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Yikes! Predictions sure are hard, especially about the future.

A good time was had by all!

Internet 1.0 before the primitive accumulation, the world would be so much smarter.Sadage

Great conversation

What is frustrating about the conversation in academia about AI is that it's disconnected from the all the other ways in which academic professionals are actively deskilling themselves. Students writing papers with AI is a problem, but plenty of academics I know use it as a means of editing their work. There has also been a wide-scale adoption of text-to-speech and speech-to-text tools which are essentially changing our understanding of literacy without any forethought or contemplation about the wider implications.

Thanks for fighting the fight. Beyond Cutrone's issues, the comparison here is pretty inspirational. Namely, I have in mind Cutrone's overall readership and influence. In that respect, you could do the same with Allen Ginsburg or Rachel Maddow's critique of capitalism to anyone in the right grad school.

One thing marxists never speak to is, if we have to implicate China and Russia in global imperialism, why is their imperialism so different? Why aren't they putting babies on pikes and committing mass rape and genocide like the USA and its proxies? Why is Chinese imperialism low interesting lending, but American imperialism is plague fleas, false flag attacks, nuclear bombs, and napalming children?

Shared with people doing Reading Groups, suggest everyone else into Reading Groups watch first

Varn makes a very important claim: "I refuse to sell people bullshit". And it makes you realize how much BS is sold as part of the daily operation.

Thanks for this series Varn. I've been engaging with Cutrone for a while, but ultimately rejected his project as idealist and have joined MUG. However, I do keep finding myself having issues with Mike Macnair's takes as well, and some of Cutrone's critique of MUG are holding up too. I've traced this all back to Lukacs, thus I ordered "History and Class Consciousness" to further develop my critique. You starting a deep dive on Lukacs right when my book arrived is serendipitous, and I'm looking forward to hearing more of your takes while I work through it.

As for the money angle: 1) Get public funding like so many companies do 2) Or attach a raffle and a lifestyle (e.g. Apple's selling a "creatives" lifestyle and getting rich off of gacha games on their store being used by users who have the money)

On the point of Nvidia Vs AMD: AMD has ROCm which allows Nvidia Cuda (AI) code to run on AMD cards. Nvidia shut that down legally recently but so who's to say that that can hold. Nvidia is on thin ice here because China is also developing AI. Nvidia needs to deliver and even if they do keep things at reasonable prices, it's not like AMD wants to let Nvidia have the market just because they have the developers. AMD has the hardware just as much.

Feels like some overstating of costs going on. If you narrow the tasks sufficiently enough you don't need to go crazy on training let alone running the thing (which is already eminently affordable). Of course the overstating of costs is part of pitching the thing as the road to ASI or whatever like this is a thing you could in principle throw unlimited resources at after all.

AI is good for summaries so it'll damage existing advertising channels. And reduce required labor time. That's probably it.

No famine in 1788-1789, no revolution, no terror, no 18 Brumaire, no Austerlitz, no Waterloo.

Omg, this is the teamup of two seperate worlds of my TH-cam watching that I never thought would intersect.

that hair! the man is becoming Marx!

@C. Derick Varn - Speaking of Marxist historians, have you heard of James Vaughn? I ask because Doug Lain mentioned him in response to a comment I made on one of his videos. In response to my suggestion that he have Professor Gerald Horne (author of “The Counterrevolution of 1776) on his podcast, he said “I will invite Professor Horne on, perhaps in order to put him in conversation with James Vaugn.” Later, I watched a youtube video with Professor Vaughn. He is presented as a “Marxist historian and professor at the University of Chicago” on the 1Dime Radio youtube channel for the video “The American Revolution: What the Left Gets Wrong”. I would be very interested in your reaction to this historian if you have heard of him. Excellent show by the way. I am a fan of yours and the Esoterica channels.

“Dragon show”😂 Game of Thrones is objectively the best, most high-quality tv show in history.

Just starting to listen to this discussion, but … “Oh, X thing is missing from X thinker.” …And?

Bonsai level reflections, very impressive, VV :) Shared with all the generations that needed to hear today, Such a beautiful message with a Strong Vox ;)

There should be a world championship in ranting; Varn would easily win that!😂 I have never watched anyone rant like him!

It would be very cool to see an analysis of Phillip Mirowski's (and others) ideas on markets as automata and the implications of this be for Marxism/ the left today

We all have blind spots, but missing the fact that your audience is 90% aspiring wizards is a pretty big one.

great discussion - warms my heart to hear people promote complexity.

Computer scientists still think they can code intelligence into existence, but that's gullible. Denis Noble once said in order to even set the ground stages for something close to AGI, we'd need to build an entirely new type of computer, build of water (remember, cells are largely made of water), not semi-conductors. If you wanna create human type intelligences, then just have kids.

Thanks Varn, this was super informative and appreciate your additional commentary on the article.

Israeli Defense Forces Commando and postmodern designer Gal Hirsch in his autobiography would offer the following on how militaries frame the concept of “profit” as distinct and unrelated to commercial contexts: “Unlike the business world, in the military realm, the ‘profit’ is reflected by the ability to create an effective and timely operational response”

Imagine if we had taxed away the monopolistic profits and excessive wealth that allows such splurging on grotesquely expensive moonshot ventures. Redistribute the wealth, give people healthcare, & allow them room to try new ventures & ideas they might not have had the ability to risk otherwise & who knows where the next brilliant idea will emerge? It’s absurd to think that just because someone had one supremely good idea that they’re going to keep pumping out more, or that they have the right to waste so much capital in the attempt.

It's pronounced Ass-eh-moglu

Okay, on the whole issue of the historicity of Jesus, I tend to agree that he probably was some kind of apocalyptic preacher or prophet in first century Palestine etc. However, I think Richard Carrier has successfully made the case for Jesus mythicism not necessarily being some cranky conspiracy theory. The man is definitely very well-read on the subject. An important aspect of his work is pointing out how all the supposed “evidence” for Jesus’s existence is not really evidence at all, but rather very ambiguous. To take an example: when Paul talks about “James, brother of the Lord”, that’s supposed to be evidence for the historicity of Jesus since James is assumed to be the biological brother of Jesus. But a “brother of the Lord” could be any male Christian (or member of this Jewish sect), since they all were considered brothers and sisters of Christ. So it’s ambiguous. So what Carrier is very good at establishing is how thin the actual evidence for a historical Jesus really is. Unlike Carrier I still think it’s more likely that he existed than not, but it’s not a slam-dunk in the way mainstream historians claim.

“Linguistics is a science.” Well, it is as long as it’s Chomskyan; otherwise it’s not a science…

Amazing episode

I came across some Durkheim recently where he was saying values come before epistemology and rituals produce language. I’d love to hear your thoughts on that topic.

can we have a movement which has a classless society? yet without the marxist attack on spirituality and the liberal arts??? yet with the rest of the knowledge of marxist thought? hellllooooo😮

HELL yeah

Any Matt Christman fans here? I hope he gets well. I want a Justin/Cush Vlog crossover.

What a pleasant surprise this was. I'm not surprised at Dr. Sledge's thoughtful and erudite politics, but he's so good at "staying in his lane" otherwise that this feels delightfully leftfield to me. Like seeing your favorite teacher at your favorite record store.

This has been a great introduction to a subject I didn't know I needed to look into. Thank you both.

Great episode!

Structural determination for Dr. Sledge seems to go one way here, from structure to subject. But surely if subjects emerge from structures they also then act in ways that potentially modify those structures, and also make existential choices between different determinations which make some essential and other determinations basically irrelevant. I disagree with a lot of what Marx says, but if he was JUST an emerging nodal point of history, there should have been many "Karls" arising from his milieu. But there weren't, in fact a major problem of Marxism is that no milieu was created which could produce thinkers as astute as Karl Marx, so we only have the one, and that's precisely why his writings get put on a pedestal. Obviously the "great man" theory goes too far in the other direction, but individuals do matter and sometimes particular individuals do have a disproportionate effect on history compared to others in their milieu. The existential choices individual humans make within the context of their "thrownness" do matter. So, the conclusion people should make about Marx is obviously not "he got everything right." But it also isn't just "He's a typical product of his time and place." He is not. So, the conclusion we make should be, "Wow Marx really developed himself intellectually in ways that allowed him to open up new horizons for the future development of the human species, I should work really hard so that I can live up to that example, and perhaps even surpass it!"

I tend to think of Jesus as a fabrication that is quite heavily based on Julius Caesar who was some sort of Bernie Sanders like reformer figure so that's that.

Please add this conversation to the podcast. Great stuff!

1:18 love the shade on Foucauldian historians!! 🎉

I also only came across Sledge's channel within the last year and I've found it fascinating. Can't say I understand how the materialism and the practitioner stuff sit together... I've also found it kinda puzzling why Moses is a construct but Jesus is a real historical figure, maybe I've just not seen the videos which explain that...

Awesome. A crossover long time coming. More of THIS, please! Adepti of the world Unite! We have nothing to lose but the chains of our capitalist egregore!

Love the idea of Jesus as a questionable character 😂

That was fun.

I've really been looking forward to this. Two of my favorite channels collide!

My two favorite educators on yt came together, and it did not disappoint.