same but I didn't expect anything different from a TWM for a game that relies on floating windows
1,769 karma · joined June 2, 2012
To be clear, psychoanalysis is actually cited in the original essay: "Heinz Kohut and Otto Kernberg" are both quite well-known, although divisive figures. But Freud himself, who produced the theory with proper scope to interpret the claims, is not.
Hannah Arendt (in "What is Authority?") zeroes in on the term "religio" in particular, as the root of "religion" with the literal meaning of "to bind [oneself]". If one is bound to a higher law, secular or theological, as common knowledge, then to act against the law is to subject oneself to punishment.
Unfortunately, as we know all too well in software, this state of having a group bound to a law that transcends them is a precarious state indeed, requiring continuous maintenance or else it's liable to be taken over by those who manipulate the rules to preach without practicing. A failure of the rules leads to the "primal father" situation described by Freud in _Totem and Taboo_, where those who feel dominated band together to kill the person who bound them, and then produce taboos to prevent the situation from occurring again.
That said, we _can_ approach the phenomenon of narcissism structurally. Freud uses an energetic model based on thermodynamics: each of us has some degree of (psychological) energy, and we invest that energy in various ways. One of those ways is in fantasy, as Freud explained in his classic "little entrepreneur" model in _The Interpretation of Dreams_. The little entrepreneur, who has the capital (energy), invests in specific companies (fantasies) hoping to receive a return (satisfaction). This is the basic gist of what's known as Freud's "economic model".
Narcissism is the extent to which the little entrepreneur invests in himself. Immediately we can see that some narcissism isn't bad -- you need to invest in yourself! The problem is only when there's too much, or more specifically, when energy is _not_ invested into the world (or, more specifically, into others) because too much is invested in oneself.
Freud dealt with the seeming "paradox" of grandiosity and depression in his paper "Mourning and Melancholia". The simple overview is that you have a little voice in your head watching over your "self", formed by early authority figures, that says "no" (footnote 1). When you have a lot of energy invested in yourself but it's saying "no", then you feel depressed, because all of your fantasies are rejected. Sometimes you can suspend the voice for a while and say "yes" to everything, which results in a burst of energy suddenly available for use. This is called mania. The manic-depressive is caught in a back-and-forth oscillation of the voice that says "no" and the suspension of that voice.
In a general sense, if you have a lot of energy invested in yourself, you will feel grandiose when you can turn off the "no" and depressed otherwise. If you can figure out how to turn off the "no" forever, then you can feel grandiose all the time. If you can't turn off the "no", then you'll feel depressed, and you might go to therapy hoping that they will give you permission to turn off the "no".
And this isn't a bad thing: the therapist gives you permission to turn off the "no", suddenly the energy is available for use, and maybe you get through to the other side, when you realize that the promises of satisfaction through the self alone feel somehow empty in comparison with investing your energy in the world, in other people. The transformation that must occur is the development of the capacity to _love_. And narcissism is, to an extent, a step along the way (footnote 2).
There is a distinct phenomenon that "science" also seems to categorize as narcissism, where you might feel like you're the master of the rules of society, and that you have the right to control other people, do whatever they want, break the rules, etc. This phenomenon, which some might call "sociopathy" but as a technical term we can call "perversion", doesn't always come with a high level of narcissism, but can, and when it does, you end up with the sorts of villainous characters like Donald Trump etc etc. They wont seek "treatment" because why would they? They're already the masters. The social structure required to help them is really to incentivize them to act such that their personal interests align with the greater good, rather than creating an antagonism, because otherwise the greater good will lose. Another solution is to make spaces where they can act out their desires without harming others. On a personal level, though, it's pretty hard, but thankfully this sort of individual is quite rare, and oftentimes their actions lead to their own downfall.
1: not using the term until the end here, but the voice "above the self [I]" that says "no" is the "superego".
2: working off the Lacanian idea here that analysis proceeds through a stage of "maximal narcissistic projection" (Sem 1), after which the analyst can intervene from the position of the "Ideal-I" and basically allow the analysand to reorient their position wrt fantasy.
- dualboot (not doing that again, Windows 10 loved to eat my bootloader over and over and would get stuck in update loops)
- wine, which requires a lot of configuration and has weird bugs, but is really good for more heavyweight apps (foobar2000 is still king)
- virtualization, which also requires a lot of configuration. need to perform a full OS install, etc. I haven't found a way to easily spin up a virtualized windows box (I run Manjaro = Arch, let me know if you have an easy way. A while back I gave it a couple hours and couldn't figure it out, so I gave up.).
A Windows-in-browser that runs "well enough" and can access my local filesystem would let me just run the damn app, do the thing I want to do, and then call it a day. Of course, I'm sure there's lots of details I haven't thought through here. But it feels like a potentially legitimate use case.
Beyond that, I legitimately think that my experiences with raiding, min-maxing, grinding, etc. were a sort of preparation for the social dynamics of... corporate leadership. Of course, a lot more was required (technical skills, philosophical grounding, etc), but it was a good start.
In general, error correction adds a lot of time. My sense is it will re-read the damaged sectors several times and take the "most common" reading. Then, it compares that with the external full-track hashes to establish correctness. So, it has to do a lot of seeking to read and re-read a damaged portion, which can take minutes for "secure" rips in EAC.
In my eyes, this is not TOO much different than the kind of radical reorg that might take place at a company like Twitter anyway (although ofc I've never seen it first-hand), just weird that it's playing out entirely in public.
That said, I think the public strategy is potentially interesting, as the engineers who remain at the company will probably feel like they're a part of a very exciting moment, will feel more aligned with leadership, etc.
I'm sure there's hundreds of smaller companies eagerly awaiting a lay off list so they can start reaching out to ex-twitter engs.
I highly recommend shooting old-school like this, as practice. After a while, you stop needing to meter, even, because you understand the light conditions and can pre-emptively configure the camera to do exactly what you want. Then, focus and shoot.
The other thing shooting on film taught me is that one perfect photo is better than 100 bad ones. I find that digital photography natives tend to rely on burst features in an attempt to capture the right moment. But in my experience, especially with portraiture, waiting and then grabbing the precise moment can produce better results.
What the authors did here was reground it in neuroscience (scientific materialism) rather than the generic philosophical primitives of phenomenology (which in this case fade into the background a bit, although they remain relevant to all empirical work per se), and draw out some of the impacts of that shift.
- to human beings (subject), food (object) has "intrinsic" value
- to Americans, US dollars have "intrinsic" value
- to Redditors, karma has "intrinsic" value
etc
Interesting aside -- this is also how falling in love works (overvaluation of the object via the subject's projection of value).
You wouldn't believe how rare it is for me to meet someone who agrees with this. I'm in leadership at a web3 company and I need to reiterate this point over and over again. NFTs don't have intrinsic value OR arbitrary value. ERC20s don't have intrinsic value OR arbitrary value. If it doesn't tie back into user psychology, it's not worth anything.
Interesting historical note is that one of Freud's original metaphors for understanding the nature of desire was the unconscious "investor" or "capitalist" who outlays affective charge to the conscious "entrepreneur", who relates to objects. This is known in the literature as Freud's "economic metaphor", which I've found immensely helpful in my own understanding.
> looksmaxx, moneymaxx, surgerymaxx
> daygame, nightgame, warm approach
The language itself reveals deeper structuring principles in terms of truths/untruths, from which the knowledge presented in the chart arises.
The problem isn't that it's ideology; the NYT is equally ideological (ironically I had a far more visceral negative response to the angle of the OP article than to the above chart). The problem isn't even necessarily that it's TRP/manosphere ideology, but that it's treated unreflexively.
The question that immediately comes to mind is "why are the only categories 'sub5', 'normie', and 'chad'? What grounding principles must I assume in order to decide which of these categories I'm a part of?" Same goes for the proposed actions: what worldview must I assume so that these action-words "make sense", are coherent?
I can't speak for everyone, but when I personally dig into these questions, the answers I arrive at don't align with the other ways I elect to live in the world. I'm not saying the chart is "wrong", but rather that it's not relevant, for me at least.
Boring redpill ideology stuff.
1. The entire page hierarchy was only one level deep. You had 10 buttons that select a parameter, and a single data entry slider. So, with two hands, you could very rapidly manipulate parameters. I believe the Yamaha DX7 also had this, but what made the ESQ-1 cool was that the button usages were listed right on the digital readout next to the buttons themselves, rather than off to the side and hard-coded to the parameter. So it was like hitting a hardware button that could automatically remap.
2. Again unlike the DX7, there was no button-press needed to "edit" -- you just hit the button and moved the slider. It felt very natural to use even though it was technically a digital parameter being editing. If you needed additional editing power, you could still hunt for the other buttons outside of the 10 "screen" buttons.
I had one about 5 years ago, and swapped it for a JP-8000. I regret it. Very cool synth, very innovative UX.