By all means try to use this blog post to hold onto whatever community you happen to find yourself in. It is a toolkit for strangling a scene to death and feeling good about it. The gamergate handbook for smearing people (not Shermer, just women) you happen to want out of your company.

Just restating what Chapman says is not a correction? Perhaps I wouldn’t come out swinging like this so hard except that perhaps nothing makes me more angry than being told I just don’t understand something blindingly straightforward, and perhaps if I did I would agree with you. Do you think other people just aren’t as smart as you are? Do you talk like that to people in daily life? Who the hell do you think you are?

Chapman’s fanatics are (eg.) the people who organize the independent film fest and talk endlessly about independent films but don’t direct or act in their own films, or the people who reply to posts but don’t initiate their own threads.

Yes, I am not confused, and this is precisely what makes his terminology useless. The people who reply to posts and talk endlessly about stuff are frequently deadbeats, but this is not captured by his pseudo-technical terminology. Chapman has defined “fanatics” self-servingly as the people who do the productive work and defined them against “mops” as people who are less interested and do not do productive work: it is a false and a very stupid distinction for the reasons I have outlined

Personally I don’t think I have met anyone fitting this description: “They love to be a part of something but they’re too insecure to let other people love it too, and they lose their ability to meaningfully contribute because they’re so busy policing the boundaries of the space.”

Yes, this is another problem with the essay. Since it only serves to flatter the prejudices of a sympathetic reader, the dynamics it claims to point out will only be recognisable to somebody willing to indulge those prejudices, whereas to the unsympathetic reader it just doesn’t have anything to say at all.*

*slight correction: it doesn’t have anything interesting to say at all. It does perform adequate speech-acts viz. draws the boundaries of what Chapman considers acceptable participation in a scene according to his “judgement” about who is and isn’t a fruitful and productive member of his little society. But that makes it an effective piece of political propaganda, a worthy role but not the one he would like to intend for it.

Hall published a noncommittal review of a dodgy-sounding book

I don’t even know who Harriet Hall is, but this undersells it. Just in the wikipedia link that we can all see, she says that the (fake) issues raised by Abigail Shriner in Irreversible Damage, “urgently need to be looked into”. That book, far from a mere “dodgy-sounding book”, was an enormously influential, best-selling, and intensely transphobic avalanche of lies and self-serving distortions.

Benjamin’s The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction is about how groups of artists establish symbols

That work is not primarily about symbols or groups of artists at all, and insofar as it is about symbols and groups of artists it is about how mechanical reproduction diminishes the ability of artists to control the symbolic structure of their artworks. With that established, that work is primarily about art in a technological society, and about how technics shape (a) art, (b) politics, © the mediating interface between the two (which is itself technology in “the age of mechanical reproduction)

Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle is about how consumerist states cultivate mass consciousness through mass media

For Debord, the state is merely part of the Spectacle. The book is about how capitalism itself mediates culture through mass media. The idea of “mass consciousness” is too vague to get much of a look-in here, although the book could be plausibly explained as developing the vague idea of “mass consciousness” into something more concrete.

I have been sufficiently tempted to point out one of the ways in which this is horribly stupid viz. it is written from the perspective of somebody who is a liability to whatever scene he claims to have been a part of

Fanatics want to share their obsession, and mops initially validate it for them too. However, as mop numbers grow, they become a headache. Fanatics do all the organizational work, initially just on behalf of geeks: out of generosity, and to enjoy a geeky subsociety. They put on events, build websites, tape up publicity fliers, and deal with accountants. Mops just passively soak up the good stuff.4 You may even have to push them around the floor; they have to be led to the drink. At best you can charge them admission or a subscription fee, but they’ll inevitably argue that this is wrong because capitalism is evil, and also because they forgot their wallet.

Everybody with half a brain knows that actually fanatics are frequently fucking deadbeats, who are therefore incapable of materially contributing beyond their physical presence. That’s fine, but it doesn’t lend itself to the financial stability of the collective enterprise, especially if they expect to get free stuff out of the bargain, which they frequently do. Of course, this isn’t the case for everybody, but that just proves the point that this is unbelievably fucking stupid

Mops relate to each other in “normal” ways, like people do on TV, which the fanatics find repellent. During intermission, geeks want to talk about the New Thing, but mops blather about sportsball and celebrities. Also, the mops also seem increasingly entitled, treating the fanatics as service workers.

“Fanatics” like this treat whatever community has sprung up around its artists as a vending machine for personal connection and social clout. They love to be a part of something but they’re too insecure to let other people love it too, and they lose their ability to meaningfully contribute because they’re so busy policing the boundaries of the space. This isn’t a “fanatic” actually, because again, it’s just a(n extreme and highly idealised) type of guy, but again that is proving the point of the stupidity of this enterprise.

Mops also dilute the culture. The New Thing, although attractive, is more intense and weird and complicated than mops would prefer. Their favorite songs are the ones that are least the New Thing, and more like other, popular things. Some creators oblige with less radical, friendlier, simpler creations.

cf. Bob Dylan, “Judas”

Even reading just a paragraph of the article you get the sense that Chapman is an insufferable dork who feels somehow burned about something in his past

The strangest thing about it is that the complaints are played so much to such an intense stereotype it’s as if Chapman is the only person in his model who actually embodies what would otherwise be a ludicrously idealised and caricatured type, and it turns out to be the horrible deadbeat superfan who ruins everything trying to make it his personal possession

Chapman is a fucking moron, and not rationalist curious but deeply embedded in rationalism. “Post-rationalism”, when it was new, was nothing more than a way of being into (at the shallow end) Deeprak Chopra type shit for personal growth on “rational” grounds (“if it works it isn’t stupid” or whatever) without getting kicked out of the clubhouse. It’s harder to see those outlines now because mainline rationalists have effectively adopted that plus far more extreme attitudes in their day to day over the last 5+ years, so post-rationalism looks harder to understand and more interesting than it really is or was.

Chapman himself was trying to do rationalist existentialism (hence his title, “Meaningness”, the quality of being meaningful, with particular respect to “having meaning in one’s life”).

Of course he was naive, but he’s also just writing yet another completely oblivious ass-pulled blog pretending to do meaningful sociology with just whatever shit came off the top of his dome. It’s identical to everything else written in this regard within 15 miles of LessWrong and should therefore be ignored except insofar as its laughed out of the room.

It’s true though. They’re not nazis. They’re incapable of being fired by any fundamentally political or spiritual ideals, no matter how ultimately black and nihilistic, at all. Even if these people were full-throated card-carrying members of the American Nazi party marching through Times Square with a swastika flag throwing out copies of Der Sturmer from a Panzer tank they wouldn’t be nazis. The fact is that they’re just the purest distillation of 20th-21st century media culture yet: they’re so utterly saturated in media that the only choice they’ve made, the only choice available to them, was whether to lean into the goodie or the baddie vibe, and they plumped for “baddie” because it suited their contrarian aesthetic and then, without even leaving a ripple on the surface, they slipped into the role and inhabited it so thoroughly that it is, literally, indistinguishable from who they are.

These people are nothing less, and 100% nothing more, than your childish glee at getting to play the villain in an RPG.

Honestly? Improvement

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

It’s from Maps of Meaning, per the caption, so no this is from his original theory of everything.

Nonetheless, to be perfectly honest, I honestly can’t complain that he put something weird like that in the book as such. What, after all, is actually wrong with it, assuming a certain amount of charity about context relevance? That it’s gross to recount weird sexually charged dreams you had about your grandmother?

For a psychologist in the tradition of Jung, and therefore to a great extent Freud, such material might actually be quite useful! Amongst the worst things therapy culture - and perhaps the whole ideology of post-Freud psychology/iatry/therapy - does is to rehabilitate prudishness about what it is and is not acceptable to talk about in our psychic lives, when liberation from those oppressive norms is precisely the best achievement of those aspects of Freud which remain uncontroversial (not to mention those which are only controversial for bad reasons).

You know the whole thing: “we don’t talk about that wanting to have sex with your mother stuff”, well why on Earth not? Amongst the most obvious things in the world is that people are incredibly weird and complex. Why cave in to propriety and ignore it?

Lots of people have experiences like this, and therefore by definition it’s important to discuss them - non-pathologically - if you want to understand (and improve) people’s psychic life.

I just want to draw special attention to the reasoning here

BigTech, which critically depends on hyper-targeted ads for the lion share of its revenue, is incapable of offering AI model outputs that are plausible given the location / language of the request. The irony.

• request from Ljubljana using Slovenian => white people with high probability

• request from Nairobi using Swahili => black people with high probability

• request from Shenzhen using Mandarin => asian people with high probability

If a specific user is unhappy with the prevailing demographics of the city where they live, give them a few settings to customize their personal output to their heart’s content.

Not gonna say anything in particular about that reasoning, just gonna draw attention to it

It’s a horrific tragedy that John Locke should have become America’s (made up) philosopher king after Reconstruction, when Thomas Hobbes was right there

I like some people who have written for Jacobin, sometimes I even enjoy an article here and there, but the magazine as a whole remains utterly unbeaten in the “will walk the length of Manhattan in a “GIANT RUBE” sandwich board for clicks” stakes

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.

Too stupid to debunk without resorting to bullying.

If you’re moral realist he’s even more wrong. Of the realist positions available this is closest to naturalism, but it denies the essential precepts of any moral realism viz. the mind-independence of moral truth. This “is-ought” “solution” is as old as Protagoras, “man is the measure of all things”, where “e/acc’s google-brained account of consciousness” stands in for “man”.

As a philosophical position they’re just doing relativism, and then as a historicised political project this is just late 19th century scientism(ific racism). And I emphasise that the premises (“evolutionary fitness”) reveal the sources reveal the political project.

Moral realists introduce an independent condition (mind-independence) which at least purports to save ethical principles from reducing to “might makes right”, this is just the latter window-dressed with talk of “post-selection” to implicitly let in some degree of ethical deliberation as constitutive of morality, making it incidentally also a cowardly way to propagandise racism.

“We have built the torment nexus” but for more literate morons who read Borges

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

Highly recommended for a dissenting view, against the greatness of Sidgwick, is from another great (and personal fave) Bernard Williams, who has a longish essay criticising Sidgwick in particular (his critiques of utilitarianism and kantianism in general are much better known)

It’s very easy to get the impression reading the more surface material that Sidgwick is universally admired, even where his reasoning may go awry. Williams corrects that misapprehension.

yeah well since gawker god knows what people aren’t covering about thiel’s breeding programme