Would Western Marxists say pure math is something like a limit case of relative autonomy? In the sense that, like, good luck mapping the movement of pure math to the movement of anything else at a scale finer than 'geometry first emerged to price land'
What I mean is, pure math seems like strong proof of concept for the possibility of formalism in the arts: an autotelic human enterprise that interacts with other world historical processes only haphazardly
Jun 10, 2023 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
Getting Brigitte-Fontaine-pilled with help from @no_earthquake, vive la France
Oct 11, 2022 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
Pelis on migraine meds can have a little migraine as a treat, it turns out
Did I give myself a migraine by being sad that my 'interests of reason for AI' thread didn't hit (neither on here nor on the discord)
Oct 10, 2022 • 13 tweets • 3 min read
So here's a take on how something like ethics from pure reason could turn out to be 'real' in the context of AI alignment
I am going to be using concepts from @Turn_Trout's and @QuintinPope5's 'shard theory' framework, nicely described here lesswrong.com/posts/iCfdcxiy…
Sep 10, 2022 • 19 tweets • 3 min read
I'm gonna try expressing something I've been struggling for years to make explicit: why I started caring about 'continental' philosophy, and what I think the basic drive that guides philosophy like that is
There are a few different things people get from theism or spirituality, I think. There's security in the rightness of their values, and security that good will prevail, but there's also a special kind of possibility for mystery and surprise in the realm of value
Aug 30, 2022 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
Thinking about the Hegelian opening of @lastpositivist's White Psychodrama paper, I'm struck by how much I think this desire for reconciliation is tied to the irrelevance of 'goals' or 'preferences' or 'utility' for guiding life
Why is the answer to 'how do I make what I do make sense given my circumstances' not 'bro just have a utility function'?
Jun 24, 2022 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
The insane thing about 'internalized misogyny keeps us from seeing that traditionally feminine subject-positions are powerful' feminism is that this is literally the MRA thesis: that women were never oppressed, they just had different but just-as-good forms of power
People are really uncomfortable with the fact that anti-oppression politics is incompatible with identifying as a winner who is doing great and has always been doing great
Jun 22, 2022 • 7 tweets • 1 min read
Question to my mathematician friends: are there cases where you'd say mathematical analysis articulates something you were already 'feeling' or 'experiencing' before the analysis?
My reference point is insights like 'green is between yellow and blue' or 'cola is cinnamon+citrus+vanilla' or 'notes in Western music cycle on 12 semitones,' which I would say articulate structures we already (in some sense) feel as structures
Jun 12, 2022 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
One thing people don't fully get about this situation is that it's like talking about whether the characters actors on Curb Your Enthusiasm play are conscious
This weirdly has nothing to do with whether AIs are conscious or not -- it's like if a robot did a ventriloquist act and the fact that the ventriloquist's a robot somehow made you go 'the wooden dummy on that robot's knees is sentient'
Jun 3, 2022 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
Weird how much the 'I should k*** myself' and 'I should convert to hedonistic total utilitarianism' voices in my head are the same voice
Utilitarians love to lead with 'we're the ones that say letting poor people starve is no different from murder' and not with 'also having suboptimal-sized population is no different from murder'
I was a preference utilitarian until I learned about population ethics and became some kind of virtue ethicist in the aftermath
Feb 22, 2022 • 6 tweets • 1 min read
There's a particular kind of depression I feel creeping when I get into either a real or in-my-head argument with: hedonistic utilitarians, Dennettians, aesthetic-judgment-is-just-power-hierarchies people, ordinary language philosophers
That's a very weird cluster! I think what they all have in common for me is the call to give up on a discourse that I care about but recognize as 'strange' from their perspective
Dec 23, 2021 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
Merry Emily in Paris day to all who celebrate!
If @Mepbon and @tobihaslett are cheating on me by watching with coordination so help me God
Dec 21, 2021 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
Entering a working-on-my-book month. Pray for me, already nauseated with anxiety
Is it bad that I can't say whether I posit autoencoding as an analogy or model or explanation or grounding or correlate of poetic insight
Dec 21, 2021 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
I think I get more out of Hegel if read 'negation' as 'interruption'
Also 'identity' as 'interdependence'
Nov 13, 2021 • 22 tweets • 3 min read
Sometimes people think that in saying that the discourse of aesthetic meaning needs computational grounding I'm implying that the discourse of 'regular' meaning has or needs computational grounding, I... disagree?
IMO the discourse of aesthetic meaning is inherently about something at the interface of the space of reasons (or 'the language game') and the empirical mind
Oct 16, 2021 • 14 tweets • 2 min read
I truly don't know anything more shocking than the neverending literature on how every tractable 'nurture' effect disappears by early adulthood
Like, you'd think that if some nurture thing reliably makes kids do worse in junior high there's gonna be a chain reaction leading on to less good college prospects, then less fancy job and whatnot, but instead the influence just disappears!
Oct 16, 2021 • 7 tweets • 1 min read
TMI thread, chaste people avert your eyes
If you're a man (or person with a penis or whatever), is the orgasm a highlight of sex for you? Always find it the least fun part, and also immediately get moody after
Jun 19, 2021 • 20 tweets • 3 min read
The great idea of Kant's 3rd Critique, which Kant couldn't quite handle, is that the conditions for putting stuff into words can't be put into words
Heidegger saw this in Kant with amazing clarity, but was too high off his mind on Nazi occult shit to do something good with it
Jun 17, 2021 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
I just had an incredible idea: what if German idealism but also computer
I'm changing the name I use (in literary-philosophical context) for the set of possible outputs of a trained autoencoder from calling it the autoencoder's 'canon' like I did for the last 4 years to calling it the autoencoder's 'image'
I liked 'canon' because it communicated that the objects in this set are how the trained autoencoder interprets the world, but almost everyone who reads my work thinks 'canon' is my synonym for 'training set,' no matter how much I stress the distinction
