YouKnowWhoTheFuckIAM
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
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.
He’ll be judging standard of living by raw GDP/PPP per capita, where the US does indeed notoriously outperform everybody by an absurd margin. This does the rounds even on the “serious” econ net every few months, and it’s always the same paper thin sophistic ideas going back and forth arguing whether it’s telling you something meaningful about euro vs us living. In any case a good portion of self-assessed intellectual types have been drowning in that debate for about two decades (or more) so it’s always easy to spot lurking in the background: it’s a shibboleth for people who’ve self-educated on development by reading blogs.
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.
Scholars of fascism and nazism do it all the time! The target of quotes like that is supposed to be those who deliberately muddy the waters. The “call a nazi a nazi” principle is a blunt instrument, and there are other tools in the anti-nazi kit.
[some hours later…] ah, the quote is from AR Moxon, whom I happen to know is both (a) not remotely averse to going deeper on what makes the nazis, (b) distinctly averse to not going deeper