4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
<3
User ID: 355
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
5mo ago
Ah, thanks, that works.
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
5mo ago
You are right, but I don't think that was "the point", given that @self_made_human apparently was led to believe that it is yes (and seemed to treat that answer being given as a success criterion).
(I was actually in the process of writing up another response as I had realised it is not true, after I fed the question to DeepSeek-R1's Qwen7B distill to reason through and found that it choked as it tried to conjure up compact neighbourhoods that I didn't see the grounds for existing, but I hadn't gotten to the point of having a good counterexample yet)
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
5mo ago
· Edited 5mo ago
There's one particular question that I ask LLMs, courtesy of my maths PhD cousin: "Is the one-point compactification of a Hausdorff space itself Hausdorff?" The correct answer is yes, or so I'm told.
Are you just asking it as a yes/no question? This is a standard question that a first-year undergrad could be asked to check that they understood the definitions, and it's unlikely that the answer wouldn't be in the training set somewhere. For example, I quickly fed it to a Q4_K_M quantised Qwen2.5-3B (that's on the level that you could run on a smartphone nowadays), and it completed
Q: Is the one-point compactification of a Hausdorff space itself Hausdorff?
A:
with
Yes, the one-point compactification of a Hausdorff space is itself Hausdorff.<|endoftext|>
edit: See @wlxd's discussion for why the correct answer is actually "No". In fact, Qwen2.5-3B is almost perfectly on the edge: the log-odds of the first token of an alternative answer that goes "No, the one-point compactification of a Hausdorff space is not necessarily Hausdorff.<|endoftext|>" is only about 0.21 lower, so the probability of it being chosen is about e^-0.21 or 0.81 times the probability that it would pick the "Yes...". (Think 45% No to 55% Yes.)
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
5mo ago
Yeah, but any idiot would; the analogous China argument is incomparably stronger; china being a superpower, far more peaceful, and on the other side of the world. I find american discourse on china shrill and out of proportion to chinese aggression. If our american friends look to be engaged in an ego driven „War for Number One“, Europe should obviously do a 180 and moonwalk out of the ring.
Well, it's easy to say that now. I remind you that shortly before the war, 55% of Germans still were for operating NS2 "despite the ongoing conflict with Russia". Can you say with confidence that if a CN-TW war starts, after three years of nonstop war propaganda in the media, where Chinese atrocities and Taiwanese valour are frontpaged in the papers every day and every expert agrees that China will no doubt attack Europe eventually if it is allowed to win in Taiwan, which will presumably percolate through the social strata until everyone you know agrees and only obviously disgusting and sketchy outgroup people argue for moderation and non-interference, you will still think that Germany should stay neutral and mind its own economic interests?
Where is the unknown? They keep threatening our cities with nukes. The idea that we could resume cordial relations after this is delusional.
Do they? I don't think I've seen much of that messaging at all, and to begin with, was this before or after their people were being killed with military hardware that we donated?
Germany ignored its friends‘ advice and gave russia a chance to be peaceful and rich, forgave its trespasses for a long time. Now that it has all ended in tears and defection, that failed forgiveness and goodwill is to be withdrawn with prejudice, and I want russia to lose more than I want ukraine to win.
What trespasses were there against Germany? You can of course extend the set of trespasses that count to include any arbitrary rule concerning anything anywhere in the world, but that sort of approach does not converge to a notion of national interests that allows equilibria that are not global dictatorships.
Russians always go on about their perceived slights, justifying all this madness; this is ours. Germany‘s been disrespected; put this into your prison hierarchy metaphor.
In the prison hierarchy metaphor, Russia is bending over for Germany pants down. I mean, again, German tanks are currently being used to take towns that had been Russian for centuries, and what's Russia doing in retaliation? Making unhappy noises?
That's disgusting. Keep your blood gas.
I expected better from you, but every time I dig into a pro-russian position, there is nothing but moral nihilism.
Ugh. We can have the same argument from a non-morally-nihilist standpoint, which would be much closer to my actual standpoint, if you want - I've done that many times here (with my line being that unchallenged American hegemony is a far greater evil upon the world, and to put checks on it, barring a miraculous inversion of firepower, you need to support lesser evils with opposing interests, so their capacities are tied up with each other and they are compelled to do good to gather third-party support), and apart from the uninteresting responses that selectively assign low moral weight to targets of US evildoing, the dominant retorts always turn out to be the morally nihilistic ones ("sure, grant that the US hegemony kills millions and results in even greater non-killing injustice around the world, but why should I as a citizen of $european_country care about that?").
Why did they not counter-coup? Perhaps they preferred losing hundreds of thousands of men. Or they can‘t counter-coup, because they‘re unpopular. All they have left is violence and their own lack of restraint to inflict it.
They did counter-coup; the result was Crimea and the Donbass and the whole 2014-2022 period. To begin with, are you suggesting that coups are not "violence"?
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
5mo ago
This line of reasoning kind of makes me think of an objection I always have to people wanting to use "safe"/garbage-collected programming languages like Javascript or Golang instead of C/C++, because "explicit memory management makes it hard to write correct code, and your program will crash with null pointer errors": bad programmers are going to write bad code, the only difference is that with C their bad code will crash right away, while in a GCed language their bad code will instead live to leak memory and contain subtle logic errors that you won't notice until it's too late.
As I see it, translating perfectly requires emulating the intention and mental state of the original author/speaker in full, and then leveraging your language skill in the target language to convey the intention as the author did in the source language. If you skip this step and translate by following the structure of the original text, be it word for word, idiom for idiom or sentence for sentence, your translation will actually be flawed - it's just that if the two languages were similar, the flaws will be less apparent, and you can go on for longer before the fraud (that the translator did not actually understand, but just chinese-roomed the translation) is detected.
The number of words and phrases that Japanese speakers use on a regular basis is simply more restricted than what we have in English, and a perfectly literal translation of Japanese text can come off as subdued, repetitive, and stilted to English ears
I think this goes both ways, too. The context-dropping nature of Japanese means that if you actually communicate the context in it that an English speaker would habitually want to convey, you also wind up with something repetitive and stilted - but if you drop the wrong piece of context, you also get something that is between jarring and incomprehensible. A big part of Japanese fluency is knowing what context to provide with what timing, and how to play the language's much greater (compared to English) dynamic range from absolute minimalism to byzantine circumscription.
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
5mo ago
English's "let's make 'gh' represent the 'f' sound... sometimes" does not seem to deter people all over the world from enjoying English media, though.
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
5mo ago
· Edited 5mo ago
I was talking about LLMs with a Japanese friend the other day, and they brought up a 1963 SF short story by Hoshi Shinichi that neatly prefigured an element of the current ChatGPT debate. Prophetic scifi is always fun, so I figured I'll give a sloppy translation of the abridged representative blurb that everyone seems to quote from it.
"The Secretary on the Shoulder" (from the anthology "Bokko-chan")
It is the near future. A door-to-door salesman is visiting a private residence to pitch his company's product. A single parrot is sitting on the salesman's shoulder, and the resident who just emerged from the entranceway likewise has a parrot perched.
The salesman mumbles to the parrot on his shoulder:
(Buy it)
As he does, the parrot starts speaking fluently.
"I am most sorry for bothering you at such a busy time. Today, I would like to humbly request that I may introduce you to the latest product that is the pride of our company."
The resident's parrot translates this.
(Seems like he's here for sales)
Having received this much, the resident whispers to his parrot.
(Ok, what?)
The parrot in turn translates:
"That will be most welcome. At your pleasure, let's hear about it."
The premise, in more detail, is that everyone has a personal robotic parrot that translates to and from convoluted/polite/considerate/PC prose for the benefit of its owner. The full story features the dialogue between salesman and individual (a housewife) in more detail, where in the end parrot translates the housewife's "I don't need it, so scram already" into a long polite excuse about how she would have to consult with her husband before making a big purchase, and if he would kindly inquire again another time. Then the salesman returns to his office and is chewed out by his boss('s parrot) for not closing more sales, and in turn has his "as if it's that easy lol" turned into a suitably deferential statement of contrition. In the end, he drops by a hostess bar to unwind after work, and is of course welcomed by a wall of flattery from the mamasan's parrot. Closing line: "For [salesman], this is the moment he always looks forward to the most."
Especially during the segments where the prompts turned progressively rude, I couldn't help but think of our occasional posters cracking out the AI rewrite in response to being stop-and-searched by the tone police. Much like in the other modern narrative where LLMs will expand one-liners into compliance forms, powerpoints and press releases which are in turn only ever consumed and reduced into digests by other LLMs, the intention presumably was to make the reader wonder whether all the polite bloat (of which Japanese especially has a lot) really serves any purpose.
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
5mo ago
· Edited 5mo ago
Correct me if I‘m wrong, but I seem to remember either you being part russian,
Fully, actually. I left long ago, though, and have no remaining ties or attachments (financial or otherwise).
Rest assured I will argue for the same position when/if China vs. Taiwan kicks off and the Germans are once again invariably subjected to a year-long psyop to make them enthusiastically sacrifice blood and treasure for American interests (because of some mixture of democracy, the rules-based international order and China will come for you next), and I say this as someone who thinks of Taiwan as far more sympathetic than the PRC, or any of Poland, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Russia or Ukraine.
The only thing I think it the Russian roots really do here is giving me a better understanding of how the country ticks, so I feel more confident in the assessment that there is not more of a likelihood that Russia would proactively seek out war with Germany than there is that the UK would (of course, the general likelihood of war is more likely, along the lines of "Estonia kicks off something and Germany is obliged to join", but again that could be prevented by cutting off false allies.), and more generally resisting arguments resting on "scary unknowns may be capable of anything". A lot of the Western theoretising about what Russia will or won't do is based on a model where it is basically some sort of DnD character maximising for what the speaker understands as evil (and casting those who doubt this model as secretly pro-evil), whereas I argued before that it is better predicted by a "prisoner social hierarchy" model/the thing where you deter transgressions against yourself and secure high status by signalling that you are willing to take disproportional revenge with no regard for collateral self-harm.
The unhelpful behaviour of ukraine and the baltics towards germany you highlight is motivated by one thing only : an extreme fear of russia (shared by finland, and every close neighbour of russia).
Yes, but that should be their problem, not ours.
I don‘t see how anyone else in europe can look at russia‘s behaviour these past 5 years, nay 20, nay 100, nay 300 years, and not see a threat.
...because not everyone in Europe is a close neighbour of Russia. Yes, being a close neighbour of Russia sucks, just like being a close neighbour of China and the US sucks. Germany didn't form an alliance with Cuba, Nicaragua, Taiwan or the Philippines either. Why did it have to form one with Ukraine or the Baltics?
I was expecting russia to stop warring against its neighbours. It‘s not some obscure demand russia inadvertently missed. Russia keeps acting against Germany‘s expressed will. No argument can be construed where those wars are in line with germany‘s interests.
The argument is actually easily construed, based on everything that has been said before: if Russia subjugated its neighbours or they at least forced them to act mindful of the possibility of it doing so, that would mean a lot of middlemen who want a cut from the natural beneficial trade partnership (Russian raw materials for German secondary products) being robbed of their ability to demand it. There is no obvious other way to stop the middlemen from taking their cut.
Even a 19th century diplomat would have threatened war in retaliation: ‚you want abkhazia/donbas. What do we get for staying neutral?‘.
I don't think 19th century diplomats are paragons to follow as far as not sticking your nose into business that will be unprofitable for you goes. On that matter, should the Russians have asked the same thing when the US+EU were grabbing Ukraine? Do you know the events that lead up to Euromaidan?
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
5mo ago
I don't understand why this would be a (materialistic) interest for Germany or anyone west of it. There is a spiritual interest, sure, but I contend that it was manufactured by transatlanticists. The Baltics seem to me to be a net negative, and even then Russia wasn't making any real moves against them since they joined NATO. I don't see the Russians having done anything that could be fairly interpreted as rejecting a German offer to be Germany's gas station, unless you understand such an offer to also include Russia admitting the US State Department up its rear (in Ukraine, Georgia, and domestic opposition), in which case Germany was making a bad and certainly not "generous" offer against its own interest. Germany should have considered slapping Ukraine itself after it started stealing gas meant for transit to Germany in the 2000s; instead it demurred as our Baltic "allies" did their utmost to sabotage any project to expand gas export routes that bypass it.
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
5mo ago
· Edited 5mo ago
They received about 3% of their GDP in EU subsidies every year for the past 20 years, for a total about 250bln EUR. I don't doubt that their development has been a great boon to themselves, but it's not clear a priori why it would be to Germany, or how to quantify whether and how much of a boon it would have been. Manifestly, Germany's economy is currently shrinking. (...and the standard analysis attributes this to loss of Russian gas, where Poland for years obstructed procurement and finally hosted and sheltered the group that blew up several of the Baltic pipelines!)
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
5mo ago
The more important question, in my eyes, is whether "the Europeans", or the EU, are even a natural geopolitical unit if the US actually draws down its support. Its scale and structure have grown way beyond the initial undertaking of intertwining the three perpetual poles of conflict (France, Germany and the UK) economically and culturally so they would never go to war against each other again, and while I would see the France-Germany axis of that project as essentially successful and stable for the foreseeable future, it's hard to understand any of the eastward expansion as anything other than driven by a mixture of American geopolitical interests (which are now being withdrawn) and the Western European industry's interest in maintaining wage pressure on their own workers (which is increasingly irrelevant as Western European industry itself becomes irrelevant, Eastern European living standards have gone up, and Arabs/Africans have become an alternative source of undercutting labour) and supported by a well-oiled deputised propaganda machine of transatlanticist media and NGOs (which is getting weakened as American soft power is eating itself and the USAID money hose has been shut off, though it has a heavy flywheel).
Without either the US stick of "we can bring you on the brink of civil war" or the US carrot of "we can ensure political stability, pay for your defense and insulate you from responsibility for any hard and unpopular decisions", it's not clear why countries like Germany or France would have any shared interests with countries like Estonia, Lithuania or Poland, which are all mooching off subsidies and still basically behaving like adversaries (between sabotaging infrastructure and demanding ever more reparations). The natural order of things in an America-free Europe may see Western Europe downsizing back to something like a Coal and Steel Plus community, which would maintain cordial relations with the great gas station in the far East, while the Baltics have to figure out for themselves how to shine the boots of the two greater powers on either side well enough that they do not just get partitioned up and invaded again. Interesting things would probably start happening along the Balkans-Greece-Turkey axis, but the rump EU parties might be able to muster enough of a peacekeeping and expeditionary force to keep the minnows down there from each other's throats (though it might be hard to save Greece from a thousand-cut death in the long run, similar to what is happening to Armenia).
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
5mo ago
It's an entirely new way of organizing labor in society
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
5mo ago
That sounds like outgroup homogeneity bias to me. I am also tempted to describe SJWs as normal right-wingers with some idiosyncratic beliefs (The basic similarities are all there! They all want to defend a specific hierarchy, restrict speech, impose strict rules on sex life and push doomsday beliefs.), and any similarity is not diminished just by them happening to have the luxury of choosing between two parties that cater to them.
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
5mo ago
I don't really see them being against social hierarchy - to me this perception seems like another instance of conflating "they don't accept my version of $thing" and "they are against $thing". What is "trust the science"/"trust experts" if not an appeal to social hierarchy? What is the "progressive stack" if not an outline of a social hierarchy? Do you imagine established SJWs sassing an Ibram Kendi?
There are always a few Youth Guards early on in the pipeline who take the stated principles a bit too literally, and in turbulent times they might even be fielded as useful tools, but as they age and learn to integrate cognitively dissonant positions more effectively, they fall in line. On the other hand, it's not like there isn't plenty of dysfunction and backstabbing in auth-right movements as well.
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
5mo ago
Wasn't the kickoff event of Gamergate to do with artsy SJW types capturing some sort of indie game award, though?
My sense is that the drama about wokeness in expensive "AAA games" actually came later - the community was instead taken over from below, with the points of incursion being along with the gaming-liberal arts border (journalism, awards, small-scale narrative games). I vaguely recall people asking an evil genie that video games finally be recognised as an artform in the years leading up to it.
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
5mo ago
Hah, that's catchy, but I don't know. Per the second paragraph that I edited in, I really do think that something fundamentally divides us from SJWs and even their ideological ancestors - even during my middle-school-era political awakening when I didn't have an older version of any political firmware to cling on to, I felt firmly alienated from the class of leftists that wanted to ban and prescribe individual behaviour (in Germany, at the time, the Greens), even as I would want to march with them against the corporations and governments. Without American Citizens United gaslighting, the two views are really not incompatible - I have never had trouble distinguishing corporations from people.
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
5mo ago
· Edited 5mo ago
I don't know if "social liberal, fiscal conservative" is a fair gloss of the people that self-identify as classical liberals. What would you label people that are fiscally left-wing (for taxes, regulation and redistribution) and socially liberal as in for the freedom to abort and take drugs and also the freedom to use slurs and misgender and sideline minorities that are statistically rarely good enough for high-status jobs?
I think there's an unfortunate impulse to take the default political compass too seriously - "we are auth-right, so our archenemies must be lib-left". I think reality is explained much better by putting the entire SJ movement in the auth-left quadrant - just because they are noticeably and loudly for allowing some things that you don't like, this doesn't mean they are permissive in the anti-authoritarian sense. Even the Mao-era CCP, a type specimen for auth-left if there ever was one, allowed and tolerated some things that the auth-right wouldn't, such as parading people through town naked, vigilantism and (locally) cannibalism. Conversely, it's easy to come up with lots of things that are allowed in the perfect MAGA world and forbidden in the perfect BLM world.
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
5mo ago
· Edited 5mo ago
Outside of what DOGE has been up to, how are "things moving very fast"?
There is at least the cluster of things that amount to a rapid shredding of the previous arrangement where the US has a network of allied nations that enthusiastically follow it as a Big Good/moral leader - see the tariff tussles, and the public snubbing of Ukraine and especially the EU over the Ukraine war. All the German papers have spent the past few days apoplectic about Vance's comments at the Munich security conference, ranging from NO Uing Europe with accusations of democratic backsliding and comparisons to the Soviet Union to declaring that they will not have a seat at the table in upcoming negotiations over Ukraine. As much as I get a "you tell them, bro" feeling about those remarks, this does amount to kicking the lapdog for no good reason.
In terms of internal politics, there are also the ICE deportation raids and the drama about Adams discussed downthread.
I feel sorry for OP. Classical liberals have already left the running decades ago, when they failed to formulate a response to the logic of fear-driven engagement bait from either side.
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
5mo ago
· Edited 5mo ago
I'm taking into account that Amadan's reaction here was to issue a warning, not to ban anyone. I do think there was room for sockpuppet2's request for a source to be worded in a more diplomatic way, and ultimately left-wingers being also forced to maintain decorum would indirectly encourage right-wingers to do so as well in a way that will have effects beyond what even a hypothetical even-handed and strict mod team could possibly enforce. Either way, left-wingers have no shortage of alternative places to go to - whether they will leave, as they do, because the community sasses them with impunity, or they will leave because the mods chew them out, the outcome in terms of number of left-wingers present will be the same, but in the latter case at least the forum was cleared of some boring zingers. If not all of them leave under either regime, the "chew both out" strategy is more likely to select for left-wingers that are happy to not be allowed hot takes, while the "leave both alone" strategy is more likely to select for left-wingers that are ok with an environment where everyone is just tweeting at each other.
Besides, even if I am more sympathetic to the "source?" demand here, last time I complained about moderation and actually went as far as suggesting an inversion of the verdict, I was just flat out dismissed as, quote, "engaged in the same special pleading that nearly all rules-lawyers and mod-critics bring to us, as if we'd never seen it before: 'why don't you moderate my enemies more, and my friends less?'". It's fairly disheartening to learn that merely suggesting more even-handed moderation is also sufficient to earn a lazy dismissal.
I continue having a fairly straightforward prescription to put mobs in their place, which is to apply progressively higher standards to posts in proportion to the number of upvotes and approval they get, up to "it better be an effortpost that could stand up to adversarial lawyering of all the rules" at +40 or so. Circlejerks would quickly get the air taken out of them if any attempts to boost a take you like are tantamount to condemning it to have to live up to a less attainable standard, and you could only really feel like you are helping your team if you are upvoting takes that will actually live up to it. I was thinking of pitching a meta discussion about this at some point, if I can muster the time and energy.
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
5mo ago
Fair, sort of. I'll settle for the public signal that having my objection sit there sends as a lesser desirable outcome, and hope you can tolerate that I will continue bringing this point up when it applies. I do want to force an argument on this topic - if not with you, then with others.
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
5mo ago
· Edited 5mo ago
That in similar cases, going forward, you either admonish/moderate everyone involved, or nobody (in this particular case, "everyone" seems to me like it would have been the most reasonable choice) - and perhaps more generally that you adjust the perception you seemingly have that there's nothing you can do to make this forum less hostile to non-right-wing posters without either putting in a lot more work, compromising on fairness or changing the rules.
edit: It might be a relevant piece of context that I actually wound up in this subthread because I was looking for the very same evidence that sockpuppet2 asked for. A normieleft friend asserted to me that the quid-pro-quo of judicial relief for political favours is norm-breaking for the US; I had a nebulous feeling that it's in line with how corrupt US politics always had been, but couldn't think of a concrete example, so I went looking in the bowels of the thread figuring that if some comparable action by Democrats had happened, someone would have posted about it.
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
5mo ago
Time to return to the scheduled programming in which I complain about moderation! I believe the tropey term for statements that are impossible to corroborate or refute is "not even wrong". Either @2rafa's statement was in that category, in which case she should not have made it to begin with; or @sockpuppet2's request for evidence was in principle reasonable, in which case he shouldn't have been mocked for it, nor implicitly unilaterally dinged by the modhat. Even if the request was in fact unreasonable, a mocking one-liner is certainly not mending any broken windows in the neighbourhood.
You looked at an escalation spiral that started with 2rafa's low-quality post (red valence), which invited a low-quality reply (blue valence) by sockpuppet2, which invited an even lower-quality response (red) by jeroboam, which in turn invited an equally lower-quality response (blue) by UwU, which then invited a mercifully higher-quality meta-discussion by the last two, and modhatted it casting blame on the blue-coloured entries in the chain only. Is this not a clear case of selective enforcement (more colourfully, "anarcho-tyranny")? And then you go and act like the community's rightward shift is an unfortunate natural phenomenon that you have nothing to do with and can't do anything about.
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
5mo ago
Would you also be happy to apply that reasoning to Biden (Sr. and Jr.) and Ukraine? Surely "get Ukraine tangled up in US patronage networks" was part of the Biden admin's agenda.
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
5mo ago
And I'd argue that signalling "I'm a male feminist" is about as cheap as it gets. It is basically free, you literally just affirm what a woman says and denigrate males as a class while subtly implying you're not really a member of that class.
I think that this part is a bit of a cope/emotionally comfortable belief about the triviality of the outgroup. The dating market is not so uncompetitive that a priori one would expect any successful strategy to be cheap. Gaiman's schtick was hardly just that he is "a male feminist" - he is a bestselling author, gregarious convention-goer, and supposedly a commanding storyteller in person and all around magnetic personality, on top of being a male feminist. It is this whole package that allowed him to enrapture groupies so easily - of course there must be some natural predisposition involved, but he nevertheless would have worked hard his whole life to become the New Feminist Man that a particular type of woman finds irresistible. Neither you nor I would get anywhere by just suddenly going out there, affirming what women say and denigrating males as a class; people like that are dime a dozen, and they are more likely to wind up as sad caricatures or give up in short order to churn through other cheap-and-ineffective approaches than to even get to the point where they would be #metoo-ed.
I have encountered a good number of guys who fit the same archetype in my life, and it is always abundantly clear that they pour a lot of effort into verbal skills and social standing, like by volunteering as DMs for D&D sessions, volunteering for all sorts of things in general, or attending improv theatre. One of them even forced himself to pretend to be bisexual.
If you aren't already familiar with it, The Chaos is relevant.
More options
Context Copy link