Oceans Yet to Burn

bambamramfan:

balioc:

wirehead-wannabe:

discoursedrome:

argumate:

fluffshy:

It seems that people assume that if only we got rid of conventional beauty standards that everyone’s internal beauty standards would default to some standard that placed themselves at the top. I haven’t seen anyone ever argue for that position explicitly though. I could just be misunderstanding the logic behind other peoples hatred of conventional beauty standards. (I also might be biased because my internal beauty standards don’t seem to be influenced by external culture in a straight forward fashion.)

even if we got rid of conventional beauty standards I suspect that many people would still inexorably end up fixating on a particular aesthetic that isn’t physically possible for them, so transhuman body mods all the way baby

sometimes I fantasize about how nice it’d be to just automatically look really great all the time, like perfect skin, effortlessly excellent posture, everything in place all the time, don’t have to mess with your clothes, and so on, because I covet that look but just do not have the discipline to put the effort into that. BUT

inevitably this leads me to reflecting on how, if everyone was like that, we wouldn’t have a world where everyone is effortlessly beautiful, we’d have a world where people put the same amount of time and expense into their appearance that they do now, and expectations are just as uneven, only the bar is higher, so it’s like you’re totally sloppy if you leave the house without painting a unique abstract art composition over your entire body and crossbraiding your hair with live flowers

like most superpower fantasies, it only works if everyone else is denied it.

I think the actual position that people unconsciously hold is that we’ll stop having beauty standards, in the same way that naive anarchists think that we’ll stop having power dynamics if we get rid of the current government.

So…I think that there are (at least) two mostly-separate psychological phenomena that manifest as The Dream of Being Beautiful.

There’s the desire to be recognized as a Beautiful Person, someone who is noteworthily more-attractive-than-the-masses by conventional standards.  This is a semi-specialized social role that comes with its own perks, in the form of certain kinds of status and attention and identity-validation etc.  (It also comes with its own burdens, of course.)  Some people covet those perks, and so find it painful that they don’t have the looks necessary to get them.  Such people, when they’re wise and thoughtful and self-aware, don’t usually rail against beauty standards in the abstract, because – as @discoursedrome implies – the thing they want actually requires that some kind of beauty standards exist.  They want to win the status competition, which means there has to be a status competition.

(I should be clear, here, and say that many people in this category do rail against beauty standards.  That is because they are being hypocritical, or otherwise failing to achieve integrity and self-awareness.  They are sleight-of-handing their way to the fantasy of a world in which they are the beautiful ones, not those hateful Chads / popular bitches, but otherwise nothing much has changed.)

Then there’s the desire to be Beautiful Enough For Practical Purposes, which is in fact pretty different.  There are lots of people who don’t particularly wish to be remarkably attractive, to be the best-looking person in the room, and who would actually find it kind of weird and unpleasant if that got folded into their identities. Many of them nonetheless want to be free of physical flaws that they or others might find actively off-putting – want to be sufficiently attractive that they can feature in fond romantic/sexual imaginings without dissonance – want their preferred partners, who probably aren’t super invested in the have-the-hottest-mate status game but who do probably have normal levels of preference for an attractive-looking mate, to be totally satisfied – etc.

This is the desire to live in an anime world, fundamentally.  In an anime, some people are marked as being noteworthily more attractive than others, just like in real life, and everyone treats them as such…but even a universally-acknowledged “plain” character is in truth physically flawless, and his level of physical beauty isn’t ever going to cause a problem for him in a relationship that’s largely based on other things. 

Assuming that “make reality look like an anime” sadly isn’t an option, “widely-available body mods” is a pretty good solution for such people.  You can’t guarantee that you’ll win the status contest no matter what you do, but you can probably guarantee that you’ll be perfectly acceptable by your own lights and the lights of your ingroup.  “Eliminate beauty standards by enlightening humanity” is a terrible solution, in that I think it would be easier to eat the moon than to make it happen, but it does at least attempt to address this kind of suffering face-on. 

All very true, though there is also the third type, which is the purely relativist desire to be “more beautiful than I am now,” or “beautiful enough” where “enough” is a bar that is always out of reach.

It’s typical status-anxiety that most people face some sort of, but is probably most starkly illustrated in the memoirs of people with anorexia.

collapsedsquid:

mitigatedchaos:

@collapsedsquid

As far as I can tell, even though uneven exchange of trade between nations means that someone, somewhere must be taking on debt or selling off assets, only Nationalists actually care about the trade deficit.

The Left in general would prefer to see the end of nations, and want “reparations” to go to “brown people” from the developed countries for the sins of colonialism.  (Never mind the colonialism of their own movements.)  

The Liberals also want an end to nations, and everyone singing along happily together, but under Capitalism.  Also they really are individualists, so they don’t think countries have a ‘right’ to hang onto their wealth.

The Capitalists like it because, aside from making the money themselves, weakening nations and loading them up with debt messes with the state’s abilities to regulate their behavior and make them do things like quit using child labor.  Further, weakening nations weakens the states themselves, but most people cannot see this.

“Global trade, but we don’t keep a net trade deficit or surplus across the total of our trade with all nations” would likely be beneficial to American workers, but who cares about that?

Are you so sure nationalist elements are opposed to this?  It’s the other side of the account you want to pay attention to, the capital account. It’s about America’s role as the global hegemon.  Having the US dollar as the global reserve currency means that the US can use to enforce it’s will.  Nations stockpile US dollars to fend off the IMF.  It’s about increasing the desire of others to hold US assets. The trade deficit is the result of decisions the US has made to increase it’s national power since the Second World War.

It depends a lot on what US assets they’re holding.  In general, to maintain sovereignty, you don’t want foreigners owning all of your real estate and other assets unless you’re planning to purge their ownership without compensation later.  If they own your physical dollars, that may not be as big of a deal, since you can unilaterally change your currency if necessary, leaving them with piles of worthless paper. (That and, of course, significantly strengthening China is not a good long-term plan for American hegemony.)

Although, this does make me curious based on the level of implied competence in the ruling elites’ actions based on your evaluation, what do you think the purpose of the Iraq War was?  The purpose of the Euro?

Though, to refine the previous statement, it isn’t that all Nationalists want to balance the trade deficit, but rather I think most people who want to balance the trade deficit are going to lean Nationalist (prioritizing the nation’s workers over capital or foreign workers).

official-mugi:

Tumblr funnymen: omg gamer dudes are the absolute worst and garbage pedophile and they sexuallize characters

Meanwhile in the shipping side of tumblr:

“Let’s turn all friendship and emotional intimacy between men into a sign of androsexuality (even though anecdotal reports indicate that straight women are not interested in bisexual men).”

Like, I get that the fujoshis love to ship men, that’s okay, but a healthy media marketplace will contain examples of men deeply relating to each other that are entirely straight, even though it will also include gay men.

ranma-official:

discoursedrome:

afloweroutofstone:

A white dude saying “you can’t call me white because whiteness is an ideology” is the perfect example of taking academic language and concepts out of their actual contextual meaning to defend something really shitty

unpopular opinion: people who accuse others of being white are the real whites

I’m a level 5 white, I can’t breathe near anyone who has a culture

the-grey-tribe:

academicianzex:

Tfw everyone is reblogging your post and you can’t tell if it’s for your trenchant insight or @argumate ’s insipid jokes

It’s like a symbiosis!

This is all assuming the goal isn’t to get Argumate to reblog the post, so that his audience of joke-readers will spread it far and wide.

marmod:

having a 3yo brother means i get exposed to kids’ shows way more often than i thought i would at this point in my life, but man, binge watching thomas the tank engine as an adult is a wild fucking experience

all these trains (and there’s like 20 counting locomotives alone, don’t even get me started on the anthropomorphic train cabins) are MAD competitive the whole time and will constantly fuck up their own whole day by tring to prove they’re the biggest baddest train. and like, i understand that you gotta get you plot from somewhere and i imagine plotlines like this happen in cars etc. as well, but the other day i was watching and i noticed that all these goddamn locomotives have DRIVERS in them. that apparently have no control over their train’s actions at all whatsoever. so these trains wake up, pick up their drivers, go to work, get taunted by another train who’s like “ha ha i see u there with your 4 cabins but did you know i can pull SIX cabins and still fucking book it at 80mph” and the 4 cabin train will be like “fuck it i gotta prove myself now, hook me up with 4 more cabins” and will inevitably derail themselves or some shit while the engine driver just shuts up and kicks back the whole time

i explained this to my brother and was like, is that fucked up or what, but he just pointed at the green train and went “that’s percy” so i guess that’s his take on the situation

earnest-peer:

polyaletheia:

aellagirl:

I want to complain about people who send messages containing only ‘hi’ or something similar. This happens mostly on dating sites, but it happens on Tumblr too. 

Like, what do you think will happen? Do you think I will also say ‘hi’ back and then you will be like ‘how are you’ and I will be like ‘pretty good how about you’ and you will be like ‘i like your stuff’ and I will be like ‘your blog is pretty cool too’ and then you will be like ‘yeah lol’ and i will be like ‘do you wanna have sex’?

It’s annoying, but it’s better than those people who don’t send messages at all, and just expect to receive them.

Disagree unless they can actually make that expectation relevant to you.

There was a hilarious dating site a while ago (whose name I forgot and which might well still exist) where the concept was that only women could initiate conversation. The consequence was that women would send hot men empty messages so they could initiate.

Apparently reality is more exaggerated than even my own beliefs.

sinesalvatorem:

The Fourth of July is an annual American celebration of freedom from repressive laws and government. In time-honoured tradition, the American people observe this date by setting off as many illegal explosions as they can before the police show up.

rtrixie:

azureleon:

terran-tophat:

thivus:

free markets werent such a bad idea at first but i think theyve run their course

the idea that a corporation make the end user pay for a product but then place in their terms of agreement that said corporation is the real owner is actually evil

the end user should be the absolute sovereign owner

also closed source is bad and gross open source is good

What are you rambling on about now, you flaming homosexual?

A rant about physical products are now licensed rather than outright bought.

Something akin to the original intention of Xbox one during unveiling

stocking Stallman is right

There’s a reason commercial software is so successful when FOSS is just sitting right there in competition.

You want what you need, not the minimum of what some bored sysadmin in Oklahoma can code in his spare time.  Having to actually sell the stuff provides funds to hire developers and keeps the project from going too off-the-rails.

That doesn’t mean there aren’t alternative ways to arrange software development, just that “boo, closed source!” isn’t very clueful on the intersection of economics and software development.

slartibartfastibast:

mitigatedchaos:

@slartibartfastibast

I don’t think we’ll see Neural Nets creating entire television shows any time soon, in addition to other classes of drawings/images, for two reasons.

1) During the act of creation, human beings are able to constantly evaluate what looks good according to their own tastes, thus acting in a both backwards and forwards search through the content space.  A regular neural network which is orders of magnitude less complex cannot accomplish this or logically reason about it.

2) Filling in certain elements requires higher abstract reasoning, which is more complex and also requires a lot more power.  (e.g., logically deducing facts about things which are not immediately visible in the scene)

What I think we’ll see instead are patches, filters, and tools.  Not “make me a South Park episode”, but “make me a texture of gravel”.  An existing one sharpens up pictures of animu girlz, and likely a NN could be trained to, for example, increase the resolution on old 90′s anime.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generative_adversarial_networks

(I do agree that low-level feature generation will be used first)

Oh, it may well get there eventually, but with the slowdown on Moore’s Law, it depends on one’s evaluation of just how powerful and just how inefficient human brains are - and if they’re doing stuff with microtubules and non-trivial quantum stuff, that suggests something more rather than less powerful than previous estimates.  

It’s likely that, aside from the requirements for replication (itself non-trivial), the human brain’s computational density isn’t that horrifically poorly tuned, probably reflecting tradeoffs in energy consumption, heat dissipation, latency, durability, and so on.

Currently, I’m forecasting specialized modules on dedicated hardware, but I don’t think we’re going to hit the levels of computational cost/density that Kurzweil and the other Singulatarians predicted, as the cost in engineer manhours per chip is going up, last I checked.

(I think I’ve already mentioned some implications for ethics.)

It does cause the information risks you’re worried about long before being able to create an entire South Park episode, however.

the-grey-tribe:

epistemic-horror:

ozymandias271:

I mean if I were in charge of urban planning there would be a trolley track, a median strip, a sidewalk, a cycling track, and NO CARS ALLOWED

the sidewalks are broad enough that there can be a food truck on every corner

and sufficiently dense mixed-use zoning that this is practical for everyone

probably there is a reason no one has left me in charge of urban planning tho

okay but to move goods in and waste out you need either cars or beasts of burden and cars are clearly the far better option, go 2 bob gordon church lol

Pneumatic tubes and drones tho

two trolley tracks, with additional sidings and supply trolleys

about two minutes later you realize it would be more efficient just to use buses and trucks than two have “roads, but only for trolleys”

isaacsapphire:

random-thought-depository:

inquisitivefeminist:

Actually, have other people noticed that taking ideologies to weird extremes is a Thing among thirteen to fifteen-year-olds?  Because that’s definitely something I’ve noticed.  Like, I once new a thirteen-year-old girl who claimed to be uncomfortable watching two women dance together because it “promotes lesbianism,” which is…not something most Catholics believe, I’m pretty sure?  (They weren’t even, like, slow-dancing, it was some kind of Scandinavian Traditional Cultural Dance that only women did).

Has anyone else observed this among The Youths?

I think age tends to make ideas more nuanced, because you get more experience and the real world is complicated.

13-15 is when people develop something like an adult political consciousness, and you know what they say about new converts being the most fervent believers.

Heck, I totally did that in my youth. I boycotted LL Bean for promoting lesbianism and objected to CCM for having a beat when I was 13 or so *embarrassed emoji*

I got better, in some cases pretty quickly, but that was my nadir.

Haha, I never had ideological extreme phase, and was contrarian against arbitrary non-conformist teenage rebellion aesthetic as a teenager.

I’m probably at my most ideologically extreme right now, even though it’s orthogonal to the existing factions.

ranma-official:

wirehead-wannabe:

ranma-official:

theunitofcaring:

The solution to this, of course, is to just give low-wage workers money instead of making laws that try to force their employers to do it. No one should have to live on the money they can bring home from $9/hour? Agreed! Give them money. 

What will happen as a result is, of course, that companies will routinely underpay their employees, effectively outcompeting companies that pay fair wages purely on the taxpayer’s dime, which is by the way what already happens when people who work are paid low enough to be eligible for welfare.

This is a fact.

Factual solutions only. No pandering.

Do you actually disagree with any factual statement Kelsey is making here? All I see are value disagreements about “underpaying” and “fair wages.”

A factual statement is what I said.

When companies underpay the employees and you pay those employees instead, you reward companies for underpaying employees.

The correct course of action is to force companies to pay fair wages to employees. The incorrect course of action is to provide companies with more market incentives for not doing so.

That is a factual statement also.

A value judgement would be if you’d disagree with me that people like me are not literal subhumans (which is by the way the universal opinion of people who endorse underpaying as much as possible).

It depends - do we have individuals paying the low wage workers and not a subsidy to all low wage workers by the State? Then the problems with the libertarian plan will ruin it, that’s how the economics works. Do we have state action instead? Then the leverage of all low wage workers will be increased by other economic effects.

argumate:

transhumanisticpanspermia:

“hey you know, bikes work well in european cities”

yeah i do, did you know that boats work really well in venice? really makes you think about US public transit doesn’t it

flood the cities!

This is the subject of my next one thousand villages post, where I discuss optimal public transport choices for if all citizens weigh over 1,000 lbs.