Idk if I’m steeped in enough siskind lore. How did he frame it?

Also James Scott is not an anarchist, or at least wasn’t at the time he interviewed about writing “three cheers for anarchism” anyway. He is very sympathetic though as is typical in anthropology.

iirc he basically agrees with the tennents but thinks states are unlikely to be defeatable.

Yeah there’s a book I quite like called seeing like a state. The author is an anthropologist who spent a lot of time studying SEA people living in the margins of states and non state areas as the state tried to bring them to heel.

In this book he coins the term “high modernism” to talk about this style of thinking wherein problems are simply matters of technical expertise and can, and should, be solved by abstract design from the centre and this design should be inflexible (because it is ideal).

While this kind of eugenics and sundry stuff isn’t exactly the same I think it shares lots of characterists: The idea that you can solve real problems by sitting in a chair, the ignorance of how ideologically motivated you are and how heavily aesthetics features in your motivation (e.g. here they are far more concerned with the aesthetic of rows of healthy, pretty children doing well on tests than any of the messy details. Such as whether this is actually particularly useful in a world where many people suffer illness or disability merely because they are not given access to proper care), and the dismissal of other’s reservations as a sort of “peasant ignorance” which in this case is highlighted by the notion it’s merely the scary thoughts at the word holding people back, as if eugenics were some phantom we cower at in ignorance.

Anyway moral of the story read the book it’s good. Weirdly rationalists also sometimes read this book and take all the wrong lessons from it. Stuff like “wow it was bad to supplant traditional agriculture because it yielded just as well or better than western” instead of “Oh their obsession with rational farming made them completely blind to reality including the enormous human cost of their authoritarianism”

This is the shit about “rational” thinking that pisses me off.

you start with a premise that sounds reasonable: “Wouldn’t it be good if future generations were better off than their parents?”

Then you throw out all the hard parts of the question like:

• what does it mean to be better off?
• would there be equal access to the technology?
• what would the social consequences be if there isn’t?
• could one group of people impose their designs for humanity on others?
• have people tried this before? did anything go wrong?

Then you ignore all of history, pretend it’s just a surface level question of technical ability and the only objections people have must be because they’re stupid.

And voi-French noises you have yet another position to be smuggly superior in.

Like fuck, we do this to other animals and we get fucking sheep that die if you don’t sheer them and get infections around their bum, chickens with a fifth the lifespan of their ancestors, chickens that grow so fast their legs sometimes break, dogs so fucking inbred they are a mess of health problems.

Maybe you could take a lesson from this about how fucking awful we are at deciding what traits are desirable and how twisted the logic of capital is. Or nah? maybe people who think a few random rich shits deciding on the perfect human will go about as well as other high modernist ideas are just idiots. That must be it.

That not a cult quote strategically placed after all the cultish babble quotes mwah perfect journalism

I find it’s a great way to figure out who to immediately stop listening to.

yes, that’s why I don’t eat them either

Call me pentadactyl cause I’m gonna flipp’er over

Well first we feed it a big corpus of books written by dogs, and then we get a little shaggy with Scooby if you know what I mean.

Who gave you a keyboard? Back to the truffle dig swine!

That’s cool! Conversations will be depressing as fuck though.

“Hey whale how’s it going?”

“Umm weird, you can talk. Hey will you please stop killing us?”

“No can do whalearino, only a tiny handful of us think we shouldn’t kill other animals”

"oh… ok… Do you think you could stop throwing garbage in our home then? "

"hahaha Whaley old pal you crack me up "

"Sonar? "

“Not on the table old chum, now go dash yourself against that beach over there, I’ve got an ocean floor to map!”

lgbt rights bad because Chesterton fence something something.

also

Consent standards:

(╯°o°）╯︵ ┻━┻

(ᕗ ͠° ਊ ͠° )ᕗ [dolphussy]

Idk maybe that Mr beast guy would set it up and finance it?

I don’t want to endorse dolphin fucking or whatever but idk if we can necessarily very accurately map non human intelligence onto stages of human intelligence development. Like human children can idk stack blocks but they’re also very emotionally volatile and forgetful. Whales can’t stack blocks but they have a lot of emotional stability, good memories, and large stable social groups. How do you map between that? They’re not human.

In some ways non human animals appear very similar, especially other mammals and their social relationships and emotions. In other ways they appear very different. They’re their own thing and I think overly simplifying their minds by trying to work out some human age equivalent will just mislead us. It’s not like a pig that can do calculus would suddenly become a reasonable romantic partner haha.

Physicists: I have spent several months of my life on top of years of study and I’m pretty confident I can now say what is going on at this surface site on a catalytic membrane!

Physics enthusiasts: Stuff rolls down energy wells so anyway here’s how we should structure all of society.

you just gave me a great idea for a comedy show.

Nerd makeover except gpt is fed an image of the contestant and asked how to make them over. Contestant then goes to a mingle or speed dating or whatever. Using guidance from the chatbot on what to say and do.

Can we bait tech cultists into this?

Why do I feel like this guy knows exactly how far a Scooby snack gets you.

How the fuck will LLMs help you flirt with Mr Snuffle paws? What is going on in this guy’s head?

It’s fascinating seeing everyone project onto this things. Like a rorschach test of desires. You have the madcap industrialist slavering over firing all humans, the nerd rapturists, the sexbot enthusiasts, the doomsday preppers, and apparently dolphinfuckers now.

cop in a shop >:D

🤣

counterpoint: my GALY (giggle adjusted life year) would skyrocket

Ethical use for gpt 4?