And why do you use "appropriate" instead of "immoral"? If a fat joke at a convention must necessarily be construed as bullying just in case (e.g. just in case the target is a fat, sensitive person for whom it might the final straw), wouldn't it be more appropriate to call it "immoral"?
And some of my earlier comments have been so far beyond the pale that they've been ... removed? Is that because I said some dumb, sorry "inappropriate" things, or because someone has decided I'm an "inappropriate" person?
In response to Charlie: yes, context; yes, imbalance of power. But, as I said in my first post: overshoot of a principle. And overreaction.
Funnily enough, I was just watching One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest the other night, and it's shocking how old-fashioned the film seems. What's with having a "hero" who's committed statutory rape? And McMurphy is such a misogynistic asshole, the way he treats those girls he invites to the sanatorium, slapping their behinds and all. Thoroughly inappropriate behaviour. And what's his problem with Nurse Ratched? She obviously means well; she's just doing her duty ferchrissakes.
]]>Someone making fat jokes about someone again and again, and with vicious or manipulative intent, would certainly be bullying. And in retrospect, the first fat joke in that series would be understood as the beginning of that person being bullied.
But a single fat joke at a convention? Is that really bullying?
Or has language gone on holiday here again?
]]>I am male, but I don't see what difference that makes. Are females uniquely fragile, little treasures to be kept from the slightest shock? Hmm, that sounds a familiar ...
There's a difference between something done for amusement and something done out of viciousness. If the former is put on a level with the latter, the latter loses distinction as something abhorrent.
Unless one takes the tack that all humour is necessarily vicious, in which case, let's just forget about laughing at anything ever again. Maybe laughing at things is just bad.
Jesus, I'm 54 years old, what the fuck is the world coming to?
I think basically it's just "overshoot"; a line of thought on automatic pilot. Certainly, to be in a minority and laughed at for something you can do nothing about, like your skin colour or accent, must be extremely unpleasant. But jokes on such a basis aren't funny anyway, and clowns like Bernard Manning and his ilk were deservedly shot down for it.
But laughing at a man or a women because they're fat - which 9/10 is something they CAN do something about - is not on the same sort of level at all.
Fat people are intrinsically funny. Cheeks are often puffed out as if the mouth is permanently full, fat wobbles, and people who are very fat usually waddle in a semi-majestic, semi-ungainly way, which in itself is intrinsically funny.
If it's too painful to be fat, the remedy is easy: cut out all sugar and all processed foods, exercise.
Only if someone is fat because of a condition, would I agree that humour directed at them is misplaced, and to the extent that it's not always possible to tell (although actually it is most of the time), that's the ONLY reason why scattershot fat jokes in public aren't a good idea - precisely because what's being laughed at is out of the humour-butt's control, just like with racism.
However, had Wossie done that, the proper course would have been for some nearby wit to take the piss out of his speech impediment and see how he liked it.
All that to the side though, of course it's a private do, and the organizers have the right to invite or not invite whoever they like.
]]>What happened to thick skins, what happened to, "sticks and stones will break my bones but words will never hurt me"?
Are words, humour directed at oneself, so painful to bear now that we have to ban vicious humour or caricature, walk on eggshells, etc.?
As a stone-gone comics fan, Jonathan Ross has done a fair bit to make geeky stuff respectable. I don't see why he was an inappropriate choice. If he were to call someone out for being fat, or whatever, so what?
Can't we laugh at each other any more?
]]>It's tied up with the ability to lie, in the sense that lying is possible because we are able to make this distinction. We can create an impression of "me" for others while all the time being aware of a private sense of "me" that can either coincide with the presented "me" (what's called "authenticity") or be totally different, a facade.
For sure it's grounded in world/self modelling abilities that many animals share (especially social animals), but with us it's developed (in tandem with our extraordiary linguistic specialization) to such a level of sophistication that we could quite rightly be called "the species that lies".
Or to put it another way, while many animals can model themselves and their place in the world, we can also do something even rarer: model our interior workings to ourselves. Albeit we are, as Dennett says, not the experts on ourselves that we think we are, we are sort of experts, close enough for jazz most of the time.
Anyway, this is the sort of thing that, I think, people really mean when they talk about sentient robots. For example, ironically and somewhat amusingly, a sentient robot that could pretend to be an insentient robot in a Turing Test would have to be sentient.
]]>Self-awareness, IOW, has something deeply to do with being in society with like others.
Precisely because of the problems re. substrate (how fine does the simulation need to be, etc.), I think the path of direct simulation is pretty hopeless, at least for the foreseeable future.
Better, I think, is the path of a neural net (howsoever instantiated, doesn't matter) being taught, interacted with - raised by its makers, in a sense.
But then ... why bother? :) As you say, intelligent specialists and expert systems are really all we need, and there's no incentive other than curiosity to build sentience.
I think it likely that sentient machines will come, but not for a long time, and only as a by-product of the kind of intelligent-machine-building that's more utilitarian, combined with this path of either building more than one of them and having them be social and grow up together, or intensive interacting with a single machine to raise it like a child. And when that happens, there WILL definitely be a moral issue, as there isn't with merely intelligent machines.
]]>Re. the "are games art" thing - when I think of this, I think of particular peak moments in great CRPGs (BioWare, Bethesda), where some event in the game has moved me (to elation, to tears, etc.) as a virtual participant in an unfolding story, in a way roughly analogous to the way it might move me as a passive observer of a story in a film.
A "moment" like this in a relatively recent game that comes to mind was in Dragon Age: Origins, when I as a protagonist, managed to convince an "evil" person to drop their thirst for revenge, and make amends for what they'd done. The combination of the trouble I'd gone through to get to that point, plus the VO, the digital puppetry and the music, resulted in me having floods of tears as the guy did the right thing and the music soared. THAT was a form of art, to me. And to me, it has something to do with immersion, with being totally "there" in the story, in the virtual place, with virtual characters who, for a moment at least, seem real.
Re. the future of film, I agree with a lot of what you say, Hugh. Spot on. Particularly with the thing of actors being able to act in the virtual space. It must surely be incredibly hard for actors who don't have strong visual imagination to react to things that they can't see.
Also re. mixing real actors with digital "spear carriers", procedurally-generated stuff, etc., I agree with that too, that's the way forward, and an example of the kind of convergence you're talking about.
Great stuff! :)
Of course, our genial host was way ahead of the curve with Accelerando. In his Wired/Dotcom Bubble trance, he foresaw how it is all going to proceed ... :)
]]>There's an odd uncanny valley effect when you have naturalistic motion with blocky models though.
Hmm, that reminds me, re x games, what about Skyrim, has anyone done anything in that? In terms of looks, with hirez models, things can look absolutely amazing in that game.
Thinking: I guess what's possible for VR machinima is limited by what's possible with the way models are animated? It seems to me that models in games are between two stools of having a structure that's convenient for whatever the game designers want to do, and being models that could be "lived in" as avatars, where the structure of the model has more of a 1-1 correspondence with the structure of the body? (Think of those weird limb distortions one sometimes gets, etc.)
I have a bit of a theory about that, mainly that, although of course you don't need to virtualize the body to the nth degree, I think the "tensegrity" structure of the body (not just bones and muscles, but also fascia) and the way the body holds itself up against gravity has to be modelled, so it has a natural bounce and elasticity. That "tensegrity" structure should be handled by physics, to form a neutral "base" for animation, and then you overlay specialized motion capture on top of it, blend it somehow. This is what would avoid the "stiff bucking bronco" effect you get with CGI so often - that weightless, disconnected feel, which still hasn't disappeared even in the most expensive CGI.
(And then of course there needs to be some sort of collision physics for the body in relation to its own limbs, etc. Interestingly, there's been a recent development in Skyrim modding. A Chinese guy has put a Havok physics layer underneath the Skyrim engine. At the moment, it's a few experimental things like the inevitable bouncing boobies and a flowing geisha dress and a Tomb Raider type ponytail, but the possibilities for this seem huge for the future. It's called "HDT".)
Damned interesting, all this :)
]]>I actually "invented" Machinima in my own mind roundabout 2004 before I'd even heard of it, and was chagrined to discover it was already a "thing" :)
My version had the additional twist of using VR so that actors could actually act "in" the game environment (i.e. seem to themselves to be in the game environment). Needless to say I was disappointed to see that the tech hadn't evolved at that time, or was too expensive. I was pleased when King Kong came out though (showing that face capture was getting better).
I wonder if developments re. Oculus Rift would make VR-based Machinima possible in combination with motion capture suits and a nice big space? The problem with Machinima for me is animation, I'm scared of it. Yeah, it can be great and it has its own character, but I'm more interested in the possibility of getting actors to act in a cheap virtual space.
(OTOH, I'm aware that even motion capture has to be extensively fiddled with to get it to work. You cant' win.)
]]>Particularly the fight scenes, very well done. Having decent voice-acting helps a lot (Brian is just awesome :) ).
The only thing I'd say is that this kind of low-rez 3-d stuff isn't very conducive to long, lingering looks - a few milliseconds in and you realize you're just looking at a blocky 3-d model.
But other than that, it's watchable and enjoyable, and I want to know what happens next.
]]>The question is what's the best political system? Let's take it for granted that we all share roughly the same morality. We don't want to see people abused, starving, etc., etc.
A political system is generally a kind of machinery to do social stuff, a machinery that boils down to force or threat of force.
A common response is that this machinery should be the tool of the public weal, the tool of a majority public opinion, of elected representatives, etc., etc.
Now of course there's a whole passel of interesting problems at that level. And the usual result is the idea of a democractic government run by "us" (the good guys) that corrects whatever imbalances it supposed there might be, in the distribution of goods and services that would have fallen out without such correction.
But that level of questioning doesn't go deep enough. The real question is not "who rules?" (or its subsidiaries "under what circumstances?", etc.) but "is there any validity in the concept of "rule" at all?" The real question is, do we need such a tool, and if we do, under what limited circumstances?
Anarchism and libertarianism say, "if at all, only just barely".
Hence, any and all government policy should be understood to be not a potential solution, but as a least-worst outcome, as a lesser of evils, or something in the nature of training wheels, useful only to the point where individuals do in fact commonly take responsibility for themselves and their own lives, and learn to self-rule (and from there, to communality). (Incidentally, from this view, democracy falls out as another least-worst method of sorting out the "who rules" question.)
So, if there is a perceived social imbalance, the first question ought not to be "what can government do?" but "what is stopping people from doing?" This might indeed result in some policies that might be practically indistinguishable wrt a libertarian state vs. a socialist state. The difference will be, practical terms, that the policy will be more readily ditched if it doesn't work as advertised, because it isn't based on ideology, on what policy-makers think ought to be, but rather on observed pragmatic effect, in the libertarian case.
So it's not so much that libertarianism thinks we can do away with government tomorrow. We probably couldn't. But it ought to be our solid, long-term political aim to see how little politics we can get away with, and how much can be done just by individuals interacting according to common rules. It ought to be the political aim to nurture ground-up stuff that's already tending to happen, rather than impose solutions from above. Etc.
In the longest historical view, what basically happened was that the great democractic revolutions got rid of kings, but not of the king's ruling tools (i.e. government). They didn't get rid of the ruling tools because they thought good could be done with them. By now, we ought to be less naive about it.
It's ok to have training wheels, but they will have to come off at some point.
]]>Essentially, there is nothing wrong with capitalism per se - i.e. with the principle that the means of production can be in private hands. It actually doesn't matter who owns the means of production so long as they run them productively.
The evil always comes with collusion between a subset of capitalists and the State.
Mainly it's two types: the industrial and the financial. The industrial types lobby for new laws to restrict their competition, and the State disguises those laws as beneficial to the majority. The financial types keep the debt cycle going in a way that benefits the State first of all, them second, with everyone else further down the food chain effectively indentured to service the debt.
]]>The super-rich like it because they can cream off debt repayment when it's at it's highest value, States like it because they can use it to indenture future generations to pay for their cloud-Cuckoo-land vote-catching promises du jour.
It's the primary source of the peculiar phenomenon of us living in a world of abundance but still feeling like we're on treadmills. Basically, the extra value we produce is stolen from us, in a way not too dissimilar from the Marxist idea of stolen surplus value (but Marx laid the blame on private property in the means of production - i.e. capitalism - per se, whereas the blame in fact lies in the collusion and cronyism of government and big business, i.e. it's more a fault of perverse incentives set up by the State, in the first instance, and as a system it's as old as the hills, it just works to enslave us all more efficiently - becomes more salient - with higher technology).
It's also the primary source of consumerism run rampant - basically more has to be gouged out of the earth to satisfy the debt monster, and our psychology messed with, and statistics mismanaged and massaged.
Anything which breaks this debt system is bound to be good.
Bitcoin is not The One in this regard. Nothing is The One, and the end of the old system will come by a thousand cuts - by, e.g., the large pension funds and large capitalist stakeholders diversifying portfolios, avoiding the bond market, and using other forms of money in general, and holding more and more transactions outside the system.
But Bitcoin is a helper in this regard - part of the solvent. I look forward to other forms of digital money in the near future. Caveat emptor and may the best one win.
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