> "online celebrity is only ever 240 characters away from online infamy"
Horace, about 2'000 years ago, suggests a (long to modern eyes) embargo[1]:
> "You will have it in your power to blot out what you have not made public: a word once sent abroad can never return."
cautions against seeking internet points from astroturfers[2]:
> "As those who mourn at funerals for pay, do and say more than those that are afflicted from their hearts; so the sham admirer is more moved than he that praises with sincerity."
and even agrees with TFA's psychoanalytic reading[3]:
> "And whomsoever [a mad poet] seizes, he fastens on and assassinates with recitation: a leech that will not quit the skin, till satiated with blood."
[3] http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%...
Amusingly, footnote 3 in the perseus text is a rosetta stone for the scholar's leisurely manner of saying "like and subscribe": "I must beg to recommend to the reader's notice my translation of Aristotle's Poetics, with a collection of notes, as the two treatises contribute to each other's illustration in the fullest extent."
"That we want to waste our time. That, however much we might complain, we find satisfaction in endless, circular argument."
"But political and economic and immunological crises pile on one another in succession, over the background roar of ecological collapse. Time is not infinite. None of us can afford to spend what is left of it dallying with the stupid and bland."
But in the past we had plenty of crises and yet we used to spend our downtime shooting the shit, going around in circles, with stupid and bland people just like ourselves (there's not many geniuses in any particular locality, and they usually aren't the ones shooting the shit, just as they don't now). At least it was face to face, I suppose. And at least you could go home and leave them behind to watch tv!
Edit: I will admit that there was more time to think and daydream (and be bored) then. Probably because you didn't have a tv in your pocket and, even if you did, there was often really nothing to watch.
>But in the past we had plenty of crises and yet we used to spend our downtime shooting the shit, going around in circles, with stupid and bland people just like ourselve
Past people were much more involved in societal change and day to day history than we are.
You can't make a broad statement like that. In most places, for most times, people have been pretty passive. The mass of people being involved is the exception, not the rule, and even then, it normally was not a majority, but a local minority that acted at the right time that changed things.
I think both statements can be true.
It's just when there are only two hundred people around, each voice has more influence then even an enthusiastic politician nowadays.
So just by living like we do today with having opinions and voicing them you've already influenced your society back then.
If you do the same today, nothing would've changed.
But that's comparing apples to oranges. You're defining society "nowadays" as being hundreds of millions of people, and society "back then" as having only two hundred people. That's like complaining that people are more involved in their family and their workplace than they are with people across the country. It's absurd.
I also can't think of a time period or large geographic area that's had writing being common and most people were constrained to a society of 200 people, unless they were purposefully insular.
while you're once again correct that i'm comparing oranges to apples, my point nonetheless stands. the world population before the industrialization was in the lower hundreds of thousands.
the usual town did house significantly less then a thousand people. compared to a usual town of today with >40k inhabitants.
By year 1500 world population was 500 million, so my point is that your claim how "before industrialization world population was in the lower hundreds of thousands" is completely incorrect. That's my point.
Probably that already in the "middle 18th century" it was close to a billion people (and in any case, many more than low thousands: hundreds of millions).
Heck, ancient Athens alone (a single Greek city) had a population in the "low thousands" in 500 B.C.
Yeah, I don't believe (or see historical proof) for eternal stasis, so I don't find the argument "haha, he complants about kids these days, like tons of people did on their day, so it must have been always wrong to complaint about that" convincing.
There was a Rome, and then a fall of Rome and the dark ages. And the same for tons of institutions, states, cultures, etc.
Heck, there was the pre-war Germany and then there was the Nazi germany.
"Kids these days" is often very true compared to what preceeding generations did at various times.
There were many "past people" who did absolutely nothing when faced with atrocities brought upon Jews in Nazi Germany, just as there are "now people" who risk their very lives by engaing in various forms of activism regarding societal change. Making broad statements about level of engagement of "past people" is akin to statements like "in our time music used to be much better!".
And correct: the telos of the clickbait economy is fascist kitsch
I'm not sure how to parse this. What does it mean for something to have kitsch as its ultimate aim, or for an economy to have an aim?
I think I understand what the author is getting at, which is that exciting the lizard brain in humans is easy to do by creating artificial fears and enemies, and that it takes very little effort to construct this "art". But "telos" specifically doesn't mean "a means", it means "purposeful aim". And I don't think kitsch is the aim. If anything, the aim of the clickbait economy seems to simply be to displace all other economies, which is a rather trite statement in itself.
On the other hand, maybe the author was simply looking for a high-brow synonym for "product" and missed the mark? It's like saying "the telos of the pottery industry is kitchenware". No it isn't: the telos of the industry is to safely store long-term goods.
I think 'kitsch' was used to imply that the products of the clickbait economy trend towards the trivial. Kitsch is not just product, it is cheaply produced product whose value quickly fades; I think it's a fair critique.
Kitsch and fascism have been linked for quite some time. Fro Dwight MacDonald's "A Theory of Mass Culture" (1953):
When to this ease of consumption is added kitsch's ease of production because of its standardized nature, its prolific growth is easy to understand. It threatens High Culture by its sheer pervasiveness, its brutal, overwhelming quantity. The upper classes, who begin by using it to make money from the crude tastes of the masses and to dominate them politically, end by finding their own culture attacked and even threatened with destruction by the instrument they have thoughtlessly employed. (The same irony may be observed in modern politics, where most swords seem to have two edges; thus Nazism began as a tool of the big bourgeoisie and the army Junkers but ended by using them as its tools.)
> "... whereas High Culture could formerly ignore the mob and seek to please only the cognoscenti, it must now compete with Mass Culture or be merged into it."
Horace's Art of Poetry implies that in his time (as in Molière's or Shakespeare's? What about Goethe?) dramatic writers had to consider a wide audience, including but not limited to: the moralisers (those who are senior in years), the elite (those with a horse, or a name, or a pile of money), and the mob (those who buy snacks at the show).
Edit: to what degree is meming, insofar as it is "a spontaneous, autochthonous expression of the people, shaped by themselves, pretty much without the benefit of High Culture, to suit their own needs," a new Folk Art?
ejected myself from a twitter addiction just a few months ago and this resonated.
i think people read the “zombie” comparison as metaphor; IME, it’s pretty literally accurate.
the realization that snapped me out of it cold turkey was that my twitter “self” —- cultivated outside of my body, for an environment of pure text —- had accumulated far more status, meaning, friendship, etc than my physical self possibly could; and why wouldn’t it? the internet has no friction in comparison.
so that weird external GPT-3-esque “self” quite literally reached primacy within me, with a huge margin over the original one unlucky enough to be constrained by physical reality & trained via physical human interaction: and as a result i was genuinely zombie-like for a while.
perpetually a disoriented visitor to physical reality, to the people actually around me — only at home in text. and it was probably clear to anyone who knew me in person well.
maybe annoyingly mystical for HN’s taste, but when this clicked for me, it felt like discovering i’d been possessed by a demon.
While I did not find this article particularly deep, psychoanalysis has hardly been discredited. The core of the theory has been infused into almost every psychological modality practiced today aside from CBT, and studies have shown its general efficacy as a practice to be on par with others and in some cases superior. For the past 20 or so years, the field of neuropsychoanalysis under Mark Solms et al. has done a lot of good work understanding memory, dreaming, and higher cognitive processes stemming from Freud's ideas. Nobel Laureat Eric Kandel wrote in the 90's that psychoanalysis still constitutes the most intellectually satisfying model of the mind; Kandel has gone on to promote studying psychoanalytic ideas with modern neuroscientific techniques. Although several authors have been critical of psychoanalysis, having been criticized by some does not make an idea instantly discredited. There remains no clear way to verify a model of higher cognitive processes in the same fashion as a physics formula.
In 2015, psychoanalyst Bradley Peterson, who is also a child psychiatrist and director of the Institute for the Developing Mind at Children's Hospital Los Angeles, said: "I think most people would agree that psychoanalysis as a form of treatment is on its last legs."
> If you look at all of the complicated ideas that they have developed in an infinitesimal amount of time, if you compare to any other of the sciences how long it takes to get one idea after the other, if you consider all the structures and inventions and complicated things, the ids and the egos, the tensions and the forces, and the pushes and the pulls, I tell you they can't all be there. It's too much for one brain or a few brains to have cooked up in such a short time.
The difference between Kandel and Feynman is that Kandel is a neuroscientist who understands psychoanalysis and Feynman clearly hadn't really read Freud's work, only expressing skepticism on the basis of his vague intuitions about how long it should take to come up with a theory.
Kandel got Nobel for medicine, namely memory physiological basis of neuron storage, not for proving psychoanalysis correct. His thoughts on it are as relevant as Feynman.
A counterexample - Tesla was also a genius Engineer but he also believed in Aliens, and doves with laser eyes, being infused by Cosmic energy.
Kandel's obvious expertise on the functioning of the brain puts him in precisely the right position to give an assessment of how realistic Freud's models in describing what happens in the brain. More specifically, his expertise on the neurology of memory is directly connected to a lot of what Freud hypothesized about how memory functions. In fact, in his 99 paper on psychoanalysis and neuroscience
https://ajp.psychiatryonline.org/doi/full/10.1176/ajp.156.4....
Kandel cites specific neuroscientific mechanisms that connect with mechanisms in the paychoanalytic model. This is very much his area of expertise and far more relevant than Feynman shooting from the hip about something he does not really know much about. Kandel is an expert in neuroscience and from the literature very well versed in psychoanalytic work, and makes actual arguments salient to both disciplines to justify his opinions, as can be seen in the above article.
Ok, but did Kandel proved Freud right? Did he found proof for ego, id, super-ego, Thanatos/Eros in brain morphology? Me skimming it shows little to no evidence of so, hence his contributing to prove Freud right is no more different than what Feynman did.
I did found this gem though:
> Thus, unlike various forms
of cognitive therapy and other psychotherapies, for which compelling objective evidence now exists—both as therapies in their own right and as key adjuncts to pharmacotherapy—there is as yet no compelling evidence, outside subjective impressions, that psychoanalysis works better than nonanalytically oriented therapy or placebo.
So wait. Even he admits Psychoanalysis is less useful than what we have currently. Way to bury the lede.
From what I see, this is more a rally to revive psychoanalysis on solid biological grounds, than confirmation of psycho analysis as such.
The question is not whether Kandel proved anything, but merely whether psychoanalysis has been discredited. I am not making the case here that it is proven, verified, or completely substantiated in any particular way (here at least). That people are still taking its ideas seriously in mainstream research fields is enough to show that it is not discredited. The whole point of the aforementioned article is argue that psychoanalysis has credibility as a theory.
Kandel points out several connections between ideas from Freud's model and potential neuroscientific correlates. The subsequent works of Solms have further pursued these connections as a rigorous scientific project. How can you compare all of this to Feynman arguing against psychoanalysis on the basis of personally doubting someone could come up with it?
These are not marginal outsiders doing basement research. A theory being discredited means that there is a consensus in research against it. There is plenty of active research in reputable institutions both in psychoanalysis and neuroscience as I linked to explicitly, as well as in therapy research (which could be surfaced pretty easily). Many may have contested psychoanalysis, but tis is not what a discredited theory looks like.
> The question is not whether Kandel proved anything, but merely whether psychoanalysis has been discredited. I am not making the case here that it is proven, verified, or completely substantiated in any particular way
Well, if it's not proven and verified, if it's not more useful than another theory, what is the point of it?
As the wise man once said "All models are wrong, but some are useful". Why stick with theory if its useless?
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Let me demonstrate - Geocentric system is correct. From POV fixed to Earth it's correct to say Earth is center of rotation. So they nailed the particulars. Sun and the rest of the stars/galaxies rotates relative to Earth.
However, here is the kicker. The more you want to study movement of a certain galaxy, the more cycles and epi-cycles do you need to construct. The calculations become more and more difficult. In other words - model is useless. Model with high effort to predictive power is useless.
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Is Freud right on some particulars? Yes. I do believe there is strong evidence of a subconscious and conscious process, and subconscious process being the foundation for consciousness.
But ID/EGO/SUPER-EGO? No. That probably doesn't exist. Same for his Eros/Thanatos. Same for his obsession with child sexuality (this was experimentally disproven). It's just a relic of his flawed theory and worldview. Why are people trying to resurrect it? No idea.
Instead of building a theory based on evolution, biology, psychology, people are chasing what some Victorian philosopher said as if it were a gospel.
At the moment, there is no canonically useful model of the mind that is established in the consensus of those who study it. You are writing this as though psychoanalysis has been replaced by some better theory that explains more of the phenomena that it addresses, but no such theory exists. One of its main contenders, evolutionary psychology, does not actually provide a model for the mind, just the conditions under which it developed. Other models have offered piecemeal models of isolated effects such as cognitive dissonance, many of which are subsumed by psychoanalytic models anyways. The point of Kandel referring to it as the "most satisfying model of the mind" (at least in 1999) is because it addresses a territory of phenomena that still does not have a clear alternative. There is no analogous "geocentric system" against which psychoanalysis looks Ptolemaic. From the above reference to work, clearly psychoanalytic models are not useless, and hence researchers continue to find reasons to stick to it.
I think you are conflating Freud's model of the mind with a couple of particulars. The id/ego/superego is not particularly central to Freud's work until it makes an appearance as the "second topography" in the 1920's. The most important part of his model involving unconscious processes are almost taken for granted by psychology today after trying to soft shoe around the idea for half a century via reductive behaviorist models that fail to substantially account for anything complex like language, culture, thought and memory.
Even if we address the second topography, why is it that it "probably doesn't exist?". Is it because Feynman doubted it? It would certainly be dogmatic to suppose that this suffices to justify this claim. Solms et al. have done a lot of work showing correlates between the model of the ego and the id and functional neuroscience, so there is work to show that they very well may exist. You cannot just assert that these things don't exist because you or Feynman don't personally buy into them. None of these researchers are taking Freud as gospel, as you seem to be taking the words of Feynman. Denying that psychoanalysis is useful means engaging in those actually working on its ideas, or even engaging in Freud's ideas substantially, and making clear arguments for why this should be treated as useless.
> At the moment, there is no canonically useful model of the mind that is established in the consensus of those who study it.
I'd personally go with either one that shown promise, i.e. can be used to cure people and can make testable predictions. I know it's hard, this is psychology. I think a lot of theories that shown promise are computational theories of mind.
> I think you are conflating Freud's model of the mind with a couple of particulars.
I've never read a book about Freud's model without id/ego/superego or Oedipus/Elektra complex, etc.
Like, ok. He hit the mark with conscious/unconscious. What else?
> why is it that it "probably doesn't exist?" Is it because Feynman doubted it?
Because I'm neither a psychologist nor a fortune teller. I'm not aware of any modern theory really propagating id/superego/ego as some form of structure of the mind (I could be wrong here), nor am I able to say that in future we won't discover exactly three precise parts of the mind.
So no. It's not about Feynman. It's about how Freud came with his theory of the mind and the "evidence" for it.
First. He didn't look at data and then synthesized a solution. He basically said, yeah, this looks like it, lets make conscious and subconscious. Oh, and different desires. And different parts of mind. And make them three.
Second. Psychoanalysis is essentially science based on hearsay i.e. therapist reporting their view on the patient. Yeah, no way that could be biased or distorted. I'm pretty sure I cured cancer in that one guy. He had symptoms of common cold, but I definitely cured him of cancer. Yup.
That's not how you do science. Like I know psychology is hard to do, because it's not like you can debug a person (in clear conscience).
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But Feynman is onto something. Frank Wilczek defined a beautiful theory as one you get more than you put in, or as he put it exuberance of productivity.
In lieu of that, for having all these parts and urges and egos and complexes, what does psychoanalysis do that other disciplines can't?
Whether one assesses one or another proposed model as having promise is a matter of debate and not a means to credit or discredit anything. It does not seem as though there is any case here for the assertion that 'psychoanalysis has been discredited', as that issue is no longer being debated.
Instead, it seems that the question you are addressing now is whether psychoanalysis is a promising model. That is a different issue and bears upon a discussion of the theory itself. If you have never read a book about Freud's model without id/ego/superego, you don't appear to be familiar with Freud's work to begin with. Look at everything Freud wrote before 1920, and there is little mention of these things (the ego shows up some because the term in German was just "Ich" and is used anywhere a notion of "self" is referenced, but the "id" and "superego" certainly make no appearance until later). "Interpretation of Dreams", the "Introductory Lectures", the 19th century works on "Neurosis", and the metapsychological works primarily address unconscious processes, memory, repression, and other mechanisms of defense, with reference to hysteria, obsessional neurosis, paranoia, and psychosis. The id/ego/superego organization was introduced later in "The Ego and the Id" and other works around that time.
I would suggest if you are skeptical about Freud, and want to actually evaluate his ideas, and not cartoons of them, you should at least read "The Unconscious" or "Interpretation of Dreams", particularly the third part of the latter text. If you read Freud, you will see that he most certainly looks at data and syntheses solutions. Freud very clearly and methodically deduces most of his ideas from accounts of neuroses, dreams, and other mental phenomena. In the "Interpretation of Dreams" for instance, Freud discusses previous research on dreams, observes many interesting qualities of recorded dreams as well as discourse in therapy, "and then synthesized" a model of cognitive mechanisms that would account for the phenomena, among them condensation, displacement, and regression. He then goes on to further synthesize a plausible model of how these processes work in general, how memory and consciousness plays a role in them, and how these models are consistent with cognition in general. Modern research on dreams actually substantiates this fairly well thus far, taking the position that dreams are forms of memory consolidation and the consequence of "regression".
You really have to read some of this stuff and not just parrot what you have heard others say about Freud. The "Elektra Complex" is not even Freud's idea; it was an idea of Jung's that Freud was critical of.
"Psychoanalytic is as discredited as theory can get" - you'd be surprised. People saying such have in mind some caricature of 19th century Freudian analysis.
>Plus the article is riddled with sentences like "telos of the clickbait economy is fascist kitsch."
Which basically means "the final state the clickbait economy moves forward as its inherent tendency is fascist kitsch".
>It's just empty claptrap, that could have been written in half as many words, if the writer wasn't trying to be as pretentious.
In other words, if we talked down to his audience, assuming them to being half-illiterate Joe Sixpacks.
> People saying such have in mind some caricature of 19th century Freudian analysis
Article mentions Freud's desire for death.
Freud theory is bunk. It's unprovable, can't be verified, useless and outdated model. If psychology as a whole has a replication issue. Freud psychoanalytics has a deeply existential issue.
> Which basically means "the final state the clickbait economy moves forward as its inherent tendency is fascist kitsch".
I know what it means. In the end you didn't explain much, just explained what telos is.
Let me help - Clickbait economy is a rage generator.
> other words, if we talked down to his audience, assuming them to being half-illiterate Joe Sixpacks.
I read my fair share of philosophers, I understand what he's trying to say. However it's all been said better and more eloquently by CCP Grey in his video on memes.
Any halfwit, pompous, rudderless, telos lacking humanities reject could have written, a long, detalied, baroque word salad if the whippersnapper in question was so inclined - much like this sentence.
Real artistry isn't saying as much as you can, but saying as much as you can in as few and understandable words.
Yes. Which is not the same as a caricature of Freudian analysis.
>Freud theory is bunk. It's unprovable, can't be verified
Not everything has to be verified. This tendency of Anglosaxons/Analyticals to want to "verify" everything is bunk. Heck, it's itself unprovable and can't be verified (you can't verify the need for verification -- in the end you always get to some unverified tenets you need to begin, e.g. utilitarianism).
>To quote a poet "Brevity is the soul of wit".
To quote another poet: "I have heard many people say, "Give me the ideas, it is no matter what words you put them into.... Ideas cannot be given but in their minutely appropriate words".
Not everything can be verified. However a self proposed science that isn't verified is just philosophy. Hence, my four elements from Aristotle.
What Freudian psychoanalysis has is a semblance of science. It reminds me of quacks selling quantum energies to cure your back problems. Only instead of quantum its Phlogiston.
> Heck, it's itself unprovable and can't be verified
An unprovable science is just philosophizing.
As for verification can't itself be verified. Purely theoretically - yes. However. Purely theoretically you could use a rock enchanted by your local witch doctor to send me this message.
Are you using such device (not based on science, and verification but magical powers) to communicate?
My point is, verification is based on things working in the real world, which psychoanalysis for the most part doesn't.
>Purely theoretically you could use a rock enchanted by your local witch doctor to send me this message. Are you using such device (not based on science, and verification but magical powers) to communicate?
No, but that's probably a coincidence more than anything else. Other cultures have used such methods, and were satisfied by them!
We might say "sure, but they were ignorant, those methods didn't work", etc. -- but if they had no qualms about them at the time, our objection is somewhat moot...
Well presumably he read it because he wanted to. I wouldn't have survived such language myself either, luckily "Max" was there to boil it down for you and I.
And I found the review fairly amusing for a while. It cited some competing theories, including the book's theory which, despite psychoanalysis equating to people pulling complex theories out of their favorite orifice, was still a rather interesting theory worth thinking about.
Certainly it beat a lot of articles about "fixing" social media which often seem to be little more than attempts at maximizing ad revenue by packing in lots of references to famous recent outrages and/or Trump (who barely got a mention here).
The toxicity of social media is that it plays into the darkness of our cognitive process and hightens tribalistic thinking. And in the article about social media, instead of recognizing this, the author chooses to use social media as a jump off point to pseudo intellectually glorify his tribe while bemoaning the oposite tribe. It's re-hashed fox/cnn with longer words. As someone who is non-affiliate to either tribe and finds the tribalism silly, the conceited sound of the article is jarring. I'm pretty sure the inspiration for South Park's smug alert episode was based on people who write this stuff.
The author talks about the good of social media as such:
> street uprising of the late spring felt like its joyous opposite—a future in which platforms were responding to and being structured by the events on the ground, rather than those events being structured by and shaped to the demands of the platforms. This was something worth our time and devotion... As people in the streets toppled statues and fought police...
And talks about the perils and evils of social media as such:
> promoting people who exist only to be explained to, people to whom the world has been created anew every morning, people for whom every settled sociological, scientific, and political argument of modernity must be rehashed, rewritten, and re-accounted, this time with their participation. These people, with their just-asking questions and vapid open letters, are dullards and bores, pettifoggers and casuists, cowards and dissemblers... That we get some kind of fulfillment from tedious debates about “free speech” and “cancel culture.” ... why not spend a few decades of it with a couple New York Times op-ed columnists, rebuilding all of Western thought from first principles?
Horace, about 2'000 years ago, suggests a (long to modern eyes) embargo[1]:
> "You will have it in your power to blot out what you have not made public: a word once sent abroad can never return."
cautions against seeking internet points from astroturfers[2]:
> "As those who mourn at funerals for pay, do and say more than those that are afflicted from their hearts; so the sham admirer is more moved than he that praises with sincerity."
and even agrees with TFA's psychoanalytic reading[3]:
> "And whomsoever [a mad poet] seizes, he fastens on and assassinates with recitation: a leech that will not quit the skin, till satiated with blood."
[1] http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%...
[2] http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%...
[3] http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%... Amusingly, footnote 3 in the perseus text is a rosetta stone for the scholar's leisurely manner of saying "like and subscribe": "I must beg to recommend to the reader's notice my translation of Aristotle's Poetics, with a collection of notes, as the two treatises contribute to each other's illustration in the fullest extent."
Bonus tube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UKftOH54iNU