100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
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User ID: 2039
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
3d ago
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
3d ago
I appreciate the effortpost and math.
But the divorce rate is only half the battle. High income earners with college degrees may not get divorced at a high rate, but how many of the marriages are anywhere near healthy? In my own extended family, we have zero divorces but a bakers dozen incidents of infidelity that I only learned about at the family reunions after I could start drinking with the older cousins. In my own PMC circle, I've had both male and female acquaintances confide that they're only staying married for the kids and once they're out of college a divorce is guaranteed.
Again, I don't hold any fantasy notions about finding an easy marriage. I understand they take work and evolve over time. I've actually written about this on the Motte, but if I can't find a partner who I really believe has a similar concept of commitment (let alone level) - I'm reticent to risk it.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
3d ago
They didn't even worry about the bodies.
The FBI Behavioral Analysis Unit reviews the case files to establish patterns and idiosyncrasies in the the actions carried out. They do victim profiling, some demographic analysis, and comparisons with other, similar crimes. Their output product is a "psychological profile" of a suspect.
This is compelling because it plays to the trope of "getting inside the mind of a killer" and because it's more or less the backbone for a lot of serial killer related fiction (the Hannibal Lecter canon is a prime example).
The downside is that it might all kind of be bullshit. As my first post outlined, a lot of the time, the profile feels specific because it's long and includes interesting details. If you zoom out a little, however, your realize that the profiles are actually incredibly broad and mostly representative of the demographics of the locality.
Here's a fun example:
"He's probably young. 20-30 at the most. Takes physical fitness very seriously and is also generally highly disciplined. He has a set daily routine and trains with weapons multiple times per week. While able to control himself at work, he'll sometimes let loose on the weekends and drink heavily and/or engage in other risky activities. He can function in a group but is mostly a loner."
Great! But the body was found near a military base. You have just described 80% of the males on the military base. You are not helping.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
3d ago
This is a classic Motte comment. Demonstrates the complexity and interdependencies of a problem, relative tradeoffs, real world likely impacts and outcomes, and doesn't use any cliche argumentation, sloganeering, etc.
So, of course, my only response is: Defund The Police because Blue Lives Matter.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
3d ago
Zero problem with commitment, not worried about actually meeting and dating a girl (have done this many times, a few that looked like they could go all the way).
My opinion, unfortunately, is that marriage is fundamentally broken in the west. I see this in my own laptop class PMC constantly where the pair got married on nothing more than the basis of "it seemed like the time!" Even if they don't end in divorce - which is common - the day to day subtle resentment between the partners is really astonishing. The hyper fixation on individual achievement or "actualization" paired with the toxic comparative nature of social media means that couples are living not for each other but for their imagined perception of themselves in the minds of other people outside the marraige. That's an insane way to be.
So, just find a down to earth girl who doesn't care about any of that. Maybe go a little more trad-ish, too, right? I (kind of) tried that. Started going to the Young Catholic events at a parish known for being very pro-coupling. The first girl I met was already engaged but we hit it off nonetheless and she became a good friend. A couple months into me going to these kind of events, having a few coffee dates etc. she pulls me aside and drops the truth bomb on me - a lot of the women in these groups are LARPing for a provider husband who they feel is utterly domesticated and low risk of ever straying away .... the men in these groups are pretty much doing the exact same thing but with a weird eye towards "sex on demand" and "thy wife shall submit!" This latter group are pretty much incels who went RadTradCath online, the former group are often party girls who wish to exit the hook-up culture and want to find a guy who is low risk, low dynamism. Both groups are entering relationships with a fundamental lack of respect for the other party. It's self-referential all the way down.
I want to commit to building a life with a partner, that is in no way the problem. I don't care about the leveling off of the passionate attachment phase of the relationship. But I do have sincere concern about the ability of most any firmly "in the matrix" person to really commit to the idea of marriage at the level of depth that I think is necessary for the marriage to last. Simple screening based on religious or political affiliation doesn't guarantee much (see above) and, what's more, I feel that social pressures and relative comparisons to other couples or imagined states of marriage are so omnipresent that they're a constant source of erosion of the commitment to the marriage itself.
I can recognize my own neuroticism here and I am aware that the only solution is to just do it and continue to work at it with a wife who also wants to work at it, but these thoughts persist.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
4d ago
I realize this and agree. My main concern is marriage.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
4d ago
So you can look at my posting history and determine what level of autism risk you're comfortable with.
"Kettlebell aficionado" is, to me, an exquisite level of applied autism. I'd actually rank it above "rainman math genius hedge fund quant" but below "geospatial imagery wizard"
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
4d ago
but no very pretty ones unless he’s Don Draper handsome and wealthy
So what's the modal match for "Walton Goggins 'handsome' and permanent Delta Diamond status"
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
4d ago
Replace YouTube here with any of the major tech platforms; Netflix, Amazon Prime (only their digital catalog. Put aside physical goods from Amazon for a moment), the rest of the Google services (Gmail, Google meet), Zoom etc.
It all comes back to the infrastructure underpinning it and cost. The memory/compute/storage cost alone for these runs into 100s of millions to 10s of billions annually. Add on the management complexity on top and it's not possible for a competitor to emerge. A better investment would literally be a nuclear power station.
This is the problem at the root of decentralized web product ideas. The only way to compete is to actually play a different game; decentralization. We can never "trust" that an infra provider or a platform built on top of it will ever actually play nice indefinitely. Maybe you get an Elon Musk type willing to pony up $10 bn of his or her own money to build the alternative but then - "die a hero or live long enough to become the villain." How long before the management executives of that company decide to start charging or running ads or walling off users own data?
The chicken and egg problem, however, is user adoption and friction. Any actually decentralized web applications (take IPFS for instance) requires technical ability that - while actually pretty simple - only exists in, maybe, 5% of users? Now, add on the fact that for 99.9% of users it isn't actually solving a functional problem, but a half philosophical one. Nobody is complaining that there's "no easy and low cost place to host videos on the internet!" Sure, general homepage YT is dogshit, but people shrug it off because being fed pop culture content (and being happy with it) is as old as the radio.
The internet isn't dead, it's better than it has ever been. But the low-friction, easy to use internet is mindless garbage much like the low-friction, easy to use television was before it. I'll admit that the ubiquity of internet slop is at a whole new level of maddening - the experience of using a cell phone for any sort of activity beyond comms (text, calls) is now a net negative to overall life satisfaction. The browser setup to enjoy surfin' the net! (as the kids say) is non-trivial. Social media is literally brain cancer, and most political news is never ending rage-jaculation. Ours is a culture of hyper-abundance where the key is self-moderation, not maximal self-indulgence.
I guess what I'm saying is the true competitor to YouTube is touching grass and leafing through the pages of a physical book. I'm being like ... fucking deep here, Bro.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
4d ago
I hate to do this, but I have to half-hijack the thread:
When is it actually "too late", for a male, to have children? Please don't give me the sunshine and rainbows "it's never too late!" nonsense. I'd like the informed and unvarnished truth that the Motte is (in)famous for.
I ask this as a mid 30s male in great shape with FAANGy levels of income in a non-FAANG job who's just a little too surly about marriage, but has accepted the moral imperative for reproducing and being a good parent.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
4d ago
I've been on a True Crime spree habit over the past few weeks. This happens every year or so. This year, among other material, I listened to the audiobook Hunt For The Green River Killer about the initial investigation into Gary Ridgway (I do recommend this book). Additionally, earlier this week, I watched American Nightmare on Netflix about the so-called "Gone Girl" case in Vallejo, California. Netflix streteches out what should be a 90 min doc into 3 almost hour long episodes. The directors also shoehorn in a MeToo theme towards the end and, with some selective editing, make a single female police look like the only pure police hero. They are swimming as hard as they can against the riptide of a poor business model.
In Hunt For the Green River Killer, you see just how complex a "Task Force" investigation at scale is. The various intertwined jurisdictions in and around Seattle threw everything they had at trying to catch (then unknown) Ridgway in the 1980s. The result was so many possible leads and suspects that they drowned in their own noise. At one point, the lab work backlog was over 50 years. At other points, they had at lest two suspects that, at the time, looked almost like sure things. The authors do a good job of then demonstrating how obvious it was that those suspects were in no way sure things. This shows the level of confirmation bias and motivated reasoning that can crop up in these kind of investigations even in otherwise experienced and talented cops.
The Ridgway people even brought in the legendary FBI behavior psych unit (of "Mindhunter" fame). Their composite profile of the killer was along the lines of "white male between 30-50, does a manual labor type job, drinks beer, smokes, may have prior military service or outdoors interests." Again, the authors point out that that profile narrows it down to .... 40% of all men living in Seattle! Interesting and also infuriating to see how far people can build a career off of what amounts to a Forer statement.
As a fun side note: Even back in the 1980s, you had pro-sexworker women's groups who demanded the police "do more!" with the investigation, complete with statements like "if this had happened to a bunch of high school cheerleaders and not prostitutes, we would already have an arrest!" It's turtles all the way down, and Witches v. Patriarchy all the way back up, I guess.
With American Nightmare, due to its recenecy, I won't give out any spoilers. Suffice it to say that the police actually try to employ Occam's Razor and go with a basic explanation first but reality intervenes and a fairly wild story unfolds instead. The initial investigating cops don't come out looking good - although I feel like the Netflix editing team was responsible for thumbing the scales hard in this case.
The question I find myself asking in regards to both is; just how well equipped is American law enforcement (outside of the FBI) for complex investigations without a pretty obvious narrative with a lot of obvious circumstantial pointers? An example of what I mean here is; when a drug murder happens, any decent police in the area will know "this was a drug murder. the victim was a known dealer." A slightly above average police probably has some awareness of the recent conflicts between the locals gangs and can therefore say, at least, "It was probably this crew that knocked this guy off, now I just have to try to figure out who exactly did it."
With the "whodunnits" of serial killer victims and frankly just bizarre circumstances of cases like that of American Nightmare, do cops have a playbook / infrastructure / support to actually perform a full investigation effectively? The simple narrative (which Netflix eagerly jumps to without second thought) is that "Cops are often stupid / lazy / racist / sexist / corrupt and so they don't solve cases." I don't buy this for a whole host of reasons. You can debtate me on that, but I'd prefer we stay focused on the question of "are police departments setup to handle complex investigations?" The Ridgway investigation is particularly illuminating, I think; a bunch of well intentioned and talented cops eventually buried themselves in a volume of work that was utterly unmanagable. They really did pull out all of the stops and, in so doing, pretty much led themselves back to square one where their only hope was catching Ridgway in the act. (What ended up actually leading to the arrest was a 20 year wait and the advent of DNA technology, which is just as much of a magical solution)
The higher level of analysis, however, is; should police departments be setup for this? I'd actually argue they should not. Complex investigations are rare. American Nightmare gets a netflix special and Ted Bundy, Gary Ridgway, and Jeffrey Dahmer get hundreds of books, documentaries, and podcast about them because they are so rare and bizarre. The "murders that matter" to use a slightly indelicate phrase are those that are part of a larger anti-social pattern; drugs, gang violence, preventable domestic violence, etc. I'd much rather have a PD that is doing the leg work day in and day out to know about the goings on in bad neigborhoods so that once a murder does occur, they can jail the offender swiftly and, hopefully, interrupt a retaliatory cycle.
I have only the deepest sympathy for the victims of the "one in a million" crimes of serial killers etc. But I must admit that, at a societal level, these aren't things we can really systemically remedy (same goes for a lot of the more sensational gun violence incidients. See: Las Vegas). What we can do at a systemic level is police and enforce known areas of persistent anti-social behavior aggressively.
So, again, two primary lines of questioning:
- Can police departments launch effective complex investigations, or are they at a structural / organizational disadvantage here?
- Should they focus resources on the above capability beyond a small, dedicated "Major Crimes" unit (or some such) or, ought they double or triple down on basic patrol, fast response, and community intel work?
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
4d ago
Thanks for this comment.
I'd be interested in your opinions about the dynamics of Red/Blue tribe affiliation at the ultra high end of climbing. Obviously, there's a lot of crunchy types there, but:
- In Maru, the boys rip a cigarette after a hard day of climbing
- In the SufferFest series, you can tell Honnold pretty much wants to say "stop being a Pussy" to Cedar multiple times
- I get the vibe from a lot of elite male climbers that they're just as "rock out with your cock out" as any other athlete at the top of their field
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
5d ago
I really want to like that podcast but holy hell does Stavy's laugh grate on my ears.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
7d ago
I appreciate the straightforward explanation here of how policy and intent creep occurs.
Taken at face value, the logical (though extreme) conclusion of the open boarders set is to import all of the less fortunate of the world no questions ask. As "pure" as the intent may be, this is, on its face, a non-viable option to any informed audience. So that argument isn't made ... but it sure as hell gets reflected in the policy-enforcement system.
I believe this is one of the core unsolvable problems in American politics; there are, at least, three "versions" of any given policy - the intent stated by candidates publicly, the letter of the law as literally recorded in U.S. code, and then the execution thereof by the executive branch. When Americans vote for a candidate, they often are voting for just one of those concepts, or are switching between them in their heads. The appreciation of the process is non-existent and so constant dissatisfaction is constant.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
9d ago
Right, but what's the Oath itself called and when do Catholics make it?
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
9d ago
By that standard, most American Catholics are "non-Catholic" since it is common to deviate in opinion and practice on things like birth control, sex outside of marriage, etc.
nervous laughter
Yeah, um, about that ..... we're talking it over.
More seriously; there's a growing division in the church over just these issues. And American Catholics are definitely near the center of it. And while Pope Francis might not care so much about the opinions of Yanqui Capitalists, the realities of the needs to convert within the developing world means that he'll bend a knee to the African bishops as necessary
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
9d ago
What's it like living in an episode of Giri-Haji?
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
9d ago
The reason Catholics could not be POTUS is because we had an oath to the Pope.
What's this called?
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
10d ago
interesting far rightist perspective, that maybe is common here, but expressed in much better form, than you can expect from mottizens with similar views.
I feel personally attacked.
And can also offer no protest to your assertion.
My YT Submission: Horses
Very stylistic documentary shorts on ... nothing in particular? But they're very well done. The one on Icelandic Witches is a must watch.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
11d ago
I was a Div 1 college athlete and got a perfect score on my SAT and took 14 AP exams.
Yeah, this is a balls out, face first brag. I've never actually said it like that in real life. Thank you, internet.
In my experience the top tier athletes are one of two camps; yes, group one is all around above average 110+ IQ types who also have very good emotional intelligence and social capability. Remember how the teen bully is the football star and also the homecoming king? He's probably also going to like, UT-Austin. I had a fraternity brother who was Div 1 in a different sport, head of the Panhellenic Council (so, literally the boss of all of the fraternity and sorority bosses and yes, it did function exactly like the mafia) ... ended up becoming an Air Force Officer and now does Consulting for basically the defense-focused version of McKinsey. If I had to wager some money on "knowing a future member of congress" ... there you go.
The other types, however, are the sports savants. These are the guys (and girls) who probably have built their entire life around whatever sport they're doing. Frequently this included some pretty extreme parental ... "supervision." The GOAT poster boy for this is Tom Brady. He's a football genius (and, yes, it was him not Belichik) but, outside of that, he's fucking weird and awful. To get to that level, and then to absolutely crush it at that level, means your brain maps so perfectly onto the sport that you're Ramanujan levels of brilliant in that domain. This can't be explained away with "Dad made me practice every day" or even "My ex Soviet sports machine dad made me practice every day" ... you have to be born with it.
But I use "savant" on purpose. Some of these guys are fucking useless outside of that sport and actually lead kind of fucked up lives. I can't say the sport without probably doxxing myself - but I grew up training with the Bobby Fisher / Tony Hawk / Tom Brady of my sport.
Yeah, he's fucking weird and lives at home still and can't drive or cook for himself. When the clock runs out or he blows out a knee, I am super, super worried what happens next. Sports aren't transferable skillets. If you're rainman and can math-your-ass-off, you can probably find work for a variety of places that will be happy to put you in your special room 8 hours a day so long as you can fill out the reports. You can earn a living, even if that living gets reinvested into Hungry Man TV dinners, porn, and cheetohs. Sports with a limited professional (I.e. money making) applicability? Not so much.
So who do you want to be? My old friend, Captain Chad Thundercock? Or VictoryBot9000? Above median breadth but, perhaps, never true greatness? Or brilliant, early greatness that will be remembered far past your life ... which will be 70% "over the hill nothingness."
(P.S. The answer is always Captain Chad Thundercock)
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
11d ago
HOWIE DO
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
11d ago
As a tacti-cool armchair bro, I am utterly floored by how shitty the cops are in this video.
At literally any given point past about the halfway mark (when the camera has enough perspective to capture all of the involved parties) there are at least 3 cops doing fucking nothing. The pony-tailed brunette deserves special acknowledgement for standing around. When the first cop goes in and gets stabbed, there's a clear shot of three of his comrades sort of standing in a "ready position" on the edge. With backup like that, right?
Say what you will about American policing, but the bias for action is still well instilled. If something like this went down in any major American metro, and there were 5 -7 cops in the vicinity, you would have a dogpile on at least Mr. Knife.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
11d ago
There was no reason for Hillary to set up her own private email server, unless: 1) She was doing horribly corrupt things on it 2) She was extremely willful and ignorant and insisted on doing something that everyone around her would have told her was a bad idea.
I actually think it's a worse double compounding of these two things;
She did it because the people around her knew she was doing horribly corrupt things and convinced her this was a really good idea so that she could avoid responsibility down the road.
I wanted to add something related but tangential to @self_made_human 's post on therapists.
The business model issue.
Without doxxing myself, I'm just going to say that I once had a person who ran / co-owned a therapy practice explain how his business ran. He and his partner would contract with independent providers who would contract with them, they guy and his partner would handle all of the overhead, paperwork, legal, marketing, etc. and take a percentage of patient fees.
He told me that the customers break down into three groups.
The first two are what you would probably expect.
The first group is more or less stable people who go through specifically difficult life circumstances and require the services of a therapist for some amount of time. People after a divorce, death in the family, traumatic event. In addition, you also have those with enduring mental health issues (major depression, bipolar etc.) that can function in society but probably need therapy and possible medication to do it. In many ways, these are the "best" patients in that the therapist gets to see them heal, grow, thrive etc. Very much a win-win.
The second group are folks with severe mental illness that have sought out therapy usually with the assistance of family and / or friends. Now, because the guy telling me about this was running a very much for-profit no-insurance practice, I will caveat that this is one perspective / reality. I can definitely see how this group's dynamics may be different at other kind of practices / state sponsored hospitals etc. Anyways, these folks have brutal situations and are doing what they can to manage. In addition to the severe mental illness, substance abuse and other self-destructive behaviors are super common. Some therapists really are dedicated and do what they can to help, but few and far between see these folks really turn it around. Maybe a few "stabilize" and can live with a lot of family support.
So, here's the first business question. Do you think Group 2 here can ... pay their bills? on time? Even with family support, the answer is "no."
But that first group! Surely they always pay. The answer is "yes" .... for a time. Remember, folks in that first group often "get their shit together" after 6 months, a year, two, three ... And even the ones that are getting therapy for decades are probably not doing it weekly after a while. They often slow down to once a month or even less frequently as check-ins.
So, from a cash flow perspective, you're in a rough spot; some percentage of your patients are so unreliable you can't really put much confidence in their recurring revenue. Another percentage pays, but does not pay with enough volume or long term durability to cover that other group. What to do?
Group Motherfuckin' 3.
Group 3 are the textbook, highly online, utterly insufferable "therapy culture" people. Soccer moms, yuppie young professionals who probably had awesome childhoods, confused and wistful early retirees, college professors (who may be banging those young professionals), and art history majors. Unfulfilled dads don't get therapy - they become very good at grilling meat and an expert in either WW2 or the Civil War (God Bless all ye taxpayers!). Group 3 is at least weekly in their visits. Many are more frequent. Most will go through periods of "needing" more intense therapy. They change prescriptions a lot for .... unknown reasons. If they catch a hint of lack of interest from the therapist, you can bet they will effect some sort of scene outside of therapy to re-energize their sessions (_"When we were in Cabo, I told Braden that I wanted to try polyamory. He just went golfing without saying a word! HOW CAN I LIVE LIKE THIS!") I'll be nice a little here; sometimes, Group 3 types just need a little professional reassurance and they do turn their shit around. Sometimes, even, they realize a lot of their problems are of their own making or that their perspective was just miscalibrated. Yet, the majority are absolutely using a therapist as a paid friend. Depending on where you live, lap dances from strippers are more cost effective.
Back to business - how do we square the circle of Group 1 and Group 2 not covering our costs or making us money?
Group Motherfuckin' 3. And boy do they Make. That. Money.
What to take away from this? As @self_made_human 's post pointed out - therapy works (if you work at it, I would add). But the problem is that so much of the therapy business and market is now geared towards "therapy culture" people that it's creating a really bad situation in which new providers either think that everyone they're going to meet is just an exasperated housewife or, even worse, that everyone they're going to meet is just an exasperated housewife who doesn't care if it's $275 / hr holy shit free money hack. When that second group comes face to face with their first hard case of a patient, it can be horribly destabilizing for both of them. The proliferation of the online telehealth therapists is the poster child for this.
What's the market solution? I don't have one and I don't want one. If we ever get to the point as a society where we really deeply subsidize mental health services, we're going to be broke overnight. Think about that - that's creating a free service for when you feel bad. Absolutely uncapped demand. And, as I hope this post as pointed out, the way it works in practice, you do have an effective voluntary (albeit semi-informed) wealth transfer tax. I will never not let rich people spend their money the way they see fit.
I think this is false. (heh)
If general relativity were falsified tomorrow, I wouldn't walk out of a fifth story window because I'd still be aware of the obvious phenomenon of falling from heights. Intellectually, however, I might think "I wonder why I fall? That whole General Relativity thing seemed to offer a pretty good explanation, but ever since Quantumfreakonomics falsified it, I guess I just don't know why this whole "falling" things actually happens."
Moreover, I think you may have pulled a fast one by slipping in "objective scientific truth" into your sentence. Popper's problem of demarcation (with falsifiability following from it) are designed as ways to differentiate between science and non-science (especially metaphysics). Falsifiability has to do with logical falsification, less than experimental falsification (although Popper did say it would still retain its validity to some extent within experimentation). All of this phrased differently; falsifiability isn't about being the truth finding tool, rather, it's about evaluating the proposed routes to truth for their scientific (really, logical) validity.
So, your assertion that "The fatal premise of falsificationism is the denial that inductive reasoning can be a basis of true knowledge" I think isn't quite playing nice. "True knowledge" can come from a variety of sources; metaphysics, theoretical physics, pure math, the scientific method, some (including me!) would also add in faith. Popper, I think, would call many of these things non-science but not non-valuable.
And I think this is very important because if we're fighting over what is or is not "science" it follows to ask why defining "science" is so imporant to which it is often responded "science is the only way we can find the capital-T Truth!" which really gets my ears perked up because that's how we, eventually, get coerced into "Following The Science" (what Taleb would call "scientism") and then we end up veering steeply away from Truth.
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