leftyted

> 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 living in voluntary exchange (making even more people starve.)

I'm "struggling to see" how you interpreted my post this way.

As long as we're both struggling here, please explain how sex work doesn't entail massively imbalanced power relations. I wasn't just talking about OnlyFans: the post I responded to says "sex work is stigmatized way more than it should be". But even if we're only talking about the internet, I think you're extremely naive if you think physical separation means there's no coercive power involved. The money comes from somewhere. And don't forget, there's a middleman between the performers and the audience.

> Sure, I think with genuinely left policies, there's be less people who felt that sex work that lots of people not doing it find unacceptably degrading was a net win, and so fewer people choosing to voluntarily engage in that; capitalism naturally is economically coercive that way. But there's nothing particular about sex work here, fewer people would accept agricultural field work at current wages, absent economic coercion, too. The fix for the problems capitalism creates index work has everything to do with capitalism and very little to do with sex work.

I can't parse this. I don't claim to know how to solve this problem or "the problems of capitalism".

I think that general revulsion toward capitalism has very little to do with Marx and much more to do with unfairness (perceived and real), cutthroat competition that seems to reward dishonesty, the dispossession of the losers in that competition, and crass materialism. To me, all of those things clearly apply here.

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 win big, losers starve.

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 just deeply sad. Paying a woman to act as though she's interested in you is the commoditization of an innate yearning for companionship. It's turning something that poems are written about into mere transaction. And it's baffling to me how people who tend to be "against capitalism" somehow rally to the free market when it comes to selling sex.

Maybe you should respond to what I wrote instead of telling me "what I sound like".

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 your mood.

Do we gain anything by describing this as a "mental illness"?

> 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 voters chose Biden over many other candidates that progressives preferred.

> We need better candidates who generate real support and appeal other than just not being their opponent. Not sure how to get there.

You cannot imagine someone actually liking Biden without being soft in the head. And other people cannot imagine someone liking Trump without being racist. But these assumptions prove nothing except lack of imagination.

People need to understand how heterogenous the US is...in every way. We have to regain the ability to see the world from other people's perspectives and extract the grain of truth from those perspectives.

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 perspective seriously, it's clear that anything can become a moral issue. Buying an iphone, driving a car, drinking coffee, eating chicken, writing inefficient code, laughing at Dave Chapelle and so on. It's also clear that there's no genuine rationality behind this: no one really knows which actions increase or decrease utility, the people who go for this stuff are just expressing their interests and emotions under an extremely thin veneer of rationality.

While utilitarianism can be useful -- of course we should consider the outcome a policy -- I think it's a dead-end as a replacement for a bedrock moral philosophy. Utilitarians answer the question of "what is the good?" with "whatever maximizes the good". Sounds like kicking the can down the road to me.

Hannah Arendt:

> This perplexity, inherent in all consistent utilitarianism, the philosophy of homo faber par excellence, can be diagnosed theoretically as an innate incapacity to understand the distinction between utility and meaningfulness, which we express linguistically by distinguishing between "in order to" and "for the sake of." Thus the ideal of usefulness permeating a society of craftsmen—like the ideal of comfort in a society of laborers or the ideal of acquisition ruling commercial societies—is actually no longer a matter of utility but of meaning. It is "for the sake of" usefulness in general that homo faber judges and does everything in terms of "in order to." The ideal of usefulness itself, like the ideals of other societies, can no longer be conceived as something needed in order to have something else; it simply defies questioning about its own use. Obviously there is no answer to the question which Lessing once put to the utilitarian philosophers of his time: "And what is the use of use?" The perplexity of utilitarianism is that it gets caught in the unending chain of means and ends without ever arriving at some principle which could justify the category of means and end, that is, of utility itself. The "in order to" has become the content of the "for the sake of"; in other words, utility established as meaning generates meaninglessness.

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 right now.

It seems that there's something wrong with the polls themselves, how the models interpret the polls, or both.

There's lots of talk about "stealing the election" coming from both sides. Lopsided predictions from polls and models can increase the perception that the election was "stolen" if the vote defies the predictions.

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 call conspiracy theories. A decade ago there were all these polls showing fairly broad approval among Arabs for Osama Bin Laden. That makes sense when you consider other polls showing that most Arabs didn't think Bin Laden was involved in 9/11 [0].

Personally I have a soft spot for conspiracy theorists. At least Alex Jones is thinking for himself. Glenn Greenwald and Matt Taibbi are on HN a lot and I feel similarly about them -- which is not to say I put them in the same category as Jones. I think they get some stuff right, I appreciate their fire-and-brimstone approach (at least it's fun to read), but both of them frequently write sentences that cause my eyes to roll back in my head.

I think the ultimate source of conspiratorial thinking is linked to reductio ad absurdum. In our minds, we seem drawn to the extremes. Everything reminds everyone of Hitler, Stalin, Maoist struggle sessions, and so on. Trump is a vile white-supremacist-fascist. Biden is kowtowing to critical-theory-reading neo-Marxists. Reducing an argument to the absurd makes sense in logic and math but perhaps not in the real world where there's no guarantee that an argument is based on anything logical.

Or maybe it makes sense in the real world too. It seems to me, sometimes, that conspiracy theorists are actually fairly good at identifying the ultimate goal of an ideology. But ultimate goals are ideals, they're never realized and, in practice, they provide a direction rather than a destination. It's one thing to identify the ultimate goal of the ideology animating leftists but are you so sure our society shouldn't be a little more left-wing? Because, in practice, that's what electing the left-wing candidate is likely to accomplish. It's unlikely to recreate The Cultural Revolution.

On the other hand, maybe the fact that such ultimate goals came astonishingly close to being realized, on the right and left, in the 20th century, is a good reason to be alarmed.

[0] - https://newrepublic.com/article/94546/middle-east-radical-co...

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. Meanwhile, Marx thought the revolution was going to happen in his lifetime.

> Any attempted adjustment is always categorized as blind ideology and, by implication, chaos. For the erudite it's called "abstract ideology", for the less so it's simply labeled "communism". The effect is the same: portray reform as destruction and create comfort for the beneficiaries of society in the status quo.

Who said anything about "any attempted adjustment"? There are infinite ways you can "make adjustments" to attempt to make people's lives better in a given situation. We do it the time.

> Conversly, both laissez faire-ism and Ayn Rand's thesis are both very much ideologies but they are not called that by those who approve of them. I know of no possible definition of "ideology" that does not also apply to the both the American and French revolution as well as the motivation of every soldier in every army and indeed to the ethics driving every action that is not self absorbed.

My opinion is that, in a given situation, Ayn Rand may be right. In another situation, Marx may be right. What I don't understand is the claim that either of them is always right.

If I had to choose a policy "to reduce suffering," I'd go with Henry George today but I'll probably change my mind later. Mainly I'm just glad it's not up to me because I'm probably wrong. I'm a bit horrified by people who are sure they're right about "how to end suffering" or "how to rationally order society".

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 given time and place -- but to pursue that abstraction as if it has absolute validity (as if it is all-encompassing) is what I'm criticizing.

> 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 often sided with the fascists.

Is that really your takeaway from Homage to Catalonia?

The lesson that I take is the silliness of thinking that your political perspective has absolute validity. All of the leftist factions resisting fascism in Spain were doing something heroic. Meanwhile, in the USSR, other leftists were acting as tyrants. The USSR used its influence in Spain to declare various factions illegal (including POUM, the faction that Orwell was aligned with). The Soviets insisted on the absolute validity of their perspective and started persecuting anyone who was skeptical of Stalin in the midst of a civil war against fascists.

> Those given just enough improvements to their own material conditions no longer saw themselves as exploited by capitalism and largely ignored the working classes.

Yeah, it's almost as if human beings care about concrete, meaningful changes that affect their lives and not some all-encompassing, abstract class struggle.

edit - It's interesting that, in the linked article, Orwell says that Franco's victory was not due to disunity but rather the fact that the fascists were well-supplied (by the Italians and Germans) whereas the republicans had much less assistance.

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 the road to a communist utopia.

Towards the end of the article, the author accuses "the NumFOCUS policy" of failing to "consider the mental health of people that are accused". But if someone has a mental breakdown after being criticized that does not mean the critic did anything wrong. Legal and moral norms exist to allow us to answer questions like "did this person do anything wrong?" or "did this person cause this other person's mental breakdown?" I think it's naive to expect codes of conduct to improve on what we already have.

I suppose I think codes of conduct are as good as the people you get to enforce them. But that's the thing: the people willing to volunteer their time to be cops tend to be the last people you'd want in those roles. If codes of conduct are not a replacement for fair-minded people maybe they're more trouble than they're worth.

Also, while I did not find his presentation insulting, I do think he made a mistake by spending so much of it directly critiquing someone else's presentation. It was in bad taste though not -- of course -- the kind of thing that needs to be punished.

In other words, if juries deliberated in front of cameras, every jury would be hung.

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 metaphors that express judgements about the world, usually without realizing it. In other words, the way we use language encodes concepts in a deep way.

To borrow an example from George Lakoff, we, in English, use war-metaphors to talk about arguments. Of arguments and of wars you can say things like "he's marshalling his forces," "they're ceding their territory," or "she's girding her defenses". In fact, almost anything you can say about a war you can also say about an argument. In American politics, with regard to partisan squabbling and the filibuster, we talk about "the nuclear option". The fact that these metaphors make sense to us indicates a judgement, something like "arguments are like wars". That judgement shows up in billions of lines of English scraped from the internet and can be fed into a model, allowing GPT-3 to "make that connection" via purely statistical methods.

Yes, this is a bit like asking "what a library believes". But a lot of these metaphors show up in our languages and, in a way, they express judgements, which is something akin to a belief. Does that mean a library has beliefs? Is this all knowledge is? I wouldn't go that far. But the argument is an interesting one and worth raising.

> 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 knowledge.

Great point.

> A language model such as GPT-3 operates only on words, not concepts. It can make connections between words on the basis of statistical correlations, but has no capacity for encoding concepts, and therefore cannot "know" anything.

Are you sure? Aren't "concepts" encoded in how language is used, at least to some degree?

LeCun does say that models that explicitly attempt represent knowledge perform better than GPT-3 in terms of answering questions. I'm no expert but I believe him.

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 On Truth and Falsity in their Extra-Moral Sense and George Lakoff makes it in Metaphors We Live By.

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 (or, at least, there is no distinction between knowledge and language). In this view, all there really is is language, which is mostly composed of metaphors and, ultimately, metaphors only refer to other metaphors, i.e. language is circular. In this view, not only is the ultimate, physical, concrete world beyond us but also we can't even talk about it. From this perspective, GPT-3 is not substantively different than what our minds are doing.

That view makes some strong claims (I don't find it convincing), but it's out there. A slightly different claim, though, is that "knowledge of how (we think) the world actually works" is encoded in language. To me, that seems trivially true. So, again, how you take this quote from LeCun depends on what you think knowledge is and your view of the relationship between knowledge and language.

> 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, the entrance exams with questions predicated on a familiarity with middle-class culture naturally disadvantaged working-class students.

> 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, disadvantaging shall continue?

It depends on the policy. Is the height of a basketball hoop a policy that is unintentionally discriminating against me because I can't jump that high? Is the Nobel Prize racist because Jews are massively overrepresented among winners?

The debate here is over whether any policy that results in racial disparity is racist. To me, that argument is obviously wrong.

> A good example is in the (historical) [entrance exams for the UK's Grammar School systems which are sat at age 11[(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eleven-plus#Controversy); while the grammar-school system was ostensibly universal and open to all, the entrance exams with questions predicated on a familiarity with middle-class culture naturally disadvantaged working-class students.

To you, tests like the one you mention are racist (or classist) because you assume that certain races or classes will be more likely to know certain things and others less likely. But, ironically, to me, your assumption is racist (and classist) because we have different definitions of racism.

Finally, I think there's a serious flaw in your thinking. If "studies show" that rich kids test better in math, does that mean math tests are classist? Is it even possible to create a test so that every group you consider (ethnic or socio-economic) will achieve the same average score? And which groups shall we consider? Isn't it common knowledge these days that there is no canonical way to divvy people up into "races"? Why is it that, for the purpose of college admission, "Asian" is an ethnicity but "Jew" isn't? Furthermore, imagine I am born to rich parents and my parents hire a math tutor from the age of 3 until I graduate high school. By the time I take the SAT, I will probably be much better at math than the average high school student. Is there anything wrong with that? Why is it correct for tests to attempt to discern innate ability rather than current ability?

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 that Orwell pointed out in the 40s. If you're going to call Tom Cotton a "fascist" then you should also call any mouthpiece of the CCP "fascist".

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 not like we've answered questions like "what is knowledge?" "what is good?" and so on.

I never said that "only since Marx" was the government an instrument of violence owned by the ruling class. I said that idea is a Marxian idea. And it is. Also, I never meant to imply that it's a wrong idea (I think it's wrong, but you don't have to).

The fact that you're mouthing ideas from Marx without even realizing it while denying the concept of intellectual heritage is stunning.

> 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

> 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 world. Marx turned much of that upside down.

It's fine if you don't agree with the idea of "intellectual heritage" (or the influence of that heritage). But I (and others) do, so clearly we're going to talk about it.

It seems, uh, strange to fail to notice Marx's influence in particular given what happened in the 20th century and what continues to happen in China. Furthermore, the idea of the government as an instrument of violence used by the ruling class (which is so common these days, on HN too) is clearly straight out of Marx.

> The private sphere is where the most severe abuse happens.

Certainly plenty of abuse happens in the private sphere. My original post was hasty.

My opinion is more complicated than "everyone is good in private". It's more like, at a certain point, "publicness" becomes a problem. And things that we can do in private (like goodness, love, and hatred) do not work in public. And yet we seem to be reaching for them anyway.

> 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 the source of the visceral disgust some people have for lawyers, journalists, activists, and other people who affect being underdogs so they aren't held to the standards of honest people, and then antagonize others using those dominant rules as a cover. The same can be said for trolls. What it comes down to is this calculus of self permission to act like a piece of shit because you identify as the underdog.

> It's not the platforms, it's the single idea that identifying as an outsider, resister, pariah, defender, or challenger, justifies cruelty because being "good," is defined by your chosen bugbear. The reality is the mainstream is not "good," the public sphere is an open sewer, and the only things that float in it are turds. It's not a right/left thing, it's a conflict between people competing for mainstream power and people trying to find freedom from that mainstream's domain, with some of each self-identifying as beneath decency.

What a great insight.

My opinion is that this comes down to the fact that we cannot be good in public. The more "in public" we are, the more dishonest we are.

The private sphere -- family, close friends, personal intimacy, etc -- is where people are at their best. We can be honest there. We can show weakness, we can apologize, we can compromise and we can forgive.

The internet has made lots of things public that used to be private. It is also taking things that were public and making them more public. This is making the world worse.

Since I know you've read Hannah Arendt, this matches up well with her assertion that "in politics, love is a stranger, and when it intrudes upon it nothing is being achieved except hypocrisy" and "hatred and love belong together, and they are both destructive; you can afford them only in the private". She insisted on glory -- not goodness or justice or love -- as the sole criterion for political action.

Sure, we shouldn't "give murder a try" to see if our biases against it are unfounded. But LSD seems like fair game.

Correct, it's from 250μg

> 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're open to coming around to the idea that they might be well founded.

> 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 body seems to be feeling ‘mechanical’ and my movements weaker, with my skin feeling like a flesh glove (if that metaphor makes sense), although at the same time, the bright sunlight and cool wind feel exceptionally vivid to my senses; I was reminded of when I went skydiving and on the way down, the world seemed to ‘pop’.

> One persistent problem was my jaw or neck muscles seemed to be rigid or clenching and I had to keep relaxing them or they would create a sort of want-to-vomit feeling, which was pretty strange when I focused on it. But I still wasn’t impressed by the experience.

> I happened to spend a little time cloud-watching, and I realized that the clouds were strobing like stop-animation as I focused on individual patches; in particular, I realized that I could force a visual flip (like the young/old woman optical illusion or the rabbit-duck illusion) from seeing a sky of blue with thin clouds to a roiling stormscape where the blue was the black, and the white clouds were just the illuminated underside. Quite interesting, and an unexpected figure-ground inversion. I also could temporarily force pareidolia by visualizing and willing the clouds to form claw or grasping hands or vaguely human-like shapes.

> Back home, I spent the next 2-3 hours listening to music by Explosions in the Sky tracks, which while planning I had thought would sound better on LSD. I was right - the experience was amazing. Lying in bed with my eyes blindfolded and just listening carefully, I have never followed the music so well, or been so moved emotionally or physically by it. My misanthropic soul was moved twice to tears.

There's no way he'd have those experiences with "bad tabs". I think you're mistaking his prose style here, which is attempting objectivity, with "dismissiveness".

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, Dostoevsky, and Chekhov all wrote in the same stilted, modernist style.

As I said, the reputation that Russian literature has in the English speaking world is mostly due to Garnett's translations. If nothing else, her translations are beautiful.

From the linked article:

> What differentiates ­Chekhov from other story writers is his fineness of perception, his ability to discern the subtlest emotional shades, and his appreciation of “the elusive beauty” of human experience. In the story “Strong ­Impressions,” the hero learns “that the same word has thousands of shades of meaning according to the tone in which it is pronounced, and the form which is given to the sentence.” And that is why one should never read any translation by ­Richard Pevear and ­Larissa ­Volokhonsky. They translate literary masterpieces word by word, with no appreciation of what the author is trying to accomplish or what makes a great work extraordinary. If ­Pevear and ­Volokhonsky had done the King James Bible, Cain would have asked whether he was his fraternal sibling’s custodian. With Chekhov, their ­approach is especially unfortunate. He is all nuance, and they are all ­bluntness.

> Some fifty years ago, Ann ­Dunnigan did the best versions of Chekhov’s plays and of some of his stories. For the rest, the versions of Constance Garnett, all thirteen volumes of which were reprinted in 1986, remain, despite some lapses, impressive in their sensitivity to tone. I have cited their translations in this essay. Just as there is no point in reading a translation of a comic novel that loses the humor, so ­Chekhov can be appreciated in English only when a translator can catch the fine shades of his stories’ elusive beauty.