07mk
7mo ago
The OP is clearly saying you cannot infer anything about their beliefs or worldview on the basis of the mods they play. That is what I don't agree with. Those are not trivial things.
Indeed, and I agree with the OP and disagree with you. "Anything about their beliefs or worldview" is different from "anything [at all]." The deliberate choices one makes when modding falls into the latter category but not in the former category. E.g. if someone decided to make a mod that changed some pixels from brown to beige, it tells us that that person decided to make a mod that changed some pixels from brown to beige, which falls into the latter, but not the former. I doubt the OP would disagree with the notion that a modder deciding to change some pixels from brown to beige tells us that the modder decided to change those pixels from brown to beige, but he can speak for himself, I suppose.
Not every possible explanation is equally possible. I don't think people are missing the fact that the mod they were downloading, in the SV example, was explicitly about making a black character white. That context matters. Is it by itself enough to say a person is racist? Maybe not. But it does make it more likely.
Does it? It's possible that it does, but I dispute that you can believe with any meaningful level of confidence that it does make it more likely. This is the kind of nice-sounding narrative that intuitively makes sense and sounds plausible, and as such, if we believe it without doing the hard empirical work to check that it's true, then we should be highly suspicious that our belief in it is due to how plausible it sounds and how much it is in concordance with our intuitions, rather than how true it is. Again, in that SV example, it is, by itself, absolutely not enough to say the person is racist. Is it enough to imply that that modder is more likely to be racist than the typical SV modder or player? It might be, and it might not be, and we haven't done the hard empirical work to figure out which.
07mk
1yr ago
What do you mean by "support this?"
For me, "support this" would involve something akin to being either ambivalent to or promoting of a medical/social standard where when someone believes they have gender dysphoria and wants to explore options to progress from there, this pill is presented by doctors/psychologists as an equally helpful option to address their dysphoria as medical/social transitioning, modulo the relative risk/benefit ratios of the different processes. This is a pretty muddy and imprecise standard, but that's hard to avoid when talking about something as broad as "leftists" "supporting" "this."
I'm a leftist who would support this by the above standard, but I have to honestly say that I'm skeptical that agreeing with me would be popular or even common among leftists.
07mk
1yr ago
What made them think hiring subpar writers, rewriting lore, rewriting characters of one of the most popular fantasy IPs while simultaneously drafting off of the brand was a good idea? It feels like the motive isn't even to make money but solely to push an agenda, but who would do that?
I don't think they thought they were hiring subpar writers. I think they just have a different measure of what a quality writer is compared to the general public. When people who push this sort of agenda say that having representation of people of certain races/genders/sexualities makes a piece of fiction better, I think they actually believe it. They really do believe that if you take an existing successful franchise and tack on a story that appeals to such sensibilities with diverse characters or allegorical plot threads, it makes the work, in some real meaningful way, better. And thus hopefully more successful. And so they prioritize doing just that.
But, of course, there's no such thing as prioritizing everything at once. If you prioritize the messaging, you necessarily put less priority on the actual quality of the work in terms of things like world building, character development, interesting plot, etc. And making a good TV show isn't easy; you can't just de-prioritize those things and expect to end up with good results. But, again, the people making this stuff genuinely believe that the messaging is what makes the TV show good. There's much to be skeptical about when it comes to the narrative of Hollywood/filmmaking leftists being too far in their own echo chambers to understand what appeals to the general public, but the more I observe the leftist echo chambers in my own environments, the more I can believe in such a narrative.
Of course, such delusional beliefs do have to encounter the stark reality of revenue and watch numbers, but culture like this tends to turn slowly, and there's enough money to keep them afloat and going. And the always-dependable narrative that "we didn't fail the audience; the bigoted audience failed us by refusing to watch our show" (examples abound, but the recent Billy Eichner movie comes to mind, as well as the Charlie's Angels reboot-reboot from a couple years back), followed by "but next time, as the march of progress continues on and our side gets more and more vindicated as being the right side of history, the audience will be receptive to our correct notion of what constitutes quality."
07mk
1mo ago
I wonder how the media reaction to this will be, compared to what happened in 2014. I was a much more avid user of Twitter back then, as well as a much bigger gamer compared to now, and I was able to watch in real-time as various gaming media outlets formed their narrative about misogynist gamers harassing women which was about as close to the exact opposite of the situation as one could get if one actually intentionally tried (which I suspect was the case). Even back then, media outlets had been losing readers in favor of social media, but they still seemed to have enough credibility that plenty of more casual gamers just naively took them at their word. 10 years later, and social media has continued to rise and media outlets have continued to lose credibility, and I believe the viewership/readership numbers have reflected this.
That means that if people sympathetic to SBI want to set the narrative again, then doing the same thing as before, where some sympathetic writers at a handful of media outlets rewrite the narrative (most likely in uncoordinated fashion, I'd guess) to flatter the people they like and denigrate the people they don't, might not be enough to achieve the same level of success in convincing people. I primarily learned about this situation from a YouTuber/Twitch streamer who regularly gets 6-7 figures in views on each video, where he was just straight-up shitting on SBI for being ideologues trying to sell something that customers don't want to buy and calling out one of the media outlet authors as racist for stating the very standard - downright cliche at this point - modern "progressive" line "you can't be racist against white people." And there are plenty of smaller "content creators" similar to him saying similar things who still get 5-6 figures per video. That kind of ecosystem wasn't really around back in 2014.
Now, this ecosystem also definitely produces people who are sympathetic to SBI. And, who knows, maybe there are YouTubers who get 7-8 figures per video who basically parrot the lines Kotaku and Polygon spit out? But even if that's the case, I think the presence of the ecosystem of more diverse viewpoints would make it harder for the SBI-preferred narrative of "oppressed minorities being harassed by bigoted gamers who want to exclude them from their spaces" to take hold. It's not a true marketplace of ideas, but it seems at least half a step closer to one than what it was in 2014, and that half a step could be enough for contrasting ideas from diverse viewpoints to win out.
To take a more bird's eye view of this, I think the past decade since the affair of reproductively viable female worker ants has shown that the Anita Sarkeesians of the world had a complete victory in that time period. SBI has been around and modifying games for a while, and it's only now, after plenty of damage has been done to multiple formerly well-regarded franchises, that fans have even begun to notice them to any significant extent, much less push back. And more to the point, the very fact that devs and/or publishers see enough value in SBI that SBI can survive as a company shows that the ideology has taken a pretty firm root in the industry. The future is not yet set, of course, and this particular episode seems to be at least a blip in the other direction, but what I'd expect right now is that the people sympathetic to SBI will come up with some new technique that I don't even have the capability to imagine right now to continue to subvert the industry in ways that paying customers are even less able to notice or control.
07mk
1yr ago
I'd like to discuss the best ideas my political opposition has, but I'm increasingly concerned that "signal boost liars" is the best idea my political opposition has--or, if not their best idea, maybe just their most pragmatically effective.
I don't think that's is a very charitable way of describing this, but I do think there's a grain of truth to this that could lead to fruitful discussion. When I read this description of what happened, not having heard of this person before and taking the top-level post at its word, the first thing I was reminded of was the affair of Jussie Smollett, whose hate crime hoax was initially met with immense amounts of support and sympathy, leading to a TV interview where he theorized that the supposed hate crime was motivated by his outsized criticism of "45," i.e. Donald Trump, before the absurdities in his story quickly caused the public perception tide to turn against him. I think anyone with a clear head or a belief in ethics would have recognized the hoax was both bad in itself and highly likely to be bad for himself, but I'd wager Smollett had neither. And the adoration that he received in the brief period before his story broke down was very real and very sizable, something I'm guessing he truly got a lot out of.
And this in turn reminded me of the affair of Jackie Coakley, the University of Virginia student whose story of being gang-raped as part of an apparent frat house hazing ritual was the basis for the Rolling Stone article A Rape on Campus by Sabrina Rubin Erdely which made waves about 10 years ago before it was retracted by the publication for purportedly lacking in veracity. I don't remember it too well, and Coakley wasn't a public figure like Smollett who actively tried to publicize herself, but I recall what little we got from her was that she genuinely stuck to her guns that the story was real, despite the lack of evidence.
What these highlight to me is that there are some people who are so narcissistic and lacking in a sense of ethics and honesty that they're willing to lie in an effort to gain... something that feeds their egos. I don't know if it's called sociopathy or what, but I feel like it's very similar to the kind of mentality we see in (people I think are) scam artists like Elizabeth Holmes of Theranos or possibly Sam Bankman-Fried or the guy who ran the Fyre Festival or Travis Pangburn. Who knows why they are the way they are, but they're that way, and they'll likely always be with us.
So as a society, it falls on the rest of us to have norms and rules and laws that allow us to accurately detect and prevent/punish people like that. And I think if you want to be charitable to your "political opposition," their failure is that they've created an environment that provides weak points for people like that to attack.
Another thing associated with your "opposition" I was reminded of when reading this post was "Believe Women" (FYI the fact that Jones in this story is a woman is tangential to the point I'm making, not least because her claim isn't one of sexual abuse). There is some controversy over what this actually means, muddled by the fact that "Believe All Women" was also a common variant of the phrase for a time, but the most charitable version of it that I've encountered is something like, "In the past, accusations by women against abusers were automatically treated with hyperskepticism, leading to many men to get away with abusive behavior, leading to more women being abused. Like it or not, you, by nature of living in this society, are also infected with this tendency towards hyperskepticism. In an effort to correct this injustice, you when judging the veracity of the next woman's claim of being abused, you should err on the side of believing her." This most charitable version still literally means that you personally should override what you personally believe to be your best judgment: your very ability to judge is not to be trusted, in favor of, well, "Believe Women."
The "Believe Women" meme is only one in a long line of similar memes and messages about overriding one's own best judgment in favor of taking claims at their word based on the particular scenario and identity. "Lived experience" is probably the most famous one. And there's a real belief that this is the ethical and just thing to do here, supported by a scaffolding of narratives around oppression and history and what is really believed to be social science. That the current oppressive structure of society has essentially infected the minds of everyday people with invisible - or "implicit" - biases that tilt them against the words of certain types of people, which must be actively fought against by consciously overriding their very ability to judge things.
When you have this sort of norm of shredding one's skepticism in certain circumstances, it becomes very easy to convince oneself that any particular case that makes one's enemies look bad must fit the circumstances. You do that enough times, and it just becomes automatic, to determine one's own skepticism based on how bad it makes one's enemies look, rather than based on the actual specifics of the situation at hand. And this norm has been pushed and pushed and pushed as the only correct thing to do in many influential leftist circles.
And let me be clear, I don't think this is well intentioned; but what I believe it is is an attempt at being well intentioned. This sort of downstream negative impacts aren't immediately obvious at first blush, but neither are they so counterintuitive and complex that it would take a genius to figure out. Every individual who believes in pushing some sort of sociopolitical message has the responsibility to think through things at least enough to figure this out. And the people who pushed this sort of norm hadn't. And so they failed in their attempt to be well intentioned. But they don't outright believe that "signal boosting liars" is their best idea. They just find themselves doing it because the norms they follow have corrupted their ability to distinguish between liars and truthtellers in cases where the lies are very flattering to their side.
I think this is a trap that everyone everywhere can fall into, and due to the asymmetry between the right and the left, the way it instantiates on the right-wing is different, looking more like authoritarian hierarchical organizations, such as the church. Our society has done a bang-up job in explicitly identifying and subverting such organizations for at least the past few decades, and I think (hope) we're catching up to doing the same for the left versions.
07mk
1yr ago
I must admit I'm a bit surprised, both in the direction and the magnitude of the direction. A priori, I would have guessed that the strong norms of free speech and personal liberty would have made it so that Americans would generally be against a government-mandated ban on TikTok. The trends between Republicans/Democrats and conservatives/liberals doesn't surprise me, at least, since I would expect the former to be more prioritizing of stuff like protection of children from social media brainrot and protection of US citizen data from Chinese governments over freedom of people to use social media services that could be harmful to themselves and others. On a personal level, I think TikTok is probably a net negative both to US society and to US citizens, but I also think that the government setting a precedent of banning TikTok is probably a much bigger net negative to US society and to US citizens.
07mk
1yr ago
This is something that gets me as well. I wager if you asked the person from MLive Media who wrote that statement to choose to become a Nazi right now, in the sense that he truly, in his heart of hearts, believed that Jews were sub-humans who ought to be exterminated, he couldn't do it, even under threat of death or torture. The best he could do is to play-act the role. I don't see why this would be any different for Scott Adams's views about black people or anyone's views about anything.
This does cross into free will territory and applies more broadly to any sort of behavior. A bank robber didn't have the choice to have a brain that tells him that grabbing a gun and threatening tellers was a good way to make money, no more than Charles Whitman had a choice to have a tumor in his brain affecting his amygdala before he went on a killing spree in UT Austin.
Yet our society does treat these behaviors as being "choices" and hold the people carrying these out as agents responsible for the consequences of these "choices." And to a large extent, our society depends on this in order to function. People noticed that holding people accountable for their "choices" is helpful for making a more comfortable society to live in, likely through incentivizing - perhaps "manipulating" is just as good a term - people to behave in certain ways. The way I see it, the idea that these types of things are choices is a sort of legal fiction that society holds up as a means to make it function at all. And basically no one who created the fiction realized it was fiction, and same goes for people who follow the fiction.
And so we get to cases like here, where someone like Scott Adams is excoriated for daring to "choose" his views. The person is just acting out the fictional thing that our society agreed on to treat as fact; he doesn't like Scott Adams's behavior and wants less of it, so he incentivizes less of it in society by punishing Scott Adams for doing that behavior, while invoking that fiction as the justification.
07mk
2mo ago
First time I ever heard the term was, as described in another comment, in relation to the Occupy protests from one of the social media posts in their favour.
This was my experience as well. The term "Progressive Stack" became popular IIRC during the Occupy Wall Street protests, being pushed* as the correct way to create a hierarchy in whose voices got heard first in these intentionally structure-less organizations. I had never heard the notion that this was actually a term of denigration by critics, but perhaps it's not too surprising, since that criticism tends to get leveled at many terms that some progressives choose to label themselves when other people start associating those labels with the underlying characteristics of the actual thing that the label is pointing at (obvious examples being "woke" and "social justice warrior").
* There's a very common conspiracy theory among leftists that Occupy Wall Street and/or aspects of it were intentionally sabotaged by progressives inserting their identity politics into it, as a way to sow division among people of different demographics within the working class. The fact that some seem to believe that the very term "Progressive Stack" is a term of denigration that critics imposed on the people pushing it makes this conspiracy theory funnier to me.
07mk
6mo ago
This is what I've been doing for years, starting back when Google Music became a thing, because subscription to that also came with a subscription to YouTube Red (a terrible name for their premium service, given the existence of RedTube - though still preferable to calling it YouTube One like every single brand in existence has been doing the last decade). Once Google Music got shuttered I just kept the YouTube Red subscription at the same price.
Of course, this makes me the sucker who got baited into a service I didn't initially want and stuck with it just out of laziness and inertia. I rationalize it that $10/mo is worth it for the hours I must save not watching ads on YT, to say nothing of the disruption and annoyance, but that rationalization is going to be harder for others depending on their circumstances, I admit.
07mk
7mo ago
Man, if I killed someone with a gun, I'd love to have you as my defense attorney. "My client didn't intend to kill someone, your honor, he just pulled a piece of metal/plastic on a product he owned while it was aimed at a person for two minutes straight!"
This is, to be frank, an insane comparison. Pointing a loaded gun at someone and pulling the trigger is the literal physical act of killing someone, or at least causing injury with the high likelihood of killing. This has no comparison to how changing some pixels - or anything else - for a virtual game relates to racism. There is no physical reality that connects the playing of a game with racism the same way physical reality connects shooting a gun at someone with murder. Many people believe that the contents of a modded game can exacerbate racism, but this is by no means a well-supported view, and is certainly a far less consensus view than "shooting someone with a gun has a high likelihood of kill them," and the leap from "I personally think this mod could exacerbate racism" to "therefore, this modder, even if possibly subconsciously, had racist motivations in creating this mod" is unjustified.
By this logic, I could download a mod that changed "white" to "cracker" or "cracker-colored" and no one should assume I'm being racist.
Absolutely. I would 100% not assume you were a racist and I would defend you as being a non-racist, at least on the basis of this one decision. This would remain just as strong even if, say, you modded Doom to change all demons to cis white men and the player character to an amalgamation of Ibram X. Kendi and Robin DiAngelo. The only conclusion we could draw is that you wanted to make a Doom mod with these properties, and any sort of speculation about your personal beliefs about the politics surrounding people like Kendi, DiAngelo, and cis white men would be just that, speculation, and you would be responsible for exactly none of the speculation that many people could (and would likely) speculate about your principles and beliefs that motivated you to create such a mod.
And, needless to say, in neither your example nor mine, would you actually be being racist, since there's no one to actually be racist towards in a situation where you're just writing some code in a computer and offering other people the choice to download and use that code.
07mk
11mo ago
But assuming the allegations are false, what then? The natural inclination is also to deny, except you're in a legal bind. Any denial necessarily implies that the accuser is lying.
This is the part I find a lot of problem with whenever this topic comes up, often in the context of sexual assault/rape accusations. I don't think any denial necessarily implies that the accuser is lying. It necessarily implies that the accuser is wrong. Given what we know about the fallibility and malleability of memory, particularly when stressful situations are involved, it's entirely possible for the accuser to be honest to the best of their ability and still be completely, entirely wrong about the facts of what occurred. I don't know if this affects the legal calculus of the potential defamation suit; is the claim that an accuser is making an incorrect accusation for whatever reason - without implying that the accuser is lying - defamation? I don't know, but that's the actual pertinent issue than the claim that they're actually lying.
07mk
1yr ago
At the end of the day, we can't really tell who's got a more perception, I guess. My thinking is that much of the philosophical basis I hear from the left around trans issues seems to implicitly posit a sort of dualism, that there's some immaterial soul that has a gender that is decoupled from the sex of the body. As such, I would predict that for most of the left, a pill that makes someone identify their gender with their birth sex would be akin to a pill that tears off a part of the person's soul. It's the same reason why I would guess that even if gay conversion therapy were proven to be effective and with low risk/benefit ratio for a medical/psychological intervention (neither of which seem plausible to me), I doubt there would be much support at all for it from the left.
My perception could easily be colored too much by the leftists I interact with, though. And it's entirely possible that the implicit dualism I see being invoked is just a tool being used to push forward policies intended to reduce the suffering of people with gender dysphoria, and in the scifi scenario that a pill is invented to painlessly do just that, the dualism basis would get dropped entirely. Most leftists aren't activists, and most people aren't principled left or right, so it could take just a few activists supporting it and the regular everyday people going along with it to make it popular among the left.
07mk
1yr ago
My favorite fake fact is that people with <100 IQ can't understand hypotheticals. I've worked minimum wage jobs and I've met some real fucking dummies - yes, they can understand hypotheticals.
Every time I've run into this, it has not been presented as a fact, and the number was far lower than 100 - I think 85 or 80 maybe? Where here have you seen someone claim that it's a known fact that people of 49th percentile intelligence or lower can't understand hypotheticals?
07mk
1yr ago
But this suggests another strategy: don’t train it on the world as it appears to be. Train it on the world that could be.
Is creating such training data trivial? No. Does it require discriminating against anyone? Also no. Seems like a decent idea to me.
Presuming that this theoretical "world that could be" is at all different from the "world as it appears to be", it absolutely requires discriminating against someone. There's just no way to bridge that difference without applying some discrimination against someone at some point in the process; otherwise we'd just end up back where we started.
07mk
1mo ago
A place where I've noticed the whole "self-improvement is right-wing" meme being true has been in fictional media. In recent years, a number of films (e.g. Star Wars, Captain Marvel) and TV shows (e.g. She-Hulk: Attorney at Law, Rings of Power) - all of them made by openly progressive people openly pushing a progressive agenda - have been criticized for what some have disparagingly called the "HER-o's Journey," wherein the heroine, often fairly boring or unlikeable from the start, goes through a character arc where she discovers that she was actually always as awesome as she always believed she was, realizing that all her problems were the fault of everyone else who couldn't see her innate awesomeness that was always within her. This is obviously meant to contrast with the classic "Hero's Journey," which tends to involve a hero going through a character arc where he struggles with and overcomes some flaw he has, allowing him to overcome some obstacle at the climax. It'd be easy to say that this is a projection of how women and men relate to each other IRL, where women judge if men are good enough for her while men improve themselves to become good enough for women, but I don't think it's that simple, since, AFAICT, fictional media that follow this type of narrative tend not to be particularly liked by women any more than they are by men. But to add on to this whole "refusal to self-improve" phenomenon, when these works underperform commercially, usually the creators of these works tend to blame the fans for failing to understand their value, rather than blaming themselves for failing to deliver something that fans would want to give money for.
More broadly, these phenomena both tie into something Jonathan Haidt has talked about with respect to modern leftist politics, which is that he sees it as "reverse-cognitive behavioral therapy." One well known trope in CBT is that one reframes "this person caused me to feel this way" to "this person did this, and I responded by feeling this way," which obviously shifts the locus of control from external to internal. Much of the modern left is informed by the idea of discovering one's true self and being in touch with one's emotions, which often rounds down to just trusting every feeling that goes through one's mind as true and valuable and projecting it onto the world - this is something we obviously see coming from all sides all the time, but the modern left particularly encourages this as virtuous for people who have been deemed oppressed.
Another disparate thought I have is that the left has long been associated with support for religious and sexual minorities, who have traditionally been oppressed by a society that would treat them as second class citizens for believing the things they believe. In such a setting, trusting one's own feelings over what society tells you is considered a righteous act of rebellion, and it's not at all a leap to go from that to the belief that any sort of belief in improving oneself is actually an internalized form of the oppressive standards that society imposes on you. I also wrote in another comment that the connection to postmodernism makes it so that it's easier to disconnect one's beliefs from base reality, which in this case is the belief that any negative health effects of being fat or obese are purely imposed by society and disconnected from biology or physics. This also connects with beauty standards, where the notion that skinny, fit women being considered attractive is deemed to be a purely arbitrary societal invention.
I don't know that there's any theory that neatly ties all this together. I'll just say, as someone who's been a leftist Democrat all my life, seeing Democrats whine about Republicans for so many decades without taking responsibility to improve themselves has largely made me check out of politics over the past half-decade to a decade. The idea that it's our responsibility and only our responsibility to shape our message to win over Republicans and independents to our cause, and that these people who disagree with us have no responsibility to be convinced by a message they don't find convincing just doesn't seem to occur to them. That said, I'm seeing this from the inside of just one side, and so maybe this exact same type of passing-the-buck phenomenon happens just as much in the other side.
07mk
1yr ago
This whole situation seems like a perfect storm of... a lot of things, starting with the fact that it's fundamentally about children, which tends to bring out the least rational, most passionate sides in people, both for better and for worse. I've only heard of this Mermaids group in passing so I'm not intimately familiar with them, but the way you describe them and your further notes about trans activists speaking on behalf of trans kids brings to mind this old blog post that resonated with me, particularly "It felt like I was talking to an AI designed to maximize the number of trans people." The idea of such activists having any influence on actual care providers seems completely FUBAR to me, and likely to cause truly monstrous travesties.
I admit part of my reaction here is colored by a couple of personal factors: 1. I knew a temporarily FTM transman who decided to detransition back to woman partway in and who had felt betrayed by the community that had pushed her to transition and the permanent physical changes she had gone through during her initial transition as a girl in her late teens, and 2. I could easily see myself as having been pushed to transition MTF if I had been born 30 years later and grown up in the same places I have; I am quite fine with being cis male now as an adult. These make me feel that the dangers of false positives are very important to acknowledge and work around. It's only through cold empirical study that we can nail down the proper ways to detect and serve the true positives and false positives, and activists whose motivations seem to be to maximize the true positives with little-to-no concern for everything else should have precisely zero influence in that study.
I think back in 2016-2018, on the actual Slatestarcodex comment section (likely one of the open threads), I had a conversation with someone who believed that calling out the media lying/misleading about Donald Trump in a negative way was worthy of derision, because doing such would help Trump to get (re-? I don't remember the exact date)elected. I disagreed strongly, because my view was that the media spreading such deceptions was discrediting itself, and it was only by calling out such deceptions that the media could be pushed to correct itself and stop its self-discrediting, and it's only by having a credible media that the populace could be expected to take seriously true negative things that the media claimed about Trump. And as someone who felt very strongly about not wanting Trump as POTUS (or as 2-term POTUS), I wanted the media called out on each and every such deception, as harshly as possible.
I feel similarly about this situation. Medical care for potentially trans kids is very important to nail down, and whatever medical institutions come up with the standards for care need to have credibility that they did their homework in a scientific, rigorous way. If there's any indication of undue pressure by certain activist groups to these institutions to put their thumb on the scale, that destroys their credibility, leaving us at square 1 on figuring out this very important issue. So I would expect that anyone who actually cares about helping potentially trans kids would make it a high priority to make sure that such credibility-destroying influence gets called out and corrected. And contrapositively, anyone who's hesitant to call out such influence for whatever reason is someone who can't be trusted to actually want what's good for such kids. And this goes just as strongly for any sort of anti-TRAs that might exist who behave in a way as to maximize the number of true negatives, even if that means maximizing false negatives, who might have undue influence on medical institutions.
That's all pretty meta, and I wish I could form some meaningful opinion at the object level, but at this point, I'll admit that for most CW topics, and certainly this one, I'm just mostly suspicious of anyone who has strong opinions either way at the object level due to how, at the meta level, the ability to find actual true knowledge of the object level concepts seem to have been so corrupted, often intentionally.
07mk
1yr ago
The sense that I get is that this can't possibly work that way, because women are the ones who define what "defective" means. By definition, 0% of women are defective, and X% of men are defective as determined by the judgments of the women which play out in whether or not one of the women chose to marry the man. I think this underlies most of the discussion on this topic, and trying to reason why those X% of men might have negative character traits is just a long-winded way of trying to avoid recognizing this. Those men are defective, by definition, but for whatever reason, people in our society don't like to think of ourselves as judging people as "defective" based purely on their romantic success, and so we come up with other reasons to justify this judgment that avoids the obvious answer.
07mk
1mo ago
I don't really play AAA games very much, so the actual effect of Sweet Baby on those games is not very salient to me, but when reading and hearing about it, I can't help but notice that they usually aren't giving many examples of of aspects of these games that people really think are bad because of Sweet Baby. In fact, before this controversy, the main thing gamers were complaining about was in-game transactions.
I think there's no actual way to know what Sweet Baby Inc influenced in these games unless you work for SBI, the company, or there are leaks. Before SBI was put on as a face to the concept, though, the "woke" direction of the industry had been criticized for a long time, so the issue was never SBI specifically or even companies like SBI, but rather that devs actually seemed to want their narratives to receive influence from the type of ideology espoused by people working at or defending SBI.
One recent fairly prominent example of a game that SBI had worked on according to that curator (but whose exact influence is a mystery AFAIK) was Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League which, as the title implies, involved killing the Justice League heroes, where the one heroine Wonder Woman apparently got a noble and dignified death with the male heroes getting fairly muted or pathetic ones (apparently there was some extra controversy cuz the Batman VA died before the game was released, and he got a rather unceremonial death). The game was apparently shit for many non-narrative-related reasons, and this kind of thing could easily be chalked up to coincidence, but it does fit very neatly into a pattern we've seen in a lot of visual media of legacy franchises the last 5-10 years.
There have been a number of mini-controversies over patterns like this, such as (mainly western) devs making heroines more masculine/ugly than players tend to prefer seeing, with the Horizon games, The Last of Part 2, and even the aforementioned Suicide Squad with Harley Quinn compared to her depiction in the old Arkham games by the same dev, being examples. Last year's Resident Evil 4 remake was criticized for cutting out 2 of the best lines in the game: "Well, if it isn't the bitch in the red dress" and "I see the president has equipped his daughter with ballistics," but the game was well received for being good. On the other hand, the previous year's Saints Row reboot was criticized for making the protagonists soft 20-something roommates getting into crime to pay back their student debt while rebelling against the current societal order or whatever, along with censoring in-game stores like Freckle Bitches to FB's.
I don't think any of these rose to the level of being a major, or anything more than a tiny, controversy, and it was the rare person who was actually worked up over any of it, but certainly lots of people noticed the pattern of the direction things seemed to be going and were making some noise about how devs were just making games worse for no good reason. The SBI Detected curator probably created a focal point where players who were noticing this could direct their ire, but, again, the issue was never SBI specifically or even the specific devs that they worked with.
What people are mostly talking about is how their employees conduct themselves on social media. And even though the way they often conduct themselves is unprofessional and dumb, It's also understandable when there's a hundred thousand people telling you how bad your work is and trying to stop people from doing business with you.
I actually don't think it's understandable. Like you said, they're conducting themselves in an unprofessional way. They are industry professionals, and there's a standard of conduct they ought to hold themselves to as professionals. I'd say it's understandable only from a cynical perspective, as an attempt to build a "we're getting harassed" narrative out of whole cloth to build sympathy.
07mk
5mo ago
You're so myopically mired in self-pity that you actually think there's even the remotest chance that a woman would rather be in a relationship with a man who beats her up than you. You shouldn't be "open to the possibility": it's preposterous and a grave insult to every victim of domestic abuse in history.
I have no disagreements about how pathologically self-pitying SkookumTree is in his comments, but I don't think the rest follows. The revealed preference of many a woman is to be in a relationship with a man who beats her up rather than with someone who's awkward to the level of what SkookumTree believes he is. It's possible to discuss if those are her "true" preferences and what she would "truly" rather do, and there's room for such factors, but I think the pudding they actually choose to eat is where the proof is.
Personally, I think this sort of thinking stems from a sort of "Just World Hypothesis" when it comes to romance, particularly that moral qualities that society in general sees as good in a man also translate to romantic success, and as such, if a man has romantic success despite having negative moral qualities such as beating his gf/wife, then there must be something that corrupted and manipulated the women who keep volunteering to be his gf/wife. When I think the more straightforward and also more correct explanation is just that there's only coincidental overlap between these two categories, and women, like all people in many contexts, often tend to be prefer things that are unhealthy for them over things that are healthy for them, if those unhealthy things provide other benefits that the healthy things don't.
07mk
6mo ago
But I also couldn't imagine a Hamas rocket leveling a building even with a direct hit.
Perhaps a result of my own ignorance with respect to explosives and my observation of 9/11, I find this surprising. I would have thought that it wouldn't take much to take down a building, even one as big as a hospital, as long as it hit the load-bearing parts, and I figured that hitting those load-bearing parts wasn't particularly unlikely in the crapshoot of battle. I suppose buildings, possibly especially in Gaza, must be hardier structures than I'd initially thought.
07mk
1yr ago
they confuse methodological constraints for a metaphysical theory. That is, science has methodological constraints; it makes certain assumptions and speaks only to things within the constraints of those assumptions. But instead, folks want to claim that those are not constraints on the method; they're constraints on reality.
Sorry, this just seems to be restating the part I quoted before, just in more words. Could you please be specific about what specific methodological constraints and specific metaphysical theories and specific assumptions and specific constraints on method versus reality are being involved here?
Sorry, the post in that link was more muddled and confusing than enlightening. It seems to write about "shoe atheism" as if the reader already understands what that refers to, which is specifically the thing I don't understand. Who's saying or implying that shoes are atheists, and what does this have to do with the above statements about metaphysics versus methodology?
07mk
1yr ago
Xakota Espinoza, a Fair Fight Action spokeswoman, also sent a statement to The New York Times: “It was deeply disturbing to see an attempt to diminish the qualifications of a nationally esteemed Black, woman attorney.”
No one in the Politico article criticized the legal qualifications of Ms. Lawrence-Hardy.
This sort of editorializing is so slimy, and transparently so. It's obvious that the last paragraph is meant as a follow-up to the sentence before that, in a way appears to counter it to a typical inattentive reader. But it doesn't counter it at all, since there was nothing in the quotation from Espinoza that implied that her accusation was that the attempt was to criticize the legal qualifications; she specifically used the term "diminish" and didn't imply any sort of "legal" conditional on the qualifications of the attorney. There are a million and one ways the Politico article could diminish her qualifications without criticizing her legal qualifications in any way. And the NY Times presenting the latter statement as if it's in any conflict or even any discord between the 2 reduces their credibility in my eyes. Either they're purposefully misleading, or the writer and editors lack the capacity to understand that it's misleading.
07mk
1yr ago
I have to ask myself; was I, in turn, being pandered to in the previous eras of scifi in the same way that different demographics are being pandered to now? Am I just primed to like things featuring men or manly women set in space, or that feature nanotech and computers at the expense of character development or good writing? And honestly, the answer is probably yes. There probably is some cosmic Ginsbergian justice to Woke sci-fi taking over traditional awards ceremonies.
No. I think you can only reach this conclusion by essentially obliterating the notion of "quality" when it comes to fiction. This is something implicitly supported by woke fiction producers/critics who explicitly use "(imagined) downstream effects on how humans behave in society" as the measure of quality, but I don't think this is a reasonable position. There's no objective measure of "quality" in fiction, but it doesn't then follow that it's completely subjective and merely a question of who's being pandered to.
07mk
2mo ago
If women have a civilizing effect on men, shouldn't a higher woman/man ratio lead to greater civilizing on men? Also, I'd guess that, in this kind of society, most of the things you described, e.g. promiscuity, less stable marriages, and bastards, wouldn't really be considered misbehavior; because of the way the numbers add up, society would have to create systems that account for these things and integrate them into the way society functions. Rootless lives among underclass men, I could definitely see being an issue, but I wonder how much that rootless living will be correlated with antisocial behavior in this kind of setting. I honestly don't know how much competition for women (both in terms of extra resources and in terms of criminality actually making one more attractive) drives the antisocial behavior of underclass men now; if it's significant, then we could see more rootless underclass men but less bad behavior from them in aggregate (depending on the ratios).
What's the justification for this inclination, though? After all, in the realm of physics, there's no clean demarcation between "hardware" and "software." What we call "software" is actually a difference in the physical substrate, in terms of different atoms being placed in different places in the HDD or different volume of electrons flowing through different circuits in a microchip. "Running one set of instructions [instead of another]" really just means "a different physical object," and it's not clear to me that the change in the physical object necessary to generate qualia can't be accomplished through changes in the instructions. It's also not clear to me that it can in this specific case, and my bias points me in the direction that it didn't in this specific case. But I don't see the justification for dismissing it outright.
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