07mk
5hr ago
They're arbitrary, but not random. They're not "good and right" in some sort of objective sense, and whether they're worth holding onto would depend heavily on the exact specifics. Whether it's possible not to hold onto those is also a separate question that I think the answer is No to most people in most contexts.
07mk
8hr ago
How does the smart, brave, loyal person come to sincerely believe in the absolutely evil and abhorrent X? Is she simply misinformed and deluded? Either she or 'you' or both have fatally misperceived something.
I don't think this follows. I think it's entirely possible for two equally intelligent, brave, loyal, [insert good adjective here] people to look at the same set of facts and come to equal and opposite conclusions about the goodness of the exact same thing, because people can have arbitrary fundamental values that inform every other value they have.
07mk
17hr ago
For whatever reason, and I haven't played it recently enough to have a strong impression of why, Halo 2 and Halo 3 didn't seem as bad in this regard, even during the sections that were heavier on flood.
I have a similar impression, and I think it's probably just that god-awful library level in Halo 1, which Bungie learned enough from not to repeat.
The variability in the level design surprised me though. It became more apparent to my more experienced eyes that a few of the levels in the second half of the game are pretty sloppily, borderline amateurishly put together, IMO. Maybe they ran out of time for polish before the deadline. ¯_(ツ)_/¯
I think I heard Xen suffered from that (Black Mesa tried to "fix" this and utterly ruined it by packing way too much content there - I quit after 2+ hours in Xen, likely only a few hours away from the ending, having grown fatigued of that area). It's kinda crazy to think that HL2 (correction: HL) came out just 2 years after Quake, the game whose engine it was partially built off of (I believe id gave Valve access to some Quake 2 engine material too). In 24 months, they had to put all of that together, enough levels to fill 15-20 hours. Compare that to the amount of content that games with 5+ year development times have today, when building using far more mature engines and tools, as well as well-established blueprints for game design.
07mk
1d ago
As someone who was a teenager gamer when these games came out, I'll add on to agreement with this. Halo was certainly a great, innovative accomplishment in singleplayer fps design, but it doesn't really compare to Half Life in that respect. It'd be like comparing Half Life to Doom or Wolfenstein 3D.
I will say, though, that HL2's ushering in of the era of rollercoaster singleplayer FPSs was an utter travesty. Even as a teenager, I could recognize how vastly inferior HL2 was to 1 in level design, making everything feel completely artificial in how it felt like Valve was sitting over my shoulder and ordering me to "Go there, not there, only here, etc." instead of shoving me into an immersive setting where I have to use my wits and tools to map out the terrain and navigate it successfully. Unsurprisingly, Ravenholm was by far my favorite part of HL2 (and I have very little love for horror games or horror tropes), and I still consider HL2E2 as the best singleplayer FPS I've played, with only maybe Metroid Prime being in the conversation as a competitor.
07mk
1d ago
There was about a 1.5 year period when I was had a passionate love affair with Halo 3 on 360, the last time I devoted any amount of time into an online competitive shooter. I've heard that they've become a lot more sanitized since then, and it's a bit sad that kids these days don't get to have that only weakly-filtered experience of calling and being called "nigger," "faggot," and the occasional "kyke" regularly in a light-hearted competitive environment. The world would likely be a much better place if that were a much more common experience.
07mk
2d ago
Is it not possible or practical to gimp chess engines to play at a level and style equivalent to elite human players? I would have thought that lowering a super-capable tool to human level capability would be possible, but, of course, with something as complicated as chess, it's not just a matter of scaling some number down by 50% or whatever.
07mk
2d ago
My intuition as a complete outsider to chess is that hours of grinding online could get you from low to mid or mid to high, but to reach the truly elite levels of top-10-in-the-world, you really need to spend lots of time competing against people at or near that level. I don't think a billion reps against little leaguers would be as valuable as a thousand against minor leaguers for someone aiming for the MLB. That said, I do wonder if chess engines, given their clear superiority over any and all humans, might enable the best of both worlds, but also, as an outsider, I could be missing some important distinctions.
Do people really think that lack of tournament play in open divisions is what's holding women back, or is this just an excuse/cover to try to get rid of the women's divisions?
I'd guess it's a genuine belief in the former, for the purpose of something like the latter, but rather than to try to get rid of the women's divisions, it's to try to land at a societally mediated conclusion for elite women's evident underperformance in chess compared to elite men's.
07mk
2d ago
Hm, are you pretty knowledgeable about competitive chess, and, if so, do you know if there's any controversy about transwomen competing in the women's division? I wonder if it would create a videogame speedrunner-like situation where basically every last one of the top "woman" speedrunners are male (I'm sure high correlation with autism would play a part, as well as the sex, though I'd also guess that high level chess or speedrunning tends to be disproportionately autistic, both male and female).
I've heard off-hand that men also dominate "sports" like darts or billiards/pool/snooker, despite there being minimal advantage from physical strength in those sports. If that's true, I wonder how much of that's biological in terms of men being innately better at geometry versus biological in terms of men having greater penchant for obsessing over some meaningless task until they achieve mastery versus biological in terms of men having greater incentive to become known for being great at something.
07mk
2d ago
There's a lot of behavior that seems mysterious if "believing that it could ever work for accomplishing the ostensible and stated goals" were a prerequisite for engaging in it. Not just by women from upper class circles, but basically everyone in every context, even the most powerful and influential among us, like some politician or executive blaming others when they fail to get the votes or buyers. I think that people, by and large, don't care about the consequences of their actions and just follow their inner impulses in the moment.
07mk
2d ago
There's a joke I've seen before that is along the lines of "women be shopping = bigoted, white women be shopping = woke" so it doesn't seem to be strictly true that sexism is tolerable while racism and religionism isn't. It seems more to just be directional from minority and "oppressed" groups in the English speaking world to majority groups.
I think this is more or less the correct explanation. It really is just who/whom in its fundamental essence, and trying to make it make sense logically is a fool's errand.
07mk
2d ago
Took the words out of my mouth. Like, literally, I probably typed almost those exact words back in mid-2016, before he got elected. It's been almost a full decade since, and I'm almost impressed at the resilience of people trying to keep doing this. But I guess fatigue is probably the strongest feeling I have at this point.
07mk
3d ago
However, with my girlfriend, we talk every day. Meaning our conversation often feels like a "What did you do today?" conversation, and it often feels surface level stuff. And I'm finding that trying to
Do you have any suggestions for me that I could change to make our daily calls more interesting and engaging?
I am midst a similar situation as you, finding such things trying as well, and my strategy has been to change myself to stop caring about how interesting I find such calls. I've learned to simply see it as just another one of the many boring, rote work that goes into making a relationship work. The way I see it, just like how having sex whether or not you're, in the moment, enthusiastic about it, is one of the duties of being a good romantic partner, so too is having conversations whether or not you're, in the moment, enthusiastic about it.
07mk
3d ago
Don't go into a relationship trying to change someone
You and your partner need to grow into the right people for each other.
First bullet says don't try change the other person, the second bullet says try to change yourself. A characteristic of someone is their willingness or desire to change in order to help their relationship with you; this is something you shouldn't go into a relationship expecting to change about them. They either will or won't change themselves to help the relationship they have with you, and your efforts to influence that will have minimal effect at best. So find someone who is willing to change for you (rather than someone you find attractive that you believe you can change into the kind of person who would change for you) and change yourself to help your relationship with them. This doesn't seem paradoxical.
07mk
5d ago
it seems people take this too far and think even a trained woman can't beat an untrained man, and I don't see why THAT is true.
As far as I can tell, what it seems to you according to this sentence isn't reflective of the actual reality; it seems to me that people don't take this that far, except the Lizardman Constant. The idea that you could take some random 50th percentile man from the street and have him face off against, say, an MMA world-champion-caliber female and have him consistently come out on top is something I've seen pretty much no one ever express, except in cases of extreme differences in weight (controlling for which is usually already built-in anyway in competitions like this in regular cases). Or comparing deadlifts with a world-champion-caliber female power lifter or anything of the like. The point of comparison when comparing elite female athletes unfavorably to males has always been with male athletes, in my experience, usually ones that are even higher level than, say, a local rec soccer league (which is already a much higher level compared to the median man off the street).
07mk
6d ago
Good news is that in an open market, it really doesn't matter. The best decisions economically will win out over time, and as wind and solar becomes increasingly more viable, it's going to win out more.
This seems correct and, along with your bullet points above it, indicates that any sort of renewable-focused activism in the past was a complete failure, and in the future would be a complete waste of time. I wish I could hope that those people who were complete failures in the past would learn from this so as not to waste their (and our) time and resources in the future, but I'm not that naive.
07mk
6d ago
The 'somehow' in that sentence is doing alot of heavy lifting, though. Among other things.
To be fair, you probably would be doing a lot of it too, if you managed to wrangle such an arrangement.
07mk
8d ago
Retard was never quite ubiquitously PC-banned, but there was a lot of spikiness. I grew up in the 90s and 00s in an area with such a spike, such that calling someone a retard or something retarded was probably about equivalent to calling a gay man a faggot. I was quite surprised when I grew up and encountered people in my professional life calling things retarded in the office.
I think it's probably retreated a bit such that it's not considered quite as offensive here anymore, but certainly almost no one ever says it in casual conversation. The last time I heard it in a social situation was a friend's gf who had recently moved into the area, which prompted the friend to stare daggers at her and compel her to shut up.
I've noticed a bit of hubbub in the PC circles due to the distress at this word becoming more common again. Ironically, I feel like this is an example of moral progress: in the 90s, we naively thought that it was morally correct to discourage the use of that word. 30 years later, we've realized that, like slavery or human sacrifice, such a notion was just a primitive belief by a less moral culture that we've outgrown.
Drunk who slapped her around, lived off her money while not giving a penny towards upkeep of the house and his kids, isolated her from family and friends and was big dreamer who couldn't follow through. He seems to have had a shallow, facile charm that impressed people on the surface level until they got to know him better.
This is a common enough phenomenon that it's essentially a cliche both in fiction and IRL. I know someone who's living in a household with a man like this right now. The husband stays at home all day watching TV, barely doing any housekeeping while the wife, who needs dialysis 2x a week, is doing manual labor to support the family and their 2 teenage kids. He hits her sometimes (no idea how often) and also hits their housemate's dog sometimes. The kids reportedly often complain to the mother, but the mother is also the biggest defender of him and will apparently never every blame him for anything or put any responsibilities on him.
It's certainly a curious phenomenon, because the biggest cliche is probably that women will put up with a lot of abuse and other negatives from a man if he's rich/high status enough. But this man is neither. One time, they reportedly got into a fight and he was kicked out of the house, and he had to come back begging later than night, because not a single one of his "friends" was willing to lend him a couch or floor space that night. He used to have jobs but kept getting kicked out for insubordination and bad attitude. He reportedly used to have a coke habit that is not fully gone. Status can be hard to ascertain and context-dependent, but for this guy, it's hard to imagine a realistic context in which he is anything but quite low status.
Maybe this cliche comes from the intersection of men who are huge losers like this who are also somehow ridiculously good in bed or something? I honestly have little idea what's going on.
07mk
10d ago
The right way to deal with that is just to ignore it. Men are slowly learning to do that, but it's not an instinctual thing for them to do, so it's going to take another few decades for them to evolve far enough to have a healthy response to this.
Turns out that the feminist cliche about men not being sufficiently evolved for modern civilization was true, after all!
07mk
10d ago
I wonder how many physically abusive men, when "apologizing" to their wives for their most recent outburst, have excused their behaviour with exaggerated or invented claims of being victims of abuse themselves. I wonder if abusive men even deliberately/unconsciously seek out gullible or suicidally empathetic women who'll be more susceptible to these kinds of rationalisations.
I don't know the answers to these questions, but I couldn't help but read your comment and be intensely reminded of my father. Both my parents grew up and lived in Korea until after I was born, and the culture in Korea in the 70s-80s when they were dating and then married was certainly very very permissive of physically abusive husbands (it was only very permissive in the 90s). But that's not the part that reminds me, it's that whenever my father beat my mother, he would excuse it to her that this was just a result of the upbringing he had in his family (his father beat his mother quite a lot worse than he beat my mother, by all accounts), that he was trying his best to escape it (they were/are both second-wave feminists, which was a movement that, AFAICT from my mother, was quite popular in Korea during that time).
I haven't watched the show, but I heard that there's a scene in The Last of Us Season 2 where there's a flashback to Joel's father Lalo Salamanca explaining roughly the same thing to him while or after beating him and his brother, that his father beat him really really bad, but he only beat them really bad, and they'll go on to beat their sons only kinda bad, or something. So I get the sense that this is at least common enough to be a cliche or stereotype, and it matches my anecdotal experience.
My father's 2nd wife was also Korean and even less agentic than my mother by my judgment and also suffered quite a lot of beatings from him, which at least somewhat anecdotally points in the direction of such men seeking out such women who are ready to be victimized.
07mk
10d ago
I would argue though, that women sure seem to complain a lot more about landing in abusive relationships than men do, so clearly there is some kind of gendered thing going on here.
My intuitive guess is that this is due to there being a mismatch in how much women rationally expect their complaints to have positive impact in their lives versus how much men rationally expect such. But I'm not sure how much is that versus more women being in abusive relationships or women tending to be in abusive relationships that are more violent.
07mk
10d ago
Of course, I don't think such a perfectly neutral observer exists in the first place, which makes the whole thing moot.
I think the same, but I assume that omnipotence includes the ability to convince people like you or me that we are wrong about this, without resorting to hypnosis or mind control or whatever.
I interpreted the original hypothetical as Alice being better in all things except for fundamental morality - hence why she thinks something as evil as X is good.
More options
Context Copy link