Newspeak never became a real problem

never heard of wokeness, i see

robin hanson blocked me for referring to him as aella with tenure. now i think that he’s ghislaine maxwell with tenure

new odium symposium episode. this one is a lot lighter than the previous two. we went back and looked at joseph swetnam, the guy the word misogyny was coined to describe, and how he got relentlessly dunked on by his peers.

https://www.patreon.com/posts/9-first-149546072, or on any platform

new epstein doc release. crashed out for like an hour last night after finding out jeffrey epstein may have founded /pol/ and that he listened to the nazi “the right stuff” podcast. he had a meeting with m00t and the same day moot opened /pol/

you have to make your ai antiwoke because otherwise it gets drapetomania

i actually find the content pretty amusing, since it amounts to “have you guys tried using words correctly every once in a while?”

“you should watch [Steven Pinker’s] podcast with Richard Hanania” cool suggestion scott

this happens like clockwork

I often feel like our industry has lost its sense of whimsy and experimentation from the early days, when people tried weird things to see what would work and what wouldn’t.

hard to think of anything more dreary and whimsyless than shoving a rainforest into the gas tank of an llm

New episode of odium symposium, available on all platforms: https://www.patreon.com/posts/8-ceci-nest-pas-148404664

we look at a particular book by french philosopher and murderer louis althusser, and talk about what it can say about femicide

this is so cool

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this is very insightful, and it sheds some light for me on something underappreciated: the way in which inceldom is not the same as not having sex. it’s an ideology characterized by misogyny, misanthropy, and a sense of one’s own brokenness, and in particular by a fixation on the sense of unrectifiable loss you describe. people really struggle with the idea that there are incels who have had sex or that someone can not have had sex and not qualify for the label incel.

more generally, chan culture and its offshoots really successfully capitalized upon these tendencies in ways that seem to be underexamined. there’s a reason /lgbt/ attracted so many trans people. if you went through the wrong puberty, you have suffered actual, extremely painful unrectifiable loss, and a culture that recognizes that and encourages wallowing in it can serve an oppositional role to a broader culture that just lies to you about what you’ve experienced. i rarely hear about this and when i do it comes wrapped in moralizing terms like “brain poison” which are in their own way accurate and useful, but which are not sufficient for a complete examination

my experience has been that it’s actually driven primarily by the absolute weirdest ppl you will ever meet, these people having overlap with anything weird you can think of, including antisemitism, wellness fascism, inceldom, MRAs, etc, but not tending to be based particularly in any of those groups.

all of which is unfortunate because i also think they are just correct in their claims that this is a real bodily autonomy issue

update on the grok csam story: the heat on this was not dying down, so X has taken steps to address the issue.

update update: by restricting the csam generator to paying users

update update update: actually they didn’t do that https://www.theverge.com/news/859309/grok-undressing-limit-access-gaslighting

💔

Ok, lot to respond to here. I’m familiar with the relevant mathematics.

First, I think it’s clear from the litany of failed attempts that you can’t write down a finite set of rules that tells us what is true about the world. At least to me, it’s also intuitively clear that you can’t write down such a set of rules. That is not, without considerable auxiliary claims at least, a consequence of gödel’s incompleteness theorem, nor does gödel’s incompleteness theorem follow from it.

The essential issue here is that the incompleteness theorem deals with formal statements and formal reasoning in formal languages. There is a significant gap between the perfectly acceptable reasoning we use every day to understand the world around us, which if it can be written down at all often requires us to use informal language, and the sort of thing the incompleteness theorem addresses. There are real philosophical claims to be made and argued, which in at least implicit form go far back and have yet to be pinned down. For example, the sorites paradox can be understood as an (informal) proof that induction can fail in informal arguments. The whole thing, rather than being clarified, becomes more and more hopelessly complex the more one thinks about it.

I agree that inasmuch as objectivism pretends to formality it makes itself vulnerable to mathematical theorems, and surely would evaporate on contact with them. But the failure of the pretense to formality itself renders the issue moot.

Second, the question of what is or is not a “consequence” of this or that theorem is, given the nature of implication, a little difficult to pin down in borderline cases (are not all theorems a consequence of “T -> T”?). I’m perfectly fine with calling cantor’s theorem, the halting theorem, the incompleteness theorem, etc instances of lawvere’s fixed point theorem. But there is significant work required to take the hypotheses of some of these types of theorems and maneuver things into such a position as to apply the FPT. So I don’t think it’s a consensus opinion.

Third, if we want to describe a postmodern movement in mathematics, while I’m not sure about the dates, I get what you’re going for and it makes sense to me. But I think the description you’re putting forth here gives way too much weight to theorems. The movement toward a post-modern sensibility is imo much more marked by a movement toward guiltlessly abstract definitions and axioms. Consider the centuries of the torment that mathematicians experienced trying to justify or explain what negative numbers or complex numbers really are. In contrast, in the 20th century one has the definition of a scheme in algebraic geometry, a kind of space characterized by functions on it which are not really functions and which can be 0 at every point and yet not the zero function. What is the meaning of such a thing? Well, it is up to the individual mathematician to accept their own metaphors explaining that matter. Totally unthinkable a century prior. Examples of this sort of thing abound (for example, test functions in functional analysis). The movement toward such things was doubtless urged on by the impossibility theorems you refer to but goes far beyond them and is far more impactful imo.

ah fuck, man. reddit.com/r/therapyGPT if you want to ruin your day

unfortunately i don’t think there’s any way to communicate how significant the gap is without coming off as condescending or churlish. but like qaa is probably my favorite podcast and i too am tormented by this

that is who we reached out to. i think rat material would fit extremely well with what they’ve got going on and represents a significant gap in their current coverage