leftyted

8 ms·

31.
by leftyted 6y ago
> Im struggling to see how you imagine a crackdown on voluntary sex work would make that better, except as a way of draining more resources from everyone (itself making more people starve) to guarantee that fewer people could make a livi
32.
by leftyted 6y ago
Maybe that's true for Marxists but it's not true for "the left" more generally. What bothers people on the left about capitalism is, from the article: > The environment it creates is ruthlessly competitive. Winners w
33.
by leftyted 6y ago
How am I supposed to feel about a sentence like this? > "Like there was one guy who paid me to make a reaction video about his ‘appendage’ and it took me like seven takes to sound like I was excited by it." To me, that's
34.
by leftyted 6y ago
Maybe you should respond to what I wrote instead of telling me "what I sound like".
35.
by leftyted 6y ago
Isn't being sick for two weeks a pretty good reason to be unhappy? There is pain, discomfort, shortness of breath. You may have trouble sleeping and lose your appetite. You won't be able to exercise. All of this will affect you
36.
by leftyted 6y ago
> Likewise this time around, nobody I have talked to seriously voted for Joe Biden on his own merits. They voted for him because he's not Donald Trump. Yeah, same here, but that's because we live in progressive bubbles. Dem vo
37.
by leftyted 6y ago
I think that this article correctly identifies the root issue here: naive application of utilitarianism. All of these "write better code to save the planet" blogs are an unavoidable symptom of that naivete. If you take this pers
38.
by leftyted 6y ago
I agree the language is a bit childish but it is quite remarkable how -- for two elections in a row now -- we've seen these models get so much so wrong. Almost everyone was predicting a landslide for Biden and it's dead heat righ
39.
by leftyted 6y ago
His conclusion is that this style of paranoia belongs to "the dispossessed" rather than to one political faction. Or at least to those who feel dispossessed. Another data point for that thesis: Arabs are very into what we would c
40.
by leftyted 6y ago
I don't agree that everything is abstraction. You can't argue with starvation. The comparison of class struggle to physics is astonishing. Physicists predicted the existence of black holes and then found them later in nature. M
41.
by leftyted 6y ago
Suffering isn't an abstraction. The notion that suffering is caused by the subjugation of one class at the hands of another is an abstraction. That doesn't mean it's wrong -- it is almost certainly right with respect to a gi
42.
by leftyted 6y ago
> I have thought about this a lot this year, especially how the bourgeois liberals, who when faced with a choice between a people’s revolution (only half realized when the fascists began to take over) and a fascist military dictatorship
43.
by leftyted 6y ago
It was hard to read this blog. The author reminds me of a character in The First Circle, Rubin, an avowed Marxist imprisoned in the USSR. Rubin sees his punishment as unjust but he believes this kind of judicial error is a small bump in th
44.
by leftyted 6y ago
In other words, if juries deliberated in front of cameras, every jury would be hung.
45.
by leftyted 6y ago
I agree with you in that I would make a strong distinction between what a model like GPT-3 does and whatever it is that humans do. But I do think you're missing the point just a bit. When we speak and think, we use all kinds of metaph
46.
by leftyted 6y ago
> In our heads, language is a combination of words and concepts, and knowledge can be encoded by making connections between concepts, not simply words. If there is no concept or idea backing up the words, it can hardly be called knowledg
47.
by leftyted 6y ago
Personally I do not find the whole "language = knowledge" argument convincing. But if you're interested in reading writers who make that argument (and perhaps I'm vulgarizing the argument a bit), Nietzsche makes it in O
48.
by leftyted 6y ago
Reading this is really interesting: > GPT-3 doesn't have any knowledge of how the world actually works. I think this is a philosophical question. There is a view that, basically, there is no such thing as knowledge, just language (
49.
by leftyted 6y ago
> they were testing knowledge irrelevant to the thing ostensibly being tested That's a good argument but it's not the argument that I was responding to: > the grammar-school system was ostensibly universal and open to all,
50.
by leftyted 6y ago
> Or are you suggesting that unintentionally disadvantaging a group is not only not discriminating against that group, but that also it is is also excusable and needs no correction? i.e. that the consistent, albeit unintentional, disadva
51.
by leftyted 6y ago
I think you're right. The article is talking about totalitarianism not fascism (it uses the two terms interchangeably). Still, most of the article's points stand: "fascist" is used to mean "bully," something t
52.
by leftyted 6y ago
This isn't a question of idealizing people who lived thousands of years ago, it's just an observation about how ideas pass through the centuries. Also, philosophers who wrote thousands of years ago are relevant today. It's
53.
by leftyted 6y ago
> The issue is what you do on a phone, not the phone itself. Are you sure? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_medium_is_the_message
54.
by leftyted 6y ago
> Aristotle and Marx have zero to do with it and the way people on HN bring super old classics in completely unrelated context is getting obnoxious. The Greeks are the source for a lot of our language and a lot of how we think about the
55.
by leftyted 6y ago
> Internet trolls use the higher bar for entry of tech focused platforms to harass people who are competing in the desperate political struggle for approval that is mainstream social media. Conversely, this mainstream culture is also th
56.
by leftyted 6y ago
Sure, we shouldn't "give murder a try" to see if our biases against it are unfounded. But LSD seems like fair game.
57.
by leftyted 6y ago
Correct, it's from 250μg
58.
by leftyted 6y ago
> Seriously. I'm dumbfounded that we had to regress all the way to this point in order to discover why the social norm existed in the first place. Is that a bad thing? It's good to question social norms...as long as you'r
59.
by leftyted 6y ago
> I admit that I only skimmed but his experience seems to me very atypical. He talks very little about his experience with the 250μg dose, almost dismissing it. He doesn't dismiss it. He writes: > During the walk, I notice my bo
60.
by leftyted 6y ago
All of Pevear and Volokhonsky's translations are stilted in a modernist kind of way. They read like experimental prose. I like experimental prose and I find P&V readable but I have a very hard time believing that Tolstoy, Dosto

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