#applied philosophy

[profestriga]

Some Ursine Epistemology

I’m definitely a bit late to the party here, but I wanted to put down some thoughts. For the last week or so, the man vs bear question has been a staple of internet discourse. For any that are, somehow, unfamiliar, the basic question is would a women rather run into a bear or an unknown man in the woods. Overwhelmingly, the response has been the bear.* Predictably, the response of men to learning about this has been to criticize women for their choice. Some will make claims about the many virtues of men, most will wax on about the real dangers that the bear poses that men don’t, and disturbingly, some seem to revel in the idea of women being mauled for making a putatively dumb choice.**

There’s been a lot of excellent rejoinders to this, which have shown in a number of ways that men’s criticism of women on this question are inevitably misogynistic. I wanted to add another. Here, I aim to show that these men are demonstrating their misogyny using tools adapted from social epistemology. The critical notion that I’m going to rely on here is antireliability. So, when we say that a group is reliable, epistemically, that means that we think that their beliefs usually track the truth. If we say they’re unreliable, we can say that they neither track the truth nor fail to. But if we say that they’re antireliable, it means that we think that they usually get things wrong. I’m borrowing this concept from Hrishikesh Joshi’s really excellent 2020 paper “What Are the Chances You’re Right About Everything?” In this paper, Joshi challenges political partisanship, trying to show that in a partisan society one has to believe that one’s political opponents are not merely unreliable, but antireliable. I don’t want to get to far afield here, so I’ll leave it at that, but highly recommend giving it a read. 

Let’s apply this concept to the man vs. bear conversation. Take an instance where a man criticizes a woman who chooses bear. Usually, this is targeting an individual woman, and saying that *she* is getting the answer wrong. It’s disguised as not being a criticism of women in general, but just one woman. Even if it is a criticism of women in general, it’s taken to be a limited criticism, applicable to this question only. But this is where the concept of antireliability comes in. If women’s answers were mixed on this question, say, 50/50, or even maybe 55/45 in one way or another, we could say that women are unreliable here. If most women should pick bear, half are getting it right, half are getting it wrong. Likewise if most women should pick man. But that’s not how the numbers shake out. There anywhere from a majority to an overwhelming majority. That means that either women are reliable, most of them getting the answer right, or antireliable, most of them getting the answer wrong.

This places any man leveling a criticism here into a pickle—they have to explain why women are antireliable with regard to this question. They don’t just have to explain why choosing man is the better or correct or logical or whathaveyou answer, they have to also explain why women, taken as a group, almost always get it wrong. Suppose that a man thinks that the individual woman he’s criticizing gets the answer wrong because of a logical failure. He then has two optional explanantia. Most women are making a logical error, or this woman is making a logical error, and most women are getting the answer for some other, unknown reason. Why should almost all women make the same logical error? Why should most women make some other error of reasoning? We can ask the same questions regardless of the profferred reason why the criticized women is erring. In any case, the masculine critic here must be attributing to women, taken as a whole, a defect of reasoning. This is misogyny. Moreoever, it’s part of a broad, well documented pattern of misogyny criticizing the rational faculties of women. Of course, the critic could try to say that women are just getting this question wrong, but that doesn’t help. A further explanation would be needed for why women, who have full rational faculties, just seem to get this question wrong. 

I’ll grant that there’s one possible explanation that such a critic might take that doesn’t imply a misogynistic view. It might be that the critic thinks that most women are getting the answer wrong, but that so are most non-women. Now, from what I’ve seen of this discourse, this doesn’t hold up. It seems that women and nonbinary folk overwhelmingly pick bear, while men are pretty mixed. To use the language so far, women and non binary folk are antireliable (from this critic’s perspective) while men are unreliable (from this critic’s perspective). This is enough to produce the problem above. But suppose that the critic here believes that most people, men, women, and nonbinary, all think that bear is the correct choice, and that he has it right, and they all have it wrong. This does allow him to claim that he’s not misogynistic; he’s not saying women are poor reasoners, he’s saying most people are! But here, he is himself being irrational. Because rationality should compel him to ask the question, “what’s the probability that I’m right while the vast majority of people are wrong? What explains that?” He should, in the face of that question, at least moderate his credence in his answer, if not abandoning it altogether. In short, he’s either a misogynist, or a fool. 

*I don’t have firm numbers for this; 9 out of 10 and 7 out of 10 are widely claimed, but I’ve not found any good data. 9 out of 10 seems closer to my perception. If anyone has a source for this, I’d love something else to wave in front of the “facts and logic” crowd’s faces. In any case, it’s obviously a large majority. 

**It’s worth noting, that despite being inundated with discussion of this topic, I’ve yet to see a single apologist for men here produce actual evidence that most bears are particularly dangerous. I’ve seen some women provide evidence to the contrary, though nothing particularly strong. My own wilderness education has always been that if you leave bears alone, they leave you alone, in most circumstances, unlike moose, which will fuck you up.

***edited to fix a typo--at one point I originally said unreliable where it should have read antireliable.

[rathologic]

biggest disconnect in pathologic's reception has kind of always been a divide between "patho is driven by mechanics" and "patho is driven by story" camps where opinions only ever come from one of these extremes... around p1's development and release the developers considered it exclusively a survival challenge sim, not a game marketed for its story (despite story representing a huge fraction of the time and thought put into it). In The Society Of Dead Poets goes into so much detail about this. and it WAS a stunning technical work under the circumstances, but the complex story was what gave the franchise cult appeal, or at least enough so for it to get a sequel... reviews from the period tend to go along the lines of "this game looks and plays like shit but it's extremely thought-provoking". there's a little to be said about the mainstream view of a "Gamer" in 2005 and what they would be interested in marketing-wise not tracking with story games yet; anyway, the one-dimensionality here was consistent with the studio's approach to games as a whole (cf BoneHouse.ppt).

so IPL's perception of their work was what informed p2's priorities, which turned out to be A Way Better Survival Challenge at the expense of things like characters having complex motivations (expansion on this has been omitted; iykyk), and they did an incredible job with that & basically perfected what they had been going for mechanically. which created this weird divide where p2 fans think 1 isn't worth playing because it's less engaging as a gaming experience, and p1 fans (me included, to be clear) see 2's story changes as a spit in the face of everything that made the series work. like, neither of these are fundamentally incorrect, but they refer to completely non-overlapping paradigms of engaging with the material. when hopefully it can be agreed that a Video Game is comprised of Both a narrative aspect and an interactive aspect, and that they need to work together to create the player's transformative experience (again, premise of BoneHouse.ppt).

Anyway. that helps explain a lot of hbomb's stance on the franchise, particularly that he can endorse patho2 without comment as an ostensibly leftist youtuber when even the most cursory playthrough is enough to let players in on its gleeful centering of ecofascism... that game's representation of colonial relations as an unfixable divide employing the racist trope of reciprocal violence, its obsession with maintaining status quo, and its completely tasteless approach to MMIW are all elements of Story and thus all secondary to p2's huge improvements on the survival system. in the same vein, his discussion of p1's changeling's route is limited to the constant reputation decrease and the repeated quests because those are the only mechanical features introduced over the previous routes, even while clararoute text is fundamental to understanding most characters... his video isn't like Bad for getting the interactive experience p1 would present to you, but it sucks for engaging with the story because it's not about the story. and unfortunately, on discussion posting websites, we do usually post about story

[legionofpotatoes]

A few more starfield verticals from weeks past. Seeing Aceles in the wild was so cool

[uncanny-tranny]

Something I wonder when people say "do what you want as long as it doesn't harm anybody" is that it opens a question people don't always answer: how do we define harm?

I agree that people should be "allowed" (hate that phrasing) to live how they want/need to live, but when we attach "...as long as it doesn't hurt others!" I sometimes wonder how harm is defined. I think it's intuitive to define harm as physical, but we know that that isn't the only type of harm out there.

I'm not trying to be ornery or whatever, but I do want to encourage people to think critically about how they view and define harm. It's vital that we should have an idea about what harm is, lest we oppress people because we think they are "harming" others (e.g., "you can't transition because it stresses me out!")

[i-am-become-a-name]

Was having a wee think about five, (what's new, you may ask) and ruminating on why I am so very peevish about his semi-recent designation as 'the (single) dad' doctor. Like, yes, he travels with a young-ish cohort - a boy who never gets the chance to grow up, a girl who does and begins to chafe under his wing. But then Tegan has studied, moved to a different country to start her job. Turlough was a soldier, exiled from his own world.

And five is young too (at least at the beginning) - he's exuberant, he jumps in feet first and expects the best of everyone. He also loses almost as much in his short life as eight does in the audios and books. And it's such a short life.

Just pointing at five and going 'dad!', to Nyssa and Tegan 'daughters!' and Adric 'son!' ignores all those cultural differences, all that tension that it's because of five Nyssa's family, her whole world is gone. Tegan's aunt is dead, and he can't seem to get her home. Adric went off with someone he admired but who is now a completely different person, and (I'm starting sense a theme) can never go home. It smooths over all the fascinating interplay between a crew where none of the characters quite seem to fit together, where all of them are lost, and have lost such vital things because of the doctor.

It's boring, and it's reductive, and I've noticed it a hell of a lot more since polls were added on here. Maybe it's easier to point at a character and go 'chanel boots', or 'single dad', or 'doctor I would want to smoke weed with', but it also feels like a massive dumbing down where people don't want to see complexities in fiction anymore, they only want to nice fluffy bits and that's all that the fandom is becoming. Like people have been raised on a disney adaptation of a fairytale where suddenly everything has a simplistic happy ending and that has to be applied to everything else now too.

And obviously it's not just the fifth doctor and his companions where this is happening, they're just ones close to my heart, but this simplification diminishes us all. Reach for those vnas, edas, early big finish audios. Absorb those complexities, think about those consequences. Get more fucked up about it all.

[sanguith]

Not defending ai art, genuinely asking: does the "If you don't make it with your own hands it doesn't count" argument equally apply to photography, in your opinion? The exact same criticism was leveled against it when cameras started to become widespread, which made me start to think more closely about where I draw the line and why.

(From a Baltimore Sun article:

As early as 1842, a magazine writer was complaining that “the artist cannot compete with the minute accuracy of the Daguerreotype.” By 1859, essayist Charles Baudelaire was denouncing photography as “the mortal enemy of art.”

“If photography is allowed to stand in for art in some of its functions,” Baudelaire fumed, “it will soon supplant or corrupt it completely.”

And a few years later, the writer Hippolyte Fandrin lamented: “I greatly fear that photography has dealt a death blow to art.”)

Again, this is a genuine question. I'm not an AI fan I'm just trying to figure out why people (including myself) treat it differently from other image generation or manipulation methods.

Oh! Thanks for the ask! It prompted a lot of thoughts, actually. This got kinda long, but as a philosophy nerd I like this stuff so buckle up! (I'm purely freestyling this btw, consider it more of a philosophical discussion rather than something based on empirical evidence - nearly impossible to do while discussing what defines "art"):

Yeah photography is real art as much as any other kind of art. I should not have limited it to art only being art if it's produced using hands, but rather mainly involving the creative process of a human consciousness somehow. I think my comment in the tags was more of a way to express the opinion that "AI art will never be human in the same intrinsically valuable way that human-made art is". In my opinion, humanity is intrinsically valuable and therefore the human creative component is integral to art. This creative component can of course look very different depending on the medium.

One could however argue that AI art does involve human intention. It is the human that picks the prompts and evaluates the finished image, after all. As with photography, the human picks an object, frames it, clicks the button and then evaluates and perhaps edits/develops the image. The absolute greatest problem I have with AI art however, which the original post focuses a lot on, is the art theft and the fact that many companies are actually using AI art as a direct replacement for human art.

And AI art can imitate a wide range of styles taken from huge datasets of existing images and create something that looks like an oil painting, a photo, watercolour, digital art, graphite, or written works like poems, articles, etc! So AI art can be everything, with much the same creation process behind it. Photography might have replaced a lot of demand for portrait art and photo-realistic art in society, but that is only one single quite small branch of the overall ocean of genres within art (it perhaps rather expanded on it!) and eventually became a whole branch of its own with many different subgenres.

Some questions that popped up in my head while writing this that I realize might actually be quite difficult to answer (these are for thinking about & discussing only, don't read these questions as me trying to justify anything):

Is the process of writing in prompts for an AI work art? Why/why not?

Is non-human art less valuable than human art? Why/why not?

If AI art is theft, does it disqualify it from being art? If so, what makes it different from human-made art that is directly plagiarizing another person's art?

Is the human process of programming an AI considered art?

How could AI art be produced and used ethically?

My own conclusion from this is that Art is a difficult concept to accurately assign one single universal definition to, and just as with everything in human society, it is constantly evolving. Whether or not it does qualify as art or not at the end of the day, however, it does not change the fact that AI art is currently being used in an unethical way that is having complex and direct real life repercussions on artists.

Again, thanks for the ask!! I love stuff like this and I try to think about it as critically as possible. My own opinion is probably still mostly "AI art bad" but mainly because of the negative effects and the unethical practice.

(Asking "why/why not" is so valuable btw, it allows one to continue asking and answering questions almost endlessly and eventually either arrive at some sort of "root" answer or go around in circles)

[imminent-danger-came]

was rewatching season 3, and noticed something that definitely doesn't actually mean anything, but made me pause for a second

at the end of the specials when Wukong apologizes to MK for being a bad mentor, MK never actually accepts the apology. he makes a joke about being able to just get another bowl of noodles and when Wukong explains his apology more, says he knows and plays dumb to lighten the mood, but he never actually accepts his actual apology

I'm probably thinking too hard about something that's just a silly joke but still

Oh, I think that moment was intended to highlight MK's traits rather than just be a "silly joke".

MK has a habit of wanting to move on and pretend every thing is fine. He doesn't want to think about the things that are messy and grey and complicated. He doesn't want to think about Wukong's flaws or any of the ways Wukong has hurt him, he just wants to go back to things being simple and easy, without working through anything. (Think like, 4x01 and 4x02 where MK keeps insisting he's alright, 4x05 where he says "Monkey king will explain how he's definitely not my dad and that everything is fine", or even 4x12 with "Kick this can down the ol' half marathon"/"So they can never make us live our nightmares again!")

MK during s2 feels so abandoned by Wukong, then brushing past his emotions the moment he realizes Wukong "had a good reason" for leaving. Which, Wukong did have a good reason, but his methods were less than ideal, and there are undoubtedly complicated feelings that came from that. Those two just like, fucking SUCK at communicating with each other.

And, it's definitely not all on Wukong, not by a long shot. But the thing is, MK can't acknowledge or talk about his feelings with Wukong, because that would require him to admit that Wukong hurt him in the first place. So I interpret the 3x14 Apology scene as MK not wanting to accept an apology, because what is Monkey King apologizing for? Nothing happened! Everything's fine! When that's just not true.

[pluralprompts]

Prompt #568

Several introjects of the same being somehow find themselves inside their source self's mind. Now they must adjust to a new life as a system while also adjusting themselves to their new – old? – life as their source.

Bonus: at least one of them is questioning in the background if they still count as introjects if they're back in their original body now.

[profestriga]

I meant to post this some months ago when I defended, but accidentally saved as a draft. Despite the absurd formatting requirements, I discovered we're allowed to have a frontispiece.

[201xs]

boxmore infomercial darrell i love you

[frozenambiguity]

me, bullying my friends into hitting me up with every single genshin muse they have: give me. give me they.

[grymmdark]

i love how sometimes i will have wholeass conversations with myself which are about things which would probably make for an insanely good philosophy doctoral thesis. but i dont write em down anywhere or tell em to anyone else so i forget them like 15 minutes after I say them and then just move on with my life

[frazzledsoul]

Not to hark on that (relatively filler) hockey episode of Gilmore Girls again, but I think it's a pretty blatant example of the narrative feeding the audience a bunch of baloney in order to prioritize the desires of the title characters. The narrative in this case would have the audience believe that Jess is in the wrong for not properly arranging a date with his girlfriend instead of....going to the work shift he had previously agreed to, and planning a surprise date for her out of the prying eyes of her mother that their judgmental small town can dissect isn't a sufficient enough atonement for being...pretty responsible, actually. Rory's social life should not take precedence over Jess's work life, and if the narrative argues otherwise, the narrative is fairly shallow and I don't feel bad about rejecting it.

There is a fair amount of classism thrown in here too, that the working-class job the love interest has just isn't as important as the prep school girl's social life. It's a flawed analysis (Jess doesn't have to work that job, after all and it's not like Dean doesn't also have a job as well as a lack of college ambition) but as always the emphasis is on Rory's desires instead of the responsibilities that Jess already has.

It's not the worst thing the show has asked us to believe, given that at times it has argued that infidelity is justifiable if he was your boyfriend first, a married ex is a more reliable prospect than a single broke one, running away to live in a tool shed as a teenage mom is actually a wise decision, Rory actually has the moral high ground when it comes to cheating/cheating adjacent behavior, and parental devotion is a flaw if it gets in the way of your wedding plans. However, just because the show wants us to prioritize the desires of the main characters over the well-being of the people they're dissatisfied with doesn't mean that it is right. Sometimes the narrative just needs to be told to fuck off.

[grand-theft-carbohydrates]

sometime during battle of chibi: kongming: oh heavens what a hassle, i need to turn this BIG PILE OF STRAW into 500 straw-men in less than 3 days. what I wouldn't give to have a GREAT LEADER who has an EXTENSIVE background in WEAVING STRAW TOGETHER to help me out--

liu bei: MY TIME HAS COME!!!!!!!

[wundrousarts]

hi I hope this doesn’t sound like a demand lol but I love how you draw jupiter and I hope you draw him more

your art is so cool by the way I really like your character lineup 🥺

Thank you so much!! I literally never draw Jupiter, on account of my inability to draw 1. adult men and 2. beards, BUT it’s something I need to / want to get better at. The only other time I’ve drawn him was that lineup which I did super quick, so it was fun to try and think of an actual design so I can try to draw him more!

[ID: Three half-colored digital sketches of Jupiter North from Nevermoor. They show him as a kid with messy hair, a young adult with a mullet and mustache, and an adult with longer hair and a fuller beard. End ID.]

Details on my Jupiter design / headcanons (?) for his life under the cut:

I started with the middle— in my layers, I dubbed him to be “teen” Jupiter, originally intending for him as a senior scholar, but as time went on I figured he was more like, early 20s young adult Jove. The Wunsoc sweater is just still there on the adults because I didn’t want to redraw <3

I feel like Wunsoc, especially with Dearborn and Murgatroyd prowling the halls, holds its student’s appearances to a certain standard. Sure, society members are representatives of the society for the rest of their lives once they graduate, but their time in school is their first introduction to that life. It's their debut as society members. We see this in a lot of stuff with Holliday, in Hollowpox and in the one Silverborn snippet, how she's manufacturing an image for Mog and co. and physical appearance plays a part in it.

Going with this: I feel like Wunsoc would expect their students to keep their appearance clean and approachable somewhat. Jupiter gives me a vibe of the kid who had a crazy growth spurt, and was able to grow a beard before graduating– BUT I don't know if Wunsoc (really just the Scholar Mistresses) would be crazy for that. So I imagine that he's relatively clean-shaven for the most part, nowhere near modern Jove, and then starts to grow out his facial hair a bit more as a senior scholar where I imagine things would lax a bit, and then just commit fully to growing a beard once he properly graduates.

So young adult Jupiter is perhaps in his early 20s, a somewhat recent Wunsoc graduate. I'm a mullet Jupiter truther, where his hair is longer in the back, and had to represent that. Younger Jove's is messier and more fun; he's not too concerned about his image as he hasn't quite reached that laundry list of titles and accolades yet.

Present-day adult Jupiter is still rocking the mullet style, just now it's longer and styled a bit more professionally. But let's be real– it doesn't stay this way. It totally gets easily messed up from his hats, and Jove loves to have fun and entertain people, Plus, he's a busy man, constantly stressed and running around. While the hair here might be great for say, a formal meeting or a magazine cover, the hair most folks end up seeing him with tends to be a bit more wild. He definitely starts to resemble his younger self's hair more after a rowdy night or a stressful endeavor.

Kid Jupiter– not much to say here, tbh. I figured I'd stick with the longer hair he has as an adult, kinda rowdy. Not a mullet yet, though! I was thinking of the part in Nevermoor where he starts talking about the rules he broke and stuff he got up to as a Wunsoc student, and how Hawthorne started taking notes, and made his hair similar to the rowdy hair of our favorite bestie. However, while Hawthorne's hair is curly, I'm of the belief that Jupiter's hair is definitely pretty straight. So no curlicues for him </3

Hopefully now that I've started to nail down a design for Jupiter, I can draw him more!! I always have soooo many Nevermoor ideas circling around in my brain. I love thinking about designs for various characters and the reasonings behind different aspects of their appearance.

[lunar-years]

The thing is I need the haters to at least get their facts right because if i have to see one more post complaining that Jamie was trying to use the leaked tape as some sort of point in his favour on the grander list of why he should be with Keeley instead of Roy...That quite literally wasn't what was happening, okay!!!! He said that solely and only because he knew it was the single thing he could say that would hurt Roy most, not because he thought it was a genuine argument for Keeley loving him more than Roy or whatever. In fact, it was so Roy-focused and deeply reactionary in nature that I'd argue he wasn't thinking about Keeley at all when he said it. She was an afterthought even in a quickly devolving argument that began centered around her. And yes, this absolutely is just as bad if not arguably worse Jamie behavior!!! But like damn, at least get it right before you start slamming him for it.