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Is Elon Musk the greatest visionary or the greatest snake oil salesman of our age?

:hmm:

is wearing sunglasses a right wing twat thing now?

i've tended for years to wear (prescription) sunglasses almost if i'm outside in daylight...

It's definitely a pattern that anyone on social media with an avatar showing themselves wearing a big ol' pair of (usually fake) Oakleys is almost certain to be some kind of political troglodyte.
 
very suspect now of most gym bros, too. i understand that is entirely my imagination and totally small minded. oh but i have seen enough, seen enough!
 
goatee and oakleys - one of the biggest red flags of modern times.

Features common to winners of the Herman Cain Award.

very suspect now of most gym bros, too. i understand that is entirely my imagination and totally small minded. oh but i have seen enough, seen enough!

I don't think you're entirely off base there. Bodybuilding forums are major sources/promoters of so-called "bro science", including most notably the idea that consuming soy somehow feminises men and turns them into weak lefties.
 
Features common to winners of the Herman Cain Award.



I don't think you're entirely off base there. Bodybuilding forums are major sources/promoters of so-called "bro science", including most notably the idea that consuming soy somehow feminises men and turns them into weak lefties.
get on the work of Byung Chul Han mate - namely The Burnout Society and Psychopolitics. In my view, he is one of the most important voices around at the moment. He is descriptive rather than prescriptive, but the world is a lot clearer after reading him. The gym bros are the penicle of what he calls the atomised achieving subject, where the master-slave dialectic is an internal one, implamented there by neoliberal slight of hand in the guise of absoloute freedom. The end result...burnout. Exhaustion. Bewilderment.
 
one of the half arsed "solutions" that he puts forward (he himself doesn't believe in over-arching solutions) is renunication - an attitude of no. No I won't improve. No I won't try to accumumlate personality or character. No I won't try and improve my mental and emotional life. No I won't try and improve my relationships. See how utterly foreign that attitude is to the modern day apparatus? but try it! it's a fundementally religious attitude - one inherent in buddhist, taosim. one of refusal. and in that refusal a redemption. a giving up that suddenly opens up huge vistas of space.

the world at least feels mental and dark at the mometn. we need thinkers to really enquire re all this shit that is pummelling our brains.

Gains bro! Do you even lift, bro? What colours your Boggati!
 
get on the work of Byung Chul Han mate - namely The Burnout Society and Psychopolitics. In my view, he is one of the most important voices around at the moment. He is descriptive rather than prescriptive, but the world is a lot clearer after reading him. The gym bros are the penicle of what he calls the atomised achieving subject, where the master-slave dialectic is an internal one, implamented there by neoliberal slight of hand in the guise of absoloute freedom. The end result...burnout. Exhaustion. Bewilderment.

Does he also offer any explanation for why people fall for this kind of rat-race bullshit in the first place? It's just something I have trouble personally understanding. Like, it's just so much easier to not be bothered about trying to match up to some cartoonishly hypermasculine ideal of what a man's body should be, and the same goes for the kind of go-getting bullshit that encourages wage workers to go the extra unpaid mile to "advance your career". It all just sounds so fucking exhausting. I'd rather do the bare minimum to get a somewhat decently paying job - with persistence and some luck it is possible in my experience - so that I have more time and mental energy to do the shit I actually find fun.

One can't win everything, so turning all of life into a competition makes losers of everyone.
 
Does he also offer any explanation for why people fall for this kind of rat-race bullshit in the first place? It's just something I have trouble personally understanding. Like, it's just so much easier to not be bothered about trying to match up to some cartoonishly hypermasculine ideal of what a man's body should be, and the same goes for the kind of go-getting bullshit that encourages wage workers to go the extra unpaid mile to "advance your career". It all just sounds so fucking exhausting. I'd rather do the bare minimum to get a somewhat decently paying job - with persistence and some luck it is possible in my experience - so that I have more time and mental energy to do the shit I actually find fun.

One can't win everything, so turning all of life into a competition makes losers of everyone.
It’s neoliberal subjectivity. If you’re interested, I can post up some papers. The ultra-short version is: primacy of choice, freedom from coercion and freedom to attain produces four interrelated dimensions of subjectivity.

First, a radical abstraction from context, by which the individual understands themself as essentially independent.

Second, an entrepreneurial self-model, whereby the aim is to overcome the demands that stand in the way of authentic actualisation, rather than adapt the environment (independent self) of adapt to the environment (interdependent self).

Third is permanent growth, which comes out of the other two dimensions — one has to permanently outcompete.

Fourth is affect management, the most complex dimension. Because the motivation is “freedom to”, there is an emphasis on this freedom being directed towards achieving “happiness”. Positivity thus becomes both a goal and a method. It becomes both the motivator behind a choice and the way that the choice was known to be correct. A negativity towards negativity is cultivated to manage this process.

Some work indicates that scoring high on a neoliberal subjectivity scale is predictive of all kinds of other traits, like perfectionism, responsibilization, depression, you name it
 
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it's just so much easier to not be bothered about trying to match up to some cartoonishly hypermasculine ideal of what a man's body should be, and the same goes for the kind of go-getting bullshit that encourages wage workers to go the extra unpaid mile to "advance your career". It all just sounds so fucking exhausting.
It often doesn't feel like there's much being "a leftie" is good for, but having a critique of capital does confer a degree of inoculation against hustle culture and hyper-masculinity I think. But for the broad mass of "apolitical" people it does hold promise, as long as (somewhat ironically given the pitch) you do what you're told. Commit all your youthful energy to perfection and work, and you'll get your reward in Protestant Heaven later life in the form of social capital, escape from the grind, access to luxury, health etc. For the young particularly it's a much better pitch than "life's going to continue to suck" or "those Socialists we've demonised your whole life want to make you part of their amorphous liberal blob," offers a sense of taking control of your own destiny, and of course, by the time you see the strings it's too late.
 
Honestly I thought it came across as a bit OTT. These aren't artificial intelligences, they're very cleverly-made approximation machines. There's a lot to be said about their impacts, but it does no good at all to fudge the different concepts of potential social and economic upheaval caused by what amounts to a form of ultra-advanced automation, and 1980s nightmares about singularity and Skynet. My guess about Musk's involvement, if he's not just being oddly ignorant, is that he's pissed about being left out of the whole thing.
 
I suspect we're not going to actually have true AI unless quantum computing is actually a reality.

Why is that? I know that some have proposed that general intelligence in humans is at least a partially quantum phenomenon, but I don't think there's strong enough evidence to take the idea seriously. Neurons are squishy electrochemical things that work together in a warm and wet pulsing goop, hardly the kind of conditions suitable for quantum mechanical operations.
 
Why is that? I know that some have proposed that general intelligence in humans is at least a partially quantum phenomenon, but I don't think there's strong enough evidence to take the idea seriously. Neurons are squishy electrochemical things that work together in a warm and wet pulsing goop, hardly the kind of conditions suitable for quantum mechanical operations.

The post doesn't have to mean human intelligence has any quantum woo component, really.
I read it just in terms of conventional computing power being too feeble for the job by several orders of magnitude.
 
Why is that? I know that some have proposed that general intelligence in humans is at least a partially quantum phenomenon, but I don't think there's strong enough evidence to take the idea seriously. Neurons are squishy electrochemical things that work together in a warm and wet pulsing goop, hardly the kind of conditions suitable for quantum mechanical operations.
It's no more than a 'feeling' I have however this article may help flesh out reasons why:


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probably more properly belongs in a the quantum computing thread in Science and tech, sorry.
 
We’re not going to have true artificial intelligence until we stop pursuing it as something that emerges from suitably advanced algorithm logic. We’re not going to have it until we understand the thing we’re trying to achieve.
 
We’re not going to have true artificial intelligence until we stop pursuing it as something that emerges from suitably advanced algorithm logic. We’re not going to have it until we understand the thing we’re trying to achieve.

I'm not so sure that it's necessary to grok something in order to achieve it. We didn't need to understand genetics in order to start selectively breeding scraggly wild plants and panicky herd animals into a bewildering variety of crops and livestock.
 
I'm not so sure that it's necessary to grok something in order to achieve it. We didn't need to understand genetics in order to start selectively breeding scraggly wild plants and panicky herd animals into a bewildering variety of crops and livestock.
True, but we did need to understand that baby cows come from mummy and daddy cows. We didn’t think that if we just got enough beef together, a cow would spontaneously form.
 
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