07mk
21d 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
21d 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.
07mk
21d ago
The men are being reformed; we have plenty of coercive systems in place to punish men who behave like the man in the story. The men who keep doing it are the ones who decided that the benefits of being abusive outweigh the costs or are simply lucky enough not to get caught. If someone's benefiting from their current status, they're not going to be amenable to reformation, and that's an entirely reasonable position to take for such people (as such, we use coercion and deadly force, but, again, there always will inevitably be people who avoid detection or capture). These men have agency; they're rationally using that agency to escape our reformation attempts.
The asymmetry here is that the woman in this story clearly was, by her own judgment, not getting benefits commensurate to the costs. It'd be reasonable for someone like that to be amenable to reformation such that she doesn't choose to stay in such a situation, and an agentic woman who has unwillingness to do so would be a peculiar thing that, at least on its surface, seems unreasonable, which raises questions.
07mk
21d ago
the simple reality is that it's very hard not to have sex with someone you're attracted to
Hey now, I do this every single day, and not just once, but like a million times a day. It's not that hard.
Let's say we did a survey and found out that the majority of humans think blue is the best color. Then we can be confident in the claim "the majority of humans prefer the color blue over all other colors tested". That is not the same as blue being the "objectively" best color.
Right, and my point is, if we were to answer that question I asked previously, it wouldn't establish the "objectively correct beauty standards" or whatever, just "beauty standards that are shared among cultures in the world, as measured by [the people involved]." This will forever be intrinsically subjective, and we will never have any access to some sort of "objective" beauty standard unless God comes down and proves His existence and then declares it So. But the point of an "objective" beauty standard, like any standard, isn't to be some sort of invariant Truth about our world that we can write down onto some tablets to shoot out into space or whatever, it's a tool against which to measure other things when trying to decide how to categorize those things for use in our real life. And we can certainly discuss how useful the objective standard I came up with is for those - the judgment on how useful that is compared to other objective metrics one could come up with is also inescapably subjective and context-dependent. But we can still argue about which ones are the best and then come to a conclusion that we decide is useful enough for accomplishing our goals.
07mk
21d ago
I don't see any indication that anyone is excusing this abusive man's behavior. The question is, why did this woman decide to stay with him despite all the obvious red flags and the red marks that followed? That's an entirely separate question from, was this man being a bad person in his decision to physically abuse this woman? Which isn't really asked nor answered in that comment and is, actually, pretty much irrelevant to the particular topic the comment raises.
07mk
21d ago
The bad boy gives you the tingles, but it's not his fault that he's bad - it's society/his parents/mental illness/the patriarchy/capitalism. You, oh enlightened Liberal Woman, can heal him with your soothing therapy speak and magic vagina. Go out there and make yourself a martyr on an 80 IQ thug with no self control! I can fix him! You go girl!
I think I've seen this idea before, but written this way, it feels more clarifying to me. This seems like the female version of men who've grown up being told the same things either going to inceldom and/or attempting to date women without considering his own physical attraction to her. That this mirrors so closely things I've seen a lot IRL on the male side makes me feel like your last sentence is likely true.
07mk
21d ago
Your comment reminds me of the famous Asimov line from an essay, which I agree with: "When people thought the Earth was flat, they were wrong. When people thought the Earth was spherical, they were wrong. But if you think that thinking the Earth is spherical is just as wrong as thinking the Earth is flat, then your view is wronger than both of them put together."
We might agree that taste is not an objective phenomenon, but when you use that as an excuse to write utter dross, and pretentiously to boot? I'm glad to be with the other side in calling them out for their sophistry and nonsense. If all aesthetic judgments are equally valid expressions of equally valid perspectives, then the person saying your novel is self-indulgent dreck is expressing a perspective that is just as valid as your own conviction that it is a masterwork of transgressive poststructuralist prose. The relativist move was supposed to protect you from criticism, but it has accidentally also dissolved the grounds for your own aesthetic pride. You can't have the shield without also losing the sword.
The fact that perfect objectivity is unavailable does not mean that the concept of better and worse approximations of it has dissolved, which is why science and empiricism works.
The thing that gets me about this is, the innate subjectivity of something like taste doesn't prevent us from making objective measurements and coming to objective conclusions.
E.g. with something like beauty standards, it's possible to ask and answer the question objectively: "If a bunch of universities make a bunch of grad students research the patterns of beauty standards throughout different cultures in society, what, if any, is the conclusion that comes out about what beauty standards different human cultures have in common when they all publish their papers and argue with each other through peer review?" The choice of the question is subjective, but this question certainly has an objective answer, which we can figure out or at least approximate, and then we can decide whether or not the answer has some use.
And anyone motivated to actually learn about beauty standards or anything else so fundamentally subjective would certainly be motivated to come up with objective measures like that. But the fact that so many stop before that step and just say, "Welp, I guess that means I can just declare that any arbitrary beauty standard that places me at the top is exactly as reasonable and proper as the mainstream ones that place me at the bottom, and enforce it through righteous violence."
I recall first encountering something like this back in 2014 during the affair of reproductively viable worker ants, when the exact same people who had decried the Jack Thompsons of the world in the 90s-00s for falsely (or at least empirically unjustifiably) attributing violent acts by gamers to influence from playing violent video games were championing the Anita Sarkeesians of the world for alleging that "misogynistic" tropes in video games would cause gamers to adopt misogynistic attitudes. When I pointed out the obvious contradiction, I was rebuffed with the notion that misogynistic attitudes aren't like violent actions because they're internal and subjective and whatever, and so we can just declare it to be the case through standard literary analysis.
When, of course, the simple, completely obvious next step would be to do some sort of study or analysis of comparing like-for-like gamers exposed to identical video games but-for the presence of misogynistic tropes, and then measure their behavior afterwards (or rather: measure the delta of their behavior afterwards versus beforehand) with respect to enacting acts or saying things determined to be misogynistic. And equally obvious is that without at least 2 different independent, ideally competing, parties doing the hard work of this kind of research and all having to inevitably, helplessly, conclude the same thing, we really can't make any confident statements of truth regarding that matter, and that anyone who does claim to know the truth is at best ignorant and most likely a charlatan like Jack Thompson was.
Pointing this out basically never got any response from such people.
07mk
22d ago
I recall multiple threads where evidence was provided that went nowhere, and I have no interest in going down that path again, so I'll just register that I disagree on your assessment of Darwin and how he was treated.
07mk
22d ago
He sees the unreliable narrator as key to postmodern literature: much as postmodern readings of history challenge us to consider how historical metanarratives have been selectively constructed to favour the powers that be ("history is written by the winners"), postmodern novels routinely feature narrators whose testimony cannot be relied upon, forcing the reader to consider what "really" happened versus what the narrator wants us to think happened, and why they want us to think that.
This isn't directly related to the top-level question, but having read basically this sort of explanation of postmodernism is before, the one thing that struck me as the completely obvious next logical step is to question how this particular meta-metanarrative about metanarratives has been selected by the "powers that be" and why they want the rest of us to believe that that's a meaningfully useful way to analyze metanarratives. How does it benefit them, possibly at the cost to us, because almost certainly, people pushing narratives, metanarratives, meta-metanarratives, or anything else, are doing so under the belief that success in pushing it will result in favor for themselves, possibly at cost to people they don't care about or actively dislike. The moment you realize that the turtle you're on is on another turtle, it's pretty trivial to wonder if that turtle is on another turtle, possibly all the way down.
Unfortunately, a stack of turtles seems pretty likely to be unstable even in finite numbers, to say nothing of when there's infinite of them. Unstable doesn't mean false, of course, but in this case, the instability manifests in the reality that there's no reason to stop on this turtle instead of the next one or the one after that or the one 13 turtles down which happens to be the one that concludes that all of history was actually just setup to justify you specifically getting everything you want and all your enemies being mercilessly crushed.
07mk
22d ago
Does this come from trying to read Shakespeare? I feel like Shakespeare is best enjoyed in performance form, and trying to enjoy his works from reading them is like trying to enjoy The Godfather from reading the script. There's enjoyment to be had, likely, but there's a lot to the experience that's missing, because the target audience for the script wasn't readers, but rather actors and directors and such, for the purpose of informing them on what to perform for viewers. Personally, my favorite Shakespeare experience is the 90s film Twelfth Night starring Ethan Hawke and Helena Bonham Carter.
07mk
22d ago
Arrival is a direct adaptation of Ted Chiang's short story "Story of Your Life". I love Ted Chiang, but this is one case where I think the adaptation is marginally superior to its source material. Villeneuve and his screenwriter are to be commended, not just for adapting a short story which is aggressively uncinematic and cerebral, but for doing so faithfully and in a way which is engaging throughout. I'd be curious to know if Chiang has ever read Slaughterhouse-Five.
Of course, the concept behind both these books could have been come up with independently by both authors, but given the time periods, the extreme similarities, and Vonnegut's stature, it would be truly shocking to me if Chiang had never read Slaughterhouse Five, or at least a summary of it. It'd be like some prominent author writing a successful story about a prince whose father is murdered by his uncle deciding to orchestrate a revenge plot never having read Hamlet by Shakespeare or a summary of it.
07mk
22d ago
Personally, I wouldn't even characterise Slaughterhouse-Five as postmodern literature. It's a very short and accessible novel which employs a sci-fi* premise in order to make a powerful anti-war statement.
Having read this for the first time around 10 years ago in my late 20s or early 30s, I generally agree. However, I must admit that I don't recall the book making an anti-war statement, powerful or not. I listened to the audiobook of All Quiet on the Western Front after I read Slaughterhouse Five, but looking back, the latter book reminded me a lot of the former, in describing the horrors of war in basic, matter-of-fact ways, i.e. the famous "so it goes."
I'll also add that, the scifi film Arrival came out while I was close to finishing the book, and it was kinda surreal watching that film and realizing in-the-moment that the core scifi concept was pulled directly from that book.
07mk
22d ago
I wonder if it has to do with what seems likely to be fact that the average age at which males become acquainted with porn has been decreasing throughout recent generations, such that a far larger proportion of boys under 18 - and even under 13 - have consumed significant amounts of porn in 2026 than in 2006 or 1986. And due to current laws, this means that these boys have spent some of their most formative years admiring and feeling pleasure watching women who are older than them.
Also the fact that, throughout the generations, the length of time that someone looks like a young adult is increasing. Even if you go back just to the 90s - and certainly if you go back to the 60s - the proportion of people in their 30s who look like they could be 45 versus who look like they could be 25 seemed much higher.
07mk
22d ago
I have no first-hand experience of Europe in the 90s, but growing up in America in the 90s, that Europeans looked down on America and Americans for being backwards religious conservative hyper-capitalists without basic human decency like universal healthcare was pretty much cliche in my experience. Obviously this was strongly a function of the environment in which I grew up, but I don't think it was purely a function of that. So, at the very least, Americans admiring Europeans based on the belief that those Europeans have disdain and contempt for America for its American qualities has been around for 30+.
This is Boston area, and the ultimate Frisbee guys are primarily nerdy college educated professionals in some field, including tech. Elite colleges don't seem any more overrepresented in this group than any other group of college grads; I can only name one ultimate Frisbee guy I know who went to one: Columbia.
Now, they do enjoy drinking beer and watching sports, but I'd say not in a stereotypical male way. More like a stereotypical nerdy yuppie way, only as an outside social event at a bar, and people basically NEVER do things like casually ask each other, "Hey what'd you think of the game last night?" or whatever. We drink Bud Light Lime ironically at tournaments, but otherwise, it'd be very rare for one of us to be seen drinking a beer that's not some microbrew or less popular import or some quintuple IPA abomination.
A lot of them, you'd clock as nerds, some of them as hipsters, and very few as jocks. Though I'd say, due to the nature of a physically taxing sport like ultimate, the overt nerdiness level is pretty low.
07mk
23d ago
I wonder how soon LLMs will become cheap and fast enough that all websites can be rewritten on-the-fly to match whatever UI style and format the user wants. I feel like the tech is pretty much there in browsers, but no human has the time to write a bespoke algorithm for each site they use, which also could change at any time. A sufficiently fast AI could fill that role and do it realtime, adapting to any changes by the website devs.
Because I too dislike the substack comment UI and wish Reddit (and Twitter too, for that matter) hadn't killed all competitor apps and forced us to use theirs.
You're experiencing a bubble effect. I'm an elder millennial, so my peers are mostly late 30s, but because I play ultimate Frisbee which is a college team sport, a lot of the people I hang out with are white males in their 20s as well. I know a grand total of one confirmed Trump voter among them, including myself (I'm white-adjacent enough to count, in terms of how vast swathes of society pre-judge me), and he will only mention it to me when we're the only ones hanging out or if we're with his friends who are barely my acquantiances. Now, I don't know the precise voting habits of every one of my white male acquaintances, but given just how ubiquitous it is to hear some random jab about Trump followed by the equivalent of "aye" or applause in any social situation, and how much pushback I receive when I try to call out dishonest or manipulative framing of Trump's misdeeds, I'd wager that the number of white males I know who even consider it virtuous to treat Trump honestly, much less supports him, is vanishingly small.
What is the typical White, Male, College-educated Democrat voter like? I was surprised looking at the cross tabs for the 2024 election that this group was only 50% pro Trump.
I was shocked by the 50% figure as obscenely high, but surely you mean White Male College educated, but not Democrat? If 1 out of every 2 White Male College educated DEMOCRATS support Trump, this would be quite the coup, almost literally.
I think white and male skews pro-Trump, but college skews heavily anti-Trump, and it lands somewhere around 50%. It speaks to the power of ideas over the power of race or sex that college is able to be equal and opposite those other forces, which also speaks to the utter idiocy of judging the value of words by the speaker's race or sex rather than the ideas they're expressing.
07mk
23d ago
So I don't know if the OP was motivated by that, or if there's some other reason, but I've definitely noticed what seems like a big dichotomy in the way people approach modern generative AI tools. Which is that, some types of people see a tool with its limitations that make it fail in spectacular ways that seem silly or stupid, throw their hands up in the air and declare it as not sufficiently useful for their purposes. Other types of people see a tool with its limited abilities and figure out a way to exploit their abilities to accomplish things they couldn't without the tool, even if it means adjusting and inventing new workflows.
I first noticed this when I got heavily into Stable Diffusion in ye olden dayes of 2022. Of course, awful hands, foreground lines merging into background lines, inconsistent lighting, hallucinations, were all famous issues of image generation AI then. They're still issues now, but vastly reduced. Some people saw that and declared AI useless for their needs, since their hand drawing allows for the control they need that AI doesn't. Other people saw that generating messes with 7 fingers was like making one bad brush stroke on an empty canvas and giving up on the painting, and figured out that it's easy to iterate on subsections of the image multiple times, allowing someone to create illustrations that are far beyond their manual ability while still avoiding the common AI pitfalls.
I noticed it happening with LLMs shortly after, where some people zero in on stupid mistakes like that the hard R problem of strawberries and declare it too inconsistent or too stupid to be of much use. Other people zero in on the limited abilities and figure out how to build structures and scaffolding to allow the tool to exceed those natural limitations, enabling them to create code that they couldn't have before or that would have taken a lot more time before.
I don't think the former type of person is doing this in bad faith, or with a desire to sneer. I think there's probably just a spectrum in people's attitudes with something like this, and because AI is both ridiculously bad at some things and ridiculously good at others, this causes the spectrum to bifurcate.
07mk
23d ago
The idea that right-wing dominated forums would have any sort of moral superiority (in terms of the average rate of dogpiling, etc. behavior by users) over left-wing dominated ones in some general/average/typical/categorical sense - or the reverse - is one I find so utterly absurd* and detached from reality that it's something that I'd only charitably infer as a claim by someone on TheMotte if they actually explicitly make that specific claim. I don't see anything in the comment to which you replied nor this comment thread in general where I would feel comfortable inferring such a claim. It seems to me that the comment is about the experience of individual users who tend to "rock the boat" with respect to the dominant side in the forum.
And it seems to me to be about the specific state of things right now; i.e. leftists do have easy access to lots of online echochambers in a way that rightists don't; as such, regardless of how both leftists and rightists are exactly as likely to fall victim to their natural human biases when managing forums they dominate, we see an emergent property of the types of leftists and rightists who congregate at different types of forums. I'm not the original commenter, but it seems to me that reading some sort of moral judgment, either about groups, forums, sides, etc. in the comment to which you replied is jumping to conclusions.
* I find this absurd, because, besides being just completely obviously completely impossible to adjudicate in any way, it also has basically no consequence for anything in terms of how people actually interact with each other and forums. It's not as if there's some movement that claims, "right-wingers are non-coincidentally, non-incidentally, morally superior to left-wingers in terms of maintaining good faith discussion forum standards, and therefore, for the betterment of discourse throughout society, we should make all forums right-wing dominated" or whatever (except in the tautological case where people redefine "values logic, empiricism, evidence over emotion" as "right-wing."). I mean, maybe there is, but it's certainly not one that has any meaningful influence.
07mk
23d ago
If 70k out of 100k of comments on a reddit forum are "boo-outgroup" vs 800/1k on the motte, the motte is far more "boo outgroup" despite there being overall less motte "boo-outgroup" comments. The rate is much higher. Your stated ""rate" is per instance or total count. This manipulates statistics to give the lower population forum more grace when per-captia is more honest, because it accounts for the confounding factor of the lower population.
By controlling for the overall population of the forum, you're abstracting away the actual interesting part. If your purpose is to judge the average morality of the users of a forum, as measured by their penchant to dogpile, etc. commenters who try to rock the boat, then sure, you can use that metric. But I'm not sure that's of particular interest to anyone, and I'm certain that that is so abstracted away from the way people interact with online forums that no one can make any sort of meaningful intuitive guesses about such things, especially when comparing numbers that are orders of magnitude apart.
That's why when people talk about places like this/Reddit being unfair or hostile to leftists/rightists, I believe that it tends to be about a typical (boat-rocking) leftist/rightist's experience in using that forum, not about some sort of average of how commenters tend to react to such comments. Perhaps I'm wrong, and most people talking about such things are using your abstract metric; I just don't know what use that metric would be other than for some sort of a virtue-measuring contest between forums.
07mk
23d ago
If this is your major point then you are making a point I am not arguing, its not about quantity it's that it happens at all. This place has orders lower magnitudes of people than the mirror image typical subreddit. This is like saying it's safer to be be next to a bear in the woods because bears kill less people then men do.
If this is your interpretation of my point, then you are wrong. The "rate" is on a "per-[leftist/rightist] comment (implicit: that bucks the general popular trends of the forum)", not on a "per-day" or whatever. If the rate of physical injuries during a typical encounter with a bear in the woods was lower than the rate of such during a typical encounter with a man, then it absolutely would be safer to be next to a bear.
I'm not really going to weigh into a discussion of "quality". That is highly subjective, to the point, that one could easily just say every post that gets dog-pilled and mass-reported was "low quality". It's a just-so-story.
If you aren't going to weigh into "quality," then all you're really doing is commenting on the lack of equality of outcomes (as measured by things like responses that amount to dogpiling, Gish Galloping, etc.) based purely on left-right-partisanship. And that's just irrelevant here, because the point of this forum isn't to achieve such equity. Quality is highly subjective, but it's also not infinitely so, and there are certainly qualities which are agnostic to partisanship that this forum specifically demands of the comments both by rule and by norms, and it is a good thing that a comment's quality determines, in a large part, the pushback it gets from other commenters.
07mk
23d ago
Lefties here are absolutely dogpilled, mass-replied, gish-galloped, mass reported, or downvoted.
As a lefty (in multiple senses of the word) here, I disagree heavily. The rate at which this happens is orders of magnitude lower than the mirror image in a typical subreddit that has discussion about similar topics as here. By my observations, leftist posters who get treated this way are almost always treated this way in response to particularly careless or bad-faith posts*.
* Aside: these extremely low quality posts often have characteristics which appear to me as posts that would be popular on a typical subreddit; my conjecture is that these commenters are used to calibrating their arguments for the type of scrutiny in those environments and didn't properly re-calibrated for the standards of this forum before commenting.
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.
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