> A film student at the University of Alaska Fairbanks destroyed another student’s allegedly AI-generated display piece by physically eating it out of protest.
The cool thing about art schools is that even the protest movements are art.
Yeah, this is an important point. If the main motivation of the subjects would have been to "play along" correctly, then this could also explain the behavior regarding the shocks and "rule breaking". It could also have diminished their empathy for the "students" even more if they realized those were actors anyway.
> This feels like a huge stretch. Forgetting a step at one point or reading something out loud too early isn't a "complete breakdown of the supposedly legitimate scientific environment" -- a "scientific environment" that is completely fictional to begin with.
I found the idea pretty reasonable: Yes, the "scientific environment" was fake, but the "teachers" (i.e. actual subjects) didn't know that, so it should have appeared real to them.
The study tried to analyze the events strictly from the subjects' POV.
The point was that those mistakes would have broken the (fictional) experimental setup, and in a way that was obvious for the subjects too.
If they were really delivering the shocks only because "they were following procedure", then it's strange that they did so many mistakes that in fact broke the procedure. (and resulted in an even more aggressive shock regime than the procedure would demand)
I'd say the headline is misleading. The message is in effect that (traditional, human-written) tickets are not prompts and things will go wrong if we treat them as such.
But because we will do so anyway, people should adapt and start to write their tickets like prompts.
Yeah, given that there are some theories floating around that Trump is actually executing the "Path to Persia" paper, it's interesting that those people are (ostensibly) distancing themselves from it.
I think most far from center paper writers are more successful if they don't let reality limit their ideas. Probably few consider a real idiot with enough power to ruin them as a threat when they start putting pen to page.
I think it's interesting that at least one end of a parasocial relationship seems to involve relating not to a person (not even in a pretend way) but to a collective of persons where you don't even know the individuals. This is what the relationship looks like on the side of artists, youtubers, but also comments who address their posts as "hey r/something" or "hey HN" (or threads like this) - or bloggers.
Feels to me, that is a different kind of parasocial relationship than the pretend interpersonal relationship of relating to a specific celebrity.
> The city is an omen of its presence: “Once a society becomes primarily urban, it is locked into a process of metastasising growth which will, in the end, lead to the destruction of other ways of being.” “The Machine is the liberal anticulture made manifest.”
> And what is to be done? The answer to the Machine, for Kingsnorth, lies not in the Right or the Left, not in capitalism or communism, not in some ideological system or set of conceptual abstractions. [...] The closest we may get in the book to a description of how to secure a more humane future is the term “reactionary radicalism,” which Kingsnorth borrows from sociologist Craig Calhoun. It is a way of life that thrives on tradition, in a local place, in prayer, among a people. “The moral economy rarely makes rational sense. But it makes human sense, which is what matters.”
The book seems to follow the almost traditional dichotomy between "perverted", growth-at-all-costs urban techno-libertarianism (with some stings at liberalism for some reason) and "pure" rural Christian traditionalism.
Interesting that the figureheads of both those movements come from the right today.
As a liberal leftist, none of those two systems look particularly appealing to me. Are there no other options that the author could imagine?
Its libido. The alternatives are not fun and they won't make anyone rich. They present no drama and, I think, drama is the primary thing little minds want from their ideology.
And yet I can sympathize - the world seems sometimes almost absurdly inhumane at the moment, the people in charge seem both incompetent and to have a death grip on power and not out of any particular skill or strength, but because we cannot articulate any real alternative. The fantasy that we can fix this problem by embracing tradition or some other dumb shit is appealing because it doesn't force us to grapple with the real problems of the world.
In the broadest strokes I tend to agree that we will need to return to the human, but I think that doesn't have to look like Christianity or any other made up bullshit. I can be humanism, but we must be willing to do things which might lower GDP to get there. We have to be willing to restrain ourselves and others for the benefit of harmony. Tough sell for Americans.
The cool thing about art schools is that even the protest movements are art.
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