with its pseudo-sophistication, rushes in to defile childhood innocence. Does this sound familiar?
The adults are punished. Nabokov’s fiction is full of hellish states for his transgressive adult characters, and (as Michael Maar has observed) there’s a direct link between pedophilia and hell, running from his early poem “Lilith” to “terrible” Antiterra, where Van Veen is tempted by Ada (”of hell”), following in the footsteps of his pedophilic father, Demon. Everywhere there is madness, murder, agony, in this awful world of adults who want reverse the Ardis of time and get back to the good old childhood days of entomological pedantry and sun-and-shade games (pure form, microscopic patches of color). But this is forbidden. You can’t undo the Russian Revolution.
So we have possibility (3), too, in which everything is lurid because the adult world is just this horrible lurid virulent thing infecting the pure world of form and precise detail, because it wants to go back there, but there’s no going back.
(via jadedviol)
Has Drexler actually made any significant contributions to nanotech, or is he the “founder of nanotechnology” in the sense that Leonardo da Vinci was “inventor of the helicopter?”
The way I had this explained to me once by some people who were tangentially involved in the whole thing:
Eric Drexler invented the term “nanotechnology” to refer to a really speculative idea of very advanced far-future molecular machinery. This was stuff like “a vial of grey goo that you could pour onto an asteroid, which would then reproduce and turn the asteroid into a space station.” He did some decent conceptual work discussing some of the principles that such advanced far-future molecular machinery might use, although obviously without being anywhere close to being able to build it. This caught the public imagination and “nanotechnology” became an exciting buzzword.
A bunch of people who were doing regular chemistry caught on to the buzzword and decided to call what they were doing “nanotechnology” in order to sound more advanced than they really were. The word got applied to mean “new generation material science”, even though a lot of this was as basic as putting zinc particles in sunscreen to make it work better, or creating carbon nanotubes, or things like that. Since their field existed, and Drexler’s field didn’t, they had more prestige and access to funding so they completely took over the word “nanotechnology” and locked the original speculative nanotechnologists out.
So your question is kind of backwards, or at least gets some of its assumptions wrong. It’s more like Leonardo da Vinci developing a sketch of the helicopter, everyone getting very impressed, windmill manufacturers recasting their windmills as “ground helicopters” in order to take advantage of the hype, and then people attacking Leonardo for daring to talk about helicopters even though he’d never built a windmill.
Man, people take su3s-whatshisname way too seriously all of a sudden, for a random blogger who knows physics I guess. (To be clear, I do not know physics, so I can only assume his physics arguments are silly as the rest.)
I mean, did you guys read the OP, for example? Yeah, truly the community that literally brings this guy up whenever anyone mentions “criticisms of Rationalism stuff” is unfairly dismissing him:
I was excited, obviously Drexler would have some answer to this objection. It’s the obvious objections, the ones that would occur to a lot of undergrads reading nanosystems. Surely Drexler would have a convincing retort!
And when Drexler responded, and later in their point by point debate, it just didn’t seem like Drexler really understood the objection. And I thought, how has he never considered this? How has this objection not come up?
In the second part of my Superintelligence review, I note that Bostrom wrote a whole book on the potential powers of super intelligence without mentioning computational complexity even once. Without mentioning the physical limits of predictability even once. These aren’t deep objections, these are the obvious objections. The sort of thing you deal with in the introduction of a paper “my critics will obviously say this, but here are some reasons to think they are wrong…” And there is no evidence it hasever been considered despite all this work on AI-risk. How has this objection not come up? How was there not a whole chapter, hell, several chapters on this?
Because critics aren’t taking you seriously enough to even bother to object.
Yes, I’m absolutely sure that the fact someone so famous that even I - again, a nonscientist - have heard of his ideas from pop culture was simply too obscure for anyone to have bothered refuting him. That is the best possible explanation for him misunderstanding a question someone asked him.
The physical limits of predictability … what? I haven’t read Superintelligence, so I can’t comment on that. But … dear God, the idea that this proves “there is no evidence [ the physical limits of predictability] has ever been considered despite all this work on AI-risk”!
That is literally the first “objection” everyone comes up with, especially non-experts. “But you can only get so far, you can only deduce so much from any given amount of evidence, only physically do so much regardless of how smart you are! If you’re locked in a box, you can’t magically walk through walls by being smart!”
And everyone immediately says “yeah, but look at how good the best humans in the world in this field are, and the best ones in that field, and so on; an AI better than any human is better than a team comprised of Einsteins, Hitlers, Derren Browns, Evolution-s and Alexander the Greats, and they’re probably thinking at higher clock speeds and taking plenty of time to mull everything over.
But again, I’m sure that this guy is being unfairly ignored because “Therefore, my criticism of MIRI isn’t based on MIRI, because I also criticize Drexler, who is not MIRI.”
Yup.
No, seriously, the reason you find Tumblr full of people helpfully engaging with you is that these are the people trying to be super charitable and actively searching so they can listen to even the deepest of the green-ink brigade, just to be sure.
And the reason you get people yelling at you from Reddit is because some twit (or … troll?) tried to link to you as an authority in some Reddit thread or other.
It is not because you’re the only one competent enough to see the truth, man, and you’ve been slowly converting Tumblr to your cause, and the Reddit guys are close-minded fanatics just haven’t got the message yet.
I read the HPMOR criticism, because the dedication to writing up everything that annoyed him was really very useful. But I swear, people going “oh no, we’re ignoring this critic!” appear to be spreading all over my damn dash. Nobody wants to be left out of bemoaning how close-minded and echo-chamber-y we all are - without actually holding up any actual points of his, of course.
I’ve been actually ignoring this guy because he’s a crackpot.
And I’m probably going to go back to doing so, because he’s a crackpot.
Calm down, for godssakes - we’re giving this one critic far more attention than makes sense, not ignoring them. Sheesh.
Under other circumstances, I might think this was admirable. However, this sense of unfairness was applied only to su3su2u1, who is an anonymous Tumblr blogger. It was definitely not applied to Dr. Eric Drexler - the founder of nanotechnology, PhD from MIT under Marvin Minsky, lots of publications in respected journals, thousands of academic citations, etc. - who su3su2u1 casually dismissed as a delusional crackpot, someone whose opinions were not worth listening to, or even bothering to write a serious refutation of.
I shouldn’t really respond to this, but honestly, this sort of thing pisses me off. Alyssa, at no point in your post did you show that I was “demonstrably wrong.”
Your argument was:
1. One of the many criticisms I’ve levelled at MIRI is that aren’t productive as measured by citations.
2. Drexler has been productive as measured by citations.
3. I’ve criticized Drexler.
3. Therefore, my criticism of MIRI isn’t based on MIRI, because I also criticize Drexler, who is not MIRI.
4. So you shouldn’t listen to me.
This doesn’t even rise to an ad hominem. It’s just a fucking non-sequitur.
None of this has anything to do with the truth value of my statements. You are impugning my motives, and going out of your way to avoid discussing any specific claim I’ve made.
Your commenters aren’t saying you should listen to people who are wrong, your commenters are saying you shouldn’t decide people are wrong without listening to them.
For pete’s sake, I’m right here. If I’ve done something horribly close-minded, you can just say it, no need for passive-aggressive tagging.
(oh god i said something rude and you saw it i am so sorry oh god)
Seriously, were the quotes out of context or something?
Was a brilliant rebuttal to the “there’s something inconsistent about calling it echo-chamber-y to dismiss a blogger as a crackpot, when they themself dismiss respected scientists as crackpots” thing from the anon that got edited out?
Oh, gods, have I completely misunderstood what you meant by “computational complexity”?
I think you are making a number of mistakes here. This is going to sound condescending, but I think you would probably change your views if you read more of the interactions you are talking about.
For instance – you talk about how a particular post by su3 is really bad in your opinion, and use this to support the claim that su3 is not being unfairly dismissed, but instead being fairly dismissed (or perhaps not dismissed enough).
But if you look at the reblog chain on that post, it’s full of LW and LW-adjacent people responding in generally positive terms. They are treating the post as an interesting set of statements that serves as a basis for further thoughts, rather than as some sort of dead-in-the-water critique deserving of a standard response. The people who mention the computational complexity issue all agree that it is a big flaw in the book, such as veronicastraszh or this anon.
Elsewhere, in this other thread from today, we have chroniclesofrettek, who is an LW-rationalist, talking calmly and with apparent interest to su3 about a blog post which says Drexler is a crackpot, written by uncrediblehallq, someone who is also in the LW-sphere although he frequently criticizes it.
Nowhere in any of this is a claim that critics are being unfairly ignored – instead you just have the critics and the LW-rationalists and the LW-adjacents talking about stuff in the good old investigatory fashion of nerds everywhere. No one’s giving stock responses to already-refuted criticisms, and no one’s whining about anyone else being ignored.
In other words, this doesn’t at all look like your description of LW-rationalists “charitably” engaging with someone producing “green ink.”
You say that reddit is less charitable and that when someone linked su3 as “an authority,” they got (rightly) criticized for it. Well, su3 does get a lot of hate mail from redditors. But consider the most recent relevant reddit thread, in which someone linked to su3, Yudkowsky declared that every one of his criticisms was wrong, and numerous other commenters (on the HPMOR subreddit!) argued with him. The thread contains a number of people saying they found su3 interesting or insightful, and no one except Yudkowsky saying he was worth dismissing. Note that Yudkowsky’s comments were heavily downvoted, to the point that many of them have negative scores, on a subreddit dedicated to something he wrote.
Or look at the comments at the recent blog post about how people should ignore su3 – they are almost entirely composed of LW-rationalists or LW-adjacents disagreeing with the post.
It is fine if you do not take su3 seriously – you’re entitled to your opinion – but the picture you paint of the opinions held by other people in your community is dramatically at variance with the evidence.
Interesting. I hadn’t thought of the idea that getting involved in and promoting more standard machine ethics might slow progress (’might’ because obviously you might not succeed or get pushback).
But other than that this plan does seem to me to be targeted at something that is not what MIRI is targeted at. MIRI isn’t a generic AI ethics institute, so making it one seems to me to be fighting the hypothetical, although I suppose you set up the hypothetical yourself by not going with your ‘i kid’ anser, so maybe that’s unreasonableI think you missed my point. A few points:
1. To combat super dangerous AI you need to see who is working on super dangerous projects. This could involve setting up review boards for AI projects.
2. To address serious risks of AI, you need to establish credibility. Best to cut your teeth on small problems. You aren’t going to hit a grand slam against an MLB pitcher the first time you swing a bat (or your preferred metaphor). AI has serious, society transforming implications today. Addressing those challenges could be highly useful for an organization like MIRI.
3. To work towards any sort of AI, you need ties to the research community and actual domain expertise.
What do you think they do at MIRI all day, twiddle their thumbs?
You seem to be under the impression that the domain for which expertise is required is machine learning and NLP, since that’s the state of the art for AI that runs on real computers right now.
But if you read the technical agenda or any of their publications, you would see that MIRI is actually focused on theoretical results in decision theory for very abstract models of self-modifying agents, not preventing “super dangerous AI” from taking over the world or whatever.
Like much of theoretical computer science, this does not involve writing any actual code.
And like any research organization, MIRI appears to work on a number of problems of varying difficulty, and they publish incomplete and partial results over time.
As for needing “ties to the research community,” I think the least charitable interpretation of this sentiment is that Yudkowsky does not have a PhD and you do, and you think that makes you better than him.
But for the weaker (still wrong) claim that the people at MIRI are lacking in proper academic credentials, just have a look at this page.
You seem to have a great deal of respect for mainstream academia - most of MIRI’s research team & advisors besides EY have advanced degrees from respected universities. Your level of condescension is absurd.
This has all been hashed out like a hundred time previously. There is a fairly accurate summary in this SSC post on where I stand.
MIRI’s research advisors mostly don’t seem to be publishing with MIRI at all, MIRI barely puts papers on the arxiv. You engage with mainstream academia because that’s where most of the researchers are. And if you get them interested in a problem they will work on that problem, for free, on their own initiative.
It’s not about the phd, it’s about getting some actual research done. You like having Stuart Russell on your board? Pick a famous scientist at a university, send a researcher there to study, and you have another famous scientist advising your research.
I’ve read MIRI’s papers and commented on a few of them earlier in my tumblr. Unfortunately, I’m undisciplined as hell when it comes to tagging and tumblr is impossible to search.
Yes, I’ve read that post. When actually called on your ridiculous over-claims and mischaracterizations, you retreat to “not enough citations”.
Anyways, I think time will tell who is right on that point pretty quickly, so I’m done ranting for now.
I don’t think I’ll convince you, but it’s worth noting that most of the comments on the article, especially the comments by people who have actually accomplished research, understood my point and agreed.
In particular, this bit from a MIRI staff member:
Disband the organization.
I kid, I kid. I’m a big believer in doing the job you were hired to do, so:
Anyway, the big problems I see are that there is not enough experience at actually accomplishing research in the organization, and they seem to insist that they can somehow do impactful research largely on their own without stronger ties to the academic community.
We can fix that with one approach- every researcher without a phd is going to school. Since they’ll be supported by MIRI and MIRI has some ties to professors at institutions it shouldn’t be so hard to get people enrolled. I’d probably give them 4 or 5 years to finish a phd in CS/AI (they won’t be teaching because they have the outside support, so they just need to pass the core classes, publish papers/get into some conferences, graduate) or the like.
That will
1. dramatically boost publications with the MIRI imprint
2. Get more ties to academia and more coauthors on MIRI papers
3. give MIRI some results in reasonable publications
I’d also start looking for science ethics type conferences and I’d start sending people to them. The goal here is to develop quick outreach plans to help science and technology studies/science ethics people set up AI-ethics review boards in their home institutions. It doesn’t have to be strictly about AGI/world ending stuff- self driving cars have natural ethical problems involved, as do drones,etc. Even data mining (is it ethical to data-mine target alcohol adds to alcoholics?), lots of ethical quandries. The angle MIRI’d be pushing is that we can help them provide expert oversight on these potentially dangerous projects. The hope here is to get universities to do their own oversight but also keep MIRI in the loop.
This would establish MIRI as “machine ethics” specialists in a useful way, and it also would give lots of looks at potential projects for funding. Also, these review boards would almost certainly slow down the pace of research which from the MIRI perspective is a good thing.
And of course, accountability around these projects- we want X of these machine ethics boards set up at institutions MIRI already has close ties with, we want Y new boards at institutions we don’t have ties with … so on.
That would be the short term plan, at least.
we’d love a full-time Science Writer to specialize in taking our researchers’ results and turning them into publishable papers. Then we don’t have to split as much researcher time between cutting-edge work and explaining/writing-down.
more or less proved my point. This will set off a “you have no idea what you are even talking about” alarm in pretty much any experienced researcher.
Maybe that would actually be an interesting thing to try? I have spent hours agonizing/arguing over the exact phrasing of a few lines of technical prose, and many more crafting and positioning figures and tables down to the pixel, and yes, maybe that’s an important part of academic research, but then again, maybe there is a better way.
Edit: To be clear, I understand why that comment might “set off alarms,” of course it is every grad student’s dream to have their own grad student which does all their actual work. But I don’t think it’s actually as crazy as it sounds, and an organization like MIRI is probably ideal for experimenting with the scientific process a bit.
Also, I still don’t really understand the claim that MIRI is only “going for a moonshot” or a homerun or whatever. And I’m not sure what “talking with other academics” would actually look like from the outside, other than just that it will eventually lead to more citations.
The problem is that the person writing the paper needs to be as much an expert as the person who accomplished the research.
And engaging other researchers from the outside-outside would probably not look like much until citations come in. But from the less far outside, when I go to AI-Stats or other such conferences, people there will have heard of MIRI and there would be discussion of the related work, which is not observed now.
My whole point was maybe that’s not actually true, in all cases? Like, they might call it a Science Writer or whatever, but in reality its just another researcher who mainly focuses on writing and polishing prose? I have been an author on papers where there are professors or grad students who have had this role.
As for hearing about MIRI at AI-Stats… well, that’s weak anecdotal evidence about a conference which appears to be about more applied results than MIRI is interested in.
The problem is that, at the end of a successful project, the researchers have become narrow experts on one small problem and now need to communicate the result via a paper. Your route involves those researchers explaining their result to the writer, who then writes the paper. This is likely to be more effort than just having the original researchers write the paper. Adding a middle man like that just makes the communication problem more difficult.
Yes, making plots, dealing with reviewers, etc all takes time, but delegating it to someone less involved with the project takes more time. When grad students take this role, it’s usually because they were the primary researcher on the project (hence “first author”).
The few times my adviser made me delegate some plot making and proofreading of a paper to younger students it was in order to train the grad student. It wasn’t to speed things up, I could have made the plots and gone through the paper easily 10x faster because I had more experience.
And AI-stats was just an off the cuff example, I attend a fair number of AI-related conferences and generally no one has heard of MIRI.
A friend of mine comments that people who haven’t done much research don’t realize how much of research just is working out the details. “I have a good idea” is generally like 5-10% of the work; the rest of it is someone going through all the details of implementation to make it work. This is why the grad student who does all the work is first author on the paper, not the PI who has the lab and says “hey, you should try this thing out.”
But people who haven’t done much research don’t always realize how much of doing research is just grinding through those boring details, carefully, to amke sure they work the way they need to. Especially since popular science writing tends to emphasize the “big idea” and the moment of insight. (To be fair, popular science writing can hardly do anything else.)
I feel like this also relates to the “programming is more scientific than science” brouhaha: a programmer will be wrong about many things every day during debugging of their program. But a scientist will usually also be wrong about many things every day, most of which take the form “why the fuck is this machine giving me nonsense output, and why is my data analysis all crazy?”
Oh god yes.
I always feel awkward describing my research because it sounds so simple in elevator pitch form, and I’ve done so much fine-detail work that it wouldn’t be clear you’d have to do unless you’d actually worked on the project.