Nietzsche doesn’t “speculate” that slave morality kicked off with the Jews because they were a particularly oppressed group, and really got going under Christianity. He states it outright, and he doesn’t care whether any oppressed group could have done the same. He interprets the known history of Christian and Jewish morality as being the history of “slave morality” and calls it “genealogy” - it isn’t an economic argument.

That’s all I’ve got, I don’t care.

while dB is a more objective measure of pressure level.

Quibble: dB is not an objective measure, nor does it purport to be. It uses an objective yardstick (pressure) but it is scaled for hearing according to an approximation of subjective experiences (hearing) of pressure.

I’d also strongly suggest that not only “can” the frequency response measured off the TV be false, it will be false. It’s not just that TV sound has been highly processed, there’s just no way that the audio equipment a news crew uses picks up anything like the true sound of an environment, especially not the sort of full-spectrum noise emitted by an industrial compound. Of most interest here is that the signal picked up by those mics is liable to drop off somewhere below the range of human speech, whereas industrial equipment like that is liable to have big peaks beneath those frequencies and further, descending well past 20Hz (the bottom end of human hearing).

Persistent low frequency and sub-sonic noise is associated with severe mental distress and physical ailments.

In fact this is why it’s important to recognise the subjectivity of the decibels measure: (not only because) the body/brain responds differentially to frequencies across the spectrum, and at different volumes. It also responds according to all sorts of other variables, and these can’t really be untied from the question of noise level. Persistence, locatibility, perceived subjective control of one’s own aural environment - all of these are fundamentally tied to both the “physical” and “psychological” effects of hearing (insofar as these can be untied).

Some of the symptoms described in the article (nausea, vertigo, fainting, panic attacks) can be the result of all of these variables, given a sufficiently persistent uncontrollable sound source. You just can’t untie them and peg them all to objective noise level.

Others (such as hearing loss and fluid leaking out your ears) are associated with prolonged exposure to sub-sonic noise, and again this can be as much an issue of time and persistence as “objective” sound level.

If we want to know “how bad” a noisy environment is for people, we simply don’t have a choice but to look at its effects first. You just have to look at the subjective effects people experience first, or you’re not looking at sound in the first place. You’re grasping at some independent objective measure which won’t ever actually tell you what you want to know, except in the most limited circumstances.

The interesting thing about this is that these people never stop to think that the future they dream off might never happen. Aside from the fact that their cryo company might just go under, they don’t ever consider that in 200 years they might just wake up under a dystopia.

At one time I was going out with someone who was into Max More, without either of us being cogniscant of the rationalist link back then, and she gave me the infuriating justification that it was all a probabilities game with a bizarre political economy in the background. The thinking goes that if your society becomes a dystopia, there’s no reason and/or no resources to wake you up. Looking back, it’s amazing to see it as a combination of that characteristically (neo/)lib failure of imagination and Promethean ideology.

Well this is where I was going with Lakatos. Among the large scale conceptual issues with rationalist thinking is that there isn’t any understanding of what would count as a degenerating research programme. In this sense rationalism is a perfect product of the internet era: there are far too many conjectures being thrown out and adopted at scale on grounds of intuition for any effective reality-testing to take place. Moreover, since many of these conjectures are social, or about habits of mind, and the rationalists shape their own social world and their habits of mind according to those conjectures, the research programme(s) they develop is (/are) constantly tested, but only according to rationalist rules. And, as when the millenarian cult has to figure out what its leader got wrong about the date of the apocalypse, when the world really gets in the way it only serves as an impetus to refine the existing body of ideas still further, according to the same set of rules.

Indeed the success of LLMs illustrates another problem with making your own world, for which I’m going to cheerfully borrow the term “hyperstition” from the sort of cultural theorists of which I’m usually wary. “Hyperstition” is, roughly speaking, where something which otherwise belongs to imagination is manifested in the real world by culture. LLMs (like Elon Musk’s projects) are a good example of hyperstition gone awry: rationalist AI science fiction manifested an AI programme in the real world, and hence immediately supplied the rationalists with all the proof they needed that their predictions were correct in the general if not in exact detail.

But absent the hyperstitional aspect, LLMs would have been much easier to spot as by and large a fraudulent cover for mass data-theft and the suppression of labour. Certainly they don’t work as artificial intelligence, and the stuff that does work (I’m thinking radiology, although who knows when the bigs news is going to come out that that isn’t all it’s been cracked up to be), i.e. transformers and unbelievable energy-spend on data-processing, doesn’t even superficially resemble “intelligence”. With a sensitive critical eye, and an open environment for thought, this should have been, from early on, easily sufficient evidence, alongside the brute mechanicality of the linguistic output of ChatGPT, to realise that the prognostic tools the rationalists were using lacked either predictive or explanatory power.

But rationalist thought had shaped the reality against which these prognoses were supposed to be tested, and we are still dealing with people committed to the thesis that skynet is, for better or worse, getting closer every day.

Lakatos’s thesis about degenerating research programmes asks us to predict novel and look for corroborative evidence. The rationalist programme does exactly the opposite. It predicts corroborative evidence, and looks for novel evidence which it can feed back into its pseudo-Bayesian calculator. The novel evidence is used to refine the theory, and the predictions are used to corroborate a (foregone) interpretation of what the facts are going to tell us.

Now, I would say, more or less with Lakatos, that this isn’t an amazingly hard and fast rule, and it’s subject to different interpretations. But it’s a useful tool for analysing what’s happening when you’re trying to build a way of thinking about the world. The pseudo-Bayesian tools, insofar as they have any impact at all, almost inevitably drag the project into degeneration, because they have no tool for assessing whether the “hard core” of their programme can be borne out by facts.

My graduate degree was in philosophy of science, and I wouldn’t suggest Kuhn or, indeed, much philosophy of science as a salve for this particular problem. For much of the 20th century, the philosophy of science primarily theorised about two main sets of data: (1) idealised physics, which is to say the “final” theories of physics; (2) historical case studies, which is to say the experimental and theoretical debates which produced those theories. These are two distinct strands of research (of which Kuhn belongs to, and plays an important role in introducing, the second), but perspicuous observers will note that neither of them deal with people who get science wrong, rather they deal with either what is “scientific knowledge”, or how it is that scientific “knowledge” is produced.

Now understanding a little better how scientific knowledge is produced, or even that it is produced (and not intuited, Yudkowsky-style, as if given by a beam of pink energy from the future), could be a preliminary inoculation against behaving as if it is intuited, Yudkowsky-style, as if given by a beam of pink energy from the future. Or, in a twist of which many Kuhn readers have fallen afoul, it can be the radicalisation of a would-be “paradigmatic” thinker, who therefore learns that “normal” scientific knowledge is always local, partial, and primarily intended for the NPC types who populate laboratories. If I wanted to turn somebody with the quintessential rationalist personality into a monstrous basilisk-wraith I would give them Kuhn.

I’m not one for delivering the usual bromides against Kuhn’s supposed sloppiness (I think his treatment has been selective and unkind), but there are also better, more recent works in the same vein (and, naturally, Feyerabend did Kuhn better anyway). If I wanted to give somebody “the good shit” from philosophy of science, I would give them Nancy Cartwright, Ian Hacking, and Bas van Frassen. But the problem remains - how do I explain to these people that they aren’t participating in scientific discourse at all? - after all, as we get more and more recent even the very moderate non-objectivisms of Cartwright, Hacking, van Frassen et al. become diluted as, in practical terms, much of philosophy of science converges on the project of once again reifying a now complicated picture of scientific knowledge in the teeth of perceived worries about its objectivity.

Why is this a problem? Well the pragmatic image of science with which your rationalist is liable to come away from these texts is one in which the body of the whole thing is incredibly complex and everything has its role, including that of the rationalist. With Kuhn we will have deepened their appreciation of their own importance, and with the non-objectivists we will have challenged their STEMacism only to supply their project with an undeserved aura of validity!

(I here leave out the really technical stuff, naturally. Much of philosophy of science is of course concerned with resolving particular puzzles in particular areas. This is of course a lot more difficult and worth doing than any grand project we might have in mind, but it can’t help the people we’re discussing).

Only the hardcore realists remain, but what do they have to offer? Idealised physical models! This simply cannot help us at all.

Hell, if they’re anything like a gamut of arseholes I’ve run into over the years, at least a few of them proudly trumpet that back at the turn of the century Bruno Latour was expressing regret about the critical project in STS, and that it’s the only thing of his they’ve ever read.

The great demarcatory projects are, mostly, a thing of the past, but really this is what we need. Problematically, for the last 50 years it has been widely agreed that they were wrong, and there was no real standard of demarcation between “science” and other modes of thought. Nonetheless, and ignoring that there is one good Popperian still alive to do, we can’t use Popper - that’s absurdly dangerous territory - but we do have Lakatos.

Now that’s an idea I could have put at the top. We have to ignore that, as before, people don’t really believe in “degenerating research programmes” anymore (although perhaps philosophy of science is just a little too close to science to say so). But you know what? Fuck it. Make them read Lakatos.

But it won’t help, because their research programme is almost tailor made to outrun scientific testing. Along with history of science, which I advocate because it shows science in its particulars, the real solution is to starve the cult of oxygen. It’s an attritional war of pointing out that this is bullshit in its particulars.

Holy shit, release the classics!

Not everything is about your toy train world geopolitical supremacy and there are people far too rich and powerful to give a shit about it who benefit from your believing that it is

Believe me, I’m not even American: it’s just you, me, and everyone getting the shaft on all five other continents as well

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.

I like some people who have written for Jacobin, sometimes I even enjoy an article here and there, but the magazine as a whole remains utterly unbeaten in the “will walk the length of Manhattan in a “GIANT RUBE” sandwich board for clicks” stakes

i had a moment and i wanted to share it with everybody

To be clear: it is all movie plot threats. At the very forefront of the entire “existential threat” space is nothing but a mid-1990s VHS library. Frankly if you want to understand like 50% of what goes on in AI at this point my recommendation is just that you read John Ganz and listen to his podcast, because 90s pop and politics culture is the connective tissue of the whole fucking enterprise.

All i hear is that “polycule drama” is back on the table