Very glad to see the sub being run exactly as it was always supposed to be.

My dear boy…what the fuck are you talking about

Yeah man but it’s sold for thousands of years, and the last hundred? Oh you’d better believe we know it sells

and that “who talks to who” is basic journalism.

It’s always interesting to note when an apparently natural convention has metastasised and begun to sprout weird, ugly, distensions that no longer make sense. Sure, when the stakes are ideas, it’s important to stick to ideas and not over-focus on personalities! In fact you can take that principle fairly far, as when holding onto your ideals in the teeth of conflict which can abase you and cause you to lose all moral compass. But never talk about personalities? And in a big way we live in the century of metastasised conventions - the internet, but also everything else, both accelerates and robs us of any behavioural compass but strange and constantly shifting conventional guides for getting along (have a terrifying conversation with almost anyone in Gen Z for proof of that). In the same way “in-group/out-group” is hopelessly inadequate to capture this dynamic, but it’s another convention that this lot of have chosen to metastasise (and, paradoxically, it now looms larger in the rules governing their thinking than almost anywhere).

For them, it’s all become a strange conspiracy of the elect in which nobody knows who’s in charge and nobody is actually the elect, hence this constant bizarre resort to the counter-conspiracy whenever their strange values come into conflict with the outside: they no longer have a tool for reality-testing their values, because the rest of the world is either wrong or the enemy

The State Department? That unimpeachable organ of American governance?! Why, I don’t even know whether to trust them not to collude with shadowy corporations or not to be duped!

I have good news for you: the ChatGPT racists got there because the idea isn’t even original to either of them

Yeah, I kind of used you to grandstand about a broader point that I hoped other people who had the “yuck” reaction would see, and I still haven’t figured out how to tag people (i.e. the person above) on this janky site

Edit: I should here add that “utility” as Hume understands it is not yet the full-fledged utility of “utilitarianism” or “utilons”, which innovation is due to Bentham (only a few decades later). For Hume, “utility” is just what you’d expect from normal language, i.e. “use”, or “usefulness”. The utility of things, including principles, is in their being good or bad for us, i.e. not formally in the sense of a hedonic calculus or the satisfaction of preferences (we don’t “count up” either of these things to get an account of Humean utility).

Hume isn’t an anti-realist! The notorious “is-ought” passage in Treatise which people often take for an expression of anti-realism only goes so far as to point out what it says: that evaluative conclusions cannot logically follow merely from fact premises, so that to conclude “eating grapes is good” we also need some evaluative premise “grapes are good” alongside “grapes are red” and “grapes are edible”, or whatever.

Contemporary accounts of Hume are muddled by his long and undeserved reputation as a thoroughgoing radical sceptic, but his philosophy has two sides: the destructive and the reconstructive, where the latter is perfectly comfortable with drawing all sorts of conclusions so long as they are limited by an awareness of the limits of our powers of judgement.

For morality, Hume finds its source in our “sentiments”, but indeed not totally unlike our friend over there, he does not think that this is cause to think our sentiments don’t have force. Again not unlike our friend, he thinks sentiments may be compared for their “utility”. However, his arguments (a) unlike those of our friend, do not attempt to bridge the essentially logical gap he has merely pointed out, (b) unlike the anti-realist, take reflective judgements about utility to have force, alongside the force of those sentiments we reflect on, of an essentially real character.

Insofar as there is a resemblance, the important distinction between what Hume is doing and what our guy is doing is that Hume doesn’t try to find any master-category (implicitly, “the species” above, although e/accs place this underneath another category “consciousness”) which would ground fact judgements in science to give them force. Rather, (a) he basically asks us what else do you plan on doing, if you don’t intend to prefer good things over bad? (b) identifies the particular sources of goodness and badness in real life, and then evaluates them. By contrast, the e/acc view attempts to argue that whatever our cultural judgements are, then they are good, insofar as they are refined evolutionarily/memetically - Hume thinks culture frequently gets these wrong, frequently gets them right, that culture is a flux, not a progressive development, and he discovers the essential truth in looking at individuals, not at group level “selection” over a set of competing propositions.

Hume isn’t tied to the inherent conservatism of a pseudo-Bayesian model. Curiously enough he is a political conservative, which is arguably what makes it possible for him to (lightly) rest his semi-realist account on what he takes to be a relatively stable human sentimental substrate. But this only gives him further cause to take a genial view of the stakes of what we now call “realism vs anti-realism”: it isn’t as important as trying to be nice.

Radioactive Wolf Twinks? My God, what have we done…

or confusing GWAS’ current inability to detect a gene with the gene not existing

This remarkable sleight of hand sticks out. The argument from the (or rather this particular) GWAS camp goes “we are detecting the genes, contrary to expectations”. There isn’t any positive assumption in favour of that camp, so failure to thus far detect the gene is supposed to motivate against its existence.

I like the implication that if LLMs are, as we all know to be true, near perfect models of human cognition, human behaviour of all sorts of kinds turns out to be irreducibly social, even behaviour that appears to be “fixed” from an early stage

I didn’t ask you to apologise for using an “ageist slur”, I asked you, of the particular affects you adopted in your opening gambit here, which corresponded to how you really feel. You adopted a tone and verbiage which implied you were, as I put it, “amongst friends”, but on the other you also tried to suggest you didn’t actually know anything about SneerClub. On that other hand, you set yourself up as in favour of everything rationalism except this one tiny thing, but back on the first and again here you’re suggesting that you know pretty well where you are (re: “mainstream”, and SneerClub’s alleged favouring it against rationalism in general). My suggestion was that this muddle of cant implies a fundamental dishonesty: you’re hiding all sorts of opinions behind a borrowed language of (at least in its original context: passive aggressive) non-confrontation. Most of that is well confirmed when you slip into this dropping of “sir”s and openly passive aggressive apologising just because I was explicitly impatient.

The world doesn’t slow down but it turns smoother when you just say what you mean or decide you didn’t have anything to say in the first place.

Look back at that guff about “discovering reality”, now if that isn’t just the adderall talking it’s a move you make when you don’t particularly like somebody but you want to make them look or at least feel a little bad for not being appropriately high-minded. “High-minded” here would further translate into real demands as “getting with the right programme”, to the exclusion of what your opposite partner was doing - in this case, allegedly, scoring points “off each other”. “Off each other” was another weasel phrase: you know that at least at first blush you weren’t scoring points off anyone, so you also know that the only remaining target of that worry could have been SneerClubbers.