07mk
4mo ago
I tend to disagree with this for a couple of reasons. First, pretty much everyone is obsessed with looks, SMV and (indirectly) biological clock. Perhaps not at a conscious level, but certainly at a subconscious level.
This seems like unfalsifiable typical-minding. Glancing at the world outside TheMotte suggests that many men do, indeed, have rich interior lives, are capable of deep emotional attachment and lifelong, mutually self-giving marital love and commitment.
Then there are the men memorably described as "likes boobs, but doesn't like women." Those are the ones who tend to develop elaborate theories of dating as free-market exchange.
Now this looks like unfalsifiable typical-minding. Glancing at the entire world, including TheMotte, it seems clear to me that there is nothing contradictory or even slightly conflicting about having rich interior lives with deep emotional attachment and lifelong, mutually self-giving marital love and commitment while also having theories of dating as free-market exchange. Empirically, those seem positively correlated in my experience, but there's no a priori reason why they would have any correlation, positive or negative.
07mk
4mo ago
That you would describe the situation as a "living hell" when it would be something, if not approaching heaven, certainly in the same neighborhood to it, to vast swathes of humanity is what I find fascinating here.
07mk
4mo ago
That is likely the ultimate explanation, but also, it's not individual women individually making this particular error. I'd wager that many (possibly most?) women are easily intelligent and thoughtful enough to figure out how wrongheaded such thinking is, but for the environment in which they were raised. Which is the same environment in which boys are raised, of course, which is basically exclusively filled with messaging about how any man who ever judges a woman by her looks and not only by her accomplishments is a subhuman misogynist, to such an extent that even a significant proportion of boys, despite their innate biology, have managed to live it. Girls, seeing this, reasonably believe that they're growing up into women representing the vanguard that destroys the Old World Order where women were judged by their looks more than their accomplishments. And thus they suffer.
The same thing happens with boys, too, believing that qualities like being aggressive, toxically masculine, accomplished, or rich will not be as important a factor as how kind or emotionally available or Good Person they are. And thus they suffer.
07mk
4mo ago
Obviously Martin is in a difficult position (indeed, I wouldn't envy any white man attempting to lead the Democratic Party) because 1) everyone knows the autopsy will be humiliating for Harris, 2) Harris may be a future presidential candidate, and 3) donor funds rely on the DNC or their candidates not being revealed to have acted incompetently.
But really, Martin going back on his campaign promise is not of note here - keeping the autopsy to themselves is likely the right move to retain any dignity.
This is the perspective that I see commonly but disagree with vehemently. As a Kamala voter who wants the Democratic Party to have success in the future, the most dignified thing to do here would be not only to release the autopsy but to point highlights at the dirtiest of the laundry that gets aired out in the process. When one fails, there's no dignity in hiding or obfuscating the failure. Dignity is in owning the failure in a way that makes it clear that the most important thing to you about the failure is your wrongdoing or errors that caused the failure, to the extent that you welcome any and all humiliation that public ownership of that failure brings you.
If Harris's 2028 POTUS run's viability is dependent on the dirty laundry of her 2024 campaign not being public, then may her 2028 POTUS run not be viable, for the sake of the success of the Democratic party.
07mk
4mo ago
But if you're trying to actually find a partner to settle down and have kids with, how do you not take all of these into account? Not only does it reek of impracticality, but on an even deeper level, it appears that any attempt to practically model the dating world at all produces a negative female reaction.
I think you're like 99% of the way there to getting it. The goal, as you allude to, is very specifically not to "find a partner to settle down and have kids with." It's "find a partner to settle down and have kids with while fulfilling [other, more primary goal]." The more primary goals usually include things like "believing that oneself is so high status that she attracts the right mate without having to put in effort into finding the right mate." The best among us can find great mates without putting in effort specifically towards finding great mates, and so many of us who are not the best among us try to cargo cult our ways into finding a great mate.
The same kind of thing happens on the male side as well, just not with looks and youthfulness, but rather with male markers of status like wealth and power. It's just that the consequences for failing to adapt for males tends to be far harsher, and more consistent, and so more males have adapted (in the long run, whatever genetic cause of such behavior in males, if different from such in females, is far more likely to be adapted out through the generations, which we could be living through the result of, as well).
07mk
4mo ago
How would men appreciate it if women started discussing frankly "Look, you'll be 35 in two years. That's way too old if I'm thinking of having kids with good prospects. You better set your sights lower, some 40+ woman done with childbearing will probably take you if you smarten up, get rid of those awful clothes, and hit the gym" 😂
"Would?"
07mk
4mo ago
I think "reigned in" might have reached status of being a correct version of the phrase due to popular use, with an invented-etymological explanation being that it's like a king ordering someone to pull back. It's like how "could" now means the same thing as "couldn't" when part of the phrase "could care less," due to how people have been confusing the terms (or rather, it seems that people have made up the explanation that "could care less" is a reference to the fact that they care so little that it's less than anyone or anything - they "could care less [than some arbitrary X, and they do indeed do what they could]"). Or like how "literally" now means "emphatically" or "severely" in some contexts.
07mk
4mo ago
Furthermore, I do not think that the SPLC are actually mustache-twisting villains who want to enable far-right violence to justify their own existence.
I don't think mustache-twirling villains tend to do this, and I think people who tend to do this don't metaphorically twirl mustaches. It seems to me that a common tendency of any activist - to the point that it should be taken as the default presumption unless there's overwhelming evidence to the contrary - is to overestimate one's own importance in the activism and the importance to society of the topic around which one's activism is. As such, believing that keeping one's activist organization well funded and running, no matter what, is something that any activist who genuinely, in good-faith, believes oneself to be doing good, can easily fall into.
07mk
4mo ago
I think seeing it as just 2 teams is more simplistic than is warranted here. I see this not as Trump or his ill attacking my side, but rather shooting out a cancer that's been rapidly and successfully killing the healthy parts of my side for decades. It'd be preferable to go to a surgeon who has expertise and incentive to keep the rest of us healthy and alive, but when all the surgeons have decided to join the cult of the cancer that values the cancer itself over the host, that's hard to come by.
07mk
4mo ago
They told me that "developmentally disabled" was the proper term, and I'd guess that "disabled" might enter the treadmill at some point in another 3 decades. Maybe when describing an engine that has been made to no longer function, the non-offensive term will be something like "unworking" like how zoomers are using "unalived" for suicide now.
07mk
4mo ago
I just want to say, I found your usage of the phrase "mentally handicapped" in context of discussing the offensiveness of "retarded" to describe such people to be funny, because it was about 10 years ago that multiple mental healthcare workers informed me that "handicapped" was now even more offensive than "retarded," because it was a reference to village idiots who would have a cap in their hand to beg for handouts (no idea if there's etymological veracity to this - I'd guess not). The euphemism treadmill is hard enough to stay on top of, but it appears it's not even linear!
07mk
4mo ago
The lack of continuous learning seems, to me, one of the biggest weaknesses of LLMs right now, with respect to getting to something that a layman human would recognize as AGI. The one thing I wonder about, though, is that continuous learning is just a speed problem right now. Even if all LLM development were to freeze at this moment, it's a safe bet that, within the next century (and safer-still within the next millennium), we'll have hardware capable of not only running LLMs but also training them at speeds so much faster than now, such that the hours of training using enterprise data servers that went into, say, Mythos, could be done in milliseconds on a cheap phone that someone in the lower-middle class could afford. I'm sure there would be engineering kinks to work out, but I don't see why, once the hardware gets powerful enough, this training couldn't be happening at rates fast enough to be indistinguishable from continuous to a typical human.
And if we do reach that point with LLM software that does this, will it actually be AGI? Will there be bizarre, unexpected and fundamentally impossible-to-predict-right-now issues that arise from such a system? I hope hardware gets fast enough in my lifetime that I can find out.
07mk
5mo ago
I'm hopeful, but I'm still skeptical that this past week signifies a true return to norm. I'm not that commenter you referenced, and I also haven't made any money from the Iran war... yet. A little after the war started, I had spent some of my high-risk investment money to get into a Vanguard energy-industry fund, which has mostly been responsive to oil prices, and I've certainly lost money after today, but I also decided to put more into it today, because of my pessimism that the market is a little too caught up in the hype. We'll see.
07mk
5mo ago
The exact number determines how many martyrs you can justify, right? 160 would mean that up to 2 freedom fighters could securely murder-suicide themselves, but a third would only get about 22% of what he's owed in the afterlife.
07mk
5mo ago
Tbf a good part of the this cause is also just illiteracy.
The thing is that journalists and others in the media either know that illiteracy of this type is incredibly common among the audience of their articles and even moreso among the audience of their headlines, or they have the intelligence and knowledge required to know. So when there's significant misunderstanding by the audience of stuff like this, it speaks to either malice, malicious ignorance, or incompetence that's advanced enough to be indistinguishable from malice.
07mk
5mo ago
One thing I've taken to doing to help me use AI in my job (which I do a lot these days, and it's growing) is to use as good an AI as I have access to (Claude Opus right now) how to use an LLM to solve some problem I have, and using that as a guide to use other, cheaper LLMs to accomplish whatever task I have. I couldn't help but notice that your comment is essentially a prompt that i might enter into an AI, just dorected at a bunch of NIs. If I were in your situation, I'd try copying and pasting your entire comment into Claude and then go from there.
07mk
5mo ago
IMO woke history revisionism is one of the most damaging trends in modern academia, simply because of how much it is allowed to proliferate uncritically or even treated with any seriousness. It usually manifests in the systematic downplaying (or outright denial) of slavery, human sacrifice and other endemic practices among non white civilisations, and claiming that white men somehow introduced these vices to their otherwise harmonious civilisations.
Yes, but also, this is just a generic problem with anything "woke" in academia, because one of the core tenets of "woke" is the rejection of logic, rationality, and empirical evidence in favor of "other ways of knowing" based on claims by people who belong to favored identity groups, since the former are oppressive inventions of White Supremacy and Patriarchy. As such, there's no limiting factor for claims made by people who are at or close to the top of the oppression totem pole. Academics resolve the cognitive dissonance between this and the fact that academia is fundamentally about applying reason, evidence, and skepticism, by just looking the other way when such claims are made. This applies outside academia, too, of course.
There's also a recurring theme in progressive history circles to claim the Americas would've still evolved to become the modern superpower that it is today had European settlers never arrived on these shores, as if leaving the indigenous peoples entirely undisturbed would have produced equivalent institutional, scientific, and industrial outcomes. Even though historical and even current parameters do not support this claim.
I doubt even they believe this though, but saying it out loud would get them exiled by their ingroup as it would be implying that atrocities (real or perceived) against indigenous Americans was justified as it had led to more productive outcomes.
I'm sure some are performing like this - perhaps more now than ever - but let me assure you, I know for a fact that this is a genuine, sincere belief that has been held by at least one person in this group, and I have near-fact-level confidence that an extremely high proportion of people claiming this also do genuinely, sincerely believe it (to whatever extent anyone can be said to genuinely believe anything, anyway).
07mk
5mo ago
With so many women chasing so-called "Chad" it's become very easy for a woman to find a guy who has solid morals; a decent job; and genuine desire for a long-term committed relationship. Provided she is willing to overlook the fact that he is short; or balding; or mediocre in facial attractiveness.
In other words, it hasn't gotten any easier for women to find a mate who has solid morals; a decent job; and genuine desire for a long-term committed relationship.
07mk
5mo ago
men are probably more socialized to not challenge other men on their driving habits
If we're speculating that this isn't just an artifact and that there's a there there, my bias based on personal experience is that this is a factor. The only friends I have that are at all defensive about their driving habits, to the extent that even grabbing the handle when they're driving gets a side-eye, and pointing out anything wrong with their driving could cause a shouting match, are male. As such, I learned to put on an act when driving with such friends. I speculate that it may be a consequence of testosterone and/or the greater societal pressure to be seen as competent at such activities that men have relative to women.
07mk
5mo ago
Maybe in the 90s the memeplex around dating was "go grrrl", but today there's plenty of wisdom in the air that men [that they notice first] are not out for the women's best interest. One needs but listen and learn.
Well, listening and learning is hard enough for anyone, but I think there's a catch-22 here that's specific to this situation, in that the people they need to listen and learn from in order to avoid these pitfalls are people that they, almost by definition, don't respect or even notice. I do agree with you that it's entirely the personal responsibility for someone, woman or man, to avoid people who are romantically harmful to themselves, and the negative treatment of women in this context is the responsibility of the women who choose to tolerate or even reward such treatment. But I don't think they can help it any more than men can help being attracted enough to skinny, youthful women that they enable awful behavior from that set.
07mk
5mo ago
But credit or pride? No, silly, you can't be proud of things members of your group did! You can't take credit for advances that were achieved by your forefathers! Those were individual accomplishments that you had no role in! Why would we let you claim
This isn't true, though. A common, but not major, "woke" talking point is that black people ought to be proud of all the things their ancestors did, often including rather historically questionable claims of inventions or identities, such as the claim that Shakespeare plagiarized from a black woman or that Cleopatra was black. Of course, this is often justified on the basis that this sort of pride is only to make up for the way oppressive society forces them to be shamed merely for existing or whatever, but also of course, the actual explanation doesn't matter. It's just who/whom, based on identities that educated people can convince themselves belong to whatever part of the oppressor/oppressed dichotomy.
True, but sufficiently advanced risk-taking is indistinguishable from suicide.
Interesting, I'd never encountered it written out so well, but this is a concept I ran into (somewhat) recently. I had a friend who committed suicide, which caught every one of his friends and family by surprise. Cliche about how he was always the most lively person in any setting where he was, and how much better he was at socializing and bringing people together than anyone else applies in full here. One of the many things he was known for, though, was being an incredibly reckless (and yet somehow also wreck-less) driver. Almost everyone I met who had been driven by him once (including myself) sweared off ever being driven by him again, for fear of death, and he regularly drove his moped for hours through snowy/rainy/stormy weather day or night, ostensibly just to visit us or other friends. After the fact, some of us in his friend group started wondering if his driving behavior was a form of passive suicide that he was seeking out. He never left a note or confided in anyone who has spoken out (closest we've got is multiple of his ex-girlfriends noting how different and dead he appeared in private after the many social events he would both organize and improve through his presence, but no one ever considered this notable until after the suicide), so we'll never know (and even he might not have been privy to his motivations at the time).
Also interestingly enough, despite owning both firearms and vehicles, his way of going involved engineering a contraption to suffocate himself with helium, something which seemed to have taken some planning and execution over some hours, if not days, for procurement. I imagine there are likely many other people who had similar mindsets who made snap decisions during driving that appeared as accidents rather than suicide.
I don't think this requires psychological self-awareness. It only requires self-interest. It doesn't take someone particularly self-aware to notice that, when someone fails spectacularly and then tries to hide it or ignore it or otherwise try to minimize it, this lowers their esteem in the eyes of people who aren't already predisposed to liking them. Or the opposite, that someone who takes full ownership of their failures, in a way that credibly signals that they're not doing so for the purpose of image, tends to have their esteem raised in the eyes of people who don't particularly like them but are open to the possibility of liking them.
I do get that the
marketvoter-base can stayirrationaltribal longer thanyou can stay solventthe next election cycle, but also, if my side decides that embracing tribalism over responsibility is fine, then that substantially lowers my ability to believe that my side is actually better than the other side. The entire and only reason my side is better than the other side is because we actually did and do the hard work of finding our errors and correcting them, and the only way to credibly do that is to, again, be so much more concerned with correcting one's faults than concerned with one's image to others that one welcomes any humiliation that follows from highlighting one's faults.More options
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