joe

I met Nick Land a few weeks ago. He mentioned that many people in his circles were anti-LLMs. Someone asked why he thought so many people were. His answer was better than anything so short I thought of: “People like to exist critically with respect to something.” This I think accurately characterizes a lot of people whose outputs and inputs primarily consist of “discourse” about rather than direct contact with the reality at hand. Existing critically with respect to something makes it easy to seem cool, sophisticated, above something, hard-to-impress and therefore worth trying to impress, especially to others who also don’t have contact with the phenomena itself. And for that reason I think it’s cheap. And to someone who has an inside view of what is being discussed, it’s always so transparent and boring and compressible. I’m far more impressed by someone who is capable of loving something and showing others why it’s beautiful or good. Doesn’t have to be LLMs, but anything at all.