Otto Kretschmer

This is not 100% limited to Marxism IMHO - Francis Fukuyama's "End of History" was an expression of similar mentality (and one of the greatest pieces of ideological hubris in history on top of that)

The Marxist idea of history being teleological, i.e. progressing towards a specific, predetermined goal seems to me to be a secularized version of Christian eschatology with the World Revolution being the equivalent of the Day of Judgement and Communism (stateless, classless society) being the equivalent of Paradise/Kingdom of Heaven. The similarities are especailly uncanny with Marxists Leninists - they have their own prophets (Marx and Engels), the Apostle (Lenin), the infallible Pope (Stalin/Mao), the Judas iskariote (Trotsky, Deng Xiaoping), priesthood (the vanguard party) etc. Maoists even had a thing called "struggle sessions" which were public lynchings of individuals accused of doctrinal errors that mirrored religious persecution. Online debates among Marxists Leninists often boil down to who can correctly interpret the "holy texts", most arguments are unfalsifable and structurally resemble theological disputes. AFAIK Marx took his idea of dialectics from Hegel who was a devout Christian and it's possible that Christianity influenced him even without him being aware of it.

You know, what's funny is that this kind of weird tribalism doesn't just impact serious stuff but mundane as well - the Playstation vs Xbox wars with neverending discussions about specs, framerates, loading times ("my console went from cold boot to dashboard in 8.7s, yours at 9.2s was still showing the logo!"), sounds ("my console makes a sophisticated 'beep' sound while yours only makes an aggressive and ugly 'bloop'!"), controller layout, layout of stuff after unboxing, quoting words of retired or deceased CEOs ("the CEO of X said this in 2004 while the boss of your console maker said somthing really stupid which shows he doesn't care about gaming!") are just comical. PS: Why was the forum down for so long?

An example of mine from three days ago. I was debating the Great Terror on some Marxist Leninist subreddit. I'd pointed out that the NKVD literally had numerical quotas of how many people they need to shot and imprison and someone replied that the quotas were maximum quotas to which I replied that they were not by saying: The result - a permaban with no explanation. It's pretty clear to me that we're dealing with a secular religion here.

Criticizing a public figure at the centre of a major political controversy is nothing to be ashamed of, even if said person is deceased. IMHO it actually needs to be done.

Big five agreeableness doesn't mean "outwardly agreeing with someone", it covers stuff like altruism, empathy, cooperativeness, trust, modesty and also straightforwardness with people scoring low on straightforwardness being more likely to project a false image of themselves for personal gain while high scorers are more authentic. My educated guess about your experience is that people who are crooks might subconsciously or even consciously try to hide their vicious nature by portraying themselves in the best light possible and they actually overcorrect. Here in Poland several years ago we got a dude whose family (wife and kids, one kid survived miraculously IIRC) burned alive, he was crying on tv and wrote poetry about his family. Guess what? He was the killer. He set his house on fire to get money from insurance.

Yes and there is a scale measuring this - the modesty facet of agreableness in the big five personality model. If we assume a scale from 0 to 100 with Gaussian distribution and average score in the population being 50, teleevangelists as a group would likely score significantly below the population norm. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Five_personality_traits

Teleevangelists and cult members are either clinical narcissists or at least people with an above average concentration of narcissistic traits. You just won't have the motivation for so much self promotion if you don't have an unusually high opinion of yourself. Narcissists also love money since it validates their need to feel superior to others.

Uh... knowledge perhaps?

Such positions are also typically simpler and more emotionally satisfying Whan i learned about modern flat earthers, I thought for quite some time that it's satire. I couldn't grasp that someone can seriously believe that lol.

Bump.

Or you're a Schrodinger's cat...

That? I meant that ideological fanaticism is more about group identity than factual accuracy and that such a way of thinking might have evolved in humans as a strategy to maintain group cohesion in hunter gatherer groups living in dangerous environment.

Huh? Catholics (whom I am not) don't need to reject any branches of science ? I used creationism as a shortcut of young eartth creationism which is what's typically understood by that term. The Catholic Church doesnt believe in that.

They do but in a different, less dogmatic way. The Catholic Church officially accepts evolution as a valid scientific theory (see the encyclical Humani Generis from 1950) and does not believe the world to be 6000 years old, the Genesis story is treated more like a metaphore than a literal account. The Genesis account was never taken fully literally by the Catholic Church, Saint Augustine of Hippo already warned against taking it too seriously. Today the Catholic Church accepts all findings of science, including the big bang, it just posits that God is the First Cause.

For 99% of human history being factually accurate was far less important than being socially accepted, a tribal group full of freethinkers without ingroup-outgroup thinking would have fractured and died out. It all mighjt just be evolutionary legacy.

Here in Europe creationism is a fringe thing and the only churches that profess to it are imports from the US, not native European ones. The problem with ideological fanaticism of any kind (religious, political, even economic aka the Austrian school) isn't that it's wrong or unfalsifable but that it's actively harmful. In the US kids have died due to their parents using faith "healing" instead of taking their child to a doctor and let's not even start figuring out how many people died due to political ideologies.

I have experience with debating creationists from over a decade ago as well as recent one with debating Stalinist apologists (who actually consider their belief system to be "science") and honestly, debating such people genuinely feels like trying to punch through a castle wall with a fist - all evidence to the contrary is either rejected outright or reinterpreted to fit the dogma. No change in the core dogmas is possible. One Muslim creationist actually told me she will accept evolution but only if I show her the fossil record of every single generation over millions of years which would require possession of millions or even dozens of millions of fossils. The problem is that for such people their belief system is not just a set of opinions (like prefering bolognese over carbonara) but it seems to be a core part of identity, attacking their beliefs is equal to a personal attack on them and their tribe. But maybe it makes sense to take part in such discussions for the sake of onlookers?

Ok, thank you. I thought it's some shady organization based in Norway that I don't know about.

@TheVat What Norwegian squid?

It's happening again.

So back to the topic. Any ideas?

Lol I quoted a wrong person. I was supposed to quote @swansont's post, not yours. @swansont Chatbots are far from the most important thing in AI. There is this stuff for example: https://deepmind.google/science/alphafold/

What makes you think that AI produces exclusively slop? If AI produces exclusively slop, what makes you think it'll remain like that forever? It's a lot like expecting computers to remain frozen at ENIAC level forever, quite irrational isn't it?