Purple Cabbage

Cayley on Illich on the Problem of Man "I have more and more learned to recognize that even very careful and traditional use of words does not allow me to bespeak the precepts my grandfather knew, because they aren't there anymore" - Ivan Illich davidcayley.com/blog/2019/1/16…

@ExpertsLie it’s just a vicious cycle of evil, and the next thing in that cycle

@purplcabbage The only thing that makes sense is if they've done the calculus and low IQ malcontents are enough of a voting bloc to guarantee a hold on power

Hasan Piker is one of those figures who it is beneath the dignity of attention, and yet compels attention for his mendacity

@ExpertsLie his beady close set eyes, perhaps?

@purplcabbage It's the meta that compels attention. E.g. Why is the NYT putting him in our faces?

case in point, I don’t explain the trans or furry phenomenon in great detail to my kids, I just tell them to avoid friendships with such people, and to maintain a safe social distance they may never understand! and this is fine

practically speaking, I don’t want my kids to follow in my footsteps as a ethnologist of political and cultural derangements, I want them to note the derangement, step around, and continue with their lives they don’t need to understand why certain people are evil, they only need to recognize the evil and avoid it these are two very different mindsets, from someone betrayed (me) to someone avoiding trouble

that time has passed

there will be no thoughtful reflection

medium is the message, and the medium loves extremes and hates accountability

of course SPLC was playing both sides, the kayfabe runs deep

@Nobodyspec4502 @feelsdesperate I know many such people

@feelsdesperate met a lefty prof in South Africa in the 90s. he shoplifted regularly. rationale was stores cover "shrinkage" into their retail price so he was just taking what was already priced in. or something. scumbag

The way that we’re going to frame our descent into a low trust society is that it’s ‘anti capitalist,’ that anti-social, low-grade criminality perpetrated by narcissists is somehow a remedy for the *problem* of capitalism.

@feelsdesperate yes this is true, white leftists must launder their beliefs through non-white avatars to feel legitimate, it’s a great business for the worst people

A big reason I think neo-Third Worldism (or whatever you want to call it) is popular among enervated self-hating Leftists is that it comes to the same conclusions as Leftism BUT its avatars are energetic ethno narcissists who are much more charismatic.

@BallerThanThou do you have a list of well-curated podcasts?

@purplcabbage There there. Only the chosen ones can handle the schizo tin foil hat theories of geopolitics. I’d be on the look out for “why is the world so insane? Why are the politicians destroying us?”. It’s only after that that you gently send some well curated podcasts their way.

what’s the right age to introduce color revolutions?

this was also when we liberalized trade and moved manufacturing abroad, uprooting whole economic ecosystems and all the job opportunities in those ecosystems before there was a choice, and therefore college was more self-selective we remove the choice, and college becomes mandatory

[Warning: Non-business post] Sometime in the '90s, we made the civilizational-scale error of observing college's correlation with good life outcomes and turning college into the ~only "approved" gateway into adulthood, thereby ~forcing huge numbers of young people into life-altering debt. The irony, of course, is that the danger of confusing correlation and causation is one of the first things you learn in college!

this was also when we liberalized trade and moved manufacturing abroad, uprooting whole economic ecosystems and all the job opportunities in those ecosystems before there was a choice, and therefore college was more self-selective we remove the choice, and college becomes mandatory

@AndyMasley What people don't talk about is the dwindling number of ley line convergence sites on which to build server farms. Without propicious geomantic influences, the facility can't attract data gremlins. Hello RAM errors.

@sivori wow I haven’t seen you in my feed for ages, what a pleasant surprise

I worked at a company that still had stuff like this, the tangible residue of a Golden Age. Typical thing, company started in the 1920s, had a major heyday in the 1950s-1960s when the entire country was booming. Ancient black and white photos of ancient sales meetings featuring crowds of grinning long-dead salesmen in long-demolished hotel ballrooms hung on seldom-traveled carpeted hallways. The proverbial split-level "corner office" was enormous with its own broad conference table and bathroom the CEO could disappear into mid-meeting like slipping behind a mirror at Versailles. The office was full of rich mid-century modern details like heavy drapes, sharp lines and dark wood paneling. Padding around the building you would find glassed-in fish-bowl offices and incredible conference rooms complete with built-in bars for serving three martini lunches to grandees with gleaming coifs of Vitalis. I felt like a dirty shepherd wandering the toppled ruins of Rome.

@drocto as a usage tax, it feels fair

@purplcabbage It is also a flat tax and is roughly proportional to one's capacity utilization and wear and tear. Roughly, because it you only drive off-peak you have no impact on marginal utilization and also the infrastructure has a non-utilization component of depreciation (freezing, sun).

old timers accepted the gasoline tax, because it went to the roads, and we all used the roads

@_JinShiC well it’s still early but I made a joke about having to accept a life poverty, to which he said “but I like traveling!” we’ll know more in 3 months

@purplcabbage How is it coming along?

twice in two days have heard “I can’t afford children” from young people on the brink of family formation, who absolutely should have children so I am working on my delivery of “have children and be poor”

they are intelligent in some narrow definition of intelligence, but they also break the social contract with intelligence, due to their lack of continual learning normally, if you met someone as “smart” as an LLM (fluent expression, poly lingual, deep knowledge on a range of subjects), you could develop a very fruitful relationship over the course of months and years, as they learned the details of your life but these things don’t learn! at best they acquire some explicit knowledge about your situation through text-based memories, but they never internalize it into tacit knowledge, and this breaks the social contract that is usually inseparable from intelligence—so in that sense they are very dumb!

@SarahTheHaider @purplcabbage I think models are less smart than they appear to be for exactly this reason - they're very knowledgable so seem more intelligent than they are. But I think it's a mistake to think they don't have any intelligence, or that they're not getting smarter with each model generation.

My sense is the same, hence why I'm trying hard to understand the Doomer POV. It is just not intuitive to me on any front. As far as alignment...many of the concerns can apply to humans! China could unleash another pandemic tomorrow! Pakistan drives their nukes around in vans (for safety, lol)! Cults exist, more dangerous ones can crop up at any moment! I wonder too: are alignment attempts *more likely* to create a killer AI than otherwise? As is, it has no values, and there is a question as to it can attain them on its own. With *imposed* values, there is a shorter route to thinking we are evil. What am I missing?