07mk
22d ago
I think there's perhaps a lot of truth to what you think. Giving praise and encouragement to behaviors that feel good but are long-run self-defeating is actually cruelty, not niceness.
I'm reminded of the cliche of fat/ugly women yas queen'd by her friends and being confused why no high value men want to settle down with her. Or what I'd guess is the counterpart of nice guys being praised for being meek and submissive and being confused why he gets no 1st or 2nd dates. I don't know how often either happens, but I'm pretty sure they're cliches for good reason.
Recently, in video games there have been a number of high profile failures by major AAA studios that spent the better part of decade making games that either failed spectacularly (e.g. Concord) or just did mid in sales, nowhere near enough given the dev costs (e.g. Assassin's Creed: Shadows, Dragon Age: The Veilguard), and one common talking point I saw was that these devs probably got nothing but affirmations as they were developing these disasters that appealed to themselves and almost no one in the target audience. And as a result, many of these devs face layoffs and even closure. We don't know if the narrative of internal echo chambers of affirmations is actually correct, but if it is, then these affirmations weren't nice, they weren't kind, they were cruel, for encouraging the devs to create games that would end up dooming their jobs or their studios or both.
Perhaps there are cruel ways to discourage the type of lifestyle that Aella practices. Perhaps most ways of discouragement are cruel. But that doesn't make the encouragement of such any less cruel.
07mk
9d ago
I'd guess that the quote or something like it was independently created by many people around the same time. The idea that Joe Rogan was a leftist who supported Democrats such as Bernie Sanders is just an obvious fact backed up by mountains of historical evidence that no one denies, and the idea that Democrats look for heretics to drive away is also a pretty non-controversial one (the only real controversy being on whether this is a good thing or not, perhaps because these heretics actually wanted to be driven away and were just looking for an excuse). And so putting those together into a pithy comment poking fun at the self-induced misery of modern Democrats bemoaning the lack of their own Joe Rogan to aid in their propagandizing is something that's almost trivial to do. Certainly the thought occurred to me long before I'd encountered the quote externally, but I'm not a public commentator who would state such a quote out loud and who wouldn't be noticed even if I had.
07mk
8d ago
My guess is that this phenomenon explains quite a lot of feminism - and likely ideological activism in general. People who write essays and books and give lectures on any sort of transgressive ideology will almost inevitably be highly atypical members of whatever group they belong to. The typical mind fallacy is an extremely seductive one, especially if you're already drawn to thinking that other people are "sheeple" or "NPCs" while you are an enlightened independent thinker who has escaped from her programming. Hence you see feminist professors and entertainment writers pushing becoming independent girlbosses who pursue their favorite intellectual or professional endeavors over things like family as being the correct, enlightened way that women would behave if they were freed from the patriarchy (this is - often unintentionally - also obfuscated as part of a motte-and-bailey game as being about giving women choice rather than about pushing them towards this). Women who are happy staying in the kitchen aren't as likely to publish books or go on lecture tours about how great their preferences are and how it's only through society-wide brainwashing that more women don't share their own preferences (though the comedienne Ally Wong had a good bit about this).
07mk
22d ago
Makes me wonder if in another 20 years or 40 years we'll see these old camgirls auctioning off the chance to be their partner in a snuff film, to die as they lived.
This is so hilariously dark that I hope we see this in some sort of Futurama/Hitchhiker's Guide-esque scifi comedy.
Also, I'm reminded of when I was a teenager running across some photo book at Newbury Comics called "Suicide Girls" which, IIRC, was just softcore porn of women generally in goth makeup and style, but which I mistakenly initially thought featured women who had immediately committed suicide right after. I guess our society hasn't quite reached that level of degeneracy yet.
07mk
8d ago
I always found it strange for activists to complain about emotional labour (rather than simply describing it neutrally).
Is it ever strange for activists to complain about anything? That seems to be a fundamental part of the job description.
Less pithily and more specifically to your point, the types of activists you're talking about, i.e. feminists of a certain stripe, tend to buy into the idea of the patriarchy which has literal brainwashing powers that falsify preferences, and they tend to genuinely believe that but for the patriarchy, women would have exactly the same set of interests as men. As such, women being more into jobs like nursing because they like the "caring for people" aspect of the job is considered merely yet another way in which women are victimized by the patriarchy.
07mk
1d ago
Presuming that all that stuff about IQ in HBD is true, then we can make those schools more efficient for turning 75 IQ people into 90 IQ people and measure our success based on how well these schools accomplish this. Instead of being upset that we're not consistently turning 75 IQ people into people capable of working 120 IQ jobs and trying to fix it by pouring more money into such a futile project.
07mk
1d ago
People just hated Darwin since he was unabashedly left-wing.
Hard disagree. Darwin had a particular style of bad faith in the way he argued his left-wing positions that made left-wing arguments appear dishonest and manipulative, and that's why I personally was glad he didn't come to this site and stopped interacting with GuessWho once GuessWho revealed that he was Darwin2500 from Reddit.
07mk
1d ago
I don't have any examples off the top of my head, since, again, I stopped interacting with him after he revealed that GuessWho was his account, and part of what made TheMotte better than the Subreddit for me was the lack of that user. You can probably find plenty of examples if you just go to GuessWho's user profile, where I see that his last comment was like a year ago here.
I've read and interacted with Darwin2500 a lot both on the OG SlateStarCodex site and on Reddit, and as someone who's ideologically aligned much more to him - back in ye olde dayes of Trump's 1st term, I'd say there was basically no daylight between our political beliefs - than to the modal commenter in these places, I couldn't stand his arguments for being so transparently bad faith and dishonest that it made our side look either evil or stupid or both. There are plenty of great arguments that can be made in favor of left-wing/progressive ideology, and Darwin2500 basically never made them, in favor of overt, blatant bad faith, off the top of my head, often using Bulverism and the non-central fallacy (i.e. the Worst Argument in the World, as coined by Scott Alexander).
Every time someone has accused me of being bad faith on this site, it's been exactly that: a stronger, somewhat more intellectual way of saying "I disagree with you".
Besides this, you've also said elsewhere that plenty of right-wingers have resorted to making series of personal attacks on you without getting modded. Do you have any examples of either? I don't read every comment on TheMotte or even most of them, or even most comments that you personally make, but I don't recall a single example that matches this description.
07mk
1d ago
But it's not actually all that useful a model for the world? Society doesn't change that much if it informs your view: AA doesn't structurally fix anything, maybe try not to force kids to do school programs they can't possibly succeed in, maybe "learn to code!" is cruel. Ok cool. Now that that's out of the way we still have crushing social problems to deal with.
These seem like absolutely huge changes to our understanding of how to manipulate society in order to improve it, though. AA and similar programs are juggernauts in modern Western society, and so our understanding of how/if they work have huge impacts in our understanding of the world.
07mk
8d ago
Seriously, if guys think this is what being a woman is like, there is no goddamn hope for any mutual understanding between the sexes.
My guess is that this is common to the subset of guys who both have AGP and the propensity to act on it by transitioning, but can't be extended to guys in general.
07mk
1d ago
GuessWho quite literally answered a direct question of whether he was the user darwin2500 on Reddit with "Yes, obviously."
It's possible that GuessWho is a lying liar. But I'd say at the very least, the preponderance of evidence points to them being the same person.
07mk
8d ago
I can't see the video right now, though I've seen some clips of hoe_math talking about such men being considered "not people" by women, and if this video is of a similar vein, I'd say that not sending men messages like this is closer to needlessly cruel.
07mk
22d ago
I don't think looking for high status outliers is a good way to show that, since the vast majority of people are not high status or influential by any useful definition of the phrase.
Honestly, former prostitutes have better odds of becoming influential just by virtue of being closer to centers of power.
I feel like the outliers in this line of work who really are closer to centers of power are probably so rare that it doesn't change the median or mean all that much. Like any other entertainment industry job, my guess is that 99.999% are nobodies without any greater access to centers of power than a laywoman (pun not intended).
I don't want to talk to an AI, though. I want to talk to another Motte user who is using their mind to procure text generated by an AI in response to prompts generated by their mind.
07mk
24d ago
Is there such a complex? I thought one of the notable things about the Hawk Tuah girl was just how unusually shrewd she was for being able to leverage that one viral street interview into an actual internet celebrity career.
07mk
23hr ago
I'm sure many people with greater expertise in pedagogy than me could come up with better ideas, if they're looking at the students based on truth rather than on wishful thinking. One idea that comes to mind is having different tracks based on student competency and making sure that school performance isn't measured by overall performance but rather based on how students on each track meet their goals. And perhaps focus on career training for low IQ jobs for the lower tracks instead of academics, at least beyond the 3 Rs.
07mk
8d ago
True cultured men know the mark of being an intellectual gentleman is to only be attracted to obvious signs of intelligence like girls wearing glasses. Everything else is just window dressing.
Pun intended?
07mk
23d ago
I can't see any theoretical justification for it.
This is the way I always understood it. Lacking the ability to detect any internal experience other than our own, the way we distinguish between 2 different things is by applying input to them and seeing if there's differences in output, e.g. we shine light on it and detect what qualia the light that reflects off of it and into our eyeballs generate in our minds. Detecting intelligence isn't as simple as detecting the color or shape of something and wouldn't involve inputting light rays but rather words to see what words get returned in response. If there's no way to distinguish between 2 different entities in this way, then it makes no sense to say that 1 has human-level intelligence while the other lacks it. For that to be the case, there must be some way to induce different outputs from those 2 things with the same input. In something relating to intelligence, anyway; input-output of words probably don't cover the entirety of all possible detection mechanisms, but they do seem to me to cover a lot.
07mk
22d ago
Good ideas arise from craft skill, innate talent plus long hours of practice honing your perceptive faculties and understanding of the medium.
I don't think this is a fundamental law of the universe, though. It's a result of the fact that a good idea is only good if it can be implemented in reality, and as such, people familiar with and talented at the craft of implementing ideas to reality - i.e. in the case of images, are skilled illustrators with lots of experience in manually illustrating images - are the ones able to come up with good ideas.
But as long as it results in a good image, the idea behind it is a "good idea," regardless of who came up with the idea or how. Now, people can translate ideas into images without that deep understanding of the medium*, with that translation process bypassing all/most of the skills and techniques that were traditionally required. And because of that bypassing, what constitutes a "good idea" no longer has the same limitations and requirements of being based on one's understanding of those traditional skills and techniques.
* Some may argue that diffusion models are a medium unto itself with its own set of skills to develop and practice, akin to how photography and painting both generate 2D images but are considered different mediums. I'm ignoring this point for now.
07mk
22d ago
In my experience so far, for every one AI-generated artpiece that was a genuine improvement over the alternative of "nothing" or "imagining it by reading a text meme", there are 10 thousand pieces of absolute slop that should have never been published with less effort than it took me to scroll past.
I see similar things on my social media, and I feel the exact opposite. The things that people call "AI slop" are, almost universally, things that would have been considered incredible works in the pre-generative AI era. Even today, they often have issues with things like hands, perspective, and lighting, and though they're often very easy to fix, just as often they aren't fixed before they're posted online. But even considering those issues, if someone came across such works in 2021, most people would find them quite aesthetically pleasing, if not beautiful.
So now we're inundated with this aesthetically pleasing slop that was generated and posted thoughtlessly by some lazy prompter, to the point that we've actually grown tired and bored of it. I see this as an absolute win, and I think my experience on the internet has become more pleasant and more beautiful because of it. I see it as akin to how Big Macs have become considered kind of slop food and eating it every day - an option almost anyone in the Western world has - would mark you as low status in many crowds, but for most of human existence, if you had that easy and cheap access to food that was that palatable and that nutritious, you'd be considered to be living an elite life. I think, for such access to such high quality food to have become so banal as to be considered slop is a sign of a great, prosperous world that is better than the alternative. So too for images (and video and music soon, hopefully).
07mk
23d ago
FWIW, I perceive BinaryHobo as making a point purely about the structure of your argument, rather than about the actual trans issue specifically. And I think their point is correct. We can all tell based on their behavior that TRAs can clearly tell the difference between trans women and cis women and have to use linguistic sophistry and "mind-killing," as Arthur Chu might put it, to justify bucketing them into the same category of "women" instead of the former being a sub-category of "men," which is distinct from "women."
But it's at least theoretically possible for someone to honestly, in good faith, have separate distinct sub-categories of things which both fit into a larger category that they share. Like how someone can categorize apples painted orange as "orange apples" which fit into the larger category of "apples" that also include non-painted red apples. As such, the mere usage of "trans women" as a category distinct from "cis women" doesn't necessarily logically imply that they're using linguistic sophistry to paper over their true belief that "trans women" don't fit into the larger category of "women." All the other stuff surrounding it does.
07mk
10d ago
I played 16 recently based on enjoying the demo a ton, especially the real-time combat. Unfortunately, the full game didn't add a whole lot of depth to the combat, and the story ended up being a major disappointment, going a very well-trodden boring route after the demo appeared to set things up for a really intriguing medieval politics kind of plot. Really sad that what could've been a very bold step into a new direction for the franchise ended up being so half-assed.
I never finished 13, but I still think it has the best combat system out of any FF game I've played, including 7 Remake. Almost as a rule, I have a great distaste for turn-based combat systems, but I found the whole Paradigm Shift system of changing party members' roles in real-time during a battle and spending 90% of the time doing tiny damage to stagger the enemy so that you can deplete 90% of their HP in that 10% stagger window to be highly engaging. A shame about the storytelling, worldbuilding, and hyperlinear levels for the first 20 hours of the game.
I'll always have a soft spot for 8 for being the 1st JRPG I played and blowing me away with its huge explorable world and cinematic cutscenes. Even if the Junction system turned out to be pretty bad, and the story went off the rails near the end. The space base scene and Laguna's love story will always tug my heart strings.
I agree with this paragraph broadly, but I also see people jumping from this to claiming that Aella has been "bullied" or that people have been "cruel" to her. From what I can tell from the original link to the tweet in your post, she had to actually search her name in order to find these acts of shaming. If these tweets weren't directed at her or perhaps her immediate peers, I don't see how these could be acts of bullying or cruelty. It is perhaps uncouth, even shameful, to speak ill of someone else in a public forum, but it is neither bullying nor cruel. It's only when it's persistent and directed at the target in an unavoidable or difficult-to-avoid way that it can cross that line.
As far as I can tell from reading the post and the tweet, she's just upset that strangers are speaking ill of her and there aren't enough other strangers defending her in response. This seems like entirely a problem she invented for herself by deciding to place boundaries on things that strangers on the internet talk about with each other concerning her. The "I consent!/I consent!/I don't!" meme comes to mind.
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