Morroque posted:

The one thing I'm noticing about Prester's models are that the outcomes they pose are not further normative. All the opposition to authoritarianism can do, given the other variables involved, is prevent regression. If the republican party eventually turns into the authoritarian party, the compaction cycle which does that will likely scare the more moderate (and monied) forces into the democratic party, turning them into the de-facto capitalist party. The republican refugees would probably overwhelm the progressive elements in the party by grouping around the elite centre.

I mean, even if the authoritarians are not fighting any battle to actually win, isn't one of the outcomes of their fighting is a prevention of progressive policy? I mean, what would be the moderate reaction to them? Would the Americans of a more leftist bent have to give up on their own dreams for a better nation, just to help defend the status quo against the tea party? What exactly does one do in this scenario?

Morroque posted:

Perhaps this is too much of a tangential topic, but... What are the primary motivators towards homeschooling? On one hand, it seems like something of a old bourgeois comfort, but be financially independent enough to have one parent free to teach the children. On the other hand, I can think of a multitude of reasons why some might consider the state or private schooling to be a dreadful system and how one might do better. (To differing standards of "better," but still...)

What exactly is the crux of why homeschooling became so important? I can't help but figure there has to be some historical reasoning to it. (Historical in the sense of the time in which it was first planned up and adopted wholesale. It should've been seen as the solution to some problem, real or imagined.)

Morroque posted:

What is the rapture... for, exactly? What exact purpose does it serve?

We know that Grand Narratives serve a primarily psychological need, and that the current form of Grand Narrative in the racist, paranoid, religious, and economic clusters all follow a similar arc that can be explained as a "rapture of some kind." The Rapture of the religious cluster is the prototype of this, and it is famous for not actually being anywhere in the Bible or explicitly part of any Christian teachings. And yet, the need for the rapture to be there is so great that it is already commonly believed from square one, and must be fashioned from various out-of-context quotes in various different passages of different biblical books in order to justify itself. The other clusters all sucked similar storylines from their thumbs in order to service a similar need, and the need for it is so great that it is not moored to any explicit political program. It's only a matter of what structures exist that can service authoritarian needs, and our narrativists will coalesce towards those structures. (If it is left wing or right wing is either just a matter of outer narrative, or an ad-hoc description given after the fact.)

But I've looked over the rapture structure so many times, and I just can't imagine what anyone sees in it. The more I think over PJ's theories, the more I keep brushing up against this question. It has to be this specific rapture because one of its sources is another apocalypse story, the Book of Revelation, and yet somehow that apocalypse story wasn't good enough. (Or is too complicated, or too antiquated for modern understanding.) It didn't service the need, so a new one was created. But what was that need?

The best I can come up with is that the rapture as a storyline was a common fantasy developed during the Cold War due to the threat of nuclear war. The idea that you, a good person who can't influence the delicate situation of the world powers, could be magicked away to a place removed from it all while the nuclear war happened, and you could return to the world after all the world powers had killed themselves and you could try to resume living your life. The problem with this theory is that it assumes the Rapture to only date back to 01950 or so, yet it existed before that as far as 01830. Maybe it is the reason why an obscure theory would go to being a popular one, but it still cannot account for everything.

I suppose I could say a similar thing regarding the economic cluster: the idea of the capitalist marketplace is a large, nonlinear, oppressive, and often nonsensical system which people are forced to live under. (Ergo, it must be a good system, because there is no possible alternative.) Perhaps Ayn Rand's book gives people a sense of being able to understand and control it, if only fleetingly. Same could be said for the paranoid cluster, even if they are simply doing it to themselves.

But where this idea of "promoting a sense of control over an uncontrollable situation" falls apart is in application to the racist cluster. Given institutional racism, they are already in control over their respective situation, and yet the need for a rapture story persists anyway.

Prester Jane posted:

A Concept itself can be almost anything, basically any idea the brain can imagine that can also be manipulated in some way with Points of Interaction. (So if you can think about it, and think about ways to change it, then its a Concept.)This could by anything from designing a Tennis Court in your head to your controversial opinions on the best portrayal of Batman to a really good recipe for whiskey. Concept here represents an amalgamation of inter-related data that can be collectively manipulated in some way by your brain. Every brain forms Concepts with Points of Interaction, what separates an Artisan from a non Artisan is the average number of Points of Interaction that exist in an average Concept. If for the sake of discussion a non Artisan typically had three Points of Interaction in a typical Concept, then an Artisan would have eight Points of Interaction per Concept. The primary difference here is that the Artisan tends to be able to manipulate Concepts in a much more sophisticated manner than a non-Artisan.

Let me emphasize here that I am talking about the difference between the average Concept, not every single Concept. Let us compare for example two hypothetical electrical engineers, John and Bill. These two fine gentlemen are perfectly identical in every way except one, John is an Artisan, and Bill is not. Let us say in our hypothetical that both men are very capable electrical engineers, and both possess a great deal of Concepts that represent their knowledge and their ability to conceptually manipulate their knowledge of all things electrical engineering. Let us say for our hypothetical construct here that because of their sophisticated understanding of electrical engineering, all their Concepts related to electrical engineering have fifteen Points of Interaction. Both men then possess a sophisticated understanding of the subject and are equally capable of interacting with that knowledge in a variety of complex ways.


The difference between John and Bill really starts when they go home. Despite possessing an average of fifteen Points of Interaction per concept related to electrical engineering, Bill possess only about 3 Points of Interaction per Concept for all non electrical engineering related Concepts. John on the other hand, being an Artisan, possess about eight Points of Interaction per Concept. It is this difference that separates the Artisan from the non-Artisan. Allow me to first explain how this difference came about to be within the context of today (although it isn;t hard to construct other ways this can come about to be) and then let me elaborate on how this difference will manifest in behavior. Then in part 2 I will conclude by using John and Bill to illustrate how the Narrativist and Artisan patterns interact before applying that idea to our present political situation.

First off lets talk about why John has so many more Points of Interaction on average than Bill does. The answer is that John was exposed to the Artisan pattern during his youth much more than Bill was. Rather than talking about what Bill did not have though let us talk though about what specifically John had. In the context of American society, John was exposed extensively to a wide variety of expressive media in his youth and also had the opportunity to experiment with self expression via expressive media. John was exposed to a level of stimulation that has never existed in human history before, with constant music, art, performance spectacles, and storytelling being a regular part of his daily experience. Of particular note is that John was exposed to advertising that targeted him specifically while he was young. This advertising involved a wide variety of virtually identical products that tried to distinguish themselves by creating novel Points of Interaction within the overall Concept the product represented.

Prester Jane posted:

Part of my illness is an extremely enhanced pattern recognition. This pattern recognition stems from a part of my conscious experience that process data in a fundamentally different way, I call this part of my consciousness [Pattern], and it processes and arranges data in a way that is very different from how a healthy mind processes and arranges data. [Pattern] percieves connections and repetitions in things, and it also smashes these perceptions down into more manageable abbreviations. By and large, all that [Pattern] does is process data in an extremely abbreviated fashion, sniffing specifically for commonalities between disparate data sets and then creating abbreviated methods to reference them. In most Schizophrenics this manifests as the Schizophrenic thinking and trying to communicate using these abbreviated references that [Pattern] has created in their mind. Generally they are unaware of doing so and simply assume eveyrone else thinks in the same terms as well, so when they write something and use one of these abbreviated terms they subconciously turn it into a Proper Noun to distinguish the abbreviated [Pattern] produced concept they are referencing from the literal meaning of the words. As the schizophrenic is completely unaware of this, they feel they are communicating very specific ideas quite clearly, and they can read their own writing back to themselves and understand its intended meaning just fine. I am certainly not immune to this.

Loel posted:

RandomPauI posted:

http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_slatest/2017/05/29/texas_representative_sparks_capitol_near_brawl_after_bragging_he_called.html

Dr. Arbitrary posted:

No apostrophe in Nazis.
"Decoding the Little Lie: How the GOP establishment turned their base into Nazis"

TheQuietWilds posted:

I'm not really sure that this is true. One of the major differences between a brain and a computer is that in a computer it is possible to modify software without modifying hardware, where in a brain, this is not necessarily true. We don't really know for sure the underlying basis of things like memory, but we do know that the reorganization of neural circuits is the basis for learning new tasks. That is, while you can run a computer program on any computer, and any computer of proper function can run a program, the "programs" that our brain run are the result of the physical organization of the hardware, and can't be modified without changing the organization of neural connections. You can't separate the hardware from the software in a brain.

Prester Jane posted:

I wanted to elaborate on this as a large part of what I am trying to communicate here is the idea that each of us is running our own homegrown version of HumanOS- and that differences in HumanOS result in a different experience of reality for each of us. It would likely be impossible to transfer a "given bit of idea-software" (as Liquid Communism so aptly described it) from one brain to another as each of us has our own personal library of data that our personal idea-software was designed to access and utilize; however as a result of the base similarities in the hardware we are all using (the human brain) the there are common underlying principles in the architecture of how these idea-programs are constructed. These commonalities are the underlying mechanism that allows Self Replicating Behavior Patterns to transfer between individuals (self replicate). In this context a SRBP can be thought of as a "style" of writing/creating idea-software, and this style of programming is acquired through a combination of inherent biology (nature) and social environment (nurture).

Pavlov posted:

I'd be careful about this line of inquiry guys. Philosophy of language can be a minefield. There's still a lot of debate on the best ways to conceptualize language. Like whether to think of language as a thing that encapsulates meaning as a property, or if meaning is an act performed by language.

Exactly how the human brain uses language is tricky to determine. Some sort of artificial neural network is the closest form of machine learning algorithm to how a human brain functions, and neural networks have the frustrating property of being very obtuse. You can't easily look into one and figure out the logic of how it performs a task; the actual steps it takes are largely arbitrary, they just tend to lead towards a correct result if they've been trained well. In addition, any non-trivial problem given to a non-trivial network is going to have a large number of network configurations with very different internal structures that still answer the problem about equally well. That makes it not so far fetched that language isn't really transmitting ideas at all, it's just providing stimuli to the creation of new ideas, or the modification of old ones.

What I'm saying is language is hard and you probably shouldn't get too invested in the details until we have better technology for mapping the human brain.

Prester Jane posted:

In this particular context I would argue that language is more of a tool for sharing the data libraries that idea-software is constructed on, and learning is in large part the process of our brain developing its own suite of software in order to perform specific tasks. In this context learning would be less transferring idea-software between each brain so much as transferring data-libraries and then creating personal code to interact with those data libraries in ways that generate consistent and specific feedback. To return to the earlier example of 10 year old soccer players their coach is not transferring an idea-program about how to play soccer, he is transferring a library of general knowledge about soccer as well as a library of best-practices for creating idea-software that is very useful for playing soccer.

Our coach can for example lecture his students on the proper way to kick a field goal all day long, but until his students actually start physically kicking the ball (causing their brain to start developing the in-house software and brain structures that support efficient field goal kicking) then very little has actually been accomplished.

Pavlov posted:

I'm not challenging your academic background here, mine's mostly in computational linguistics, so if you have one in neurology or psychology you've likely got me beat. My worry is that Prester is trying to bridge neurology to sociology, which is still too wide of a gap for the understanding of either of those we have. Wrap that in some potentially out of place computer terminology and the result is likely going to be more confusing than helpful.

Dr. Arbitrary posted:

No, you're misunderstanding my complaint. There are two halves to what goes on inside our heads. There's the mind and the brain.

Surely, once we've developed our science enough, they'll be unified as a single discipline.

But right now, a Psychologist and a Neurobiologist are going to have very different models.

Trying to bridge those two without extensive knowledge in either is not a useful endeavor.

I think we've got very useful stuff coming from the psychological/sociological half of things. There's no reason to get into the biology half without a good reason.

paternity suitor posted:

The current partisan split by age is a pretty new development. Historically there's been very little difference in voting habits vs. age.

Today, the country is largely evenly split, but the passing of time will change that. That's never really been true before. I don't personally believe in the inevitable march of progress, but that said, the demographic split is real, and the reality of lifespans is going to change the country. In that sense, based on the demographics right now, barring some younger generation of fascists, there is a little bit of inevitable progress coming.

Every year that Trump is president, more and more young people are exposed to an even deeper and more toxic Republican brand, and they don't like it. And the thing is, in the past, you might have been able to count on people changing party affiliations or voting for different parties over their life, but for better or worse, that's less and less the case these days, partisanship is the new norm, so you can more rightly assume that a 23 year old Democrat is voting straight D, and doing so for life.

Prester Jane posted:

I gotta be honest, I'm worried about the direction of all this. I've been worried for awhile. It seems Russia has infiltrated us pretty deeply for some time and it is probably not a coincidence that everywhere Russian money turns up you find a bed of Narrativists. God I even realize how much of a paranoid schizophrenic I sound like as a type this, but there is a non-trivial chance that Russia has been (intentionally) implanting Narrativism into our society for quite some time. Certainly all the major [players in Alt-Media (like Alex Jones) all bleat in unison with the Russian botnet these days. It seems like Russia saw an opportunity and took advantage of situations the GOP had unknowingly created in our culture with its embrace of the southern Strategy. The extent to which these wounds are self inflicted versus otherwise is probably unknowable, but I suspect that Russia has simply figured out how to pour kerosene on various fires in the US culture wars. And what concerns me most is that they seem to have created several high-pressure spigots that dwarf anything I might have guessed at even in my literal paranoid fantasies.

Hieronymous Alloy posted:

Voting fuckery can't be uniform or wholly dominant or else Obama would have lost in 2016 and there never would have been enough votes to initially pass the PPACA.

I think vote fuckery is a lot more common than most americans are willing to admit but it can't be all-pervasive or things would be dramatically worse even than they are.

fishmech posted:

This doesn't accord with your earlier posts where there was just "leftists", "centrists", and "nazis". Especially because being "proudly non-comittal to extremes" is a very small clutch of people as it stands.

fishmech posted:

Nice paranoid persecution theory but it's not true. But of course you're moaning about how your favorite neoliberal consensus man is being hurt by being criticized from the left.

You've gone so up your own asses about the motives of people who don't agree with your particular brand of (center) leftism as to construct a bogus political spectrum where you're the leftmost thing possible. That's why you sit around complaining about the evil "centrists" who are often as not left of you.

Beautiful little strawman but seriously, don't do it again.

fishmech posted:

You were attempting to defend the theories of the dude who said there's only "leftist", "centrist" and "nazis", I'll remind you. And you attempted to do this by complaining that the centrists made fun of Bernie.

Do you even read what you write or do you just rush to complain about the massive centrist conspiracy?

Dumb Lowtax posted:

Do you think he is like, just missing the part of his brain that reads and processes posts, but still has the part intact that makes him confident that he's understood something

fishmech posted:

Yes yes I get it, college philosophy 101 blew your mind, maan. It's still a bogus statement.

umalt posted:

It looks like the tweet is deleted, what did it say?