FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
And every gimmick hungry yob
Digging gold from rock n roll
Grabs the mic to tell us
he'll die before he's sold
But I believe in this
And it's been tested by research
He who fucks nuns
Will later join the church
User ID: 195
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
5hr ago
The clothing and manners debate is orthogonal to the core question of sorting. I don't particularly care if our elites wear suits or hoodies, as long as we're selecting them for the right reasons. My objection to aristocratic sorting isn't the aesthetics, it's the inefficiency. If your system selects for people who know which fork to use, and knowing which fork to use happens to correlate 0.7 with having rich parents but only 0.2 with job performance, you've built an inherited oligarchy with extra steps.
As a very wise friend of mine recently said:
This is the big one. We live in intense cognitive bubbles.
The problem is when we generalize from this filtered view. We start believing that because IQ doesn't predict success within our bubble, it must not predict success period. We see a colleague who's a bit slower but works incredibly hard and does fine, and we extrapolate that to everyone. We forget that the slow colleague is still in the 85th percentile of the general population, and that the person in the 30th percentile who works just as hard isn't a doctor at all, they're doing something else, probably something that pays worse and doesn't sound as impressive on a Hinge profile (see proxies re-emerging?).
Dressing neatly in a clean and appropriate suit and tie doesn't strike you as a cognitively demanding task, or even really in this day and age an indication of wealth outside of branding, just as a chore to learn and a cultural heritage to pass down. But it does serve as a filter for baseline intelligence and conscientiousness when widely understood as something we can screen for. There are people that are too stupid to dress themselves properly, or insufficiently conscientious to do so neatly.
By building a culture where this is a well known expectation, we create a culture where we can look at someone and (as @pbmonster said in the SSS thread) have their IQ tattooed on their forehead. There's obvious spirals of fashion and veblen goods and in-group signaling that are bad, but culturally expected dress codes don't need to be focused on that. The broad concept of "appropriate" dress. does not need to veer into wasteful or extravagant dress.
Basically, yes, you shouldn't judge a book entirely by it's cover; but damn wouldn't the book store be more convenient if book covers told me more about the content in the book? And this seems entirely within the control of the publishing industry.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
6hr ago
In what alternate reality besides truly tiny niche examples?
You're right, I was probably being insufficiently precise.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
6hr ago
Depends on the family. Does his wife's father have any AAQCs? What about his paternal cousins?
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
7hr ago
I'm not sure it really fit, but I couldn't resist the joke.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
9hr ago
Leave the backseat moderation to heritage mottizens.
This favors the people living and breathing inside the dominant culture. It favors the legacy admission who knows how to dress and speak. It subtly closes out the dissenting voice from the outsider who might have raw supercomputer-level processing power but speaks with a regional accent, wears ill-fitting clothes, and hasn't learned the subtle dance of feigning humility while signaling status.
Some professions, like programming, are comparatively more sane/honest. You can have a perfectly decent career in FAANG if you don't shower regularly and speak with a lisp, assuming you are actually good at your job. Hell, like the dude with the MLP (pony, not perceptron) resume, you can counter-signal by being incredibly eccentric. If you're still drawing a seven figure salary, then you're worth it.
Just picking out this particular area of your comment, it amazes me when intelligent people (like you) actually repeat this odd myth in the year of our lord 2025. What you're talking about as "sane" in the programming profession is exactly what you're decrying elsewhere as opaque vibes based sorting. Programmers acting like slobs might have been rebellion against corporate life, or reflected a genuine lack of interest for social norms, twenty or thirty or fifty years ago. Today, it reflects precisely the opposite, tech-bros compete over who can performatively display their slobbery and betrayal of social norms as evidence of their talent. When professors and executives wore suits, choosing to wear a t shirt meant something. Today, it is just another form of cultural signaling.
Sam Bankman-Fried is our prime example, but there are millions more. SBF's appearance and behavior wasn't based in a natural untutored naiveté, it was a carefully cultivated performance for investors who superstitiously believed that this was what a genius startup founder was supposed to look like. He didn't play League of Legends during investor calls because his professor parents never taught him basic manners, he did it because he wanted to demonstrate to the crowd just how "above it all" he was. And venture capitalists ate it up, believing that the performance of Aspie disdain for social norms could substitute for actual genius. Sequoia Capital put it on their website! as an example of how cool SBF and FTX were, and how Sequoia was the hip company that could understand these kinds of geniuses, who could understand their vibes.
We've seen this for centuries in the arts, where the antisocial behavior of brilliant artists becomes a touchstone for young poseurs and strivers. The artsy kids I grew up with imitated the gay drug addicts in Rent and strived to die of heroin overdoses in New York City, who were written in specific imitation in both art and life of the alcoholic painters of La Boheme and strived towards dying of consumption in Paris gutters, who themselves were based on a novel whose real life examples probably imitated Rabelais or something. A real artist is depressed and deep, so the artsy teen wears black all the time and feigns misery and misanthropy. So many great artists are alcoholics, so young artists drink themselves into a stupor. Great artists abuse their sexual partners so must I!
Legible aristocratic or middle class standards of appearance and action, actually looking good in nice clothing and speaking properly, is much easier to learn and imitate, and a much better test of intelligence and conscientiousness, than is performatively spurning those standards. What suit to wear, and which type shoes to match with which belt, and what color tie, is all learnable and teachable. And learning all that, applying resources to acquire the knowledge, and exercising those skills, are all examples of that skill of "holding one million variables in your head and making decisions." Knowing when to wear tweed and which fork to use and which glass to pour which wine into may be frivolous and wasteful effort, but at least it is legible and trainable, and shows some degree of intelligence and training at a glance.
Excellent comment overall, and I may reply further on other aspects, but this in particular stood out to me, as an example of how Vibes Based sorting is so insidious and difficult to rid the brain of. Humans are very good at striving to imitate the appearance of doing something, even when they aren't.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
14hr ago
sometimes even paying for OnlyFans despite knowing that this was terrible for me and that I was probably talking with a bot.
I'm asking in a spirit of curiosity and not of attack: how does one come to participate in this practice? What made you do it for the first time? Did you regret it at the time? Leaving aside moral disgust, do you feel like you get your money's worth?
I've never in my life paid for internet pornography (I have purchased the odd vintage magazine, and Mrs. FiveHour has a fondness for vintage Playboy calendars and puzzles as home decor, so strictly speaking I have paid for nude images of women). It always feels like a sharp line for me, where doing so would cause me to cross into some new kind of behavior and I recoil from it. In the same way that I can imagine eating or drinking a drug, I eat or drink other drugs and something stronger is a soft line, but I don't know how one comes to inject drugs.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
1d ago
I'm getting too cynical, it just doesn't feel real to me, but it's going to be years before we can parse it. It's an odd strategic move, akin to terrorism on its face, to kidnap a head of state as a naked threat to hang over his successor. So I have to imagine that there was some under the radar deal with the venezuelan deep state to accept this turn of events in exchange for letting them stay in power.
Of course, deals with the USA aren't worth the paper they're printed on.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
2d ago
But I'm not cool with the idea that destroying the commons is okay when I do it in a classy way but not when those shlups do it in a low class way.
Ah, there's the problem, I am cool with that idea.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
2d ago
I have been surprised by the longevity of this incident in the news cycle. I mostly consider it a boring incident.
I think you're underestimating the impact of racism, sexism, tribalism, and profiling in the perception of this incident as compared to others.
Renee Good was a 37 year old white mother of three. I haven't looked into her background, but just judging from the car not being a complete heap I don't think she was impoverished, we can probably label her middle class. There's virtually no chance, with just that data, that she was out there engaged in a suicide terrorist mission. She might literally have to be the first middle aged white woman in all of American history to do something like that. I asked both ChatGPT and Grok, neither could bring me a single documented case of a white woman between the ages of 30-50 killing an on-duty police officer in the history of the United States. If we included "middle class," "mother of three," and "not visibly disordered" it would cut those odds even more. When I asked for 30-50 year old white female terrorists period (not just anti-cop), the closest I got was Shawna Forde who murdered two illegal immigrants as part of some cockamamie border militia thing, and maybe some left wing bank robbers from the 70s but those were getaway drivers. If anyone else can find me examples of 30-50 year old white women killing on-duty cops, let me know!
Liberals might decry racial profiling, but they believe in it, because it is obviously true. A male suspect is vastly more likely to be dangerous than a female, an old suspect less dangerous than a young one, a black suspect more dangerous than a white one. A middle aged white woman is just vastly unlikely to be a domestic terrorist engaged in an anti-cop suicide mission.
The white middle class might dislike what ICE is doing or we might not particularly care, but we pretty much assume that whatever happens it won't touch us. This is one of us getting shot. Not some immigrant getting sent to a foreign torture prison in Cuba or El Salvador, not some black kid in baggie pants getting killed, this is a middle aged woman who looks like my sister, my coworkers, my grad school classmates. I might roll my eyes when they lib out, that doesn't mean I'm comfortable with a world where they might get shot. A middle class liberal might decry his privilege, but he still believed in it, that as a middle class white person he was protected, that bad things wouldn't happen to him. This pierced that privilege. And that's hard to deal with.
The reason this is hanging around is because Renee Good doesn't fit the profile of the kind of person who gets killed by the cops. Turbolibs love to quote Wilholt's law: "Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect." And they believed that, they believed they were in the group that the law protected but did not bind. Every accusation is an admission. White liberals believed that their privilege would protect them. It turns out it will not.
And that means you have to make a decision. Because when the gun turns against your tribe, the nature of war is that you don't get a choice of which tribe you are part of. If we decide that killing middle aged women for being turbolibs is ok, I can't decide that I'm not part of the tribe, my family and my friends decide that for me. I can only decide whether I'm ok with their deaths or not.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
2d ago
It's very clear that the British viewed the Afrikaaners as colonial ethnics in the same way they viewed the Zulu, maybe a step above the blacks but fundamentally a primitive group to be managed through conflict with other such groups.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
2d ago
Picture this. It's 2011, you're nineteen or twenty. Your fraternity has booked a party bus to take everybody to formal. Everybody is pregamed, dancing in the aisle of the bus. You grab the overhead handrail, and realize you can do a pull up on it, then realize you can flip over and loop your legs over the rail and hang upside down. So of course you grab your girlfriend and you kiss her upside down and your fraternity brothers and their dates yell WHOOOOOO SPIDERMAN
So anytime you're drunk with your friends and you see a handrail or a pull up bar or an appropriately sized tree branch you can swing your legs over, you do the same thing. And everyone saw that movie ten years ago and cheers. It's the college equivalent of the middle school practice of jumping to touch the top of doorways.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
2d ago
-- Is there anything more American than finding something new, civilizing it for the masses, only to lament and resent that the newly civilized space has no place for you? It's the plot of John Wayne's McClintock, where the old cowboy who killed the Indians and built the town regrets that both the daughter of his body and the son of his spirit can't experience pioneering the way he did, and the musical Rent where the hipsters who made the Village cool bitch that New York is cool now and they might have to pay money to live there. The pioneer tames the wilderness and makes it safe for civilization, only to find that civilization has no place for the pioneer, and that he can never step in the same wild river twice, that he isn't the same man and it isn't the same river.
-- On a more culture-war and less FFT basis, I can argue there's a difference between what my wife did and the modern scene. I was at the library book sale over the summer, and among the old ladies and college students there was two or three immigrant women with little barcode scanners attached to their phones. And methodically, mechanically, they would scan each and every bar code on each and every book, one at a time, not even glancing at the cover or the title, and picking up one book out of every fifty or so which the phone told them was valuable enough to resell. That's what modern reselling looks like: poor immigrants sucking every cent of value out of stuff they don't even care about. I'm generally averse to critiquing the poor for trying to keep body and soul together, but their presence eliminates the opportunity for a down-on-their-luck hobbyist to hustle a bit of money on the side using their knowledge and skill. This is one less way that an ordinary person can make a little money without debasing themselves. And there's a certain romance to a young middle class woman leveraging her knowledge and enthusiasm to arbitrage, that just isn't there for a drone who doesn't care about the stuff involved, that I think makes the former acceptable in a way the latter is not.
-- As part of the above, the level of stuff involved is different. Mrs FiveHour would find the odd piece of Gucci or Prada and buy it for $10 and sell it for $300. Nowadays it's Banana Republic and Abercrombie getting sold at Goodwill for $20-25 and then resold marked up to $30-40. It used to be I'd spend all day hunting for vintage Scottish cashmere, and get it for $8, but on the way I'd see a thousand Banana Republic sweaters and any day I wanted I could go over and buy a cheap sweater. Now the juice isn't worth the squeeze for the cheap stuff, I think you're better off waiting for a sale on it new at that price point. Nobody needs cheap Gucci, but it used to be nice being able to get functional nice looking stuff for cheap.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
2d ago
I enjoyed the various tweets about how cyclists will be thrilled to find out what you're allowed to do to a driver that bumps into you with their car.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
2d ago
If it's applied evenly I don't object in principle. What worries me (hugboxing) is applying it on the basis of what inflammatory language inflames. "Kidnap" upsets ICE's fans, much as "Negro" or "being a pussy" inflames wokescolds. If the tendency is to discipline against language that upsets the audience, then the restrictions start to mirror the audience's preferences, creating a comfortable environment for the existing members at the cost of openness and accuracy.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
2d ago
My wife was just complaining about how second hand shopping has changed from when we were in college.
Time was, Goodwill priced everything the same: a men's suit was $12.99, a women's dress was $8.99. Didn't matter if it was cashmere from Saks or polyester from Sears, for the most part they just priced everything the same. As a result, in the sea of junk, you could find gold, and cheap. My wife and I were inveterate thrifters through our undergrad years, I still have a lot of really nice stuff I bought that way. My friends and family members often commented at the time, something like "FiveHour, Goodwill is for poor people who need it, you can afford to buy new clothing." Inevitably, when they came with me, they realized that there was essentially no demand from poor people for camel hair sportcoats, and that my consumption was orthogonal to the charity aspect of the store, and they started looking for the half-off items.
Over time, the stigma of "used clothes" broke down from people like us shopping there for fashion, and resale sites like Ebay and Poshmark became more prominent. Mrs. FiveHour, when between jobs, made tens of thousands of dollars buying at Goodwill or Poshmark and arbitraging to Ebay or TheRealReal. More and more people got comfortable with used stuff, and Goodwill noticed everyone else making money off of their work, and they started raising prices on good stuff to capture some of the value. With demand up as more people bought used, and the reputation appearing that you could get a great deal, people came in and paid higher prices.
Mrs. FiveHour whines that the used market isn't what it used to be, that it's no longer worth the effort. I'm an optimist, and pointed out that we had the best part of the wave: we got the low prices for designer goods when we were broke, and now that we're well-employed (and more set in our fashion ways) we have the money to buy what we want from the stores we like. And anyway, I've accumulated too many goodyear welted shoes and vintage cashmere sweaters anyway, I don't need to go buy more of them at any price. Though I will admit, I miss it as a fun date with my wife, I do think part of the reduction in fun comes from higher standards on my part rather than changing prices.
But if I were a broke college student today, I couldn't walk into a thrift store, invest three hours of my time, and walk out with gorgeous vintage designer clothes. It used to be that if you had the knowledge of clothing brands and construction, fashion taste and discernment, and time you could go to thrift stores and look fantastic without spending a lot of money. Now, that's a much tougher thing to do. Efficiency wins at all levels: Goodwill makes more money, or original purchasers on Poshmark get back some money, but for young or broke fashionistas the opportunity and creativity isn't there.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
2d ago
I'm making a concerted effort to read the books I picked up at the Library used book sale last summer, which have been sitting in a nice row on my china cabinet for too long. So I've been diving into Nelson Mandela's autobiography Long Walk to Freedom. Thoughts so far (his ANC activism has just started):
-- Mandela is an excellent writer. His account of coming out of primitivism and poverty to lawyer and activist is compelling and personal, he manages to balance good humor and honest accounts of oppression. I'd compare it to Angela's Ashes though obviously a bit more serious, where you have accounts of bad experiences that focus on the personal and the human.
-- Mandela's account of his youth reveals a modernizing tension. He grows up in a traditional tribal society, or at least the British-Empire-Sponsored Disneyland version of such, his father was a close courtier of the tribe's chief and when his father died Nelson was raised as a ward of the chief. Then the chief tried to marry Nelson off to another prominent family, in a way that would aid the chief in tribal politics, and Nelson didn't want to marry her so he ran away to Johannesburg. When he got to Joburg he prevailed upon his co-tribals and friends of the chief for hospitality and help getting jobs and connections, though some turned him away or reduced their aid when the chief got in touch others continued to help him. Later on he lost another housing situation when he started dating a girl from another ethnic group, and complained of the prejudice between tribes. This is both philosophically inconsistent, and very sympathetic and human: Nelson admires the close ties of tribal life, and takes advantage of them; but he shirks the obedience to the chief and insular xenophobia that creates those ties.
-- I never realized how late Apartheid was introduced. The 1948 South African elections brought the Nationalist party to power, and only then was the system formalized. While obviously the prior colonial regimes were far from woke and equal, the post-1948 system was a very real reduction in rights for blacks and an even larger reduction in optimism for future rights. Nelson's account before 1948 maps to the British belief that their colonial possessions would slowly assume independence as they assumed civilization: the British would create a civilized local black elite which would assist in ruling over the black majority and slowly assume rights, black rights would expand over time as more blacks were civilized until equality was reached. Then the Afrikaner nationalists took power and took back rights blacks had already been granted, while making clear that blacks would never achieve equality with whites. I wonder to what degree this change reflected the Afrikaner history and ideology of themselves as the oppressed minority conquered by the British? I always thought that Apartheid developed naturally from earlier systems, I didn't realize it was a late-created and harsher system than what came before.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
3d ago
it's a less precise word so i'd probably (perhaps due to my legal-adjacent background) be more permissive around it
Invasion is a precise word within numerous federal laws which regulate the ability of the government to suspend civil rights or use military forces domestically. Which I think is precisely what people who use the term "invasion" to refer to migrant labor are advocating. Does that change your feelings about how the use of the term "invasion" should be regulated?
I think once we start regulating aggressive use of terms it either ends in stilted language as we regulate ordinary speech out of existence, or it ends in one side getting hugboxed to avoid hurting their feelings.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
3d ago
Would you say that the word "invasion" and its derivations should be modded similarly?
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
4d ago
Huh, interesting. I don't really think of it like that. When I think of the backrooms kind of genre, I think of being a small child and seeing the boiler room at my elementary school. Being six years old, the boiler looked enormous, loud, dangerous and fascinating and hidden. When I think of endless dream spaces, I think of occupied spaces, or of forests.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
4d ago
I own a rental house that's on a back road between two gorges tucked in the far corner of our town. So five minutes away in the same zip code you're in solid suburbia, but at this house you're dead alone for a few hundred acres in every direction except for the coyotes.
And it's interesting because when I look for tenants, a large number of people will tell me that they can't live there because it isn't safe, no one is around. Where my reflex is that it's very safe because no one is around. I would have figured that it would be gendered, because I would think it very effeminate to worry about, but a lot of men say so too, expressed as concern about property or women.
It's just fascinating because such fears must be primal, as they are clearly irrational. There's much more to worry about in a city than in the middle of nowhere.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
4d ago
Nobody totally fails at biglaw. The nature of the job is that you have to succeed quite a bit before you even get the chance to fail. Your work product will initially be so far from anything that travels outside of the firm that if you bomb right out of the gate, your work will never be seen by anyone, and no matter how bad you are the firm will probably still give you a month or so to keep your title while you look for another job, and nobody will really know you failed just that you're leaving, which a lot of people do.
People commonly go in house at various corporations or go into government work. But really over time they'll end up anywhere.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
4d ago
That spider man movie is iconic for me just for the upside down kiss scene, which I've tried to imitate with every gf I've ever had at every opportunity and it's a good trick that goes well every time. What other movie has that?
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
4d ago
It's like the marketing is meant to tell you: hit defect, everyone around you is about to become fake and gay, you might as well defect early and reap some measly social prestige benefits quickly before this kind of thing becomes so well known that all meaning is destroyed forever.
My mother and I recently visited a memorial to WWII submariners, and my mother looked at the list of lost ships and their crew numbers and said wow how on earth did you convince anyone to get on a submarine? And I pointed out that submarine service isn't SO bad, because for the most part you either sink or you don't.
You're much less likely to get grievously wounded, disfigured, crippled than you would be in the infantry. You aren't crouching in a trench in perpetual terror for months. Your moments of danger are intense but they last mere hours, and then generally you're dead or you aren't. Not a bad deal as war goes.
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