07mk
1d ago
With all that being said, they're nice enough. They're not bad. They're selfish, they're self-absorbed, and they don't have great skills, but they're nice. Their parents are probably the reason to quit: The inability to hold students accountable for their poor decisions, and that it's somehow the teacher's fault, is more of a soul-sucker than anything the kids can do.
Only tangentially related, but this paragraph made it occur to me the sad irony of the situation with respect to how much teachers are believed to be able to influence kids. This attitude of blaming the teachers for students' poor performance caused by students' poor decisions obviously stems from the belief that teachers have the responsibility to influence students to make better decisions, and implicit in that is the belief that teachers have the ability to significantly influence students into making better decisions. It seems to me that the people who both buy into and push forward this belief also tend to be the ones who are most supportive of teachers, the biggest proponents of rearranging society such that more money and resources flow to teachers. This makes some sense, since if teacher quality matters a great deal for student performance, then incentivizing the best and brightest to go into teaching by giving them more money is likely to pay dividends in the form of better students. And yet it's the prominence of this very same belief that's responsible for this phenomenon of teachers being blamed for their students' poor performance and eventually deciding to leave this "soul-sucking" profession.
07mk
3d ago
Sure, you can see some potential grounds for profiling and unequal treatment, but the potential for such things is basically ever present in every circumstance ever. To actually say that this vindicates or even provides any support for the kind of systemic oppression narrative espoused by BLM, one would have to, at a minimum, have 2 different events that are very similar except for the race of the person interacting with the cops. This would be anecdotal but at least provide some minimal support. A single incident like this just fundamentally can't provide support for - much less vindicate - such a narrative, at least from an empirical perspective.
07mk
7d ago
That story and analogy reminds me of something a coworker of mine once said while we were talking about some random recent news about a lottery winner who went bankrupt. His theory was that, for the lottery winner in question, the millions of dollars she got was equivalent to infinite money. She had no sense that even 7 or 8 figures can disappear, and disappear quickly if you throw around 6 and 7 figures here and there with abandon, because in her mind, no amount of spending could affect the infinite money that she had. It didn't occur to me at the time that that's similar to how a 6 year old might think of numbers and money, but it does sound about right. And I'd expect more people who think like this to be common in the population of regular lottery ticket buyers.
07mk
7d ago
As a Red Sox fan, I decided to search the list for Pedro Martinez, and I was shocked and appalled to find that the first hit in Ctrl+F for "Pedro" was for Dustin Pedroia in the description for David Ortiz, listed as number 45 (Pedro's jersey number at Boston, coincidentally enough), with Pedro Martinez being listed all the way down at 92. David Ortiz is deservedly a legend for his almost supernatural ability to get the right hit at the right time, but the notion that he belongs anywhere above Pedro, much less 47 spots ahead of him, is a complete absurdity. As much as I love Ortiz, I'm not even sure his career warrants his HOF induction. On the other hand, Pedro is correctly talked about as possibly the best pitcher ever (probably most wouldn't place him as 1, but any conversation about a top 3 would at least mention him), despite his injury-filled shortened career, due in large part of his ridiculous 1998-2000 seasons during the steroid era. And I don't know if it counts for anything, but he did it all while being under 6 feet tall (by like half an inch, but still), which is almost unheard of for a Major League pitcher.
I think this is just a bad, stupid, clickbait-focused list, and any CW-related stuff are just apophenia. Well, they were probably subconsciously inserted by the voters and journalists, to be fair, but I'd guess that's the extent of it.
07mk
8d ago
I think it's plausible that the Secret Service is just out of their depth, they are set up to guard an Obama or Biden type who mostly stays in DC or gives speeches at indoors venues, but they are not set up to effectively guard a Trump.
This isn't a "just" thing, though. The Secret Service isn't a force of nature or some incomprehensible artifact we found somewhere that we have no control over, either in its competence or its application. If the Secret Service is out of their depth effectively guarding Trump, either the responsibility should have been delegated to an organization that isn't out of their depth, or the Secret Service should have transformed itself into an organization that wouldn't be out of their depth. If they didn't recognize that they were out of their depth, then some decision-maker was incompetent by not doing the due diligence of figuring out if they're actually capable of performing the role they are supposed to perform. If they were not provided the funding and resources to accomplish this, then the mismanagement is by the people who control the funding.
07mk
8d ago
I think mismanaging a sudden surge in personnel could cause that kind of organizational chaos, but the cause would be the mismanagement, not the surge in personnel. Everyone knows that a sudden surge in personnel, especially when multiple organizations are involved, is likely to be messy and cause unforeseen complications. Thus anyone in charge of such a situation has the responsibility to account for that chaos by preventing it, mitigating it, circumventing it, etc. So all this explanation would do is to raise the question of how/why the director of the Secret Service behaved so incompetently as to allow this kind of organizational chaos to occur. Perfection is impossible, but the level of failure that occurred here isn't in the realm of "they just can't reach the impossible standard of perfection" and closer to "it'd be difficult to make the failure look more intentional if you'd tried."
07mk
8d ago
It is weird. If they didn’t come out and say anything, then isn’t the blame mostly with Biden? If they say something and Biden stays and loses, then isn’t some of the blame directed to them?
I don't understand this. If Biden loses after you (some Democratic politician) stay silent, then Democratic voters can blame you for not pressuring him enough to drop out (even if "enough" to convince Biden were an impossibility). Biden would probably still take most of the blame, but you'd be left vulnerable due to your apparent lack of effort to prevent this outcome. On the other hand, if you speak out and Biden still runs and loses, you can claim to have predicted this and worked your hardest to prevent it but was helpless to do so due to Biden not listening to reason. It'd at least provide a defense.
I suppose voters could blame you and others who spoke out for casting doubt on Biden and thus making him a weaker candidate vs Trump? Given how many Americans, even Democrats, seem to consider Biden already too old to run the campaign/country, I'd think that a politician loudly proclaiming such doubt wouldn't stand out as harmful, just as someone speaking an uncomfortable truth.
07mk
9d ago
Yet, after having crowd-funded an album set to be released in 2020, they scrapped the release of the album and started sharing various links to BLM- and CRT-related “resources” and encouraging their fans to direct their money and attention to those causes instead. Did they do so because they’ve been undercover progressives the whole time and felt morally obligated to speak up? Or did they do so because they were afraid of the optics and potential backlash of raising money for a goofy ska album when black people are literally being murdered and they need your money to save their lives? (Or is it some combination of both?)
I know nothing about these folks beyond what you wrote in this comment, but isn't there a 3rd, IMHO more parsimonious, option, that they are recent converts and display the fervor present only in such people? Certainly in the past 20 years, I've seen no shortage of people who have recently converted to this particular faith with the result being going from fairly neutral apolitical/milquetoast generic liberal to single-minded fanatics cheering on violence against dissenters and denigrating peers for not clapping loudly enough at the latest stunning and brave person/organization to stand up against the Oppressors. This kind of blowing up an existing project and replacing it with calls to funnel all the resources towards supporting the organizations that run this faith would fit right into that same pattern.
07mk
9d ago
I think Stable Diffusion's public release in August 2022 marks the time when we reached "dead end beyond generating good pictures" - before that, AI being able to generate good pictures was either very very niche knowledge or just not considered true. That's not even 2 years ago. I believe ChatGPT 3.5 also came out publicly in 2022, though earlier in the year, so a little over 2 years ago, and that probably marked when we reached "dead end beyond helping write code." I think it's arguable that the roughly 2 years since those periods haven't been revolutionary, but I think it's inarguable that lots of progress has happened in those 2 years, and in any case, 2 years is a rather short period of time, probably the lower bound of what is considered "a few years."
07mk
10d ago
Back when I was dating I used to frequently use 'do you prefer the first half or second half of the Harry Potter series' as a conversation piece, and I found it very interesting that men seem to be very inclined towards the first half and women very inclined towards the second half.
That's fascinating. As a male who read the 4th-7th books when they came out, I primarily recall being severely disappointed by the 7th book, in a large part because of the quality of writing in the action scenes. And perhaps I'm seeing connections where there aren't any, but I have to wonder about this apparent male/female pattern and the terrible quality of action in so many movies and TV shows that are pushed for their female leads and female production team these days.
Off the top of my head, the awful combat action in shows like Disney's Echo and Amazon's Rings of Power come to mind, but perhaps the most stark example is The Matrix: Resurrections, which was directed by the woman version of one of the male directors of the original Matrix trilogy, and which was about as severe a drop-off in quality of action as you can get in a franchise, with the combat barely comprehensible half the time and not making any sense from the combatants' point of view all of the time. This is in contrast to the first film (and even its 1st 2 awful sequels) which had very clearly visible combat where each movement by each combatant made sense (within this fictional wushu-inspired universe) and flowed into one another as if they were attempting to mime out what a real fight would look like where 2 combatants are really trying to kill each other with all their might. Unlike the 4th film (directed by a woman), the 1st 3 films (directed in half by the same person, but as a man), displayed an understanding that a fight scene is more than just 2 people waving their feet and fists around each other in fancy looking ways.
And this is where I'm probably projecting or jumping to conclusions, but with the well-known difference between men and women in terms of "thing-oriented" and "people-oriented," I wonder if men are more scrutinizing about action scenes actually making sense, while women are more accepting of them if the underlying emotional thrust is there. As a man, when I read/view a scene in which 2 people are fighting, I pay attention to how each person reacts to each punch or kick and get disenchanted when I see them behaving in ways that don't make sense given their motivation in the moment to survive and kill the other guy; for women, perhaps they're less bothered by it and just think the important part is "A defeated B at the cost of C, which leads to D," and the how that defeat occurred is just extraneous details.
07mk
10d ago
To be very fair, critical discussion of a position is different from criticizing the position and often the latter looks nothing like the former.
07mk
15d ago
What surprises me is that Biden doesn't step down "for the good of the country". Sure, he wouldn't be President anymore, but it secures his legacy. With the academy fully captured by the left, Biden would go down as a Top 10 President who defeated the evil Donald Trump and stepped aside in favor of a woman of color.
This was somewhat surprising to me as well. Obviously, I can't know how I'd feel in the same situation since no one can, but I imagine that if I were 81 years old with as storied career as Biden's, I'd figure it'd be a good time to sail off into the sunset, hoping I have at least a decade or two left to spend with my grandkids and great-grandkids, instead of spending all my time and energy working what is reasonably considered one of the toughest, most scrutinized jobs in the world. Heck, even if it were a disgraced retirement instead of one where the history books will lionize me as the Fascist-Defeater who seamlessly transitioned the USA to a new, golden age of a black female POTUS, I'd think that'd be worth it.
But clearly, Biden thinks differently. I find myself thinking that there really are people who are just fundamentally different from most of us in terms of their ambition, that they would see working, again, one of the hardest jobs in the world, until their dying breath to be worth it for the... what, prestige? Status? Power? even if it means sacrificing a relaxing, luxurious, and potentially love-filled retirement. I see that in Trump, too, in his own political ambitions in the past decade, though he doesn't look quite close to his end as Biden is to his. Or maybe I'm just the unambitious weird one, and actually most of us would do the exact same thing and consider holding onto that power until my last, exhausted breath to be well worth the sacrifice. There certainly seem to be no shortage of rich and well-respected celebrities who have ruined themselves or at least severely harmed themselves by risking things to reach for even more.
07mk
15d ago
I mean, maybe. But then you're talking about the US right and the US alt-right, not the "consensus" of this forum. US right and US alt-right are certainly popular in this forum, but to say that there's anything nearing a consensus that such political/ideological movements are Good is, in my view, absurd, just from my time reading the comments here. Furthermore, even if there were, the people here tend to be idiosyncratic enough that their support for broad political/ideological movements such as those tend to have tons of caveats and places of severe disagreements, often in very different areas depending on the person, even when they're ostensibly on the same "team" (this is present on the left as well as on the right here, in my view, where there are plenty of left-leaning users including myself and you, but our views on what the left is doing right and what it's doing wrong tend to be quite different from each other).
If you were to say that there are many people on this forum, especially ones who produce a disproportionate number of comments, that support the mirror image of DEI, then I would agree. If you want to say that the presence of such people who make lots of posts in this vein who don't get significant pushback (a description I disagree with, but I am willing to take for granted for the sake of argument) indicates that there's a consensus, then I couldn't disagree more. Again, I don't perceive there being any consensus on this (the closest thing to a consensus on this forum I can tell is that "wokeness/leftist idpol/SocJus/CRT is, on net, harmful to our society"), but I'd wager that the most common view here - not common enough that I'd call it a consensus, but I'd bet it's a plurality - is that society is better when it prioritizes individual competency when picking people to put into important critical roles, and as such that's what we ought to do. Some (many) people here believe that discriminating on the basis of race is one particularly effective method of accomplishing this (one might say this is the mirror of DEI - one core component of DEI is that society is better when it prioritizes Diversity* when picking people to put into important critical roles, and most of its proponents believe that discriminating on the basis of race is one particularly effective method of accomplishing this).
But, who knows, in a forum like this, determining if there's a consensus, much less what it is is both nearly impossible and highly subjective. It's not like we have some numerical criterion by which we can say, "Aha! So that reveals that the consensus of TheMotte is XYZ!" It's almost entirely based on vibes, at the end of the day. My vibes is that there's no shortage of leftist posters here, and probably even moreso centrist/heterodox posters. When weighted by post count, perhaps they're, put together, less voluminous than the rightists, but the amount clearly seems significant enough to deny any sort of rightist consensus (except, again, that anti-DEI thing).
* Diversity here has an idiosyncratic meaning of something like "more people from populations that we have judged to have been overtly oppressed in the past and thus still suffer from both the legacy of that and the existing structures that reinforce that today," rather than the generally understood meaning of "having a large variety of types" or the like.
07mk
15d ago
I disagree. I think the phrase is pretty clearly meant to apply to iterative or analytic situations, rather than a one-shot. Imperfect humans create systems with unintended consequences all the time - this is common knowledge, which means that, as an imperfect human, we are all aware that our systems will have unintended consequences. As such, we are all aware that, if there are any consequences we want to avoid, then it's not good enough merely to check what we want; we have to actually empirically check the system and see what it does. We also all know that empiricism is difficult, especially when it involves systems that we are ideologically partial to, and as such, we should be especially harsh in judging such systems. Someone who ignores all that and just goes along with a system is someone whose intentions are to accomplish what the system does. Or, more precisely, their intentions are to convince themselves that they're doing good while not bothering to put in the substantial and often difficult effort required to actually check if they're doing good.
Assuming the description of "California pours money into their homeless problem and the result is mostly that you have a bunch of well-funded NGOs that make it easier to be a homeless junkie" is accurate, the fact that politicians have seemingly decided not to check what results from the systems they put in place or to ignore the results and double down with just more money tells us that the intent of these politicians is not to solve the homeless problem. It's to convince themselves that they're genuinely well-meaning politicians who genuinely want to find a solution to the homeless problem, the solution which just so happens to be in-line with their own personal biases and flatters themselves, while disregarding/ignoring/denying the suffering caused by and to homeless people due to the system they support.
07mk
15d ago
Otherwise, would you agree that the Motte's seeming consensus against even skilled immigration (well, I get dogpiled pretty hard whenever I try posting in support of it at least) is pretty anti-meritocratic?
I'm not sure how one could conclude that there's even a seeming consensus of the sort here. Whether or not you get dogpiled over an opinion doesn't really tell us anything about consensus; merely what types of people tend to dogpile, as well as what types of posts you tend to perceive.
I have the impression that the median poster here would prefer their doctors, engineers, pilots, etc. to be white/have far-reaching ancestry in whatever country (depending on the exact poster) than being the most competent people that can be found.
I'm not sure how one could come to this conclusion, as someone who spends more time on this forum than I ought to. I don't think there's anything such as a "consensus" here on this kind of stuff, but the closest thing to a consensus I could see here is the precise opposite of this, that almost everyone here believes in putting the most competent people that can be found into these positions. They simply believe that, for empirical reasons, that a world in which the most competent people fill these roles is also a world in which a majority of those people will belong to certain races. They may be mistaken, but the goal always seemed to me to maximize competence, and let the racial makeup fall where they may.
07mk
15d ago
Like, there’s liberals who do dumb things. But there doesn’t seem to be a massive pattern in which dumb things. Obesity is in practice not a liberal thing.
Obesity is arguably a dumb thing, but it's generally more seen as a lazy or weak thing. Glamorizing obesity - followed by the health consequences that follow - is the dumb thing that people could point to. I recall people actually have done this, with a viral clip recently of some transgender YouTuber listing examples of fat activists and/or others who tended to glamorize the lifestyle that would lead to obesity who died at comically young ages. Don't know that there'd be enough content to support a full subreddit, though.
R/shouldn’thavefoughtthecops gets nuked for racial insensitivity, not ideology.
I'm not sure how this works. Assuming this subreddit would be to showcase people getting beaten or killed for fighting the cops, and the racial insensitivity being alluded to hear has to do with the likely disproportionate number (relative to the general population, though perhaps not relative to actual police interactions) of people of certain races who would show up in such videos, that just seems like a case of ideology. The belief that showcasing a disproportionate number of people of certain races being harmed by police is racially insensitive is, in itself, ideological.
07mk
17d ago
This seems completely backwards to me. Preferred pronouns are if anything more useful when interacting between cultures because I often don't know what the implied gender of foreign names is.
This would only be useful for someone for whom getting a 3rd party's gender correct when referring to them with pronouns is a meaningful priority. For many non-native English or other similar language speakers, that's just not all that important, in part because their own native language lacks gender for those pronouns. E.g. my Korean-born parents, to this day, 30+ years after immigrating to the USA, freely use female pronouns to refer to straightforward run-of-the-mill cis males and vice versa, only caring to correct themselves if it's pointed out, and considering it mainly as a trivial verbal typo that they can't be arsed to discriminate between the gendered pronouns.
So if you already have a team that's full of people who have bought into the notion that getting someone's pronouns correct ("correct" can refer either to their self-ID or to what the speaker perceives as their gender or any other criterion by which we can determine that the pronoun's gender is consistent with the person's gender) is a priority worth pursuing, then having a standard of everyone sharing their pronouns first certainly could be more useful to first-generation foreign employees; however, it seems that first-generation foreign employees often tend not to prioritize such things as much as native-born employees.
07mk
17d ago
But I can’t see Mary as self-deluded. Self-delusion is the one thing those of her profession are good at avoiding.
I don't think this is a thing. I'd say it's akin to how Major League Baseball players are good at hitting baseballs pitched by other Major League Baseball players; they're better at it than anyone else, but even the best of the best fail over 60% of the time. Though with self-delusion, I'd wager that the numbers are more that the modal person fails 99.99% of the time, and if you just fail 99.9% of the time, you're among the elite class of people who are really good at avoiding self-delusion.
07mk
23d ago
I think the reaction to Trump since his initial campaign in 2015 all the way to now is a good example. Let's just take for granted that preventing Trump from becoming POTUS is a non-evil goal - hardly a consensus opinion, but certainly one believed in the hearts of hearts of the people being discussed right now, who would likely say it's not just not-evil, it's anti-evil. In an effort to accomplish this non-evil goal, many people did many evil things, including lying about Trump, ostracizing Trump supporters, obfuscating Biden's mental incompetence, and physically assaulting people who appear as Trump supporters, among others. Some people tried to point out that these evil things were evil, and that a non-evil path to accomplish this non-evil goal was preferable (I personally also believed that a non-evil path was more viable and more likely to be successful, but that's beside the point), but those people were cast aside as evil Trump supporters who were either trying to obfuscate their Trump support or were ignorantly supporting Trump without even recognizing it. As a result, people - who in general don't want to be seen as pushing back against an anti-evil movement - were cowed into not speaking out against these evil things, and thus these evil things kept happening (and, again, beside the point, the electorate's trust of journalists has fallen heavily, and Trump looks like the current most likely person to become POTUS in 2025).
There's actually no shortage of examples in CW issues. The whole trans/gender issue in the past 5 or so years is another good one: to the supporters of "trans women are women," the goal is a very much not-evil - again, actually anti-evil - one of helping otherwise ostracized and denigrated people feel more belonging in society, and they believe in accomplishing this by opening up women's sports, prisons, and shelters to any male who genuinely believes that they are a woman, enacting legal punishments for people who choose to use pronouns that reflect their own perception of someone's gender instead of the person's claimed internally experienced one, and encouraging adolescents to hormonally/surgically/socially transitioning in secret from their family and friends if they judge them to be "eggs" (i.e. people, usually young, who are considered to be not yet aware that they are trans). Many people pointed out and continue to point out that these are all evil acts in service of an ostensibly non-evil goal, and those people have tended to be dismissed as evil transphobes who are motivated by their evil hatred of trans people to evilly oppress them. As a result, people - who in general don't want to be seen as pushing back against an anti-evil movement - were cowed into not speaking out against these evil things, and thus these evil things kept happening.
07mk
23d ago
The man who does evil accidentally has a non-evil goal and may be persuaded to pursue that goal through a different, non-evil path.
I'm highly skeptical of this notion. In practice, my experience is that the man who does evil accidentally in service of a non-evil goal, will inevitably double down on that evil as not actually evil and then call out even considering following some alternative non-evil path as the ultimate evil. On the other hand, the man who does evil in service of an evil goal can often be coerced into stopping his evil actions, by forcibly preventing his evil actions from accomplishing his evil goals. This is a different point than the one about the virtue of competence, but I think it's true nonetheless, that in terms of effect to the rest of society, someone doing evil deliberately is better than someone doing so accidentally.
07mk
1mo ago
FWIW, I don't think the description of the movie's climax being the one holdout being "proven" wrong is incorrect. The holdout was "proven" wrong throughout the course of the film during which the jurors discuss the case, go over the evidence, and even mime out scenarios of what might have happened, which all introduce reasonable doubt (what constitutes "reasonable" is obviously subjective, but the film presents the doubt as a reasonable conclusion that the other jurors reach based on the evidence). The climax involving the one holdout finally relenting actually alludes to that holdout being unreasonably emotional due to past personal experiences haunting him. By the time any sort of ostracization was happening, it was obvious to all 12 jurors, including the one holdout, that the evidence pointed to there being reasonable doubt, and it was his emotional, irrational insistence in sticking with the guilty verdict regardless that was causing the other jurors to treat him this way.
07mk
1mo ago
I recall this kind of distributed training was considered by Stable Diffusion hobbyists after its public release in 2022, but it was deemed impractical due to each piece of training modifying the entire model at once, so doing it piecemeal wasn't an option. I wonder if LLMs suffer from similar issues, since the underlying architecture is similar.
07mk
1mo ago
A man of 30+ years raises his voice in that sudden deep "dad intensity" mode, makes a sudden threatening physical move in an argument, then walks off, and people will conclude he's really passionate about this topic and he, on the whole, wins the day.
This seems to me more fantastical than Lord of the Rings. In my experience, a man who did that would be deemed a pathetic insecure loser who continued his losing ways by losing this particular argument. The only times when physical performance of aggression could be said to "win the day" would be when that physical aggression literally results in some literal victory, such as punching out the bad guy or something. And greater age would be exacerbating, because a man who's 30+ is expected to be more mature than one that's <29 and thus more capable of maintaining composure or arguing his case using reason instead of force.
07mk
1mo ago
Maybe this is your point, but this always struck me as them telling on themselves. I've seen my share of online porn - almost certainly far more than all but the most extreme of the lipstick feminists - and I've never once just stumbled on porn of women being choked/slapped/etc. and extremely rarely do I even run into women being submissive. It's not my thing, so I don't seek it out, and as a result, whatever algorithm these sites are using don't make it visible to me.
This doesn't really track, because if you don't care one way or another, then it'd make more sense to find the annoyance in the people complaining more, more loudly, more violently, more disruptively, etc, and the amount of extraneous noise and controversy created by people complaining the exact opposite - that there aren't enough non-sexy women or non-white people in prominent places within said cool thing - is about an order of magnitude greater. If one is less bothered by calls for this ideology than against it, then that would mean that they certainly do care one way or another.
I'd also note that the description of these types of people "complain[ing] there are now non-sexy women or non-white people in prominent places within said cool thing" is highly uncharitable at best and just downright strawmanning at worst.
This also doesn't track for a few reasons. One big one is the fact that the very idea that it's more defensible to a wife to have the modern visuals versus polygons with boobs of the late 90s on the big living room TV is an ideological one. To some extent, what visceral reaction someone has is outside of ideology, but deciding whether or not to submit to that visceral reaction certainly is within ideology. This was one of the core arguments in the fight for gay marriage in the 00s - some attempt was made to convince people just not to find the idea of gay men viscerally disgusting, but the larger point was made that even if you do find them gross, this should play no part in the way you treat them. If there was some movement to get rid of gay men in media because it's just far more defensible to display non-gay men on the big TV due to people tending to just find gay men gross (whether or not this is actually true isn't relevant), most people would recognize that this would be ideologues pushing forward their ideology.
And speaking of movements, another big issue here is that we do have explicitly ideological movements that explicitly call for the kinds of changes we're talking about, with self-proclaimed examples of changes made explicitly for hewing to the ideology. This doesn't mean literally every last case of these types of changes is ideologically motivated, but it certainly points in that direction generally.
And the types of changes we see are consistent with the explicit goals of the movement and not so much with just wanting to put more defensible stuff on the big screen (which, again, would still be due to ideologues pushing their ideology). If the motivation were just that, we'd expect to see changes generally limited to taking costumes from stripper-level to, I don't know, something like dinner party-level. Maybe make some armor more properly covering. But we're not limited to just that, including androgyni-fying women and adding racial/sexual-orientation diversity. "Defensible on the TV" can somewhat track for jiggle physics on women wearing stripper outfits (again, still ideological), but really, not at all for having characters that aren't sufficiently diverse in a racial/sexual-orientation dimension. That's the kind of thing that's barely even noticeable to a typical viewer, and the ones who do notice it almost always tend to do so for ideological reasons (the very idea that there's something to notice there is, in itself, ideological, of course).
Furthermore, all this taking place in the context of the general increased accessibility of media that, in the past, used to be considered inappropriate makes it rather doubtful that this particular case of media transformation is driven by some secular desire to avoid what's inappropriate to show on the big TV. Often, the very same individuals who call for putting less-sexy women in games are also the ones who call for exposing kids, wives, and other general laypeople to media that's even more sexually provocative than a sexy woman jiggling around in a stripper outfit. So the push for these changes is primarily a push for changing what people do and don't consider appropriate to see on the big living room TV - which is almost explicitly a goal openly espoused by a massive ideological movement right now (and has been for, well, I'd guess longer than I've been alive). Given all that, the idea that these changes aren't being driven by ideologues (who have openly said that they want to cause the types of changes that we're talking about now) but rather by individuals making decisions about the type of media they themselves would feel comfortable showing to others just doesn't hold water.
The causal connection between "type of game devs would feel comfortable showing on their living room TV" and "type of game devs would want to make" is also something that seems to have greatly weakened since the 90s as well. Because of the more niche, less lucrative nature of the industry in the 90s, dev teams tended to be small enough that you could believe that the main decisionmakers in major titles were ones who actually enjoyed those games and were working towards one that they would want to play. Today, due to how much those things have changed, the executives making these decisions have other priorities they have to meet. One would normally think that the overriding priority would be profit, but other entertainment media, namely movies and TV, have shown that ideology is an even more pleasurable drug than money to plenty of executives.
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