lmao imagine thinking complaining about one of the only mainstream depictions of a man becoming less sexist is “liberal”.
no, this is very fair to complain about, not for Nickelodeon fan brain reasons but because it’s an example of the continued whitewashing and commodification of TV and video media as a whole. Another step towards the deep, nihilistic void of consumer slop.
The inevitable result of this is what UlyssesT didn’t want, the reason we attack and deride treats in the first place. We shit on the consumer treats because they’re written and created as meaningless and trite commodities, not because we don’t care about art or media
Yeah I never really understood the love or the idea that he “dunked” on media illiterate people. Dude would misinterpret what others wrote and then insist they were doing something insidious and then remember that disagreement for all time, carry it around like some weird grudge. He’d say he was hounded by users crying “let people enjoy things” whenever he dared to criticize their treat, but most of what I saw was people asking him to chill out for suggesting they were [insert bad thing enjoying said media could imply] for enjoying something problematic.
He posted a lot too. Whenever anyone expressed worry for him, he would claim they were doing something horrible too. He really needed to touch grass, glad he is.
Thank you, I always thought I was crazy reading his posts and just seeing him totally misinterpret or seek malicious intention in whoever he was debating. He’d always insist AI couldn’t be real because that devalues human minds, or, something? It wasn’t about the real limitations of this tech ATM but instead that it was just impossible forever period. Liked seeing his posts but that was so weird
i was there in the AI thread and this is a quite disingenuous interpretation of the points he was making. the point was always that LLMs that are currently marketed as AI were not and would never be AI because they just fundamentally do not work the same way as cognition - its a mathematical model loosely based on neurons, yes, but the model is incredibly simplified - the only data the neurons can contain in most LLMs are statistical correlations of words to other words. the technology is just fundamentally not the same as intelligence, artificial or not. to recreate AI, we would need to understand bilogical intelligence and how it is generated and more to the point, what it even really is. we don’t have that, and there are many neuroscientists that are very critical of ‘AI’ used as a marketing term for this reason. its not unreasonable to believe that humanity or some other species might someday create an artificial technology that can create human-like intelligence and even human-like experience, but we are so far from even understanding the fundamental logics and sciences behind something like that its like talking about building a Dyson sphere or a Warp Drive. the fundamental question is whether our current models of Physics can accurately and fully explain consciousness, which is a bit harder of a question than just ‘limitations of tech ATM’
I think I disagree that neuroscience is the path to AI, that any functional AI must be based on findings about how human cognition works, and that we have to understand or develop the physics behind consciousness to create AI (if that’s even relevant). Neuroscience hasn’t had a breakthrough in decades. Machine learning has been exploding and making unbelievable progress over the past few decades. Like, Deep Blue was nearly thirty years ago. Now the computer chip in my bidet can obliterate any human chess player.
no one questions LLM advances, just the use of the term AI and the frankly untrue implications that term has that are used by marketers to justify misleading claims. plus chess is ‘solved’ mathematically, of course an automatic counting machine can do it.
edit: specifically, the implication is that LLM’s are ‘sentient’ or have human-like experiential mental existence, when all they can do even in a hypothetical idealized scenario is replicate the information-processing aspects of human cognition, creating something like a ‘philosophical zombie’ (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_zombie) that reacts like a human based on statistical models with no internal experience of their existence or awareness of their cognition or sense impressions. since we don’t fully understand the nature or origin of human sentience and experience in biological humans or other animals, it is unlikely we will ‘accidentally’ invent something that produces human-like sentience and experience in contemporary computers. we cannot model human consciousness with physics (at least, not yet), so how can we possibly create technology that creates consciousness? its like trying to create a nuclear power plant when you don’t know how electricity works, you might make the world’s most efficient water-wheel powered mill complex but it won’t ever split an atom because you don’t know what an ‘atom’ even is in a basic or fundamental sense.
Right, yeah so our differing perspectives are that I don’t think the problem exists, philosophical zombies are impossible, and people themselves are less conscious than they think they are on a moment-to-moment basis. You’ll see this last comment brought up a lot in meditation, we will have occasional moments of awareness and project backward that we were also this way for the last however long period of time. You can even catch yourself doing it.
Evolution created consciousness without understanding what it was, and this is also true of many, many scientific discoveries - the popular conception that theory precedes experimental discovery is not how science has ever historically worked (ref Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Kuhn). Also, chess is not yet solved. It is still a search and evaluation problem. But this is also a bit frustrating; whenever scientists replicate some hitherto-human-only ability it becomes “well of course a computer can do that, it’s just <whatever>”, where <whatever> is the mechanistic process that was the fundamental discovery. One actually wonders whether any mechanistic description of consciousness or human abilities could ever satisfy the p-zombie crowd, or they’ve trapped themselves on a slowly-eroding island of unfalsifiability.
the p-zombie is a thought experiment, not something that should ‘actually exist’. the fact that a p-zombie is impossible intuitively is the point, it demonstrates that our experiential mental life is an important part of our thought, that something we cannot reduce to information processing has a real impact on our lives and thought processes. the reason a ‘mechanistic’ description of consciousness won’t ever satisfy the ‘p-zombie crowd’ (serious academic philosophers, just as credible as the ones you might agree with) is that the entire point of the philosophical zombie is that there is something about consciousness that is non-physical, or that is not yet captured by what we currently call physics or information-processing. any task you can set a computer to perform is definitionally a information-processing task, and the point of the philosophical zombie thought experiment is to demonstrate the difference between information-processing (which we more or less understand) and first person, internal experience of that information processing. there are no proposed physical descriptions of that experiential quality of human mental existence, and no even hypothetical ways to reduce it to physical processes. if you don’t think the ‘hard problem’ exists, then show your work - prove it, in a way that doesn’t just assume that our experience of our minds ‘doesn’t exist’ (then what are we experiencing?) or is ‘illusory’ (an illusion for the benefit of what? what is being decieved with this illusion?)
evolution did not intentionally ‘create’ anything, you are anthropomorphizing a random, chaotic, unconscious (as far as we know) process. human scientific methods may not start with a complete theory of anything, but no one went from not knowing what electricity was to immediately having a nuclear power plant - the material conditions of the possible experiments and the superstructure associated (the theories such experiments might imply or discover) both drive scientific process. saying ‘well evolution did it so we can too, and faster’ is just foolish beyond belief.
no one doubts that computers can replicate more or less all the information processing aspects of human cognition, but no scientist can tell you why we have a first person experience of our information processing, not yet anyway. we can correlate any number of experiences to brain states, but we have yet to comprehensively explain how those brain states and structures produce subjectivity. Its unfalsifiable because it is literally not a ‘scientific’ or ‘physical’ question, science and physics were simply not created or designed to inquire into the source of their own creation - a logical system can never accurately and fully analyze itself - this has been rigourously and mathematically proven as by godel’s incompleteness theorems. you can complain this is ‘unfalsifiable’ but so is literal matter - the way we define ‘matter’ as ‘whatever corresponds to the current prevailing system of physics at the moment’ (this definition is implied by standard concepts of science and physics) leaves ‘materialism’ (in the ontological sense, not the marxist sense) only trivially true. Any property, even consciousness or mind or god or the flying spaghetti monster, can be considered material, if one defines matter as having that property. there is no experiment that can prove that all the phenomena and properties we experience and catalogue empirically are ‘really matter’ or ‘really mind’, we can prove the empirical observations but whether ‘reality’ is ‘made of’ ‘matter’ or ‘mind’ is unfalsifiable no matter which position you take.
the following is from the wikipedia entry on ‘materialism’
Defining “matter”
The nature and definition of matter—like other key concepts in science and philosophy—have occasioned much debate:[33]
Is there a single kind of matter (hyle) that everything is made of, or are there multiple kinds?
Is matter a continuous substance capable of expressing multiple forms (hylomorphism)[34] or a number of discrete, unchanging constituents (atomism)?[35]
Does matter have intrinsic properties (substance theory)[36] or lack them (prima materia)?
One challenge to the conventional concept of matter as tangible “stuff” came with the rise of field physics in the 19th century. Relativity shows that matter and energy (including the spatially distributed energy of fields) are interchangeable. This enables the ontological view that energy is prima materia and matter is one of its forms. In contrast, the Standard Model of particle physics uses quantum field theory to describe all interactions. On this view it could be said that fields are prima materia and the energy is a property of the field[37].[citation needed]
According to the dominant cosmological model, the Lambda-CDM model, less than 5% of the universe’s energy density is made up of the “matter” the Standard Model describes, and most of the universe is composed of dark matter and dark energy, with little agreement among scientists about what these are made of.[38]
With the advent of quantum physics, some scientists believed the concept of matter had merely changed, while others believed the conventional position could no longer be maintained. Werner Heisenberg said: “The ontology of materialism rested upon the illusion that the kind of existence, the direct ‘actuality’ of the world around us, can be extrapolated into the atomic range. This extrapolation, however, is impossible…atoms are not things.”[39]
The concept of matter has changed in response to new scientific discoveries. Thus materialism has no definite content independent of the particular theory of matter on which it is based. According to Noam Chomsky, any property can be considered material, if one defines matter such that it has that property.[40]
The philosophical materialist Gustavo Bueno uses a more precise term than matter, the stroma.[41]
The tankie did nothing wrong until she went aggro on the environment and, for some reason, really hated that the world’s capital was in her territory.
Also after the monarch dies everybody immediately starts burning shit. The anarchists who did do it never bothered to try and make parallel power or really implied they had any theory behind them.
for some reason, really hated that the world’s capital was in her territory.
Wasn’t it literally a former fire nation colony that was made independent rather than rightfully returning to the earth kingdom? It’s like the Hong Kong of Avatar if the libs had their way.
Given that it was Hong Kong , but like a super effectual HK, I guess I imagined it like if everybody had to come to the earth kingdom for the Olympics. You get to control how food and every other logistic gets to them. There’s so much upside to having everyone come through the earth kingdom to get to the capital. If cooperation was at all, even a little bit, of your strategy you could cook something.
Yeah the thing that bothered me about Kuvira was that she was very fash coded, had internment camps, was gonna spirit nuke everybody etc., but was treated more sympathetically by the writing than previous designated villains who had way more reasonable and sympathetic causes
I haven’t watched it in a while, granted. Outside of Aangs pacifism, the resolution of which is, I would agree, very lib and one of the weaker parts of the show, I don’t recall anything particularly lib. I think it’s one of those works where the political messaging in vague enough you could read a variety of interpretations into it.
Honestly I think this need to label all media either “leftist” or “lib” or what have you, is a weird and time wasting obsession of people these days. Yes there’s blatant examples of each, Legends of Korra for example is undeniably Lib, but in between those there’s a sea of stuff that’s open enough for there to be alternative readings. Plus while you can do political analysis of all media, that doesn’t mean all media had explicate political messaging.
Since we’re in the writing comm, I’d like to press you with curiosity. What are lib elements of ATLA? I’m having trouble coming up with examples lmao easily as I could LOK. I know usurping the fire lord’s throne with his son is cringe. Aang never questions the monarchy as being central for the earth kingdom. The idea of people being born into bending and your people with this border being the stewards of this art sort of imply a natural separation of people. Though Katara overcoming the cultural sexism on the northern water tribe and Sokka breaking the cycle was cool. Zuko and Iroh go hard in the paint.
If it wasn’t lib that fucker would have been executed for his crimes
I mean, yeah, but I kinda give that a pass cuz it’s a kids show. Idk if 12 year olds really want a whole seasons of Nuremberg trials being held in Ba Sing Se.
I would agree if it werent for the entire episodes devoted to aang trying to find any way not to kill him and even all his past lives are like kill that fucker, and then its resolved with a deus ex machina of him hitting that rock and unlocking the super state and inventing this power. Could ahve worked, but the show painstakingly set up the OPPOSITE
No, I agree that I think the way they resolved Aang’s pacifism was lazy and seems to contradict everything else the show was telling us up to that point. It’s one of the weakest things about the original show, and the most lib. However I get why the network maybe didn’t want a kids show to end with the protagonist straight up killing someone, so I’m curious how much of that ending was the writers vs the network.
The incredibly liberal cartoon is continuing to be incredibly liberal. I don’t care either way.
We need UlyssesT in these trying times to guide us away from treats.
EDIT: between the malding over Barbie and the Oscars and now this, I’m starting to think all of you are libs
lmao imagine thinking complaining about one of the only mainstream depictions of a man becoming less sexist is “liberal”.
no, this is very fair to complain about, not for Nickelodeon fan brain reasons but because it’s an example of the continued whitewashing and commodification of TV and video media as a whole. Another step towards the deep, nihilistic void of consumer slop.
The inevitable result of this is what UlyssesT didn’t want, the reason we attack and deride treats in the first place. We shit on the consumer treats because they’re written and created as meaningless and trite commodities, not because we don’t care about art or media
Arguing about the true meaning of UlyssesT Thought is a bit I never thought I’d live to see.
it wouldn’t be communism if we didn’t
UlyssesT was 70% bad, 30% good
Made fun of LessWrong, so that bumps him up to the 99th percentile of goodness
Counterpoint: ThoughtSlime made fun of LessWrong and they suck, so really not that high of a bar to cross
how does ThoughtSlime suck
Can be a bit of a lib, and I just personally don’t care for their content
Nah, dude was obnoxious as hell. Glad he left.
Yeah I never really understood the love or the idea that he “dunked” on media illiterate people. Dude would misinterpret what others wrote and then insist they were doing something insidious and then remember that disagreement for all time, carry it around like some weird grudge. He’d say he was hounded by users crying “let people enjoy things” whenever he dared to criticize their treat, but most of what I saw was people asking him to chill out for suggesting they were [insert bad thing enjoying said media could imply] for enjoying something problematic.
He posted a lot too. Whenever anyone expressed worry for him, he would claim they were doing something horrible too. He really needed to touch grass, glad he is.
Also for a guy who liked calling people
he sure could be a 
Thank you, I always thought I was crazy reading his posts and just seeing him totally misinterpret or seek malicious intention in whoever he was debating. He’d always insist AI couldn’t be real because that devalues human minds, or, something? It wasn’t about the real limitations of this tech ATM but instead that it was just impossible forever period. Liked seeing his posts but that was so weird
We’ve had some real power posters but it was a bit odd seeing the affection for him
i was there in the AI thread and this is a quite disingenuous interpretation of the points he was making. the point was always that LLMs that are currently marketed as AI were not and would never be AI because they just fundamentally do not work the same way as cognition - its a mathematical model loosely based on neurons, yes, but the model is incredibly simplified - the only data the neurons can contain in most LLMs are statistical correlations of words to other words. the technology is just fundamentally not the same as intelligence, artificial or not. to recreate AI, we would need to understand bilogical intelligence and how it is generated and more to the point, what it even really is. we don’t have that, and there are many neuroscientists that are very critical of ‘AI’ used as a marketing term for this reason. its not unreasonable to believe that humanity or some other species might someday create an artificial technology that can create human-like intelligence and even human-like experience, but we are so far from even understanding the fundamental logics and sciences behind something like that its like talking about building a Dyson sphere or a Warp Drive. the fundamental question is whether our current models of Physics can accurately and fully explain consciousness, which is a bit harder of a question than just ‘limitations of tech ATM’
“the ai thread” dude posted about ai in several threads across the years
I think I disagree that neuroscience is the path to AI, that any functional AI must be based on findings about how human cognition works, and that we have to understand or develop the physics behind consciousness to create AI (if that’s even relevant). Neuroscience hasn’t had a breakthrough in decades. Machine learning has been exploding and making unbelievable progress over the past few decades. Like, Deep Blue was nearly thirty years ago. Now the computer chip in my bidet can obliterate any human chess player.
no one questions LLM advances, just the use of the term AI and the frankly untrue implications that term has that are used by marketers to justify misleading claims. plus chess is ‘solved’ mathematically, of course an automatic counting machine can do it.
edit: specifically, the implication is that LLM’s are ‘sentient’ or have human-like experiential mental existence, when all they can do even in a hypothetical idealized scenario is replicate the information-processing aspects of human cognition, creating something like a ‘philosophical zombie’ (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_zombie) that reacts like a human based on statistical models with no internal experience of their existence or awareness of their cognition or sense impressions. since we don’t fully understand the nature or origin of human sentience and experience in biological humans or other animals, it is unlikely we will ‘accidentally’ invent something that produces human-like sentience and experience in contemporary computers. we cannot model human consciousness with physics (at least, not yet), so how can we possibly create technology that creates consciousness? its like trying to create a nuclear power plant when you don’t know how electricity works, you might make the world’s most efficient water-wheel powered mill complex but it won’t ever split an atom because you don’t know what an ‘atom’ even is in a basic or fundamental sense.
basically, and there is room for more or less reasonable philosophical disagreement on this, i and a lot of others think that the so-called ‘Hard Problem of Consciousness’ (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_problem_of_consciousness) (https://iep.utm.edu/hard-problem-of-conciousness/) does in fact exist and has in fact yet to be ‘solved’.
Right, yeah so our differing perspectives are that I don’t think the problem exists, philosophical zombies are impossible, and people themselves are less conscious than they think they are on a moment-to-moment basis. You’ll see this last comment brought up a lot in meditation, we will have occasional moments of awareness and project backward that we were also this way for the last however long period of time. You can even catch yourself doing it.
Evolution created consciousness without understanding what it was, and this is also true of many, many scientific discoveries - the popular conception that theory precedes experimental discovery is not how science has ever historically worked (ref Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Kuhn). Also, chess is not yet solved. It is still a search and evaluation problem. But this is also a bit frustrating; whenever scientists replicate some hitherto-human-only ability it becomes “well of course a computer can do that, it’s just <whatever>”, where <whatever> is the mechanistic process that was the fundamental discovery. One actually wonders whether any mechanistic description of consciousness or human abilities could ever satisfy the p-zombie crowd, or they’ve trapped themselves on a slowly-eroding island of unfalsifiability.
the p-zombie is a thought experiment, not something that should ‘actually exist’. the fact that a p-zombie is impossible intuitively is the point, it demonstrates that our experiential mental life is an important part of our thought, that something we cannot reduce to information processing has a real impact on our lives and thought processes. the reason a ‘mechanistic’ description of consciousness won’t ever satisfy the ‘p-zombie crowd’ (serious academic philosophers, just as credible as the ones you might agree with) is that the entire point of the philosophical zombie is that there is something about consciousness that is non-physical, or that is not yet captured by what we currently call physics or information-processing. any task you can set a computer to perform is definitionally a information-processing task, and the point of the philosophical zombie thought experiment is to demonstrate the difference between information-processing (which we more or less understand) and first person, internal experience of that information processing. there are no proposed physical descriptions of that experiential quality of human mental existence, and no even hypothetical ways to reduce it to physical processes. if you don’t think the ‘hard problem’ exists, then show your work - prove it, in a way that doesn’t just assume that our experience of our minds ‘doesn’t exist’ (then what are we experiencing?) or is ‘illusory’ (an illusion for the benefit of what? what is being decieved with this illusion?)
evolution did not intentionally ‘create’ anything, you are anthropomorphizing a random, chaotic, unconscious (as far as we know) process. human scientific methods may not start with a complete theory of anything, but no one went from not knowing what electricity was to immediately having a nuclear power plant - the material conditions of the possible experiments and the superstructure associated (the theories such experiments might imply or discover) both drive scientific process. saying ‘well evolution did it so we can too, and faster’ is just foolish beyond belief.
no one doubts that computers can replicate more or less all the information processing aspects of human cognition, but no scientist can tell you why we have a first person experience of our information processing, not yet anyway. we can correlate any number of experiences to brain states, but we have yet to comprehensively explain how those brain states and structures produce subjectivity. Its unfalsifiable because it is literally not a ‘scientific’ or ‘physical’ question, science and physics were simply not created or designed to inquire into the source of their own creation - a logical system can never accurately and fully analyze itself - this has been rigourously and mathematically proven as by godel’s incompleteness theorems. you can complain this is ‘unfalsifiable’ but so is literal matter - the way we define ‘matter’ as ‘whatever corresponds to the current prevailing system of physics at the moment’ (this definition is implied by standard concepts of science and physics) leaves ‘materialism’ (in the ontological sense, not the marxist sense) only trivially true. Any property, even consciousness or mind or god or the flying spaghetti monster, can be considered material, if one defines matter as having that property. there is no experiment that can prove that all the phenomena and properties we experience and catalogue empirically are ‘really matter’ or ‘really mind’, we can prove the empirical observations but whether ‘reality’ is ‘made of’ ‘matter’ or ‘mind’ is unfalsifiable no matter which position you take.
the following is from the wikipedia entry on ‘materialism’
I think that particular AI thread was what broke him yes
https://www.dictionary.com/e/slang/concern-troll/
edit: wasn’t trying to remind you, just describing the abuse tactic you are apparently running defense for and criticising someone for being aware of.
Yeah that was one of the things that he would call people pointing out his behaviour. I forgot the word, thank you.
I want him to come back so he can leave to kill Kissinger again
Agreed, would be cool if he showed back up and was chill tho
I wouldn’t claim ATLA is leftist, but I wouldn’t really call it blatantly Lib either.
I agree. The sequel is mega mega lib though.
The tankie did nothing wrong until she went aggro on the environment and, for some reason, really hated that the world’s capital was in her territory.
Also after the monarch dies everybody immediately starts burning shit. The anarchists who did do it never bothered to try and make parallel power or really implied they had any theory behind them.
Wasn’t it literally a former fire nation colony that was made independent rather than rightfully returning to the earth kingdom? It’s like the Hong Kong of Avatar if the libs had their way.
Given that it was Hong Kong , but like a super effectual HK, I guess I imagined it like if everybody had to come to the earth kingdom for the Olympics. You get to control how food and every other logistic gets to them. There’s so much upside to having everyone come through the earth kingdom to get to the capital. If cooperation was at all, even a little bit, of your strategy you could cook something.
Kuvira had internment camps too
Yeah the thing that bothered me about Kuvira was that she was very fash coded, had internment camps, was gonna spirit nuke everybody etc., but was treated more sympathetically by the writing than previous designated villains who had way more reasonable and sympathetic causes
It’s blatantly lib
I haven’t watched it in a while, granted. Outside of Aangs pacifism, the resolution of which is, I would agree, very lib and one of the weaker parts of the show, I don’t recall anything particularly lib. I think it’s one of those works where the political messaging in vague enough you could read a variety of interpretations into it.
Honestly I think this need to label all media either “leftist” or “lib” or what have you, is a weird and time wasting obsession of people these days. Yes there’s blatant examples of each, Legends of Korra for example is undeniably Lib, but in between those there’s a sea of stuff that’s open enough for there to be alternative readings. Plus while you can do political analysis of all media, that doesn’t mean all media had explicate political messaging.
Overthrowing evil monarch and installing his good bean son on the throne fixes everything
Well… if you read the comics set between ATLA and LoK, it didn’t fix everything
Im talking about the show, comics are extended media and have no bearing on the show as a piece of media
glad to hear that tho
Elements of it are incorporated into Korra pretty seamlessly, so I’d say it’s “canon-lite”
I don’t consider Korra canon
Since we’re in the writing comm, I’d like to press you with curiosity. What are lib elements of ATLA? I’m having trouble coming up with examples lmao easily as I could LOK. I know usurping the fire lord’s throne with his son is cringe. Aang never questions the monarchy as being central for the earth kingdom. The idea of people being born into bending and your people with this border being the stewards of this art sort of imply a natural separation of people. Though Katara overcoming the cultural sexism on the northern water tribe and Sokka breaking the cycle was cool. Zuko and Iroh go hard in the paint.
Well you covered most bases,
I mean it’s pretty blatantly lib, zuko would at best be a Bernie sanders replacement of a leader of a horrifying system of violence
Not to mention the cop out of magically not having to kill the fire lord
If it wasn’t lib that fucker would have been executed for his crimes
I mean, yeah, but I kinda give that a pass cuz it’s a kids show. Idk if 12 year olds really want a whole seasons of Nuremberg trials being held in Ba Sing Se.
I would agree if it werent for the entire episodes devoted to aang trying to find any way not to kill him and even all his past lives are like kill that fucker, and then its resolved with a deus ex machina of him hitting that rock and unlocking the super state and inventing this power. Could ahve worked, but the show painstakingly set up the OPPOSITE
No, I agree that I think the way they resolved Aang’s pacifism was lazy and seems to contradict everything else the show was telling us up to that point. It’s one of the weakest things about the original show, and the most lib. However I get why the network maybe didn’t want a kids show to end with the protagonist straight up killing someone, so I’m curious how much of that ending was the writers vs the network.
It definitely doesn’t feel like the ending the people making the show thought they were heading towards