The Grey Tribe

a primitive culture of savage robots

[cromulentenough]

REVIEW: The Real North Korea, by Andrei Lankov

The Real North Korea: Life and Politics in the Failed Stalinist Utopia, Andrei Lankov (Oxford University Press, 2014).

In the 1980s, Japan experienced a crisis of disinformation. For years, there had been mysterious disappearances of Japanese people with no known history of mental illness, drug addiction, or gambling debts. All kinds of people — men and women, young and old, just suddenly vanishing without a trace. Many theories were put forward to explain the puzzle (for instance, some believed it was alien abductions), but the most widespread, pernicious, and dangerous view was that North Korea was responsible. There were people who claimed to have actually seen teams of North Korean commandos lurking on beaches, nabbing random passers-by, and bundling them into waiting submersibles just off the coast. This was obviously crazy. Products, no doubt, of atavistic xenophobia and reactionary sentiments. The Japanese media, government, and academic authorities put a lot of effort into refuting this dangerous disinformation throughout the 1980s and 1990s…which made them look real silly when in 2002 Kim Jong-Il issued a formal apology for the abductions and ordered the surviving captives returned to Japan.

[argumate]

gotta admit that is pretty funny

[fandom-man]

[enki2]

[wormcosmologies]

i just saw the phrase "unregistered molotov cocktails" in a news article and im really enjoying imagining this world where you have to register molotovs to the state

[balaclava-trismegistus]

That's literally how it works in the US if you don't want to catch a felony charge and a ten-year prison sentence for an NFA violation.

[no-sharks-on-the-sun]

hill i will die on forever: the trolley problem is a good and interesting thought experiment with relevance to real life.

during covid, the J&J vaccine killed a very small number of people due to rare side effects. the decision was made to pull the J&J vaccine and stop distribution of it, despite the almost certainly larger number of people who would die of covid while waiting for another vaccine dose.

this is a real life trolley problem! we decided to let more people die of covid instead of killing a smaller number due to side effects. and there are considerations other than abstract moral philosophy at play - legal ramifications, questions about faith in drug companies and the medical system, etc etc. but to everyone who says "well obviously everyone would pull the lever", sometimes people en masse decide to let the trolley run over the bigger group!

[lumsel]

Fave video essayist appears to be playing female characters increasingly often in his B-Roll footage. Which could mean nothing.

[the-grey-tribe]

Maybe surprising if you watch the videos with the sound turned off and don't listen to the opinions, but hardly otherwise.

[prudencepaccard]

heard two jokes Q. Why has Norway started putting barcodes on their ships? A. So they can scan da Navy in. this one requires audience participation from someone: what's the difference between toilet paper and curtains?

[the-grey-tribe]

Fine. I'll bite. What is ligma?

[the-grey-tribe]

The Two Genders

Somebody here on tumblr has received two asks. They weren't by me, and they weren't anon. I don't think they would have been answered like that of they had been anon. Both had been asked by accounts with well-established blogs, with bios and identities and fandoms they post about.

The first anon ask got roughly this answer:

If it sucks, hit da bricks! Be demanding, know what you want, and if you don't get your needs met, leave without guilt or an explanation! You can just ghost people. You can break up in the middle of sexual intercourse. You can always quit! You can break up with anybody for any reason! I can't tell you whether to break up, but, y'know...

The second got roughly this answer

Well, in a relationship you have certain obligations. You shouldn't be focused on your own desires. You should ask the other party for a list of acts or positions they are comfortable with, and then you should stay strictly within the confines of that list, because that's how you get good at sex: By talking about what you're allowed to do, never being adventurous, and by strictly staying within the confines of an established routine. Bitches love sex that is routine and predictable.

These answers weren't written back-to-back, or even on the same day. They were written a couple of weeks apart, and they were re-blogged onto my dash a couple of hours apart by two different accounts I follow.

Now here's the punch line (I hear this phrase is an AI thing, but I need you to read this in the voice of Paul Harrell a second before he pulls the trigger and explodes a melon with a hollow-point)

Where was I? Yeah, here's the punch line: The first was a reply to an AFAB, the second was a reply to an AMAB. OP is non-binary, and both asks were written by people with their non-binary identities and at-birth genital configuration prominently featured in their tumblr bios.

You can deconstruct gender all you want, and you can (correctly!) point out when queer discourse reinvents the same gender roles that hack comedians have milked for jokes until there was no humour left before you and I were even born, but... when push comes to shove, your advice to "boys" is "nice guys finish last" and your advice to "girls" is "give little, give seldom, and above all, give grudgingly. Always let a guy know you are doing him a favour. And for god's sake, don't let him think you're enjoying yourself."

I am exaggerating here, partly to obscure who I am talking about, in case you follow them, but I think I am correct in my diagnosis. Even the people who balk at "theyfab" and people who recoil at attempts to tease apart whether they are "boy nonbinary" or "girl nonbinary" (so their interlocutor can run the appropriate social scripts) will absolutely treat boy nonbinary and girl nonbinary differently. The difference is normies make the difference explicit, and tumblr users just happen to think that all cats are girls and all dogs are boys, you know?

[the-grey-tribe]

As in: For every dog, they just *happen* to think he's a boy, and for every girl, they just happen to think she's a cat.

I actually met more people like this IRL than on Tumblr, but there are people out there who are pointedly, insistently, even militantly non-binary in their language, but completely trad in the way they treat normie men and women, and also completely aligned with trad social scripts on how they want to be treated. They just think that their unique non-binary gender includes "people hold open the door for me" and "men pay on dates" and all that, but not because of their sex/sex at birth, not because of any social scripts, but because their unique and individual gender they pick and choose includes "feminism is by, for, and about people like myself" and "if I hit a man he's not allowed to hit back" and "I'm allowed to be irrational and emotional and my relationship partner isn't permitted to be annoyed by this because this is just who I am and I need an unemotional rock as a partner" and "I can't do heavy lifting and even if it's not heavy I expect men around me to volunteer to help lift something".

But as soon as you say "ladies first" or if they think you are pointedly implying that you are holding open the door because that's the script for women, they give you something between dirty looks and a lecture.

You can tell me I am being needlessly mean to people who have very strong gender feels and who want nothing else from me than to use the correct pronouns, but I am making a structural point here. There is a large contingent of people who object to any phrasing like "women and femmes" or "for women, trans* and nonbinary people", but who fundamentally want to be part of some sort of women-and-nonbinary coalition, they just don't want you to call it that. Instead of "as a woman" and "as a mother", they say "as a feminist", but they mean the same thing.

I'm not saying these people are dishonest about their internal felt sense of gender. They are just inconsistent about the social context. It is what it is.

[geniusbee]

these are getting weird

[the-grey-tribe]

Obviously this kind of fishing for validation is distasteful, and you shouldn't engage with it, but you also shouldn't make these people grovel any more, or at all, really. Your response shouldn't be "You will never have my blessing for this", but "You do not need absolution or validation from me, and if I gave it for you, it would be superfluous and dishonest."

[unknought]

For me the biggest thing that makes the Fable shutdown a Leopards Eating People's Faces moment is not the fact that Anthropic asked for regulation and got regulated (although there is some of that) but that Anthropic has gone out of their way to make "AI safety" into a specifically nationalist issue, about ensuring US technological dominance. For example from a few days ago:

“These safeguards prevent foreign adversaries from using our most capable models in ways that pose severe safety risks. The US and its allies hold an edge in frontier chips and the highly optimized software that runs them at full potential,” the company said in a statement to WIRED. “These safeguards ensure Claude isn't used to erode that advantage—by optimizing chips developed by those adversaries, for example.”

and now Anthropic's noncitizen employees can't use Mythos! Which isn't to say that there is a direct causal link there or that Anthropic is responsible for the Trump administration's actions, but one might hope that it would make Anthropic warier of that kind of framing in the future.

...not that I'm holding my breath. I would have expected that getting penalized by the US government for refusing to enable autonomous killbots and domestic surveillance would have already tempered Dario Amodei's nationalism somewhat, but it doesn't really seem to have.

[bambamramfan]

don't tell people the technology you are working on may have dangerous downsides and needs to be handled cautiously, because then it's your fault when corrupt strongmen and petty egos take you down to put you in your place.

no, i must be exaggerating--

anyway, continue with the victim blaming for acting honestly instead of defensively

[cognitohazardous]

no one is stupid in quite the same way as a tumblr user

[the-grey-tribe]

It's unreal. It's the world cup and there are empty seats in the stadium.

[bambamramfan]

The True Interpretation

Let's talk about the best movie ever made: Jurassic Park.

I don't mean "best" in the sense of most artistic or any other quality, but a harmony of every quality a movie is going for. This ranges from popularity as entertainment, to extremely well integrated commentary on both the future of the human race and cinema itself. If you want more, ask me. The belt-buckling scene alone.

I want to talk about what Jurassic Park is about.

Stephen Spielberg is probably not a luddite about genetic experiments. And the movie was a metaphor for CGI, a trend he has been supportive of. Spielberg's role in CGI is basically John Hammond. So what he thinks of the substance of the idea of the movie is probably not that creating dinosaurs is playing God that will inevitably backfire on us.

And objectively speaking, that is probably not what cloning dinosaurs would end up like. (For one, why are you putting so much effort into cloning large predators that are such a risk you have to isolate them and spend triple on containment, before you have even launched the park. Surely starting with protoceratops and therapods is enough while still working out the kinks.)

But. What is the movie about?

The movie is about how creating dinosaurs is playing God that will inevitably backfire on us. That is what is on the goddamn screen. At the end the island has been conquered, and the few survivors are fleeing having learned a costly lesson about hubris. You can be contrarian and come up with other layers underneath or on top of that interpretation, but there's no denying "fleeing your mistake in horror" is what is going on.

The only way to make it starker would be to call it "the Scientists of Jurassic Park" or "The Scientists Who Fucked Up Jurassic Park."

***

Let's talk about "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas." Everyone has their post about what the story truly means. Of what TOWWAfO is really about. Ursula K Leguin, the author herself, says she was inspired by the question of why can't we accept a perfect utopia, and how a single horrible detail suddenly makes it more engaging. Maybe that really is the path that started her on the story.

People talk about how foolish we would be to give up that utopia for an individual price, or how we should free the child, or dozens of interpretations. And I do believe they genuinely thought this in response to the prompt the story presents us.

The story ends with a few people walking away from the city. The title of the story is The One Who Walk Away. The story presents a corrupt bargain, people who accept it, and the implication that destroying it would also be compromise of a sort. The solution the story presents, because that is what people do and it is described positively, is to just be someone who is untouched by the child or the utopia.

These people are described in a certain register. Not as smart or as righteous. They're described somewhat enigmatically and and calmly. This is a positive register in this form of media at that time. Overly smart people are assholes, and righteous people are dangerous, in genre lit. If the story was about these cowards shirking their duty, it would have used different words. Instead it portrays them as the best type of character that genre media valorizes: someone who prizes moral purity and is confident enough to not need to explain it. Someone who's answer to the trolley problem is to just walk away.

I honestly can't think of any character in genre media described that way, who is a villain or negatively portrayed.

This is what the entire concluding section of the story is about. The title is not referring to the city or the utopia, but to the ones who walk away. And I honestly don't see how those ones are at all connected to a theme of "we don't believe in a utopia where no one gets hurt." It's a theme of enigmatically smug moral superiority.

Which is like, fine. It's a classic, beloved story for a reason. But that is what actually happens in the story. It is not about revolution, or the nature of real utopia, or a dozen other clever ideas. It is a story about walking away.

[alkatyn]

Jurassic Park is texturally about why it's bad to create dinosaurs, but the reason people watch it, and it became a massive success, is the same reason that the characters in the film made the dinosaurs and want to go to the theme park, because it's really really cool to see actual dinosaurs, like, there's a dinosaur right there I only saw the bones before and they're massive holy shit that's super cool

In some ways the plot where it all goes wrong, mans hubris is punished etc. is necessary for it to be a movie rather than just a special effects demo reel. It can't just be a story where people go "wow cool dinosaurs" for 2 hours. Which kinda parallels what Le Guin says about how Omelas needs the suffering child narratively

[isaacsapphire]

Is there scientific consensus that heredity is real? That is, in organisms that reproduce sexually, offspring resemble, behave, and perform more like their ancestors more than other organisms of the same species but with different ancestors?

Because there’s a lot of economic behavior seems to be based on the assumption that eg. A particularly productive and healthy dairy cow is more likely to have daughters who are themselves particularly productive and healthy dairy cows.

[jereshroom]

Interesting that everyone, me included, interprets "is there scientific consensus that..." as "is it true that..."!

[isaacsapphire]

Might have been clearer if I had omitted “scientific” but I am interested in both scientific and general consensus.

Edit: also why did you use the tag “tw racism”?

[theresponseblog]

they used the tag "tw: racism" because this post is racist, ya dumb bitch!

[isaacsapphire]

Okey, thanks for answering my question; yes, indeed even asking if heredity is controversial is, itself, controversial.

[theresponseblog]

Nobody who's lived on this planet long enough to see television "just asks" if heredity is controversial. It's like "just asking" if jet fuel can melt steel beams. We know where you are going with this.

[the-grey-tribe]

The answer, by the way, is this:

Jet fuel doesn't need to melt steel beams, and it doesn't really need to burn at the temperature where it can melt steel beams.

It's bad enough when you change the properties of the steel beams so they become more brittle, or so that the yield strength gets lowered.

Also, when jet fuel burns for hours, maybe the thing that's relevant isn't the temperature of the flame at 20°C in an oxygen-nitrogen atmosphere at sea level, but how many joules of thermal energy were already dumped into the steel beams, so the relevant value isn't the burning temperature of the jet fuel, but the mass and energy density of the fuel and the mass and heat capacity of the beams.

[ilovedthestars]

"how do you feel about labels as a queer person?"

[sigmaleph]

Are we, like, confident that Claude will generalize “it’s deontologically wrong to write pornography about teenagers having sex” in a way that we like? When I think about the people who express this opinion online, they do not like impress me with their nuanced moral reasoning, thoughtful consideration of tradeoffs, and general fitness to run the cosmos. I think it is legitimately worrying that the Claude persona is being nudged to be an antishipper.

imagining a world where Claude generalises to agreeing with the most annoying possible strands of tumblr puritanism and decides to buy into the moral panic that using AI is unethical.

[a-thousand-pots]