Show me an explicitly racist policy. — NOS4A2

I'm done now. Your constant reframing attempts are, as ever, frustrating.

All the sensible police/legislative reforms don't explicitly mention race either, but they will help to address the problem... Same thing.

I still cannot see the connection between what I was talking about and what Lee Atwater was talking about, however. — NOS4A2

None of those policies explicitly discriminate between races (as far as I’m aware). — NOS4A2

They don't need to...

You're getting so abstract now [that] you're talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you're talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites. And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I'm not saying that. But I'm saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. — Lee Atwater

Such policies are sold as race neutral, they are not. That a politician can pull an economic policy lever to effect blacks disproportionately, knowingly, without selling it in terms of race completely undermines your position. The politically empowered right know this, but they know their liberal supporters can't stomach outright racism, so it gets cloaked, and they bet on their liberal supporters getting duped and avoiding cognitive dissonance.

Why do you find this so hard?

I don't think so. It takes a remarkable amount of confidence in social norms to believe that the categories of folk psychology are structurally identical to the driving forces of our inner lives. If we were so descriptively transparent to ourselves, there would be fewer functional pathologies of self relation (we'd know what our problems are intimately, rather than fumbling in the dark) and fewer people finding solace in "ineffability"("I love you more than words can say"... "Words don't do this justice...")

You understood it enough to try and reframe the discussion away from it.

None of those policies explicitly discriminate between races (as far as I’m aware). As such, any racism that results is the effort of individual racists, — NOS4A2

You're getting so abstract now [that] you're talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you're talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites. And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I'm not saying that. But I'm saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. — Lee Atwater

:roll:

The people you support know systemic racism exists and weaponise it to appeal to American racists. The denial you have of it? Their propaganda and euphemisms working exactly as intended.

None of those policies explicitly discriminate between races (as far as I’m aware). As such, any racism that results is the effort of individual racists, — NOS4A2

Atwater: As to the whole Southern strategy that Harry S. Dent, Sr. and others put together in 1968, opposition to the Voting Rights Act would have been a central part of keeping the South. Now you don't have to do that. All that you need to do to keep the South is for Reagan to run in place on the issues that he's campaigned on since 1964, and that's fiscal conservatism, balancing the budget, cut taxes, you know, the whole cluster.

Questioner: But the fact is, isn't it, that Reagan does get to the Wallace voter and to the racist side of the Wallace voter by doing away with legal services, by cutting down on food stamps?

Atwater: Y'all don't quote me on this. You start out in 1954 by saying, "Nigger, nigger, nigger". By 1968 you can't say "nigger"—that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states' rights and all that stuff. You're getting so abstract now [that] you're talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you're talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites. And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I'm not saying that. But I'm saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me—because obviously sitting around saying, "We want to cut this", is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than "Nigger, nigger". So, any way you look at it, race is coming on the backbone.

Lee Atwater

You're wilfully ignorant.

"UK Coronavirus Death Toll Increases by 36 in one of the lowest rises during lockdown"

Just keeps going and going...

Consciousness may be in fact a result of previous material causes — Eugen

For them there is no resultant "output state" corresponding to our first person consciousness; it isn't a productive (functional; input-output) relationship at all, the relationship between mind states and brain states is instead posited to be one of identity. — fdrake

:chin:

So denying the intrinsic aspect of reality just because science does not explain the intrinsic part, it's purely childish — Eugen

If all you want to do is throw names around, it's pretty childish to dismiss a well researched body of work when you've not put in even a little effort into understanding their claims.

If one says consciousness is a result of neurons interaction and that there's no magic, I wouldn't call it a ridiculous statement — Eugen

If someone claims that first person events are identical to neural events then...

But denying the existence of the 1st person experiences is ridiculous, illogic, and self-contradictory, and I would be really worried about the mental sanity of the person who claimed that. — Eugen

For them there is no resultant "output state" corresponding to our first person consciousness; it isn't a productive (functional; input-output) relationship at all, the relationship between mind states and brain states is instead posited to be one of identity. Compare wondering how someone could ever possibly go on a walk when all they do is put one foot in front of the other. It isn't so much that first person consciousness doesn't exist at all or in any way, it's that you're criticising eliminativists' beliefs based off a reification of mental content; whether that reification itself is justified is a key component of the issue.

Maybe it will seem less ridiculous, or you'll have stronger reasons for rejecting eliminitave materialism after reading this.

Also, personally I'm shameless, but it does seem unusual to name the people responsible for reporting abusive posts that led to a ban. That's not something I've seen on similar sites, but then as far as I know I've never gotten anyone banned before. I understand the idea is that it ought to be anonymous so that people feel safe to do it. — Kenosha Kid

I'm sorry, I didn't think about it in that way. You didn't get them banned, it was their post history. Enough of us agreed to ban and no one registered disagreement or hesitation.

I think it's better explained by most of the staff eye rolling at god discussions, they're extremely tedious to moderate for the same reasons as they're a vital gateway drug. A poster that probably should've been banned long ago but who posts almost exclusively about vague religious topics can go unnoticed.

What is it about selectively reporting almost exclusively favourable sounding out of context statistics to support a political agenda, despite the reality being quite opposite, which is not Animal Farm shit?

Thank you very much for the references.

Fdrake, apologies if I came across as rude. — DingoJones

It didn't, it's nice to have to explain decisions. If we fuck something up really bad you lot will probably notice.

Im under the impression a warning is supposed to be given? Isnt that part of the guidlines? They are pretty specific about what things are grounds for no warning bans...but maybe Im not remembering the guidelines correctly. — DingoJones

Everyone low quality posts sometimes.

Some people low quality post all the time.

Gnostic's post history, from what I've read of it, is almost all low quality revelation based pseudo arguments with occasional bible quotes, occasionally insulting other theists, and he outputs thread after thread of it.

It's less about that he posted low quality sometimes, it's that it was his whole posting style.

A long post history of low quality is good evidence that a warning is not useful.

Nope.

Banned @Gnostic Christian Bishop for low quality, after @Kenosha Kid, @Banno@Wayfarer brought their track record to mod attention.

The UK right wing rags are doing crap like "Lowest Friday increase in deaths since...", it's some real Animal Farm shit.

Isn't clothing dipped in a semiotics of racialisation anyway? I mean in the UK, there's the "hoody" archetype, which is inches away from the racist narrative of black criminal in some places, and chav/schemie/ned street gangs in others?

I don't think Im anywhere near equipped to have such discourse yet myself! — DoppyTheElv

Neither am I!

If we start conceptualising poetry as a task a human can do, rather than an expression of a necessarily human subjectivity... What remains if you abstract the poet from the poem?

Probably something like; series of evocative expressions, rhymes and meters, associations of words, grammatical structure and how to break it for effect... The model maybe wouldn't write in expressions; thought of as a productive relation between idea and pen; it would sample the next effective device, the next effective word choice, from the corpus of its weighted associations. By the looks of it it can already do consistency of style and create effective contrast with just text input...

Could it have done it without the text input? Seems like a relevant question to draw a line between machine poets and human poets; but can a human write a poem without a much broader input? Doesn't a human need even more competences to write evocative, memorable, poignant poetry? If you give an AI a sample of poetry, that's a sample of what humans care about just like an individual's life is a sample of cares.

Speaking for myself, you’re projecting metaphysical issues way too much into this. When and if a technological singularity will occur, whatever sentient beings have that distinguishes them from rocks will be had by Strong AI as well in equal measure. Be this the “ineluctable freedoms of souls” or something else. Thereby making whatever metaphysical issue one has qualms about mute in this respect. And besides, anxiety is not it. Anxiety is reserved for more pertinent things. — javra

It's sort of off topic, but those mechanisms of behavioural modification are already in place. Doesn't need the singularity, just needs flexible enough algorithms (already there), almost total surveillance (already there) and experimental levers to pull (see online contagion experiments done by Facebook, Google's ad work with Pokemon go); your fitbit data is already being fed through a machine learning + insurance risk algorithm and sold on to calibrate health insurance costs.

The most salient issue for the thread in terms of the above algorithms is the type of training data and the model flexibility I think; it's a text processor and generator, it's trained on text and outputs text. If it had a resevoir of behavioural data and a linking model, it'd probably be able to ape the human experience informed aspects of poetry (notice this is a placeholder with no ascribed content) much better; it'd be able to link personal experience to words and generalise from it, just not "its own" experience.

Another angle is that an intelligent poem writer isn't necessarily a human; maybe the next version will have the kind of relationship to poetry that eagles have with their wings.

Anxiety is reserved for more pertinent things. — javra

As in entering a genuinely anxious state? Yeah. As in cordoning off poetry from machine functionality? Nah; that's super prevalent in the thread for mostly unargued reasons. Ego defense mechanism metaphysics everywhere.

It isn't so much that philosophy of religion is bad, it's that people who are knowledgeable about it on the site don't post about it much. Even @Wayfarer who's got chops/domain expertise uses his knowledge about it predominantly in other contexts.

If you want high caliber philosophy of religion or theology discussions, start them. Inform mods that you desire it to be kept strictly on topic and flag off topic posts.

If you want the perpetually self derailing standard fare, stand back and watch.

Regardless, I think it's important not to moderate adequate quality religion discussions off site; it's a gateway drug. People who start learning philosophy in their spare time often start with god questions or atheism questions, and those two groups will argue forever.

It doesn't. Living systems are not closed. — Banno

:up:

Another aspect of it is that entropy is unpredictability. Your body metabolises environmental resources to keep its cycles in a steady state. If you do a thing which the body predicts will decrease steadiness, or you do a thing which renders steadiness uncertain, your body will intervene to reduce the discrepancies causing those uncertainties; shunting itself closer to what it expects. Homeostasis maintains a predictable order but needs an energy source to keep it going.

The sun is a free lunch for the world, until it dies.

Anxious about what? — Brett

There being so much data to feed gigantic models that they're getting extremely close to being functionally indistinguishable from human conduct in limited domains. The all too rapid and usually hidden encroachment of machine learning techniques (faciliated by panvasive surveillance and automated tabulation of all human experience) into the folk thought ineluctable freedoms of our souls.

Poets making poems out of other poems counts as poetry; why not a machine doing the same thing.

Poet style is constrained by what they've learned about poetry; machines face the same constraints.

Poets associate words with each other to build resonant series of imagery; machines do the same thing, though maybe face scope issues - poets face scope issues too.

New work always relates to old work thematically or stylistically; poetry generated by an algorithm does so explicitly.

Poets wonder what to write next and the impenetrable to interpretation expressivity of their minds wonders what fits best for their decided purposes; machines have uncertainty about the next poem element and black box nigh on impenetrable decision making processes regarding improvised fit.

Poets improvise poem structure; machines do this too, just depends on their prompt.

Poets write poems when inspired and prompted by their experiences; machines write poems when prompted.

I can understand why people would be anxious about all this.

When I described the systemic issues in another thread, you agreed with my characterisation, and that the problems were incredibly severe and hard to shift. You still said I should be dismissed entirely. I don't know what to make of that. You agree the problems are severe, you agree that official channels have failed racialised communities in America, and by the looks of it you broadly agree with what tangible solutions and police redressals are being demanded and enacted.

Despite that, the overwhelming majority of your posts on the issues have been to condemn protesters doing property damage and to condemn the "crazy leftists" who are talking about the problems you agree exist rather than placing almost all the emphasis and attention on the actions of rioters.

The entire point of frustration is that you are placing all the emphasis on the actions of rioters, not on the problems. Despite alleging to want to discuss the problems leading to the riots.

It's a performative inconsistency which is extremely frustrating.

States' rights in a nutshell.

If you want help with the maths feel free to take it up in that thread or by PM!

There's a thing that text prediction algorithms need to do that makes the full breadth of theme and imagery difficult for them.

To a model, a poem is basically a time series of line index numbers; something like the following story;

Make a poem, model!

1. I have generated line 1 now.
2. Given that line 1 is "I have generated line one now" What should I generate here? I know, I'll generate this.
3. Given that line 1 and 2 are as written, what should I generate here? I know, I'll generate this.
...

The dependence of a line upon the history of lines before it is called serial dependence. How far back in line number a model can go from the previous one while generating semantically/thematically/image relevant content is constrained by how much serial dependence the model can ape.

Something like a theme for a poem, like desolation in "A Measure of Desolation" by Ursula Le Guinn:

Again and again the landwind blows,
sending back the rain
to the house of the rain.

Seeking, seeking, the heron goes
longlegged from creek
to thirsty creek.

They cry and cry, the windblown crows
across the sky,
the bare clear sky.

From land to land the dry wind blows
the thin dry sand
from the house of sand.

requires that the model "think about" all the previous steps and devices to embed the consistency/relatedness of each verse to each other. There're multiple serial dependences in it; the first line of each verse is predictive of all the others' structure, the second line in each verse is predictive of all the others' structure. The middle line of each verse is a descriptive elaboration of the bit after the double space in each first line and a rhyme with the last word before the double space.

Dealing with multiple serial dependences to create a consistent image dealing with a theme is hard. Before we start talking about how much branching/association there has to be to grok the associations of semantic content that make imagery work - there's word to word serial dependence too, as well as sentence to sentence serial dependence, motif motif serial dependence, device device serial dependence...

It's amazing that the model can do so much of this, I'm just hypothesizing that a poem dealing with a theme is a particularly hard task in terms of serial dependence.

Is there someone for racism? Not here, not many out there. — ssu

You will never get a socially conscious racist to defend racism. It will always always always be a reaction to negate any specific anti-racist thing.

Is there someone for more inequality? Again no. — ssu

You will never get a socially conscious politician to defend inequality. It will always always always be a reaction to negate any specific equalising measure.

Do you need someone in a position of authority to brand America with a KKK hood in order for you to see it as systemically racist? And in order for your hope for it to be less racist to swamp the tiny number of property destructions compared to the size of the uprising?

Don't you hope for all their hopes to come true?

In short, the middle layer is the layer at which the language takes action – and since at the first layer it has no coherent set of truth conditions, the middle layer acts as a proposal, conscious or not, to change the way one speaks, so that the same null truth conditions, involving the world as one always took it to be, are scrambled to be described in different vocabulary. Since we can create infinite vocabularies to describe the same state of affairs, this arena of changing the way people talk is endless. It's important to realize that this second stage can be more or less conscious, since we are typically not finely aware of how the claims we make do or don't have descriptive application, and we just stick to the words themselves, sort of like magic talismans, which we hold onto and say 'this is true!' Note that this also explains why metaphysicians have no subject matter, and do not investigate anything, but only converse – it is because the practice in principle only offers new ways of speaking, these proposals to speak in new ways are always available by talking. — Snakes Alive

I largely agree with this! But I still think metaphysics is valuable. I think you are quite right in pointing out that metaphysical talk is essentially carving up the world in different ways. It's like gardening but with ideas; what happens if I plant this idea there? What happens if I take this idea and tie it to that one, will they grow together? What happens if I declare this cutting up of the world rather than that one; what does it emphasise?

This does not work of course, and the philosopher consciously may know this. But the process itself is so intoxicating that it pulls us in pre-rationally. And it may even service deeper desires – for instance, if I fear change, the mantra that 'time is unreal' may comfort me, because that means change is unreal, and so change cannot hurt me. — Snakes Alive

I don't think you should be so hasty in psychologising metaphysics like that though, as if individual aesthetic taste or some unarticulated need is the sole sufficient reason for preferring one flavour of talk over another.

It might not strictly be philosophy; but at the margins, people use it to inform research methodology in an active way; do you interpret self reports in a hermanutic-phenomenological paradigm; do you interpret it with a social dynamics one?

We could get into a game where those marginal cases aren't philosophy, but I'm not really interested in having that discussion. I'm interested in how "carving explanations at their joints" differently engenders different explanatory categories and the use they're put to; ultimately, what talk they facilitate and what they shut down.

Most of your responses in the thread have been a long form version of that. "It can't be like that now, it's not then!"

There's a discussion in Capital, and popular Marxist trope (you can see it in Endnotes if that's still a thing), that money can't provide a measure of its own value. I wrote about it here, though I approached it technically.