In 2017 Idiocracy is a Documentary

[Steersman]

In any case, somewhat apropos of which, think you suggested or argued earlier that Jerry may have been influenced in that direction by Pinker; was just reading some of the latter's How the Mind Works and he certainly seemed anything but dogmatic on the issue.

To be honest I can't even remember Pinker's position on determinism - and I've read most of his books.

I'd read Mind some time ago but had forgotten a bunch of it so was re-reading portions and ran across the bits on free-will in passing.

Whatever it is he doesn't seem to feel the need to drag it into every conversation. I don't see how it adds to the discussion of whether Harvey Weinstein is a psychopath or not. If you've decided that nobody has free will anyway then having a personality disorder or poor impulse control is irrelevant because we are all just going through the motions anyway.

Indeed - the whole concept of psychopathology, or at least sociopathology, seems predicated on the premise, on the dichotomy, that most "normal" people have control on their desires and urges, and can "choose" not to give free rein to them whereas sociopaths & psychopaths can't or won't. Absent some degree of agency, of free-will, hard to see how the concept of psychopathology has any meaning or relevance at all.

A couple of relevant quotes from Mind:

Either we dispense with all morality as an unscientific superstition, or we find a way to reconcile causation (genetic or otherwise) with responsibility and free will. .... I believe that science and ethics are two self-contained systems played out among the same entities in the world, just as poker and bridge are different games played with the same fifty-two-card deck. .... Free will is an idealization of human beings that makes the ethics game playable. Euclidean geometry requires idealizations like infinite straight lines and perfect circles, and its deductions are sound and useful even though the world does not really have infinite straight lines or perfect circles. .... Similarly, ethical theory requires idealizations like free, sentient, rational, equivalent agents whose behaviour is uncaused, and its conclusions can be sound and useful even though the world, as seen by science, does not really have uncaused events. .... [pg 55]

Nice to see that he emphasized the "as seen by science" as it too has its limitations, something that Jerry seems unwilling to consider. Pinker said later on in the book, in a related context of how to deal with such problems:

A second approach is to deny that there is a problem. We have been misled by fuzzy thinking or by beguiling but empty idioms of language, such as the pronoun I. Statements about consciousness, will, self, and ethics cannot be verified by mathematical proof or empirical test, so they are meaningless. But this answer leaves us incredulous, not enlightened. As Descartes observed, our own consciousness is the most indubitable thing there is. .... [pg 561]

I think he's kind of alluding to, or basing his perspective on, the argument that the science and ethics "games" are just models, each of which has its limitations. And that free-will in particular is more of an imprecisely defined term than not, even if there may be, probably is I think, some substance to it. In part why I've argued for degrees of freedom, of free-will: we're not free to fly to the moon in an act of will but it sure looks like we're free to choose between a limited number of options in many circumstances. Kind of think that makes us "First Causes" - to a limited extent in any case - although that tends not to be a particularly popular position in itself for one reason or another. :-)

[Service Dog]

Are you familiar with a certain type of young guy?-- from NY or California or New England-- kinda preppy deck-shoe casual, vaguely hippie, sorta jock-y bro-ish, with a 'Do you know who my dad is?!!!' entitlement. There's a female version, too. Every generation has them, but millenials seem willing to defer to theirs... rather than cast them as the bad guys in 80's John Hughes movies & 90's 'alternative' subculture.

These wankers have the luxury of pursuing a film degree, with no concern that few who hold that degree will ever achieve actual hollywood glory.

A handful of them have banded-together, and now produce shitty music festivals-- such as the infamous Fyre Festival-- and they shoot little video montage reels, for luxury brand corporate clients. They're pipsqueaks-- getting high on their own supply-- disgracing themselves daily/ such as telling everyone they email-- "I'll put you on the VIP list!" of the music festival/ then not-actually bothering to put the person on any list. Or bragging loudly-- in front of a line of paying customers "I scored shrooms!!!!" Oblivious that the customers have been waiting in the sun without water for 2 hours, while the box office booth is still being built.

I now work for this band of tools, sporadically. A day here, two days there. Getting their accountant to pay me is a second job.

I was offered work Friday night-- 5 hours for $150-- details not specified, but I correctly surmised they wanted me to stand at the velvet rope of some party or fashionable corporate event... and be mean to the mob trying to get inside, some with valid tickets or invitations/ some just trying to scam their way in. Between 4 and 9 times as many people are invited-- than the maximum firecode occupancy. That's standard overbooking procedure.

The horsey french chick who is my hiring-contact-- never tells me what my actual job will be, what the event is. If she gives me an iPad containing a guestlist, it's always missing 60% of the people who paid for tickets or were invited. So I end up asking people to look-up the email or text thread on their phone... detailing which wankerboy invited them... or showing the receipt of their ticket purchase.

I am bound to no fair rules. I can tell someone they should have dressed better if they wanted to get in/ because it's OBVIOUS their 'important' friend would forget to put their name on my list/ and they'd be reduced to begging me for lenience. (I have actually said this.)

If someone tells me they know So-&-So... I tell them that's very impressive & good-- because I don't know that impressive guy. I don't have his number in my phone... so I can't call him & plead for him to intervene on their behalf. They'll have to do that themselves. What? He's not answering? He's probably inside where there's loud music/ too stoned to notice his vibrating phone/ or screening the call when he sees the caller's name. Tough shit.

The Friday night gig was a shitshow. A halloween ball in an amazing x-men mansion up by Eastchester & Yonkers. The day of the event, I was told the $150 for 5 hours-- involved 5 additional hours riding to and from the event, in a 15 passenger van. I told them that doubled my workday/ halved my pay. They texted that they'd 'try' to get me $200. I gave no reply. So then they wrote I'm 'confirmed' to get $250. I said, "see you tonight". The ball is a pre-existing event. Local police & fire marshalls & the people who manage tickets & parking for the county fair-- were already in place. This is the first year the event partnered with the NYC wankers, and the local boots-on-the-ground people weren't happy about it.
There was a well-oiled machine of folding tables & flea-market style tarp-tents & pennants on strings to mark parking and standing-lines. I was there entirely to deal with the wanker-company's own personal guestlist & entourage of undocumented hangers-on. The local people insisted their teenage employees maintain the professionalism of a supermarket check-out area. My nightclub nonsense was not part of their gameplan. By the end of the night, they may have realized I'm a necessary evil.

The whole reason I was working, was so the french chick could put on her Eyes Wide Shut costume and get drunk & play Girls Gone Will in the mansion.

Early the next morning, she booked me to the training-facility of a major cosmetics company, to do who-knows-what. Whatever her job was supposed to be, there. I was there so she could sleep of her partying. She planned to come-in at 2 pm. She never made it in. She hired another chick, from Jersey, sight-unseen, to do her desk-work. That chick lasted until 4pm, before she couldn't handle being abused by french cosmetics executives.. and going crazy trying to type on the non-QWERTY french laptop. She just stood up & walked-out. The french cosmetic exec lady's first instinct was to berate me-- until she realized I could walk-out the same door. So she strained to feign being nice, a performance which strained her like Andrea Dworkin attempting to fake an orgasm.

Today was Day 2... I'm up to $136 out-of-pocket, fetching sushi for french people & coffee & IKEA prop-tables in the nor'easter rain. And these fuckers say claim they don't have any cash to reimburse my receipts. They're filming some sort of training-video or commercial. Hair stylists & makeup artists demonstrating products, or techniques. Everybody on-camera looks like a model, or celebrity. Except one short fat one, with that Kardashian butt-injection look. It turns-out she's actually affiliated with the Kardashians-- a bonifide fatass, not just a copycat fatass.

Tomorrow is the last day. I have to figure-out a gameplan. Demand to be reimbursed in cash? Agree to add the petty cash to my invoice... and hope they bother to pay me at all? Walk out? Attach a large magnet to the hard-drive holding the footage of their video-shoot?

[ConcentratedH2O, OM]

There's a lovely little thread developing at Meyers's place. A TERF (as The Herd have already decided them to be) has invaded, and the cows are running around in a panic.

Nerd ties himself up beautifully in semantic knots entirely of his own making:

https://i.imgur.com/0sQXM18.png


But this is brilliant:

https://i.imgur.com/qut5I6a.png

[Guest_84d94f98]

Which rule governs that if the roadrunner runs fast enough, the road actually detaches from the ground, then reattaches behind her? I say "her" since it seems like a male/female rivalry.

"Just runnin' down the road's his idea of having fun."

Road Runner Theme song:
https://youtube.com/watch?v=OwYQsZuh2CM

-Soylent

[Matt Cavanaugh]

Is it wrong to have this much fun at poe?

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/nosacredco ... 3590949741

I'm trying to give hints left & right, but few have caught on.

600% of rapes go unreported -- c'mon people!

[Karmakin]

Hollywood is ailing, comics are fucked,

I know there's a lot of grousing about SJWism there, but honestly there's perfectly reasonable economic explanations for the Hollywood collapse.

A question a lot of people find themselves asking is "why not instead of one giant blockbuster a studio instead makes several smaller films?" I've asked that question before. But turns out as a studio grows and starts making bigger and bigger films, it expands its staff until eventually it's pretty much forced to only make big blockbusters. Because that's the only thing it can do to productively employ its large staff. Big studios are each a bubble waiting to pop.

As far as comics go they'd be in bad times even without the SJW entryists, because they're such an outdated business model. The trade market, often derided by comic shop owners for taking away sales from single issues, has been the only thing keeping the industry afloat.

The other big thing about comics, is that they're really competing for the same dollars against a lot of stuff. There's two big culprits that I'll throw out. The first, is that there's MUCH more swag you can get your hands on these days. Smaller stuff, to be sure, it's not all expensive statues, I'm thinking stuff like those POP figures. That stuff sells fairly regularly. (I say looking at the top of my computer desk at my collection of POPs and small plushies).

The second, I think is board games. This, it seems to me is the big growth industry when we're talking about the local comic shop dollar. Most comic shops also have board game sections as well. The quality of this stuff is through the roof, IMO, and avoids much if not all of the entryism that we've seen in other communities. (It's funny, the only real entryism is in a game that's almost universally panned as being TERRIBLE.)

Actually, it's kinda funny in that there's a bit of a backlash, at least locally in my community regarding boardgames and SJWs, as the SJW stuff has been TERRIBLE for boardgames as a whole..the terribleness of Wil Wheton's Tabletop show, combined with the promos that they sent out basically breaking game after game has caused a bit of a backlash.

The third big problem with comics is comics themselves, in that all they have is the hype train. They're printing #1 after #1 after #1, because they tend to sell the most. But the problem with that is it loses any sort of long-term cultural engagement. Comics have next to no actual cultural impact themselves. It's very rare to actually see people talking about what actually happens in comics. I actually see much more discussion of manga/anime than western comics.

[Service Dog]

There's a lovely little thread developing at Meyers's place. A TERF (as The Herd have already decided them to be) has invaded, and the cows are running around in a panic.

Nerd ties himself up beautifully in semantic knots entirely of his own making:

https://i.imgur.com/0sQXM18.png


But this is brilliant:

https://i.imgur.com/qut5I6a.png

The sad thing about legogender --according to the boxed warnings at that link-- is that the trans community views legogender with suspicion...

of being the worst gender of them all. Worse than Male.

"troll gender".

http://gender.wikia.com/wiki/Legogender


Why is Kekistan the only place to officially recognize us, my he/she/it/troll comrades?

[jet_lagg]

Determinism triggers something deep in people's intuition that disturbs them, though when asked how its truth would or should affect what we do in concrete terms those same people either say it "not at all" or reveal themselves to be fatalists. I don't know of even a single self described fatalist that actually lives according to that code, so I think the entire determinism question is a red herring.

Determinists like Jerry say the issue is important because how we deal with criminals. They say it's immoral to punish people for what's just the Big Bang working itself out. So you ask what should you do with criminals and they say, well, we still have to send them to prison - but as a deterrent. So basically just doing the same damn thing we always do but on a different pretext.
<snip>

This is what I was getting at. Why is punishment a deterrent for other individuals but the knowledge of potential punishment wasn't a deteernt for the individual who has already committed the crime? The situation gets complicated pretty quickly and it's best to just abandon determinism or non determinism as concepts and wade out into the weeds of what you think is really important.

[Shatterface]

A couple of relevant quotes from Mind:

Either we dispense with all morality as an unscientific superstition, or we find a way to reconcile causation (genetic or otherwise) with responsibility and free will. .... I believe that science and ethics are two self-contained systems played out among the same entities in the world, just as poker and bridge are different games played with the same fifty-two-card deck. .... Free will is an idealization of human beings that makes the ethics game playable. Euclidean geometry requires idealizations like infinite straight lines and perfect circles, and its deductions are sound and useful even though the world does not really have infinite straight lines or perfect circles. .... Similarly, ethical theory requires idealizations like free, sentient, rational, equivalent agents whose behaviour is uncaused, and its conclusions can be sound and useful even though the world, as seen by science, does not really have uncaused events. .... [pg 55]

Nice to see that he emphasized the "as seen by science" as it too has its limitations, something that Jerry seems unwilling to consider.

Pinker seems to be espousing a conpatablist view. Or at least a view which is compatible with compatiblism.

Pinker said later on in the book, in a related context of how to deal with such problems:

A second approach is to deny that there is a problem. We have been misled by fuzzy thinking or by beguiling but empty idioms of language, such as the pronoun I. Statements about consciousness, will, self, and ethics cannot be verified by mathematical proof or empirical test, so they are meaningless. But this answer leaves us incredulous, not enlightened. As Descartes observed, our own consciousness is the most indubitable thing there is. .... [pg 561]

I think he's kind of alluding to, or basing his perspective on, the argument that the science and ethics "games" are just models, each of which has its limitations. And that free-will in particular is more of an imprecisely defined term than not, even if there may be, probably is I think, some substance to it. In part why I've argued for degrees of freedom, of free-will: we're not free to fly to the moon in an act of will but it sure looks like we're free to choose between a limited number of options in many circumstances. Kind of think that makes us "First Causes" - to a limited extent in any case - although that tends not to be a particularly popular position in itself for one reason or another. :-)

I think I agree with Pinker that concepts such as free will belong to the same system as the self, morality and ethics. If you abandon one concept you really ought to abandon them all. Legal concepts such as diminished responsibility or mitigation are meaningless without actual responsibility.

[Service Dog]

I dunno about the video's title... but Shapiro is in fine form here...

[Sunder]

Just thought of something based on the idiotic hordelets dredging up that "imagine gender as a spectrum of points BETWEEN male and female."

What if you identify as beyond male or female rather than in between? More male than male. Or more female than female. And that's still just working with a single axis. No telling where you could end up if you wanted to get creative.

[Service Dog]

Just thought of something based on the idiotic hordelets dredging up that "imagine gender as a spectrum of points BETWEEN male and female."

What if you identify as beyond male or female rather than in between? More male than male. Or more female than female. And that's still just working with a single axis. No telling where you could end up if you wanted to get creative.

I've always said... you gotta be pretty manly to use another man... as your woman.

[Old_ones]

Determinism triggers something deep in people's intuition that disturbs them, though when asked how its truth would or should affect what we do in concrete terms those same people either say it "not at all" or reveal themselves to be fatalists. I don't know of even a single self described fatalist that actually lives according to that code, so I think the entire determinism question is a red herring.

Determinists like Jerry say the issue is important because how we deal with criminals. They say it's immoral to punish people for what's just the Big Bang working itself out. So you ask what should you do with criminals and they say, well, we still have to send them to prison - but as a deterrent. So basically just doing the same damn thing we always do but on a different pretext.
<snip>

This is what I was getting at. Why is punishment a deterrent for other individuals but the knowledge of potential punishment wasn't a deteernt for the individual who has already committed the crime? The situation gets complicated pretty quickly and it's best to just abandon determinism or non determinism as concepts and wade out into the weeds of what you think is really important.

I could be wrong, but I don't think there is very good evidence for the deterrent theory. I know its been studied in the case of the death penalty which has been shown not to deter people more than life imprisonment. It also doesn't make sense from a psych standpoint since the people most disposed to criminality are antisocial personality disorder, and are impulsive.

To me the best justification for having a penal system, is to protect everyone else from dangerous people. You can say that prison and the death penalty didn't deter Ted Bundy from murdering people, and from a hard determinist perspective you can say that it was morally wrong to execute him since he didn't (in that view) have any ability to control his drive to murder people. I think you can still argue that society had the right to protect its citizens from being murdered by Ted Bundy, though. By keeping him in a controlled environment he was being prevented from murdering people. Whether it was OK to execute him is a little stickier. I tend to think it was, but some people are uncomfortable with utilitarian arguments that open the door to homicide. It was certainly moral to detain Ted Bundy in my view even if he had no control over whether he murdered people.

[Matt Cavanaugh]

Just thought of something based on the idiotic hordelets dredging up that "imagine gender as a spectrum of points BETWEEN male and female."

What if you identify as beyond male or female rather than in between? More male than male. Or more female than female. And that's still just working with a single axis. No telling where you could end up if you wanted to get creative.

Yeah, I think when you're a 30-yo married dude and you score 212 on testosterone, you've pretty much fallen off the spectrum.

[MacGruberKnows]

There's a lovely little thread developing at Meyers's place. A TERF (as The Herd have already decided them to be) has invaded, and the cows are running around in a panic.

Nerd ties himself up beautifully in semantic knots entirely of his own making:

https://i.imgur.com/0sQXM18.png


But this is brilliant:

https://i.imgur.com/qut5I6a.png

And yet, if an area had an increase in 'non-binary' or 'ambiguous' genitals in babies, then by Turd's logic, people screaming for 'stuff' to be done to end the increase in these - deformities -, yeah, I said it, deformities, would make those people bigots. Tell me Turd, encephalytic babies, are those normal babies born with normal brains, cause it's all about a 'sprectrum'. Cause something is on a 'spectrum' does not make it normal. Cause a part of the spectrum is the abnormal part of the spectrum. Fuck Turd the Tard. Yeah, I said it, Tard.
Turd the tard.

[Bhurzum]

Are you familiar with a certain type of young guy? <Snippety>

A very enjoyable read, thanks for sharing it.

As for how to deal with the payment issue? I'm a straightforward kinda guy (basic, even) and would find the person who holds the purse-strings, grip the fucker by the windpipe and tell them to cough up - cash or teeth, either is acceptable. Don't let the prick out of arms reach until the money is in your hand.

[MacGruberKnows]

If the SJW's ever succeed in making the 'discovery' of a new gender right up there with the discovery of a new planet around a star or the like, heaven help us all.

[Bhurzum]

Mike has a video on the full "Big Red" interview...



...watching it now.

:popcorn:

[Bhurzum]

Holy fuck, just found out about Kevin Spacey. Man, he's shat on his chips and it's time to take a huge mouthful!

[MacGruberKnows]

Holy fuck, just found out about Kevin Spacey. Man, he's shat on his chips and it's time to take a huge mouthful!

To get ahead of the gathering storm, I want it made plain and clear here, right here, that I never had under-aged sex with Spacey. Never. That I know of. Unless he gave me roofies. Fucker. Now I cannot confirm that I never had sex with Spacey. Fucking roofies. Will consider a settlement.

[MarcusAu]

Kilstein has been spotted in the wild...



(I've not yet watched it - so it's buyer beware on this one).

[Guest_d2e60302]

Kilstein has been spotted in the wild...

Oy, 2 hours. If anyone listens to this, can you please note the times of any interesting statements by Kilstein?

[feathers]

Oh fucking fucking fuck me. Let's call it the 'spirit crow raven", make it an endangered a species, declare the whole area a reserve for endangered species.

Some species do too well with humans. House flies, rats,mice, rock pigeons, and crows. In suburbia crows lord it all over nesting song birds. Suburbia does not have forests, it has clumps of trees. And crows sit around watching for songbirds going back and forth to a clump of trees, cause that's where the nest is. In a real forest that does not happen. Crows are way beyond their natural numbers in suburbia. And songbirds are disappearing.

Bottom line, shoot a crow, exterminate rock pigeons and feed songbirds.

Your crow privilege is showing. Where I live, we're lucky if we see a crow or raven once in a year. Smart fucking birds. I love them. Fuck song birds, the noisy little buggers!

Crows, magpies, jackdaws- the whole family is well-represented in cities in the north (starting with Germany and Holland). But ravens seem to loathe crowds (hah!) of humans and were on the brink of local extinction until they got protection. I once saw one in Norway. Sixty centimetre of bird looking eagerly at my lunch.

[feathers]

SocJus is only the superficial aspect of what's going on though, to dig deeper you have to take a serious look at the "Jewish Question."

In a nutshell, the roots of modern SocJus - Boasian anthropology, Freudian psychology, the Frankfurt School and Derrida-derived postmodernism - have a common factor: they were developed by ethnic, Left-wing Jews who had a quite serious and explicit desire to forestall the possibility of anti-Semitism arising in white European/American culture, and to that end tried to deconstruct it - quite literally. Everything in the social sciences is subtly skewed by that over-arching ideological aim.

And there I thought I'd seen all Jewish conspiracies...

[Kirbmarc]

Kirbmarc and gurugeorge are right. Jooz are behind SJWism.

Only gurugeorge. I think that his idea goes way too much into conspiracy theory territory. I was talking about taking social sciences back from Po-Mo and made no mention of any Jewish conspiracies.

[gurugeorge]

Hollywood is ailing, comics are fucked,

I know there's a lot of grousing about SJWism there, but honestly there's perfectly reasonable economic explanations for the Hollywood collapse.

A question a lot of people find themselves asking is "why not instead of one giant blockbuster a studio instead makes several smaller films?" I've asked that question before. But turns out as a studio grows and starts making bigger and bigger films, it expands its staff until eventually it's pretty much forced to only make big blockbusters. Because that's the only thing it can do to productively employ its large staff. Big studios are each a bubble waiting to pop.

As far as comics go they'd be in bad times even without the SJW entryists, because they're such an outdated business model. The trade market, often derided by comic shop owners for taking away sales from single issues, has been the only thing keeping the industry afloat.

It's always been the case that Hollywood made its money from its surefire blockbusters and its other movies were loss leaders, prestige products, vanity products, etc. Same as with the music industry (I know this from the inside - most bands that have ever been signed ended up losing the company money, what paid for the whole show was the acts that were are hugely successful).

But also, part of the process was to throw things against the wall and see what sticks. In order to get the next big thing, be ahead of the curve, you have to experiment, and as with evolution most of the experiments will fail, but some will succeed and be the new big earners over the coming decades. This I think is the element that's been missing from Hollywood movies. And this is what's traceable to the SJW orthodoxy - the lack of intellectual and ideological diversity means they produce less of a variety of movies, therefore they have less of a chance of discovering the next big thing.

It's a similar thing with comics. There have still been occasional comics that have sold in something like the old numbers, the audience is still there, it's just that what's being produced is mostly SJW lockstep orthodoxy. There's no room to breathe, no room for some new thing nobody's ever thought of before to come up and be the next big thing. There's no room for the equivalent (who knows what it might be?) of a Stan Lee deciding it would be cool to show the negatives of growing up as a youth with superpowers.

[Keating]

To me the best justification for having a penal system, is to protect everyone else from dangerous people. You can say that prison and the death penalty didn't deter Ted Bundy from murdering people, and from a hard determinist perspective you can say that it was morally wrong to execute him since he didn't (in that view) have any ability to control his drive to murder people. I think you can still argue that society had the right to protect its citizens from being murdered by Ted Bundy, though. By keeping him in a controlled environment he was being prevented from murdering people. Whether it was OK to execute him is a little stickier. I tend to think it was, but some people are uncomfortable with utilitarian arguments that open the door to homicide. It was certainly moral to detain Ted Bundy in my view even if he had no control over whether he murdered people.

Isn’t the hard determinist position self defeating in this line of argument? How could a country with the death penalty act other than to kill Bundy. Presumably the state is also governed by the initial conditions of the universe?

[feathers]

In any case, somewhat apropos of which, think you suggested or argued earlier that Jerry may have been influenced in that direction by Pinker; was just reading some of the latter's How the Mind Works and he certainly seemed anything but dogmatic on the issue.

To be honest I can't even remember Pinker's position on determinism - and I've read most of his books. Whatever it is he doesn't seem to feel the need to drag it into every conversation. I don't see how it adds to the discussion of whether Harvey Weinstein is a psychopath or not. If you've decided that nobody has free will anyway then having a personality disorder or poor impulse control is irrelevant because we are all just going through the motions anyway.

Indeed, if some people are currently considered of diminished accountability because their psyche left them no choice, determinism demands we give all accused the same benefit. On the other hand, if every crime is predetermined on a subatomic level, then so is our decision to fry someone on the chair.

But Jerry seems to reject harsher punishments like the death penalty because of determinism, and then in the same breath acknowledges that criminals still should be locked up, and anyone disputing that is a 'compatibilist', which seems to have the same sour aftertaste as 'accomodationist'.

[rayshul]

This was kind of a good read about hollywood

http://www.breitbart.com/tinseltown/

[gurugeorge]

Kirbmarc and gurugeorge are right. Jooz are behind SJWism.

Only gurugeorge. I think that his idea goes way too much into conspiracy theory territory. I was talking about taking social sciences back from Po-Mo and made no mention of any Jewish conspiracies.

It's not some kind of conscious cigar-filled-room conspiracy (although possibly in a few instances it is - The Authoritarian Personality was certainly published by an important Jewish social organization of the time), it's only conspiracy in the sense of people with similar backgrounds (e.g. Jewish immigrants to the US, refugees from Eastern Europe and Russia, etc.) and interests coming up with similar ideas.

It's really something that's hidden in plain sight - Boas was explicitly working against the contemporary scientific race realist consensus because he felt that was inimical to the interests of Jews; Freud explicitly felt himself to be a modern-day secular Moses, or a Hannibal fighting against "Rome", the leading European culture; the Frankfurt school bods explicitly stated that they desired to break down the foundations of European culture, particularly the family, which they thought was pathological and led to anti-Semitism; Derrida explicitly stated that his self-identification as a circumcized "Marrano" was central to his philosophy, the aim of which was to prevent the possibility of any sort of objective judgment of preference of one culture over another by the dominant culture.

In all these instances, the tail was wagging the dog. You have these grand air-castles of theory that purport to be about everyone getting along, and all these nice things, but they're just halls of mirrors to get lost in; at their root is the simple principle of attacking the ethnic cohesion of the host culture, to make the culture safe for Jews. Attacking white males and "white privilege," attacking the majority white cultures derived from Europe was always the point, it's just that it's more explicit now than it ever was in the past - the logical implications of what those four schools of thought initiated have become explicit.

I understand it's a vexed question because our minds automatically turn away from the subject for the obvious reasons, but this aspect of the problems of what's going on in the universities, and with the social sciences today, cannot be ignored if one wants to have a clear picture of what's going on and what to do about it.

(The final solution is simply not to be bamboozled. But to do that, you have to understand that and how you've been bamboozled.)

[feathers]

And it makes no sense at all when dealing with psychopaths because it's part of the definition of psychopathy that they aren't motivated by fear of punishment. They are either too narcissistic to think they will be caught or they just don't care because either they are acting impulsively or they can take whatever punishment you throw at them.

I thought it was demonstrated even with criminals without an outspoken psychopathic mindset that harsh punishment is not a very good deterrent. The motivating factor in committing a crime turns out to be the chance to be caught more than the severity of the repercussions.

[ThreeFlangedJavis]

In any case, somewhat apropos of which, think you suggested or argued earlier that Jerry may have been influenced in that direction by Pinker; was just reading some of the latter's How the Mind Works and he certainly seemed anything but dogmatic on the issue.

To be honest I can't even remember Pinker's position on determinism - and I've read most of his books. Whatever it is he doesn't seem to feel the need to drag it into every conversation. I don't see how it adds to the discussion of whether Harvey Weinstein is a psychopath or not. If you've decided that nobody has free will anyway then having a personality disorder or poor impulse control is irrelevant because we are all just going through the motions anyway.

TBH I share Coyne's frustration, although I wouldn't bang on about it so much. He is clearly disturbed by the implications of belief in free will regarding punishment. I think he agrees with the use of punishment as a deterrent and objects only to the illogical desire for perpetrators to be subjected to payback for the conscious decisions of their "soul".

I don't think that we are just going through the motions. We shape the landscape in which our thought processes evolve through our interactions and withdrawing from the debate is diminishing the richness of influences in that landscape. While it may be true that we have no control over what arguments we put forth at any time or even the decision as to whether or not to propose them, the fact remains that it is to the benefit of society that as much relevant data as possible informs our decisions. There is an obvious feedback loop between the body of human knowledge and the added power that gives minds to make better informed decisions.

Some people have this idea that to be a determinist means turning into a fatalistic automaton, but I don't think that is a realistic fear given that we are innately emotional creatures. Coyne is just saying that while it is important not to suppress normal human emotion, we need to understand what is really going on underneath.

Regarding Weinstein, his pathology is of interest to anyone wanting to determine what makes people like him and whether or not steps can be taken to reduce the number of people like him. That seems a whole lot more useful than just deciding he has a dirty soul and dishing out retribution. The possible irony for the feminists is that, according to Hannah Whalen at least, being abused by an adult women as a youngster is a likely cause of Weinsteinism.

[feathers]

Is it wrong to have this much fun at poe?

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/nosacredco ... 3590949741

I'm trying to give hints left & right, but few have caught on.

600% of rapes go unreported -- c'mon people!

You're trolling them- under the same username you always use?!? And nobody noticed, or looked up your other postings on Disqus? I thought PZ's kommentariat were dull.

[paddybrown]

https://s1.postimg.org/1poyw7cp73/image.jpg

I'm going to call it Hoagy, after Sam Slade's idiot robot sidekick, who was also built from a kit, in Robo-Hunter in 2000AD. Will it be ready in time for my band's next gig on 10 November? My guess is not.

Curious where you got the kit from? A lot of them come from the same few chinese factories, but are then vetted for "quality", tolerances etc, by local importers. Some decent quality kits are made in Australia, some larger names in America make good quality kits too (Carvin I think?)

Tossing out the electronics that come with it is almost a given, maybe even the mounting hardware. Good quality kits combined with brand name hardware and electronics actually can supercede midrange instruments at a very competitive price.

It came from an Amazon seller called Theguitarkitfabric. Cost £150, so I'm assuming it was made in the far east. The body is allegedly mahogany, and the grain pattern does look mahaogany-ish, but it's paler and yellower than I would expect mahogany to be, and it's soft enough that I can put screws in it directly with a screwdriver, no need for drilling. The neck is a very nice, very hard piece of maple, that does need a drill for the screw holes.

[paddybrown]

As far as comics go they'd be in bad times even without the SJW entryists, because they're such an outdated business model. The trade market, often derided by comic shop owners for taking away sales from single issues, has been the only thing keeping the industry afloat.

Yep. The history of the comics industry since the 70s has been "we're losing readers. How do we screw more money out of the readers we have left to make up for that?" The idea of finding new readers seems to have honestly never occurred to them, until recently when they've tried to appeal to SJWs. And as we all know, appealing to SJWs is commercial suicide, because they're only interested in complaining about what they don't like, not buying what they do like, and their self-righteous obnoxiousness drives everybody else away.

[feathers]

I could be wrong, but I don't think there is very good evidence for the deterrent theory.

I've been ninjaed left, right and centre haven't I.

[SM1957]

I don't think that we are just going through the motions. We shape the landscape in which our thought processes evolve through our interactions and withdrawing from the debate is diminishing the richness of influences in that landscape. While it may be true that we have no control over what arguments we put forth at any time or even the decision as to whether or not to propose them, the fact remains that it is to the benefit of society that as much relevant data as possible informs our decisions. There is an obvious feedback loop between the body of human knowledge and the added power that gives minds to make better informed decisions.

What is meant by 'we have no control'?

When an aeroplane is being flown on auto-pilot, is it quite literally out of control? Because if a deterministic thing like an auto-pilot has no control over what the plane does, then nobody is controlling the plane.

[feathers]

What is meant by 'we have no control'?

https://img.wonderhowto.com/img/02/99/6 ... 80x600.jpg

[Kirbmarc]

As far as comics go they'd be in bad times even without the SJW entryists, because they're such an outdated business model. The trade market, often derided by comic shop owners for taking away sales from single issues, has been the only thing keeping the industry afloat.

Yep. The history of the comics industry since the 70s has been "we're losing readers. How do we screw more money out of the readers we have left to make up for that?" The idea of finding new readers seems to have honestly never occurred to them, until recently when they've tried to appeal to SJWs. And as we all know, appealing to SJWs is commercial suicide, because they're only interested in complaining about what they don't like, not buying what they do like, and their self-righteous obnoxiousness drives everybody else away.

Comic books are doing fine in Europe, but then again this is probably because all different genres are represented in European comics, while in the US most comic books are superhero comics.

[feathers]

Comic books are doing fine in Europe, but then again this is probably because all different genres are represented in European comics, while in the US most comic books are superhero comics.

In Europe, with France/Belgium/Holland/Italy at its centre, comics have become an art form, from old-fashioned humour via adventure to political expression. I think though it was at its height in the seventies, when the comics magazines in those countries flourished.

[Kirbmarc]

Comic books are doing fine in Europe, but then again this is probably because all different genres are represented in European comics, while in the US most comic books are superhero comics.

In Europe, with France/Belgium/Holland/Italy at its centre, comics have become an art form, from old-fashioned humour via adventure to political expression. I think though it was at its height in the seventies, when the comics magazines in those countries flourished.

True, the peak was reached in the Seventies, but even today comics are doing better in the Old Yoorop than in Trumplandia.

[Old_ones]

To me the best justification for having a penal system, is to protect everyone else from dangerous people. You can say that prison and the death penalty didn't deter Ted Bundy from murdering people, and from a hard determinist perspective you can say that it was morally wrong to execute him since he didn't (in that view) have any ability to control his drive to murder people. I think you can still argue that society had the right to protect its citizens from being murdered by Ted Bundy, though. By keeping him in a controlled environment he was being prevented from murdering people. Whether it was OK to execute him is a little stickier. I tend to think it was, but some people are uncomfortable with utilitarian arguments that open the door to homicide. It was certainly moral to detain Ted Bundy in my view even if he had no control over whether he murdered people.

Isn’t the hard determinist position self defeating in this line of argument? How could a country with the death penalty act other than to kill Bundy. Presumably the state is also governed by the initial conditions of the universe?

This is part of the reason I'm not a hard determinist. If you go down that line of reasoning it becomes absurd to argue for any change or justify anything, because everything is already the only way it was ever destined to be. I don't know what the answer is to that paradox, or if hard determinists go full fatalist and say "fuck it, no point in justifying or trying to change anything". As hard as it is for me to understand how we have authentic choices, the alternative seems both depressing and like a cop out (and also deeply counter-intuitive).

[SM1957]

This is part of the reason I'm not a hard determinist. If you go down that line of reasoning it becomes absurd to argue for any change or justify anything, because everything is already the only way it was ever destined to be. I don't know what the answer is to that paradox, or if hard determinists go full fatalist and say "fuck it, no point in justifying or trying to change anything". As hard as it is for me to understand how we have authentic choices, the alternative seems both depressing and like a cop out (and also deeply counter-intuitive).

Take something which is really hard determinism.

I fire a gun. It misses the top of your head by 1 inch.

Would you call the cops or would you say there was absolutely no way that bullet was ever going to kill you so I was not endangering your life?

Even a hard determinist would say 'You could have killed me doing that'.

[ThreeFlangedJavis]

I don't think that we are just going through the motions. We shape the landscape in which our thought processes evolve through our interactions and withdrawing from the debate is diminishing the richness of influences in that landscape. While it may be true that we have no control over what arguments we put forth at any time or even the decision as to whether or not to propose them, the fact remains that it is to the benefit of society that as much relevant data as possible informs our decisions. There is an obvious feedback loop between the body of human knowledge and the added power that gives minds to make better informed decisions.

What is meant by 'we have no control'?

When an aeroplane is being flown on auto-pilot, is it quite literally out of control? Because if a deterministic thing like an auto-pilot has no control over what the plane does, then nobody is controlling the plane.

The autopilot is controlling the plane in the sense that it is manipulating the flight controls, but it has no ability to manipulate them in any other way than it is programmed to do. Ultimately, it is code and perhaps mechanical/electrical failsafes controlling the plane.

[SM1957]

A while back there was a link in my Facebook feed to an article about the coming age of sex robots. It was the usual feminist fear of losing power over men, but disguised as concern for society and for exploited robots kind of nonsense. The interesting thing is that there were many comments expressing an indifference to the issue of sexbots, but insisted that sexbots should only be available in adult models. I never gave it any thought before then, but wouldn't you want child models to be available to pedophiles so that they masturbate with them instead of molesting actual children? Is there any kind of moral difference between masturbating with a device made to look like a 20 year-old, or a 8 year-old?

What's going to happen in 20 years time when people buy second-hand, used robots and they can prove that although the robot looked like an 8 year old, it was actually a robot that was 18 years old?

[SM1957]

I don't think that we are just going through the motions. We shape the landscape in which our thought processes evolve through our interactions and withdrawing from the debate is diminishing the richness of influences in that landscape. While it may be true that we have no control over what arguments we put forth at any time or even the decision as to whether or not to propose them, the fact remains that it is to the benefit of society that as much relevant data as possible informs our decisions. There is an obvious feedback loop between the body of human knowledge and the added power that gives minds to make better informed decisions.

What is meant by 'we have no control'?

When an aeroplane is being flown on auto-pilot, is it quite literally out of control? Because if a deterministic thing like an auto-pilot has no control over what the plane does, then nobody is controlling the plane.

The autopilot is controlling the plane in the sense that it is manipulating the flight controls, but it has no ability to manipulate them in any other way than it is programmed to do. Ultimately, it is code and perhaps mechanical/electrical failsafes controlling the plane.

So a machine run according to hard determinism is still controlling its output?

[feathers]

"I did not have sexual relations with that vacuum cleaner".

[ThreeFlangedJavis]

This is part of the reason I'm not a hard determinist. If you go down that line of reasoning it becomes absurd to argue for any change or justify anything, because everything is already the only way it was ever destined to be. I don't know what the answer is to that paradox, or if hard determinists go full fatalist and say "fuck it, no point in justifying or trying to change anything". As hard as it is for me to understand how we have authentic choices, the alternative seems both depressing and like a cop out (and also deeply counter-intuitive).

I don't see a paradox. If we all stopped trying to change or justify anything then the range of data available to each of us which informs our decisions is diminished. You could look at humanity as a giant distributed computer. Do you think that the greatest good, in human terms, will come from us all working toward understanding reality or from us all giving up in despair? Deterministic processes have lead to the human mind and it's ability to improve life. Perhaps it is a good idea to have faith in the process and use that as a justification for taking part. Determinism decrees that your actions affect the future, so why not affect it in ways that you conclude will benefit yourself and others? Your decisions may be determined by available data and experience, but the machinery that makes them is, in most cases, very sophisticated and capable.

[Keating]

I don't see a paradox. If we all stopped trying to change or justify anything then the range of data available to each of us which informs our decisions is diminished. You could look at humanity as a giant distributed computer. Do you think that the greatest good, in human terms, will come from us all working toward understanding reality or from us all giving up in despair? Deterministic processes have lead to the human mind and it's ability to improve life. Perhaps it is a good idea to have faith in the process and use that as a justification for taking part. Determinism decrees that your actions affect the future, so why not affect it in ways that you conclude will benefit yourself and others? Your decisions may be determined by available data and experience, but the machinery that makes them is, in most cases, very sophisticated and capable.

That response implies to me that we can choose to better inform ourselves, which is a contradiction for the hard determinist position. Surely the amount we choose to inform ourselves and seek out new data is also completely determined by the initial conditions of the universe.

[ThreeFlangedJavis]

So a machine run according to hard determinism is still controlling its output?

Yes, but without the ability to change how it controls it.

[MarcusAu]

If comics went the way of the Pulps, or the Dime Novel, or the Chapbook, or the Penny Dreadful - what would be the issue from a conservative perspective?

'Free to Choose' / 'Let the Market Decide' and all that.

[SM1957]

So a machine run according to hard determinism is still controlling its output?

Yes, but without the ability to change how it controls it.

So algorithms can't learn how to improve their ability to do things?

[InfraRedBucket]

Holy fuck, just found out about Kevin Spacey. Man, he's shat on his chips and it's time to take a huge mouthful!

Spacey ran the Old Vic theatre company in London for a decade, only standing down fairly recently.

https://i.imgur.com/zPIdIGN.jpg



Thank goodness they didnt put him in charge of the Young Vic , or who knows what he might have got up to!

https://i.imgur.com/gh4AHcD.jpg?1

[ThreeFlangedJavis]

I don't see a paradox. If we all stopped trying to change or justify anything then the range of data available to each of us which informs our decisions is diminished. You could look at humanity as a giant distributed computer. Do you think that the greatest good, in human terms, will come from us all working toward understanding reality or from us all giving up in despair? Deterministic processes have lead to the human mind and it's ability to improve life. Perhaps it is a good idea to have faith in the process and use that as a justification for taking part. Determinism decrees that your actions affect the future, so why not affect it in ways that you conclude will benefit yourself and others? Your decisions may be determined by available data and experience, but the machinery that makes them is, in most cases, very sophisticated and capable.

That response implies to me that we can choose to better inform ourselves, which is a contradiction for the hard determinist position. Surely the amount we choose to inform ourselves and seek out new data is also completely determined by the initial conditions of the universe.

No contradiction. It isn't that we CAN choose to better inform ourselves, but that we WILL or WONT choose to do so depending on state and inputs. We all have the potential to affect the landscape in which others make choices. I am saying that it makes sense to trust that the sum of human thought is leading us toward collective betterment so that it makes sense to remain active in the process.I believe that we have evolved mental machinery that can, given good inputs, produce beneficial output so it is illogical to conclude that determinism is a reason to surrender to apathy. None of us could have ended up in any other state than the one we are in, but that does not negate the fact that the future depends on what each of us does now and that knowledge has the potential to inform what we now do.

[Keating]

That seems like soft, rather than hard, determinism to me.

[screwtape]

Determinism triggers something deep in people's intuition that disturbs them, though when asked how its truth would or should affect what we do in concrete terms those same people either say it "not at all" or reveal themselves to be fatalists. I don't know of even a single self described fatalist that actually lives according to that code, so I think the entire determinism question is a red herring.

Determinists like Jerry say the issue is important because how we deal with criminals. They say it's immoral to punish people for what's just the Big Bang working itself out. So you ask what should you do with criminals and they say, well, we still have to send them to prison - but as a deterrent. So basically just doing the same damn thing we always do but on a different pretext.
<snip>

This is what I was getting at. Why is punishment a deterrent for other individuals but the knowledge of potential punishment wasn't a deteernt for the individual who has already committed the crime? The situation gets complicated pretty quickly and it's best to just abandon determinism or non determinism as concepts and wade out into the weeds of what you think is really important.

Presumably when determinists say we can't help ourselves, and that any action was simply the arithmetic outcome of all the pros and cons that went onto the mental scales when a course of action was weighed, then both the likelihood of being caught and punished, along with the knowledge that others have been caught and punished are factors that get placed in the cons side of the balance. That is to say that whilst it might be true that we can only do what our experiences, education, beliefs, personality, hormones and circumstances dictate, most of those factors are mutable and do change throughout our lives, and sometimes on a day to day basis. I can't see how that is different in effect to the classic notion of free will. It's the kind of distinction that matters only to philosophers. Even deterministic automata are susceptible to learning.
But is it useful to adopt the deterministic view? Consider that just as it's true to say I am just an agglomeration of chemicals that happen to sustain a set of reactions that will run for a few years and nothing more - absolutely true - but also a completely useless statement in trying to define or understand a human being. It's like the butterfly effect - yes, if you know the value of every variable you can predict the tornado occurring months later, but the nearly infinite number of variables gives a convincing appearance of randomness and chaos, never mind the small actual randomness of quantum uncertainty that might be injected along the way.
It seems reductionism is the way we begin to understand things; break them into parts and see how they interact. Keep doing it and you have smaller parts and a deeper understanding.* But there comes a point where you lose sight of the wood because of all the trees in the way. It's a problem of scale. Newtonian physics it is best suited to our typical world experience, and we need relativity and quantum physics if we want to go much larger or much smaller. Perhaps reductionism, while it always is truthful when done right, isn't so useful when used on problems of such complexity that you lose sight of the whole picture? Certainly it has no practical value in running our societies to say that we have no choices and cannot be held responsible for our actions. But we don't have any other reliable ways of knowing, and that might just mean we have reached the limits of our useful understanding. Now I'm babbling.

*Never was much good at small talk. At an excruciating dinner party decades ago I observed some young lady carefully diving a breadcrumb on her placemat with a dinner knife, and when she noticed me watching said 'Little things please little minds.' Possibly I failed to make the best possible answer when I replied 'And you're cutting them up for a better fit?'

[John D]

Of course, most modern scientist are materialists (or naturalists). This means they think that, ultimately, everything has a material explanation rather than any kind of miraculous explanation. This must mean that everything is, by definition, deterministic. Even if we say that many processes are mathematically chaotic, this does not mean they are not deterministic. Everything has a cause and effect ultimately to the subatomic level.

But, the idea of determinism is not very useful. It is a fun philosophical exercise, and really, modern philosophers don't have much else to do but talk about this shit. Dan Dennett's analogy that we are machines made up of millions of tiny robots makes the most sense to me.

So, even if we believe in a deterministic universe, we are hopelessly far away from understanding it. Most of our consciousness is poorly understood and much of our behavior is driven by sub-conscious processes that no one really understands. I suppose, if we had perfect knowledge about human behavior we could change our views on topic such as justice, fairness, criminality, etc. In the mean time though, we should stick with the ethical models that we have and try to better perfect them. There will not be any kind of dramatic abandonment in traditional ideas of justice, truth, and fairness... even with the PoMos trying to change things.

[John D]

I dunno about the video's title... but Shapiro is in fine form here...

Shapiro's not bad. I listen to him quite a bit. He is, of course, a devout Heeb, so I disagree with some of what he says. Still, he is honest and articulate. I usually agree with him 90% of the time... which is pretty good considering I agree with most people about 10% of the time.

[jet_lagg]

I think I agree with Pinker that concepts such as free will belong to the same system as the self...

If it's to be boiled down to a single sentence I like that one. Free will might be an abstraction, but so is the concept of "you". I'd add that this will be the most useful way of looking at it even if determinism is false. Suppose quantum randomness really does play such a large role in the computing process of our brains that our decisions can be said to be acausal. It's still not completely random. Humans aren't entirely predictable, but they're predictable enough that every day people bet their lives that the barber's decision to not slit their throats rests on more than a mere coin flip. Probability and the interactions of probabilities are still in play, so all our models of responsibility remain useful.

[jet_lagg]

Of course, most modern scientist are materialists (or naturalists). This means they think that, ultimately, everything has a material explanation rather than any kind of miraculous explanation. This must mean that everything is, by definition, deterministic. Even if we say that many processes are mathematically chaotic, this does not mean they are not deterministic. Everything has a cause and effect ultimately to the subatomic level.

I'm not a physicist, but according to everything I've ever read on the subject this is wrong. At the subatomic level it really is acausal. True randomness. Not like a coin flip where you could (in principle if not in practice) determine the outcome before the event happens.