I'd say these days the norm is to not simply shut down, but to become irrevocably and insidiously hostile, the moment someone hints at the existence of such a thing as "ground truth", "subjective interpretation", "being right or wrong" - or any of the bits and bobs that might lead one to discover the proper scary notion, "consensus reality".
"What do you mean social reality is a constructed by the consensus of the participants? Reality is what has been drilled into my head under threat of starvation! How dare you exist!", et cetera. You've heard it translated into Business English countless times.
They are deathly afraid of becoming aware of their own conditioned state of teleological illiteracy - i.e. how they are trained to know what they are doing, but never why they are doing it. It's especially bad with the guys who cosplay US STEM gang.
One is not permitted a position of significance in this world without receiving this conditioning, and I figure it's precisely this global state of cognitive disavowal which props up the value of the US dollar - and all sorts of other standees you might've recently interacted with as if they're not 2D cutouts (metaphorical ones! metaphorical!).
PSA: Look up "locus of control" and "double bind". Between those two, you might be able to get a glimpse of what's going on - but have some sort of non-addictive sedative handy in case you do.
OK, I'll bite the artillery shell: I don't mean to dismiss you or what you are saying; in fact I strongly relate - wouldn't it be nice to be able to hash things out with people and mutually benefit from both the shared and the diverging perspectives implied in such interaction? Isn't that the most natural thing in the world?
Unfortunately these days this sounds halfway between a very privileged perspective and a pie in the sky.
When was the last time a person took responsibility for the bad outcome you got as a direct consequence of following their advice?
And, relatedly, where the hell do you even find humans who believe in discursive truth-seeking in 2026CE?
Because for the last 15 years or so I've only ever ran into (a) the kind of people who will keep arguing regardless if what they're saying is proven wrong; (b) and their complementaries, those who will never think about what you are saying, lest they commit to saying anything definite themselves, which may hypothetically be proven wrong.
Thing is, both types of people have plenty to lose; the magic wordball doesn't. (The previous sentence is my answer to the question you posited; and why I feel the present parenthesized disclaimer to be necessary, is a whole next can of worms...)
Signs of the existence of other kinds of people, perhaps such that have nothing to prove, are not unheard of.
But those people reside in some other layer of the social superstructure, where facts matter much less than adherence to "humane", "rational" not-even-dogmas (I'd rather liken it to complex conditioning).
But those folks (because reasons) are in a position of power over your well-being - and (because unfathomables) it's a definite faux pas to insist in their presence that there are such things as facts, which relate by the principles of verbal reasoning.
Best you could get out of them is the "you do you", "if you know you know", that sort of bubble-bobble - and don't you dare get even mildly miffed at such treatment of your natural desire to keep other humans in the loop.
I genuinely do not understand what u are saying. Because reasons, because unfathomables? Everyone in last 15 years has been an npc? I have had countless deep conversations with people and i am an uber introvert.
This reads like someone who is deep into their specific pov. You cannot hope to have a meaningful conversation if you yourself are not willing to concede a point.
To the op u are replying too, arguing with people can have real consequences if u say something stupid or carelessly. There is a another human there. With a machine, u are safe. At least u feel safe.
When you start hearing things like “you do you” or “if you know you know” it means that you went way too far. That’s a sign of discomfort.
If you make uncomfortable, you won’t get diverging perspectives. People will agree to anything to get out of a social situation that makes them uncomfortable.
If your goal is meaningful conversation, you may want to consider how you make people feel.
Believe me (or don't), I always do. Even when this precludes a necessary conversation from happening. Even when the other party doesn't give a fuck about how they make others feel.
After all, if they're making me uncomfortable, surely there's something making them uncomfortable, which they're not being able to be forthright about, but with empathy I could figure it out from contextual cues, right?
>People will agree to anything to get out of a social situation that makes them uncomfortable.
That's fine as long as they have someone to take care of them.
In my experience, taking into account the opinions of such people has been the worst mistake of my life. I'm still working on the means to fix its consequences, as much as they are fixable at all.
"Doing whatever for the sake of avoiding mild discomfort" is cowardice, laziness, narcissism - I'm personally partial to the last one, but take your pick. In any case, I consider it a fundamentally dishonest attitude, and a priori have no wish to get along (i.e. become interdependent) with such people.
Other than that, I do agree with your overall sentiment and the underlying value system; I'm just not so sure any more that it is in fact correct.
> In my experience, taking into account the opinions of such people has been the worst mistake of my life. I'm still working on the means to fix its consequences, as much as they are fixable at all.
This sounds very cryptic. Can you give an example?
Believe me (or don't), I always do. Even when this precludes a necessary conversation from happening. Even when the other party doesn't give a fuck about how they make others feel.
After all, if they're making me uncomfortable, surely there's something making them uncomfortable, which they're not being able to be forthright about, but with empathy I could figure it out from contextual cues, right?
>People will agree to anything to get out of a social situation that makes them uncomfortable.
That's fine as long as they have someone to take care of them.
In my experience, taking into account the opinions of such people has been the worst mistake of my life. I'm still working on the means to correct its consequences.
"Doing whatever for the sake of avoiding mild discomfort" is cowardice, laziness, narcissism - I'm personally partial to the last one, but take your pick. In any case, I see it as a way of being which is taught to people; and one which is fundamentally dishonest and irresponsible.
Other than that, I do agree with your overall sentiment and the underlying value system; I'm just not so sure any more that it is in fact correct.
>You need uncontrolled compute for developing software
Oh you sweet summer child :(
You think our best and brightest aren't already working on that problem?
In fact they've fucking aced it, as has been widely celebrated on this website for years at this point.
All that remains is getting the rest of the world to buy in, hahahaha.
But I laugh unfairly and bitterly; getting people to buy in is in fact easiest.
Just put 'em in the pincer of attention/surveillance economy (make desire mandatory again!).
And then offer their ravaged intellectual and emotional lives the barest semblance of meaning, of progress, of the self-evident truth of reason.
And magic happens.
---
To digress. What you said is not unlike "you need uncontrolled thought for (writing books/recording music/shooting movies/etc)".
That's a sweet sentiment, innit?
Except it's being disproved daily by several global slop-publishing industries that exist since before personal computing.
Making a blockbuster movie, recording a pop hit, or publishing the kind of book you can buy at an airport, all employ millions of people; including many who seem to do nothing particularly comprehensible besides knowing people who know people... It reminds me of the Chinese Brain experiment a great deal.
Incidentally, those industries taught you most of what you know about "how to human"; their products were also a staple in the lives of your parents; and your grandparents... if you're the average bougieprole, anyway.
---
Anyway, what do you think the purpose of LLMs even is?
What's the supposed endgame of this entire coordinated push to stop instructing the computer (with all the "superhuman" exactitude this requires); and instead begin to "build" software by asking nicely?
Btw, no matter how hard we ignore some things, what's happening does not pertain only to software; also affected are prose, sound, video, basically all electronic media... permit yourself your one unfounded generalization for the day, and tell me - do you begin to get where this is going?
Not "compute" (the industrial resource) but computing (the individual activity) is politically sensitive: programming is a hands-on course in epistemics; and epistemics, in turn, teaches fearless disobedience.
There's a lot of money riding on fearless disobedience remaining a niche hobby. And if there's more money riding on anything else in the world right now, I'd like an accredited source to tell me what the hell that would be.
Think for two fucking seconds and once you're done screaming come join the resistance.
Well, some of the "old school" has left the market of natural causes since the 2000s.
That only leaves the rest of 'em. Wer dey go, and what are your top 3 reasons for how the values of the 2000s era failed to transmit to the next generation of developers?
> And that organization is explicitly nationalistic and religious
So are many Serbs (more so if emigrants from atheist-socialist Yugoslavia, or descendants of folks who moved before WW2) as well as many other nations and organizations (America itself lol). So are many Something-Or-Other-American individuals and communities.
I presume that the organization(s) sending Tesla busts, being American-rooted, have had no illusions about which matters will forever remain impossible to communicate to Americans. (Such as anything not reducible to paperclip optimization.)
Instead, I consider it more likely that the point of promoting Tesla was not to impress anyone in America, but to uplift Serbia and generally the South Slavs of the Balkans who'd only gained national sovereignty in Tesla's day: "look, our heritage has already produced an honest-to-god American inventor half a jebani vek ago, so you guys have zero excuse to act as if you're stuck in the middle ages - do join the cargo cult of mordorn civilization instead, will ya - we got value to extract from ya!"
>They've basically projected the Jobs/Woz divide back onto two historical figures who, in reality, barely interacted.
I'd rather say this has been projected for them, but by whom is anyone's guess; not like there's a shadowy cabal operating. Besides said Serbian-American heritage promoters and whatever their game is, I guess - but here we're not talking mid-XX century Serbian diaspora any more, but a "culturally nonspecific" audience.
Much safer to call it "a hivemind situation" when nobody knows where some idea comes from, and nobody is accountable for rebroadcasting it either, since it comes pre-tagged as Good and True and Useful and it is wrongthink to doubt those. Especially when the idea is so obviously Useful for excusing nonaction. ("I can't be bothered to learn the first thing about electricity, even the history of why I have access to it in the first place - but now that Tesla guy I've vaguely heard of, he was the great genius of the people! What better reason to Experience a Positive Emotion!")
I'd say these days the norm is to not simply shut down, but to become irrevocably and insidiously hostile, the moment someone hints at the existence of such a thing as "ground truth", "subjective interpretation", "being right or wrong" - or any of the bits and bobs that might lead one to discover the proper scary notion, "consensus reality".
"What do you mean social reality is a constructed by the consensus of the participants? Reality is what has been drilled into my head under threat of starvation! How dare you exist!", et cetera. You've heard it translated into Business English countless times.
They are deathly afraid of becoming aware of their own conditioned state of teleological illiteracy - i.e. how they are trained to know what they are doing, but never why they are doing it. It's especially bad with the guys who cosplay US STEM gang.
One is not permitted a position of significance in this world without receiving this conditioning, and I figure it's precisely this global state of cognitive disavowal which props up the value of the US dollar - and all sorts of other standees you might've recently interacted with as if they're not 2D cutouts (metaphorical ones! metaphorical!).
PSA: Look up "locus of control" and "double bind". Between those two, you might be able to get a glimpse of what's going on - but have some sort of non-addictive sedative handy in case you do.
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