faceh
5hr ago
My suspicion is that the rise of 'useless' genders studies degrees and major overproduction of women with degrees took off in the 90's, hence why we didn't really get a swarm of SJWs until the 2010s.
Colleges were hives of leftist thought long before then, but that was counterbalanced by there being ample alternative routes for one's career before that point.
Also, look at the stats on women getting Masters and Doctorate degrees to see where the problem became SERIOUS.
My modest proposal there is death penalty for such men.
But people find that goes too far, so I would suggest we simply castrate them, as a compromise.
I've already munched on that bullet.
My thesis is that they're just way more susceptible to virtually any ideological brainwashing, just as the Orwell quote implies.
And college is completely captured by lefties at every level, so, that's where the brainwashing pushes them.
College is in my view a large part of the problem. Social Media and Tiktok is another. Arguably that's the mechanism through which they police each others' behavior once they're out of college.
I wouldn't imply this guy was bound for a happy ending, or that ANY woman was going to be a good fit for him.
But on the margins, the fewer stable relationships formed, the more you got guys who might have otherwise been able to get some kind of fulfillment from a family who are instead left out in the cold, and MIGHT be pushed into this sort of action. And to the extent guys like this can't even harbor a HOPE of getting a relationship, more of them might decide to not even try, and then the question is what they do with their lives.
They're not bought in to the future of their society, so where should they direct their efforts?
The social technology for lifelong celibacy has fallen from favor.
What happens if the pair of you have a serious argument, a really bad blow-up, when in a relationship? It can be fixed, or he decides you need to be shot?
Also, since when did women, in general, actually prefer 'stable' boyfriends? Recall my point about Luigi getting fangirls. Although being conventionally attractive helps.
Part of this guy's whole argument is that women are selecting for traits like aggression, short temper, capacity for violence.
faceh
7hr ago
My ongoing modest proposal is RETVRNing to 1993.
Females attending college en masse seems like the nexus of many issues.
That's where they get turned into lefties.
That's where they incur significant amounts of debt.
That's where they rack up a body count.
That's where they acquire inflated standards in mate choice.
It burns 4+ years of fertility.
In short, they become far less appealing as partners in most cases, on the back end.
So it stands to reason that making it harder for women (and people in general) to secure student loans would reduce their attendance rates and would organically, downstream of that, lead to more relationships, marriage, and children.
I could write a manifesto on that topic, but I wouldn't want to shoot anybody to get it attention.
faceh
8hr ago
You adapt to them. In the modern dating landscape, you either lean into the hypergamy and superficiality of it all, or you reach a mindset where you are okay with staying a virgin for a long time, potentially forever.
The third option is you lash out at the system itself. For a lone wolf this won't be particularly impactful.
I mean, Clavicular is maybe the ur-example of "lean into the hypergamy and superficiality of it all," he's only twenty years old and is clearly depressed at the life he's now 'stuck' in (by his own doing, naturally). This won't hold over the long term.
Where do we go from here?
MY personal belief is that once we start to lose the Boomers, the primary bulwark against political changes in this country, a LOT of political options that were previously stymied will come on the table.
We might be able to limit how extreme those options end up being.
faceh
8hr ago
Its not lack of sex, its the basic impossibility of economic calculation when society reaches a certain level of complexity.
The problem is, the distribution of sex is intractable at EVERY level above, maybe, the village, without some distributed coordination method.
Go look at various attempts at forming small scale communes and see how many of those failed because one guy started hogging all the women despite the representation that it was all about free love and equality. Okay, its also because all the labor ultimately fell on the men, or a small subset of them, they can't even get the distribution of LABOR right in these cases.
Ironically, you're thinking too big. Not every "Marxist movement" is the Soviet Union.
Oh, and just a note guess what China has to start cracking down on in the name of Marxism.
Because even under Marxism with Chinese characteristics, you can't make women WANT to settle for just any dude.
A not insubstantial reason for the rightward shift of young men is that they notice that the left applies Marxist logic to every problem except the one problem that they are bothered by most of all.
No joke, this is one core reason Marxist movements will always fail, since sexual reproduction is a massive bottleneck, and yet by all lefty logic every person should be 'entitled' to reproduce, yet women are biologically wired to jealously guard their own reproduction, so 'distribution' of sexual contact, let alone actual reproduction, will ALWAYS turn hierarchical, unequal, and skewed towards the 'attractive' males, whilst attractiveness itself is never equally distributed.
I read (glanced over and noted the arguments) the manifesto, and it leaves me with an awkward feeling.
Basically the guy is pretty much correct on the pure factual level about everything he's seeing.
Its clear to me that he has directly experienced the modern, toxic dating pool/culture, and was probably caught between the impulse to adapt to it as it exists, or to lash out against it as an unfair, unsustainable, unhealthy artifact of modern culture.
The fact that he analyzed it with lefty-coded language is interesting but doesn't add much insight.
I find his ultimate methods abhorrent, unjustifiable and ineffectual.
But unfortunately I can't readily point towards a more effective strategy that he could implement on his lonesome. Solving the problems he identifies requires coordinated efforts.
So I'll keep my points brief:
I've pointed out how Male Grievances are almost never given any legitimate airing in mainstream publications. Indeed, it is exceedingly rare for a male writer to get to publish a piece on gender issues at all!
As you noted, Men are not allowed to organize around their own interests as a gender.
No politician ever voices male grievances as part of a policy platform.
So as this guy found, if you have not built up a large following a la Clavicular, your concerns will never get heard, your voice will never raise above the din of social media. You functionally do not exist.
And the one mainstream figure who was willing to voice these concerns was Charlie Kirk, and he got murdered by a lefty.
Oh, and add on that Lone wolf shooters like Luigi Mangione can garner significant female attention.
A lot of guys will connect the dots thusly:
"I have no real hope of getting a wife and happy family in my lifetime. I have no political representation. Nobody will listen to me if I speak out myself. No publications will ever stump for my concerns. I can't organize with other males to advocate for my interests, and if I DO become famous and popular whilst speaking out, I can just be killed in cold blood. However, if I do enough damage and spill enough blood, suddenly I have people paying attention to me... and if I survive I might see increased female attention to boot. Worth a shot."
Something something burning down village to feel warmth.
So my ongoing concern is that we're going to see a serious uptick in young male crashouts that involve (attempts at) mass killings or destruction, many of which won't be as thoughtfully targeted as this one.
What do you think happens if a generation where an actual majority of the men don't even believe in gender equality achieves political power?
Implement some solutions now to correct course, or I'm genuinely afraid for how the Zoomers will end up addressing this problem that, from their perspective, stole their future.
This guy was a 25. A Zoomer. The concerns he puts forth in that manifesto are WIDELY HELD amongst Zoomer males.
And these Zoomers are NOT BEING OFFERED A BETTER PATH FORWARD in the status quo.
Solve for Y chromosome.
faceh
13hr ago
Yeah, almost certainly had a few that got away with war-crime levels of it, and most that got a few girls total.
So the gut-wrenching calculation is how many girls did these gangs tend to cycle through over how long a time period.
Yep.
Also the fact that people are horrible at judging scope, which the rationalists also point out.
25,000 vs. 250,000 are literally a whole order of magnitude different in terms of the 'scale' of an atrocity. You would desperately HOPE that the scale is closer to the former than the latter!
But I bet the average person isn't envisioning the 225,000 person difference that entails, both just register as "a huge number of young girls." But the 250,000 number is clearly 'bigger' and thus a more useful bludgeon, so from a pure rhetorical standpoint OF COURSE you're grabbing onto that if you can justify it at all.
For my part, the reason that number triggered skepticism is it implies truly prolific activity by the gangs in question. Going with what seems like to me an absurd estimate, if there were 1,000 distinct 'grooming gangs' over the period examined, each one would need to rack up 250 victims to reach that figure. That's a high enough number to involve actual logistical challenges. Even if you invert it, call it 2,500 grooming gangs, that's 100 victims each.
The ratios just don't make sense to me.
It's slightly easier to accept that maybe there were 250,000 individual victims of sexual assault by migrants, mostly in a decentralized "I was accosted by a random guy on the street" sort of way, rather than all of them experiencing sustained abuse by legible groups.
Nevertheless, there's sufficient, indeed ample evidence that organized rings exist so the scale can surely be in the low 1000's to mid 10,000's if we're looking at a period of almost 20 years.
If one guy (Epstein) with a little help could 'traffic' dozens of girls over the same period, definitely feasible that multiple gangs could pull it off too.
Anyway, at this point I'm less upset over whether the 250,000 number is true and accurate or not... and more by the fact the UK government cannot actually confirm or refute it because they've been asleep at the wheel for so long the necessary data just wasn't collected???
The "problems" I view with the culture in rationalist and immediately rationalist adjacent communities is pretty much exactly what you alluded to.
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Tossing aside norms and traditions because they can reason out rules that work better and a more universally applicable morality. Whilst eliding that norms and traditions that survive are carrying important information and aren't just noise.
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Relatedly, a tendency to write off second order consequences that happen to other people. I'm specifically thinking of the embrace of polyamory for this and the previous one. Rationalist morality seems to care a lot about the individual... and a lot about humanity as a whole. But the in-between levels are less of a focus.
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And finally, the ad hoc reconstruction of certain norms and rules from 'first principles' whilst almost never acknowledging that's what they're doing. "We went through a very circuitous journey of discovery and we've wound up in almost the exact place that things started out, and we learned so many useful things along the way (that most 'normal' folks already know and consider 'common sense')! How fun!"
This is my take on EA, ultimately. "We can do philanthropy CORRECTLY by throwing out the extant playbook and starting from scratch with proper axioms, measurable goals, and airtight logical reasoning. Aahhhhg where'd all these persuasive grifters come from? Why are we falling prey to edge cases constantly? Why are all these people mad at us when we just want to improve the lives of shrimp?"
In short, when they're relegated to their laboratory in Berkeley to work and play amongst themselves they seem to get on just fine as things go. Interacting with the outside world they often project a "we're not weird, you normal folks are just doing EVERYTHING wrong!" attitude, and yet they haven't really been able to demonstrate that their way of operating (culturally, that is!) is a workable system given the substrate that our civilization is actually made of/running on.
Which hey, write all the fanfiction you want about a superior, uberrational alternate universe where things are done better! But end of day you're living in this one.
What you're hitting on seems to be a manifestation of this sort of hubris. Maybe its justified.
I think Rationalists et al. would do a lot better if they approached norms and traditions with a via negativa approach. Don't start from scratch. Remove one (1) given rule and see what changes. Then maybe another one. If something breaks then reinstate a rule. And don't slice through multiple rules in one fell swoop, especially ones that look particularly load-bearing, EVEN IF YOU THINK YOU CAN REPLACE THEM WITH NEW, MORE OPTIMIZED RULES.
If you're going to remove rules/taboos on casual, public sex... don't ALSO remove taboos on involving young kids in sexual activities/exposing them to strangers in sexual situations. Especially if you've also removed rules/taboos on drug use and, call it 'self modification' from tattoos to top surgery (fair admission: I am presuming that this stuff goes on at vibecamp).
Increasing the risk of sexual assault (and the attendant trauma and mental health issues) is certainly one possible outcome there, but you're basically banking on every individual attendee to, I dunno, intuit the proper boundaries of behavior when there are kids around, after you've already gone ahead and blurred the lines to an absurd degree?
I think a person of average intelligence but more 'standard' upbringing can foresee the failure modes there pretty easily.
faceh
7d ago
I sometimes wonder how much the valuation of those companies (and hell, the entire stock market) is impacted by the pure actuarial odds of Musk getting into a fatal accident or straight dropping dead.
The valuation of Berkshire Hathaway continuing to rise even as Warren Buffett reaches ancient age is a hint that maybe it is less than we think. But that's a very different industry.
faceh
8d ago
Yes, the North Korea model (maybe sans nuclear capability) is a semi-likely outcome in my outlook. Very minimal force projection capabilities, but fanatically committed to defense of its internal autonomy.
What are you suggesting they would do with frontier models? Not disagreeing really, just "how to use strong-ish AI for literal world domination" isn't something I've spent much time looking at.
I would be remiss to pretend any special knowledge here, but we have reliable proof that DoD was using them, so the guesses are not completely wanton.
My speculation would be feeding in their massive, gobs of intelligence files about the leadership structure and individual leaders into it and asking for a comprehensive report on which guys are the most amenable to negotiation and which are probably never going to accept a deal (and thus would need to be removed from the table).
They've sort of confirmed that it was used for target selection.
faceh
8d ago
Near as I can figure, the total cost of materiel lost to the Vietnamese was roughly <5% of the total defense budget at the time.
Even if we grant the U.S. being fully defeated in the war itself, I dunno if 'trounced' is the right way to describe it in that context.
I mean, Afghanistan was also a loss for the U.S. in the end but again, not really a trouncing.
Genuinely, Germany's example is the surprising one because they took massive casualties and material loss, then 20 years later had a fully industrialized, cutting edge military force which outperformed all their immediate neighbors'.
Because they've proven the concept that they can effectively close the strait of Hormuz and cripple gulf oil production with a collection of low-end weapon systems that can't be intercepted reliably enough to counter
And the U.S. has shown that they can shrug this off far, far easier than pretty much all of Europe.
And can enforce its own blockade as a retaliatory step too.
and, as mentioned, can pop their leadership structure at will.
Iran has no winning hand here. Maybe they have a hand that forestalls an actual invasion indefinitely. But they also seem to be constitutionally incapable of 'surrendering' so I have little doubt they're happy to posture and claim whatever victories they can.
faceh
8d ago
Good to know. Also good to know that Firefox's "Copy Clean Link" feature automatically removes that info.
Outside of Germany post WWI, I can't think of any national military in the past few centuries that got trounced thoroughly and then somehow this made them a BIGGER threat in the short term.
One of the curious assertions I saw from both the right and the left is that Trump would fold due to pressures from the midterm elections looming. Which, sure that is absolutely on his mind, but the timing of the actual attack very deliberately gave him a LOT of runway with which to bring the plane in for a landing. Like, a ton.
We're still 4 months out from the actual elections. An eternity.
An armed man literally rushed into the White House Correspondent's Dinner a month and a half ago. He was specifically trying to murder Trump, its on video. He's still alive. Nobody talks about him. Maybe it gave Trump a short boost, but the news cycle is simply unforgiving.
Yes a massive energy crisis or recession induced by same that lasted for months would hurt the GOP in the midterms.
Since that didn't materialize, you should be considering your priors as to how heavily this whole thing has been gamed out. Add in the fact that the DoD has had access to Frontier AI models in the months leading up to it.
Whatever actually impacts the Midterms will probably be events in the month or so leading up to it. Making confident predictions about those results is premature, trying to tie the uncertain outcomes of the Iran situation into it is double folly. And now we've got the whole summer of America's 250's birthday celebrations to goose the patriotism.
Arguably THAT was the bigger, more immediate pressure on Trump, to bring down gas prices for summer travel and to ensure the war wasn't going to present a distraction from festivities.
The questions now are whether this can be turned into a longer-lasting and more regional peace, and what will become of Iran's nuclear dust.
I'm kind of betting against it now that I've seen just how entrenched the Iranian leadership structure is, and committed to their ideological aims. And how Culturally they apparently can't ever, ever, ever present as having lost face.
But now that I know we can decapitate their leadership structure on a whim, this causes me less concern.
I'm not under the impression that these companies are HAPPY to shell out this money, and if they start to more aggressively cap their employees AI use (Already happening). Other headlines say it accidentally spend that much.
This particular spend doesn't seem like it was received well. So if Anthropic being profitable (in the short term) requires a bunch of companies to recklessly/ignorantly run up AI bills well beyond what they expected or intended, that's not a sustainable model.
If you get companies ratcheting down their AI spend, then the numbers we saw for Anthropic in the last quarter are so will likely not repeat.
faceh
12d ago
But the companies operating the stablecoins and whatever, were mega companies like Coinbase.
Or they were inherently unstable. RIP Luna.
Its interesting that while the fundamental tech behind Bitcoin has proven utterly sound, the inability of the tech to compensate for the human/cultural element of the community we build around it has made it less effective at its generally intended purpose. I mean, it still functions as a currency, yet that's arguably the least common use case for it these days.
Either way, there was absolutely a tipping point when the core operators in the environment stopped being a majority of those who understood and supported the technology and got outnumbered by those who were about the price and keeping it pumped even at the expense of the tech, or just straight up scamming.
Anthropic is nearly profitable, or supposed to have been profitable in Q2.
I'm suspicious about that given stories like this.
Maybe they had a revenue-positive quarter, but if it was buoyed by various companies overshooting their AI budget, this might not be an actual trend.
I've been suggested this was even an intentional move by an Anthropic investor to goose the company's valuation by artificially increasing their ARR (claims, not substantiated).
The 1973 oil shock is a useful precedent.
Not quite. The U.S. has been a net energy exporter since 2019. So domestic energy production can more than satisfy our needs for the foreseeable future.
That's before we get into the possibility of nuclear coming online.
Yes, higher oil prices impact the U.S. too, but we're not going to be the first ones to tap out, in either a literal or metaphorical sense.
Remember we just secured a massive source of nearby oil.
One thing about markets, they respond to shifts in supply and demand.
Solid question, in that case.
Could do what I did. Buy a classic muscle car. Gives you something to work on and fun as hell to drive, especially on backroads.
LARP as a moonshiner.
Add on "Prediction markets are going to change EVERYTHING" (mostly used for sports gambling, unfortunately), the Internet of Things is going to change EVERYTHING (I will now spend EXTRA money for a toaster that isn't wifi connected), OMG we might have found a room-temperature superconductor, VR/AR tech is going to blow your mind, Crypto hype moved from Blockchain hype, to DApp Hype, to DAO Hype, to NFT Hype, to Stablecoin Hype, and it was all illusory.
WHAT THE FUCK WAS WEB3?
Its funny, I MOSTLY could spot when a trend was more hype than real.
I sold all my crypto in 2019. Never bought an NFT. I thought Metaverse would become something but nobody had a good vision for it, 3D printing is indeed a cool, useful tech but don't bet the farm on it.
But I feel sketchy now because all those hype cycles leave you suspicious if the next big thing is actually arriving or there's just people who make a lot of money if you believe it is.
SpaceX seems to be real, but maybe still overhyped.
GLPs ARE the real deal, and there's some other neat drugs in the pipeline.
Smartphones continue to be a boon... if you can avoid all the gamified apps designed to suck your attention and money.
Quadcopter tech is pretty damn mature now, and is finally achieving some market penetration.
Right now, I'm still contributing to my 401(k), Roth IRA, and HSA investments for the tax advantage, but I'm being more conservative in my taxable brokerage.
It feels absurd to focus on that right now, when the way things are going we're either going to get crash and hyperinflation wiping out a ton of that nest egg, or a new industrial revolution that goes exponential and so even modest market holdings will make you wealthy over the next 10 years.
The ONE thing that doesn't seem likely to happen is just steady 7% growth in the market (on average) over the next 25 years.
Not the evidence I've seen.
Specifically, college educated womens' voting patterns (in the U.S.) vs. those of non-college educated women.
I would agree that their natural inclinations are towards the left, if anything.
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