By David Futrelle
You may have noticed a strange explosion of highly surreal memes hitting your Twitter home page of late. Blame the Artificial Intelligence-powered meme generator that you can find here, which will happily generate as many weird and baffling memes as you could ever want.
Now, the meme generator is a fairly basic thing, in principle: it takes in hundreds (thousands?) of human-generated memes in a variety of formats before pooping out something it doesn’t understand, but that we humans might.
Given that the AI-meme-generator literally doesn’t know what it’s saying, most of the memes it puts out tend to be a bit puzzling:
And sometimes it doesn’t seem to understand the meme format at all:
But alongside the surreal memes, the AI-meme-generator somehow manages to spit out others that make perfect (or at least only slightly imperfect) sense. I’ve been fiddling around with it for awhile and have been surprised and intrigued by these memes, which seem very much like the memes an actual human might produce on their own.
Indeed, these memes make a lot more sense than many if not most of the Men’s Rights memes I’ve run across (and written about) over the years — despite the fact that the MRA memes were generated by actual human beings who, at least in theory, should know what they’re saying.
Let’s look at examples from both genres — contrasting some of my, er, favorite MRA memes with memes the AI-meme-generator made for me.
Let’s start with this authentic MRA meme:
Apparently the thought process behind this, er, hilarity is: “Women are stupid! And rape is funny! Sharks!”
This AI-generated meme makes a lot more sense:
I mean, who doesn’t enjoy a nice hot dog once in a while?
Here’s an MRA meme taking aim at women in the military:
Contrast that with this cheerful and wholesome AI-generated meme:
Again, the AI hits the nail on the head. Everyone loves to see people talking about their cool stuff.
Here’s a dark and bewildering MRA meme:
I suppose the message here is supposed to be “even if she says she’s not a feminist, she might secretly be one, and falsely accuse you of rape.” But I’m not sure anyone not steeped in MRA-talk could discern that.
Also, why is “radical/white” in ironic quotes?
By contrast, this next AI-generated meme, while admittedly rude and perhaps a bit sexist, is as clear as a (school) bell.
This MRA meme may leave you scratching at your head as you try to puzzle out its strange “logic.”
This AI meme, by contrast, makes so much sense it hurts.
In the world we live in today, who has the patience to wait until you get home to get sloshed?
So why are MRA memes so illogical and incomprehensible? Part of the problem is that reality is not on their side, and so many of their memes only make sense if you’re already living in the imaginary world of the Men’s Rights movement, where black is white and mean, bitchy women rule over all. I know enough about this world from the many years I’ve spent doing this blog that I can usually make some sort of sense of most of their memes, but I still struggle with some of them. It doesn’t help much that many MRAs are bitter bastards choking on their own aggrieved entitlement; their attempts at jokes are undercut by their meanness and their barely developed sense of humor.
The AI may not have a sense of humor, but it’s also unencumbered by all this baggage, so when it pops out with something that’s funny, it’s genuinely funny.
Congratulations, MRA; it’s official now: You’ve failed the Turing test.
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@MansVoice:
No thank you. While I’m fully prepared to believe that Roko’s Basilisk is rather unrepresentative of whatever the place is like now (I ditched it pre-basilisk) I’m not particularly interested in diving back into a place which by all accounts still consists largely of, to paraphrase Jenora on the previous page, “engineers reinventing philosophy badly”. I already find real philosophy to be not my style of intellectual masturbation, and that sort of thing is even less appealing.
@WWTH
I think MansVoice can’t get into all of that because he can’t admit that he’s wrong, or mistaken, or even that he’d rephrase something now that he as the benefit of hindsight. He wouldn’t even acknowledge he’d forgot time zones are a thing, or that he didn’t know the regular commentariat does not in fact sit in a cellar all commenting together but exist in different places around the world. I wouldn’t even think anyone stupid for overlooking time zone stuff, since I do that all the time.
@Alan Robertshaw
This reminds me of a story by Theodore Sturgeon, The Incubi of Parallel X, where aliens invade the Earth and try to round up all the women because they want a chemical only human women produce. Apparently they want this stuff so badly that they aren’t even worried about ensuring a continuous supply, they want all of it and they want it now.
Not that I wouldn’t want a hostile alien invasion to be done by aliens who’d overlook stuff like that, since it might make them more easy to beat, but if you’re going to go to a parallel dimension to get something that would benefit your species or even just yourself long-term, but only if you keep getting more of it, at least set up a breeding programme or take a DNA sample and set up cloning in incubators or something, don’t just go at it willy-nily.
One of the all-ages Marvel Adventures: Avengers stories played with this. Ego, the Living Planet started flirting with the Earth (and later Giant-Girl), but having a planet-sized mass so close was wreaking havoc due to gravitational forces. The Avengers convince him to leave by showing how populated the planet was. Apparently humans are the cosmic equivalent of cra… er, cooties. (It is an all-ages comic!)
Alan wrote:
I’ve seen ‘quiet forest’ described as something that’d seem unreally quiet compared to an ordinary forest, especially if you’re familiar with forest ecology and actually pay some effort in trying to find animals, like a biologist or nature hobbyist would.
Actual rainforests are known for high biodiversity but not for abundance of easily observable animals (larger than a mosquito, anyway). A typical rainforest might indeed seem oddly quiet if you expect the lush vegetation to support a lot of vertebrate land animals. Reasons for this might include:
a) Forests don’t actually provide very much suitable food for vertebrates, especially on ground level. Plenty of small vertebrates live up in the canopy, which is relatively high above ground and difficult to observe.
b) Forest vegetation obstructs your view and provides more hiding places than food for the animals.
c) There is a superpredator around – humans living in nearby villages often overhunt local game in abscence of effective regulation, targeting especially all larger, easy to find animals.
Who wants to bet MV is a Peterson stan? He’s acting like one all right, they all shout “out of context! You can’t comment until you’ve read all his books and seen his 50 lectures on lobsters!” Sort of like what MV is doing with LW.
@Nequam
This also somewhat reminds me of Lilo and Stitich, where Earth is cordoned off from the rest of the galaxy because a government agent convinces the aliens that it’s a sanctuary for critically endangered mosquitos.
Have you read my post about your favorite “hypergamy” article? If not, why did you skip it, since it was right there? If so, why are you ignoring what it said? Is it because I demonstrated that you are not as smart as you think you are, and you don’t know what science actually is?
I’m very curious as to if I’m in a looksmatch relationship. On the one hand my Special Someone is almost movie star handsome with a square jaw, piercing dark eyes, and working man’s muscles, but is *gasp* South Asian, whereas I’m a reasonably attractive white woman with great legs, great eyes, and a jaw like a horse.
I’m I going up because he’s beautiful and I’m pretty average, or down because I’m white and he’s not?
Come on, let’s see how this plays out!
(And yes, I’m bragging about my Someone’s looks. If I went on about all the things I actually love him for we’d be here for months.
The short version is “he treats me like I am perfect for being me, even where he admits I’m flawed.” )
@Cats in Shiny Hats:
That’s a great Someone to have. He and Mr. Parasol could form a club.
@Cats and Parasol
Can wives join that club? Because I’ve got a candidate….
“The Sequences” apparently means “comment threads on LessWrong, btw.
Gee, back from last night, and a whole lot went on here…
@Alan:
That’s an interesting thought. I also like the ‘super-rational’ logic there, the whole ‘what if everybody thought this way’ idea. (I credit ‘super-rational’ to Douglas Hofstadter’s discussions on the Prisoner’s Dilemma, where he pointed out that ‘rational’ always meant defect because you always did better for any decision by the other side, but ‘super-rational’ realized that the other participant(s) were going through the same decisions, so co-operate was better if everybody did the same thing.)
I know one of the other things that people have brought up is that we broadcast a lot less radio and noise out into the universe than we used to. More of our signals are by cable, more of them are digital (which is harder to pick up and analyze remotely), for power usage reasons more of them tend to be directed rather than just omnidirectional, and there are a lot more overlapping signals as well. Back in the 1950s you could probably pick up Earth TV at Alpha Centauri with good equipment, now all you’d get is a jumble of overlapping sets of noise. (Which you touch on later on.)
Also, regarding ‘quiet forest’: there is nothing quite so quiet a forest as a Christmas tree farm. This is because pine trees practice chemical warfare and the decomposing needles alter the soil pH enough to ensure not much else grows around them, meaning not much animal life either. It’s kind of spookily dead-seeming.
@Snowberry:
From what I’ve heard, not only has LessWrong not gotten better, it’s gotten worse as Yudkowsky himself became more distant from the site and the louder and more dedicated neoreactionary types drove off a lot of those who were more trying to make a decent go of it. As you say, it lacked the self-policing to keep out the sociopaths, and the sociopath circle-jerk pushed out a lot of other conversation.
The Basilisk wasn’t the problem, the Basilisk was a symptom of the deeper problem of the sorts of lines of thinking the people there had convinced each other was ‘rational’.
@Gaebolga:
As far as Lister is concerned, I believe it was actually part of the writer’s bible for Red Dwarf that there were no aliens at all. Everything they ran into was the result of development (natural or artificial) of life from Earth. There was a Red Dwarf role-playing game that explicitly said this, as well.
@Policy of Madness, Alan:
I also watched Cosmos back during its first run, though it was hardly my first exposure to some of the ideas. (My grandfather was an amateur astronomer with a rather large back collection of Sky and Telescope magazine.) Yeah, it was mind-blowing at the time.
I know that in some world backgrounds I’ve seen set up for books and RPGs, they make it pretty explicit that spaceships never get used for bulk cargo, as it’s just not efficient. Sometimes the only real interstellar trade goods are art.
Actually, if you want crazy alien ideas… there was a tabletop RPG from The Australian Gaming Group called ‘Hunter Planet’ where Earth was a wildlife/hunting preserve and aliens came down to hunt us, Predator-style… except the aliens in question tended to be cut from the same cloth as the upper class twits you get fox hunting here on Earth, and when they ran into serious preppers (or just the Australian wildlife) they tended not to do so well. The organization that sponsored the hunting tours was playing up the challenge of the locals to get more interest while trying to downplay just how many losses they actually had. It was a very silly game.
@Dalillama
Wait, so he’s just telling us to read hundreds of comment threads? That’s even worse than I thought.
@Gaebolga
Sure!
Lainy, would your husband want to join the club as well?
According to the RationalWiki the “Sequences” are a list of essays that are, in total, longer than the LotR trilogy. Buckle up!
This “but have you read our foundational documents? HUH HUH?” position honestly reminds me of Scientology. Scientology also has a huge corpus of documents that you apparently must read in order to be qualified to criticize it, documents that no normal person has time for and which also amount to semi-coherent wannabe-philosophy. Digging in is a fool’s errand, but the True Believers can out-of-hand dismiss anyone who hasn’t bothered because they have important other things to do with their time. At least LessWrong doesn’t appear to have a financial stake in you reading their nonsense, so there is that.
@Jenora Feuer
This reminds me of the episode of Futurama where the Omicronians were watching Earth TV on a thousand year delay and got angry when the last episode of their favorite show failed to broadcast in 1999, so they invade the Earth.
@PoM
There is no way I am reading that essay list, but it looks like I’m not missing much. I’ve never read any of the Scientology material either.
@Naglfar
It amuses me that MansVoice thinks we should read his cult’s foundational documents before we’re allowed to talk about it, but it’s clear that he feels free to criticize feminism without having read word 1 by a feminist author. Not only does he not know science from a pear tree, he doesn’t think his own standards apply to him.
@ jenora
You might enjoy this.
@PoM
This seems to be generally true of the alt right as a whole. I have yet to see an alt rightist read any important left wing/feminist/socialist/human rights content, yet they appear to think that they are entitled to everyone else reading up on their stuff. Maybe it’s because he’s a man and most of the commenters here aren’t, so he thinks we should be required to meet him where he’s at?
For material like the Sequences, I think the people who worship it are the ones who don’t have enough critical thinking / analytic ability to see that it’s pseudo philosophical nonsense.
You all need to stop loving your partners so much. It is indecent to be with someone because you feel affection for them instead of because they are objectively the correct level of hot for you.
@Naglfar
My position is that telling someone “go read X and come back to me when you have” is an automatically-invalid debate position. If I agree with X, I should be able to explain and defend it myself. I should be able to hold the X position without leaning on you going and engaging with X as a source material.
So if MansVoice thinks that the Sequences are the bees knees, he should be able to explain and defend them by himself. Offloading that responsibility onto me is intellectually lazy. If he doesn’t understand them enough to explain and defend them, then it’s valid to say that, but I doubt he is that honest.
You don’t automatically lose by pointing someone to X source material, but it’s not the winning gambit that MansVoice seems to think it is. There’s no checkmate in pointing a finger and then sitting back and basking in the big W. That’s just lazy and stupid.
@ naglfar & POM
Indeed.
Our friend is also forgetting a key rule of advocacy and persuasion generally. “Use the evidence to make your point!”. It’s something we tell new barristers a lot in advocacy training.
You have to point to the individual passages in the evidence that support your arguments. It’s not enough to invite people to trawl though it and hope they arrive at the conclusion you want.
Having said that, professionals often do the same thing. Here’s a nice recent quote from a judge.
@Alan
Just saw this and thought of you, especially since it features a lawyer from your side of the pond.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HSJzhEAy5Ww
Have some COVID-19 memes! Review provided by an American litigator and a British trainee lawyer.
@Viscaria
And worse, I don’t even know how to find my looksmatch. I mostly date people of my own gender and he never answered my question about that.
@Alan Robertshaw
When I was in school, that was something that every English teacher I had told us to do. I’m curious if MansVoice failed writing, seeing as he can’t do that to save his life.
Alan, my “argument” is that I think the Sequences are good. You are all welcome to read them and judge for yourself, but dismissing the Sequences as “pseudo-philosophical nonsense” without reading even part of them just makes you a partisan clown. And I think “the jury” would agree with me on that.
Hey dipshit. React to my post that was directed to you. Until you do, you’re ceding all the ground to me and demonstrating what an unserious, uneducated nincompoop you are. Why should we read your pseudophilosophical bullshit on your recommendation when your recommendation is clearly worth zero? You don’t know what’s good and what isn’t.