Bay 12 Games Forum

I think he was vacillating between "poor kids are just as bright as rich kids" and "black kids are just as bright as white kids" and his brain shifted gears mid-sentence. He's certainly as I'm-not-racist-I-have-minority-friends as you'd expect a wealthy white septuagenarian liberal to be, but I think this speaks more to his senility and the general state of mental decrepitude that he's long passed off as folksy idiocy.

It's harder to explain away his position on the problems faced by young people being, literally, "I have no empathy for it. Give me a break."

It strikes me as somewhat hypocritical to blame millennials for losing faith in the political system when he has been part of the system they lost faith in since before any of them were born.

You can assign the term whatever connotation you want, but legally, "hand-made" really does just mean "made by hand." Per the FTC:

(a) It is unfair or deceptive to represent, directly or by implication, that any industry product is hand-made or hand-wrought unless the entire shaping and forming of such product from raw materials and its finishing and decoration were accomplished by hand labor and manually-controlled methods which permit the maker to control and vary the construction, shape, design, and finish of each part of each individual product.

I don't think anyone is arguing that the human-run process control implicitly governing "hand-made" products is worse than the mass-produced alternative. I'm just saying that, if we are seriously suggesting that stochastic manufacturing processes add value, there's nothing stopping us adding random perturbations to whatever heuristic we're using to fit the process to the feedstock to emulate that.

In either case it's given special value because a human made it.

This is kind of the inevitable end of these arguments: the only thing automata inarguably can't do is make things that will then have been made by humans, but founding our hopes on that sort of cedes the point in a way that has far-reaching consequences for craftsmanship as a concept and as a career, because it's no longer about the product but rather the process, and everyone selling a feel-good story about plucky baseline humans still doing things the good old-fashioned failure-prone way with sweat and blood and whatever other assorted fluids sound poetic is, in some sense, competing with each other. I could buy a handmade candlestick or buy an AI-turned one that's physically identical and cheaper, and get the same dopamine hit by buying a handmade mug or hat or any of an infinite array of completely nonfunctional art objects. The primary purpose of the thing isn't to be a thing anymore, but rather to be a symbol of resistance against the machines, and in that role anything works as well.

We've seen what happens to businesses where the primary value isn't in the products but rather in the story. That's fine art, and the demand for arbitrarily valuable objects through which to launder money is not elastic enough to cover everyone currently making things.

There is a charm to hand crafted objects because each one carries the risk of failure during the crafting process while success results in something which may resemble other things but retains a uniqueness that will be difficult to replicate as automation by definition kills the kitschy sort of appeal it had in the first place.

Who says automation cannot make unique items? Computers can retain a perfect record of every item they've ever made; if you tell it to randomly perturb the least functionally consequential parameters of the design until it's sufficiently different from every item it's ever made, the only question is how fast you can make the comparison (the compactness of the representation also matters, but spline interpolation alone can stop that being the limiting factor for most things where the shape is the important part.)

If you want it to randomly mess up the fabrication, it can do that too. You can even skew the randomness to match what a human would most likely mess up, if you want.

They'll move 100% to the gig economy so that you don't have to be treated as an employee.

And where the short-term gig economy doesn't work, they'll move to the academic model, where you're "in training" for the bulk of your career. When a two-year job has a year-long interview process during which you are essentially working for free for the new (potential) boss on top of the old boss(es), you know the system is working great.

I was just going off on a tangent over socialism=environmentalism (or rather =/= ) anyways. As much as they'd like to believe, environmentalism isn't the sole domain of any specific political ideology.

True, but capitalism-at-all-costs has no room for it. That's kind of the origin of the meme version of socialism: trying to get the market to do anything but hand rents to the rich is going to impede its ability to do that, and is therefore anticapitalist.

Because the quacks that thought a fancy galvanic skin response machine was a great way to measure deception got there first?

They weren't quacks exactly. Marston was careful to point out that his device fell short of being an objective measure of deceptive intent, and Keeler -- who added the galvanic component -- wasn't selling a magic truth meter either. He intended it to be used more like an occaisionally informative prop with which to con information out of people, in which purpose it still serves. It's just that the methods used at the time were closer to torture, so the public leapt at the idea that somewhere in Keeler's version of Marston's machine was a scientific version of an oracle, and law enforcement capitalized on that.

So less a case of quackery and more of people repeatedly hearing what they wanted to hear.