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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
1mo ago
· Edited 1mo ago
Why bend over backwards to dunk on the forum, instead of proposing solutions yourself? There is an obvious 50-Stalins solution to the "romance recession", which is waifu/husbando tech/ever-improving AI partners. The obvious endpoint for a society of individuals whose standards have them demand ever more while providing ever less is to put everyone in their personal lotus-eater simulation hugbox, anyway.
That being said, if we make it past all the impending Great Filters at all, I'm not too concerned about these lesser problems in the long run. In my entire social bubble, tracking from early graduate school if not earlier, there are few signs of "romance recession" - most everyone has organically paired up, whether it is from in-person matching or online dating or circulating date-me docs, and I guess we'll see in the next 5-10 years what will happen with birth rates although some are already starting to have ~2 kids, maximum observed 4. There clearly are subclusters of more sustainable norms in the waiting; given that feedback length is on the order of one lifetime, I would expect natural selection to spread them fast, and the (particular) problems we are observing to only be this one wretched generation's cross to bear.
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
1mo ago
Less than $50,000 in student loan debt.
Maybe it's because of my particular bubble, but this is the one requirement in your list that seems completely unreasonable. My understanding is that (1) 40% of US citizens in the relevant age bracket get at least a BA, tendency rising; (2) it is very hard to get a well-paying white-collar job without one; (3) US tuition fees now run on the order of magnitude of that figure per year, more for good universities. Together, this is starting to look like six-figure student loan debt is something like the standard path into the US middle-class - asking for a person in their late 30s without it is somewhat similar to asking for someone at age 40 without a mortgage, that is, you are strongly going to bias for either unusually rich or just not a homeowner.
Also, regarding
Single and looking (of course).
Wasn't there a redpill-adjacent term like "monkey-branching"? As in, the idea that women's dating strategy involves remaining formally "attached" to the best option available all the way until a better option comes along (as opposed to breaking up and then spending some unknown amount of time looking while identifying as single). In such a setting, you could have a perfectly liquid dating market in which everyone gets matched up just fine, but your way of counting registers approximately zero "marriageable" women.
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
1mo ago
I've been wondering if the reason the media aren't pushing footage from places like Vo(v/l)chansk (where the rubble is still being made to bounce) more prominently nowadays is because of saturation/fatigue or because they always invite awkward comparisons to Gaza where we are on the attacker's side.
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
1mo ago
At best it wouldn't have been a civil war, just a decade or two of people deciding it's ok to shoot politicians they don't like and all the impacts of that norm.
What do you think would be they impacts of that norm? I have always had the suspicion that in a sufficiently polarised setting, it might actually result in better leadership if the leaders had to not only optimise for getting reelected (make their ingroup happy) but also for not getting assassinated (don't make their outgroup too unhappy).
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
1mo ago
· Edited 1mo ago
It's unfortunate that this is rarely stated clearly, but I figure the crux is that COVID was a watershed moment for governments, with the backing of a technocratic expert caste, imposing novel restrictions on personal and social freedoms. The narrative the globalist-technocratic complex and its supporters want to prevail is that this was good and necessary - the freedoms are a relic of a more innocent age, somewhere in the class of letting gentlemen scientists enrich uranium in their bedrooms, and in our age of global networks and megacities it is important to endow experts and elected representatives with emergency powers to restrict them according to their superior judgement to protect the people from danger.
This narrative is a lot more compelling if COVID was a natural catastrophe and the official response at least constituted a reasonable attempt to minimise the risk of bad outcomes, than if COVID was a result of irresponsible actions by the same technocrat clique that wants to arrogate itself emergency powers to immanentize its "superior judgement". (See: the old pattern of creating a problem and selling the solution)
Underlying this all is a quiet disagreement about what was even the "problem" - one group of people sees a dangerous disease that society was worryingly incompetent in containing and wonders why it even matters where exactly it came from, while the other sees "free" societies happily going on the North Korea spectrum overnight over a cold and wonders why it even matters how bad the cold was.
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
1mo ago
Sweden did do a soft lockdown in the sense that businesses had reduced hours/density or encouraged people to work from home, and restricted the occupancy of certain public facilities like swimming pools. That, and I got the subjective sense that they have much less of a contingent of people who are young and severely unhealthy even compared to countries like Germany.
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
1mo ago
· Edited 1mo ago
Yeah, I don't care about these considerations. Whether or not they are a majority is a question that remains hard to judge, but I would maintain that at the very least they are unevenly distributed - I think I have an abundance of data on male preferences in my immediate environment, including both real targets and fictional characters, and the alleged tendency just isn't there. Would you want to posit that everything ranging from the crushes of German school boys to gacha-playing waifu collector degenerate whaling is preference falsification due to a desire to signal a common notion of high status?
To be clear, I don't doubt that there are significant subcultures/subcommunities of people where the majority preference is as stated in the blog. It's just that I suspect that those subcultures select on something that correlates with that preference, and/or induce that preference in their members. As a matter of fact, in the context of gacha communities, they like making their presence known - among others, a favourite pastime of theirs is to develop and use mods that give characters balloon tits and skimpy outfits, which they then post screenshots of in discussion threads without comment. It is evident that the message of the screenshot posting is intended to be somewhere between "I'm sticking it to Chinese censors" and "everyone actually thinks this is hotter, and I am getting to enjoy good things while you cucks are not", but even on 4chan (hardly a land of prosocial preference falsification), a majority of posters appears to find them obnoxious and have little interest in the mods.
For whatever reason, the "tit men" always seem to be desperate to assure themselves that everyone secretly shares their preferences, and they are just the only ones being honest about it, as opposed to them having a niche interest - there does not seem to be a counterpart to this among the "tit-indifferent men". This reminds me a little of the old AROOO lesbian separatist belief that women actually do not naturally enjoy sex with men, and the ones who do have just been brainwashed into it by society or the patriarchy, so I wonder if this is just a natural shape of cope that emerges among people with socially shunned sexual preferences.
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
1mo ago
· Edited 1mo ago
That the median man would prefer C- or D-cups to the blog's and the swimsuit models' much larger sizes (even if we assumed anime levels of sci-fi connective tissue), (edit) but either way, that the median man's preferences do not put nearly as much weight on cup size as the blog and some of the parent posts make the out to.
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
1mo ago
I looked for pictures of both, and neither seems to be anywhere near the swimsuit models or the original blog's purported ideal in terms of size? Eyeballing from the photos I found and a reference chart, they look like maybe D-cups to me.
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
1mo ago
· Edited 1mo ago
In any case, are we trying to argue that Keira Knightley, poor thing, has more attractive boobs than a
What a strange choice of topic to break the rule against consensus-building on! Are you asking about my opinion or what I think the general population's opinion is? I genuinely don't have strong preferences (and thus apparently have something wrong with me in your estimation?), but maybe very weakly, in the sense of how I would set sliders in an MMO character designer where I have to express an opinion, they are about equal degrees of too small and too large respectively. If I had to guess the general public's preferences, I would guess they would prefer the swimsuit models, but only because they have less tolerance for the almost completely flat, which is not actually what the thesis is about - if you compared someone with genuinely average or somewhat-below-average cup size, like, idk, Liv Tyler?, I would expect the results to be much more of a wash, and if I weren't on my phone in public I would find pictures of some C-cup swimsuit model I would expect to win.
People are very performative about this, to the point that any public statement about it should be just ignored.
Sure they are, but your sample having to ignore peer pressure is also a confounder. I'm not saying "AI art goes against the tastes of most", but "those who engage positively with AI art are not representative", which is a subtle but important distinction. It's entirely consistent (and similar in shape to what I think is most likely to be the real state of affairs) if: (1) AI art would get an objective average rating of 5/10 from the general population; (2) there is peer pressure to pretend AI art is 1/10 and you are a crass rube if you disagree; (3) 10% of people don't care about being considered crass rubes; (4) those 10% love big tits and to them AI art 9/10 on average because it is an infinite wellspring of them.
pixiv ranking
Funny enough, right now the top 2 pictures are gacha game characters that are completely flat-chested (Genshin's Furina, Blue Archive's shupogaki duo). The third one is also huge, #4 is medium... looking further down the list, similar ratio to my danbooru check. Yeah, I think some cherries were being picked.
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
1mo ago
· Edited 1mo ago
All the anime pictures I saw with a cursory look were AI-generated, though. You could make a more persuasive argument that people looking at anime-style erotic art in general have somewhat representative preferences in that department (though even there I would not be sure), but AI art is definitively only appreciated by a niche subgroup, with the modal anime erotica enjoyer being highly dismissive of it.
edit: I performed the most basic of experiments and searched danbooru with tags 1girl standing. The first page had several images that clearly belonged to series depicting the same character by the same artist, but the second page were all singletons. Of the 20 images there, 7 looked to be in the blog's "E cup or above" category, with the remaining ranging from flat to what looks like a realistic average.
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
1mo ago
Yes, how dare Estonia... attempt to inspect a tanker, possibly one traveling in its territorial waters?
Well, was it in its territorial waters or not? This seems like it's the deciding question, since ostensibly all actors involved more or less agree on the underlying conventions. There is a corridor of international waters along the centreline of the Finnish Gulf. The version I've read suggests that the tanker was following it (indeed, why would it not?), though some insinuate that it might have veered narrowly into Estonian waters at some point during the incident? It's pretty hard to discern the facts in a conflict where so many consider it their patriotic duty to lie if it makes their side look better.
I don't see anything wrong with Estonia attempting to enforce the sanctions the West has imposed on Russia, and trusting in its alliance with the West to then back it up when it attempts to enforce them.
Well, it all depends on what in fact happened, and what the sanctions really say. Are they in fact an explicit guarantee to participating state that amounts to "we will give you military cover to seize Russian ships in international waters"? Are they ambiguous, or in fact explicitly not saying that much? It's known that the Estonian state has a white-glowing hatred for Russia, and if they could press a button that made the US and Western Europe fight a hot war against it, they probably would (regardless of how the would-be belligerents feel about it). I could easily imagine a situation where whoever formulated the sanctions did not anticipate such a situation, but left enough ambiguity and lack of clear public information that Estonia saw something that to them looked like the aforementioned button and decided to press it.
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
1mo ago
Why would you assume that the customer base of online sex doll retailers or the set of AI slop producers is at all representative of "average guys"? It's easy to come up with a model where both strongly select on a criterion that could be glossed as "preference for quantity over quality".
In general, that whole blog seems to be in the old genre of "everyone who disagrees with my tastes is falsifying their preferences or a degenerate, and here is some cherrypicked evidence".
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
1mo ago
Well, that's how much the supervisor takes home - what are salary overheads in the UK like? Continental European countries tend to have between 1.5x and 2.5x.
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
1mo ago
At a not so provincial (but still(?) southern, which tracks at least with my internal stereotypes of the different German folkways) German university back in the noughties, the CS orientation event had them line the students up and do a mod-3 count (like go from left to right saying 1,2,3,1,2,3,...), and then they said that statistically speaking those who said 2 or 3 would drop out before finishing.
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
1mo ago
It is still one hour per group and week, plus whatever time you need for preparation (tutors do set and grade homework, to anchor the session and give the student feedback). For a large class this amounts to several full-time staff - and you also need a lot of small rooms, which tend to be scarce at universities. (Some supervisions wind up being held at random locations like local coffeeshops, or in the supervisor's private accommodation!)
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
1mo ago
· Edited 1mo ago
I really don't think they have the manpower now. Whether they would have the money (and talent pool) to hire that sort of manpower is another question - I think the answer would probably be yes, at least on the margin. (Manifestly, while Oxbridge primarily draw from their pool of active staff and graduate students, they do have a number of external full-time supervisors who can make a comfortable living off what they are paid (on the order of £20-30 an hour, back in the days, I think?), who in the instances I knew were local grad school dropouts.)
On the other hand, US colleges are famously stingy even with adjuncts, who are hired in far smaller numbers and teach at a greater ratio. I was not under the impression that they are massively profitable businesses, either - whatever money they take in from tuition clearly gets used up in other ways. How much of those other ways could/should be slashed is a whole thread's discussion under itself, but my impression was that discussions around it tend to have the same nature as discussions about government spending, where everyone has a different notion of what are the important things that should absolutely not be cut while everything else can go.
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
1mo ago
Other places don't generally have the manpower to copy it, since Oxbridge tutorials/supervisions are one-on-1~3. US universities also already heavily rely on undergraduate TAs to keep up their scale, which is not allowed and would probably not be adequate in the Oxbridge model since a good supervisor needs to have more command of the material than a US TA checking against a grading rubric or drip-feeding model solutions.
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
1mo ago
I was a PhD student heavily involved in TAing at a US university until a few years ago, and I could see the in-class assessment solution getting beaten out of us in real time. It started with greater and greater fractions of students demanding special arrangements (extra time, open-notes, retries (with new questions that we had to design) if they didn't like the outcome) with the backing of the disability office, and culminated around the COVID years with students sending us open letters with change.org petitions attached to them about how [blob of slick therapy-speak] meant that in-person exams were discriminatory and inequitable. I recall a multiple-evening all-hands emergency session where the TAs helped our beleaguered principal instructor thread the needle and craft a response that minimised the likelihood of him getting dragged through the town square following the spirit of the times, and around then the remaining holdouts I knew of gave up and switched to homework-only scoring. Many academics, especially at the high-profile US schools, like teaching; few of them like it so much that they would jeopardise their research career to take a stand on how it is done.
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1mo ago
I suspect you may be letting your feelings about transwomen ("gross, obviously masculine"?) cloud your understanding of the word. If you search for combinations like "work emasculating", you will see an abundance of discussions where people consider as "emasculating" things that include being called "cute" by older female coworkers, doing any desk work at all, being involved in childcare and having your wife earn more than you. I have also seen discussions of children's propensity to insult less assertive peers as "gay" as emasculation. Surely putting on a dress and trying to speak in a high-pitched voice on a regular basis is more of whatever is common to all those scenarios; and if your understanding is that being considered cool and imposing by women, doing physical labor, leaving housekeeping tasks to women and being a dominant provider who is definitively not at all gay is bad, then being far removed from those ought to be a good thing.
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
1mo ago
I meant it in the figurative sense (a man turned transwoman does not present as traditionally masculine anymore), not in the sense of actual amputation.
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
1mo ago
Isn't the "sneer faction" simply the faction of devout progressives, which has the moral foundation that the impulses and desires of men as traditionally conceived are bad? Polyamory is a way for men to have multiple women sexual partners simultaneously, which is understood to satisfy the masculine impulse - especially since the most salient cases of rationalist polyamory look like hypermasculine alpha nerds having a harem of impressionable and psychologically troubled groupies - and therefore bad. (I would be mildly surprised if the sneerclubbers took any issue with more progressive-coded free love communes, which are hardly different from poly group houses.) Transsexuality (MtF, because hardly anyone actually cares about the other direction) directly emasculates one man, and makes others uncomfortable, and is therefore good.
You could counter that the moral foundation I impute to progressives above is uncharitable and most of them would dispute having it, but neither progressives nor their opponents respect the structural implications of their stated beliefs in other cases (Transsexualism vs. transracialism? Respect for merit, authority and tradition when those are on the side of the outgroup?) either. Taking anyone at their word is only a recipe to be confused more.
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1mo ago
I think that at some point in the early 2000s, the EDM genre might have bifurcated into a much more mainstream subgenre ("Anthem Trance"?) and a myriad of niche ones that you couldn't really play at a club or beach party without scaring the hoes or whatever they call it these days.
Is your issue with the remix the specific choice of orchestration, or just that it seems all around more busy? I wouldn't call either version of the song you linked "not repetitive", insofar as there always has been trance/EDM with a more pronounced dramatic arc. There are a number of newer songs that I would consider to have similar vibes to yours: Christian Fischer - Watch the Dog (original mix), So Inagawa - Selfless State, or on the busy end of the spectrum, NAYUTA - Weisse Messer.
Some other trance songs I enjoy: busy with mainstreamish orchestration: Plutian - Sonagi, lawy - forget me not, marginal to the genre: Hooverphonic - Battersea. There is in fact a wealth of great trance songs with vocals, but I figured you might not be looking for those.
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
1mo ago
· Edited 1mo ago
I think it's rather more common with younger generations, in all countries, though I do actually have a Japanese woman friend in her 40s who is a fairly dedicated competitive Splatoon player. I don't think I would have found out without several coincidences aligning, either, even though I had known her for a long time, given the Japanese thing where compartmentalising your life and following a default don't-ask-don't-tell policy about other compartments comes very easily.
(One of the coincidences resulted in meeting some of her Splatoon buddies in real life, and their commitment to not prying behind the online masks of their compartment was notable. I figure this might actually help with the gender ratio, considering the rude and awkward behaviour I've seen in Western online gaming communities towards even those merely suspected of being girls.)
What are examples of irrationality in these discussions to you?
Usual objection: coordination problem. Assuming you can even create a strong enough dictatorship in one country or several to implement all of these, how do you stop people from defecting to a country that doesn't participate in the bans, and that country subsequently curbstomping yours?
Uh, it depends on what exactly you define the problem to be. Do you want people to report happiness/satisfaction of a cluster of needs that could be summarised as "companionship", or do you want people to pair up? It's obviously a solution for deficiences in the former but not in the latter, but if you consider the latter to be the only problem you want to solve, you run the risk of winding up in a world where nobody even agrees with you that there is a problem.
To a skeptic, this exchange may be isomorphic to something like:
Tribal elder: It is a problem that nobody sacrifices to the grain gods anymore, but you progressives will never acknowledge that there might be a problem there because there is no progressive solution to it.
Progressive(?): Well, there's a perfectly progressive solution. We just have to build up a fertiliser industry and develop industrial farming, so there will never be a shortage of grain again.
Tribal elder: This sounds like the opposite of a solution.
Who is right? On the surface, the progressive really did propose something close to the opposite of a solution to the Elder's problem as stated, but on the other hand it seems quite reasonable to treat the prospect of a grain shortage as the problem the Elder was actually talking about. Certainly, the Elder's authority would have suffered if he had been forced to make explicit from the outset that he doesn't care whether there is grain or not, but just wants people to sacrifice to the Gods regardless. His position depends upon being able to lean on an implicit assumption that sacrificing to the Gods is good (whether for the stated purpose of improving grain yield, or some other unnamed good), without having to explain or defend this.
Instead of talking about a hypothetical dismissal, please actually explain the grounds on which you want to dismiss it yourself. I don't see anything obviously wrong with it - variants like "$country will be majority-Muslim in a few years even if we stop immigration now" are structurally exactly the same thing deployed to right-wing ends. Do you think that one can be dismissed too, or are Muslims uniquely capable of receiving the boons of natural selection?
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