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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
3mo ago
That's a lot of speculative theories and subjective experience that may really just be yours (maybe about 1/3 of research papers I have built on had women first authors, and I'm in a hard theory corner of CS). Either way, the picture you paint of the impact of women in the workplace seems nothing short of apocalyptic, so wouldn't you expect at least some examples of societies that don't allow it outperforming those that do? Instead, on top of the steamrolling dominance of egalitarian Western society, we are now seeing the ascendancy/imminent superiority of China which at least anecdotally places even more women in competitive tail jobs.
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
3mo ago
Everyone can use that suffix, and it is not exclusively agreement-seeking (a simple そうだね。 has all the vibes of an English "Right."~"I see.", and the Facebook "like" button is translated as いいね).
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
3mo ago
· Edited 3mo ago
In that particular case, I never found out. It was an undergrad that I only intersected with as we both TAed the same course, and my curiosity about undergrad drama was no longer high enough to seek out information that was not volunteered.
On another occasion, there was a mixed undergrad/grad bouldering group I was in for a while, and one of the undergrad girls (who seemed to be socially fairly central to the group before) suddenly stopped coming. I asked why I hadn't seen her around and the only response I got was "X? Oh, X is cancelled." Some of the other undergrads present just turned around and did some sort of "oh yeah, there was that" raised-eyebrows nod. - me: "Huh? What happened?" - interlocutor, repeating: "She's cancelled." I didn't pry further. Figures what they have going on.
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
3mo ago
But she understood that intuitively, which is why she didn't ask her female friends. If she did ask, the reply, however superficially encouraging, probably would have carried an undertone of "really? you are asking about that?" that she would also have caught on to. The point is that female (and oldschool Japanese) norms are not actually reducible to "Male Westerner culture, with a layer of obscuring passive-aggressive misdirection applied on top"; communication really is supposed to bottom out in getting a hint, and making sure that others get the hints that you want to drop, with no truthful explanation in words being accessible as a last resort, and yet it works if everyone cooperates on it. (Whether it is a global or merely a local optimum is another question.)
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
3mo ago
I already disowned my choice of the word "bourgeois" in a comment elsewhere in this subtree, as in hindsight it was not the right term to describe the group of people I was aiming for. I assumed you would have seen that post as well, sorry.
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
3mo ago
It’s hard to describe exactly, but there’s a difference between presenting criticism in a way that allows people to save face, and the kind of knives-covered-in-sugar behaviour where the critic tries to pretend that no criticism is actually occurring.
Which setting, do you figure, does which?
A missing piece of the puzzle may be that (as far as I can tell) well-adjusted women in "feminised" social groups in the West also in fact do get the substance of socially-diffused deniable criticism clearly, even when it is never explicitly stated to them. Failures occur when men and incorrectly socialised (or neurodivergent) women enter those circles.
I've even seen a pattern along the lines of the following: Chinese girl to American CS student guy friend: "I feel like those people hate me and don't actually want me to join their homework group" - guy friend: "Did they actually say something to the effect? No? I'm sure they are just busy, don't worry about it too much" - [girl gets bullied out of the girls' group and winds up with only male friends, who also all want to get with her]. In this case, the girl should have followed her initial instincts; in fact probing about it more positively would have revealed that she had a pretty accurately understanding of why the others were cross with her. The system worked fine, up until the point that it had to contend with people that expected it to be something that it actually isn't.
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
3mo ago
After looking through your posting on the topic (search author:Amadan HBD), I concede that in my impression of it you seemed to be more hostile than appears to have been the reality (which could be because I only encountered the handful of posts of yours that I thought were out of line - ones where you were a bit too quick to lump it in with a rather less commonsensical/more universally reviled position ("our still sizeable retinue of HBD enthusiasts and Holocaust deniers") - or because those left more of an impression). However, I don't understand how you reason that my diagnosis of Hlynka is "comically off-base": you talk about his open disdain for HBD yourself, and surely the gloss of "order, discipline and capitalism" applies to a proud salt-of-the-earth ex-military man like him.
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
3mo ago
I've seen versions of this argument before, and there is one point that I always get caught up on, voiced here as
Female group dynamics favor consensus and cooperation. Men order each other around, but women can only suggest and persuade. Any criticism or negative sentiment, if it absolutely must be expressed, needs to be buried in layers of compliments. The outcome of a discussion is less important than the fact that a discussion was held and everyone participated in it. The most important sex difference in group dynamics is attitude to conflict. In short, men wage conflict openly while women covertly undermine or ostracize their enemies.
...which sounds plausible, but then I remember that this has a great deal of overlap with complaints I have read in many forms from Westerners finding themselves in a Japanese workplace. Japan is not exactly known as a den of feminism, so could the author be wrongfully universalising a Western perspective? (The hypothetical tail of the argument is also: if Japan is in fact feminised, which I guess would mesh well with old "effeminate Asians" stereotypes, then why does it work so well in ways that the Aesthetic Right tends to appreciate in particular? Why does it not import refugees or create HR departments, and why is it happy to glass-ceiling women at lower management level and outright push them to get married and retire in their 30s once you look at more traditional corporations?)
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
3mo ago
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
3mo ago
"Bourgeois" was probably the wrong term, I should have said something like "normie right" - I intended to contrast with a group that would include Moldbug fans, frog posters, antisemites who hate Jews for their treatment of Euro gentiles rather than for their treatment of Muslims, Great Replacement theorists and the "dark enlightenment". This includes a lot of people you would consider "Blue Tribe Right".
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
3mo ago
I remember the moratorium you are talking about, but thought you were talking about a more recent incident (I think we also got a sort of moratorium after moving here for a while? Maybe I'm mixing it up with a moratorium on SS's single-topic SSposting, which felt like another instance of right-wing mods wanting to bury the wrong and cringe kind of right-wing posting?). Not sure who were the mods back then and what was their motivation, though my instinct would be that it must have been similar, since the outgroup/fargroup relations to HBD in the SSC/Motte community have been like this for the longest time.
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
3mo ago
Something something building consensus, but, uh, +1.
My best guess is that OP is referencing some old CW battle (about a media personality who got cancelled?) and thinks that the personality's imminent comeback will "separate the goats from the sheep"/reveal people's true sentiments on something (hence "survey"), but yeah, I would like to see less of that sort of iykyk posting. The style seems be more in line with rDrama or Kiwifarms, that is, places where encyclopedically keeping track of obscure beefs conveys status.
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
3mo ago
· Edited 3mo ago
My understanding is that the HBD crackdown (more often just: conspicuous non-moderation of rule-breaking anti-HBD posts) was a project by the "bourgeois right" leaning (right but emphatically not alt-) mods, in the class of @Amadan or Hlynka (PBUH), rather than the handful of more "left" ones such as @netstack. This makes sense, too, as to the latter any HBDers are just the fargroup, while the former would feel irritated and threatened by the possibility of association with them ("I just wanted order, discipline and capitalism, but everyone including the racists insists that I am on the racist team").
As part of the pedantic minority(?) that subscribes to HBD as stated but is genuinely not interested in its common application as a resistance band for "therefore whites are superior" mental gymnastics (usually of the "IQ matters, but also the >100-average-IQ groups all have a disadvantage in some nebulous additional category like creativity so they are not actually superior" type), I just find the whole situation sad.
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
3mo ago
Posts like this make me think that the only bubble we are actually in is an AI-won't-matter copium bubble.
Have you ever seen a popular end-user technology become unpopular because of some pesky externalities? I can only think of several that produced a stinking trash heap of them and took zero popularity damage for it, like, for example, cars.
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
3mo ago
I think you underestimate the amount of domestic terrorism that is either not strategic at all, or seems to have the purpose of sending a message like "it's not worth the trouble to keep oppressing my allies". The latter must be the case for instances of religious and ethnic domestic terrorism - surely the PKK or ETA didn't think that the Turks or Spanish actually wish for them to have more rights and must just be awakened to the fact.
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3mo ago
· Edited 3mo ago
By "all Charlie Kirks", I meant outspoken relatively extreme right-wingers, not the set consisting of just Charlie Kirk. Otherwise it would make no sense that posters here (who are presumably not his reincarnation) would feel personally threatened by the rhetoric.
Shooting Charlie Kirk was at most a small step towards a hypothetical end goal of shooting so many of the most outspoken right-wingers that even some Motte posters make the cut. My impression is that, in the Left's eyes, the Right has already gone relatively further towards a hypothetical goal of installing Mecha-Hitler - after all, they have installed a norm-breaking nativist president with a significant cult of personality who removes ethnic outsiders and openly defies mechanisms that are meant to prevent concentration of power in the system.
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3mo ago
If the target group is actually the majority, then any indiscriminate attack hurts the correct target in expectation.
(Besides, my impression is that domestic terrorism is more often than not in fact properly targeted - racists go for black churches, Islamists go for Christmas markets, etc.)
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3mo ago
I'd be okay with that argument, if you accept that what's good for the goose is good for the gander. Surely "bash the fash"/violent communist revolution LARP is equally "the lingo they grew up with" for the Twitter crowd that was dancing on Kirk's e-grave.
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
3mo ago
· Edited 3mo ago
Well, the flip side of this is that with the righty reaction to the lefty reaction to the Kirk assassination, the Right has also thoroughly burned its "it's just banter" card. If the two competing party programmes in the US actually start being perceived as "install a modern version of Hitler" vs. "shoot all Charlie Kirks", which one do you figure will have majority support?
(In other words: any fucks you give are for your own sake, not the left's. As with everything in US politics, it doesn't matter what someone who would vote the same party no matter what anyway thinks, except to the extent this thinking becomes known to those who are willing to change their vote.)
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
3mo ago
I think of these
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"too strong and too weak" is a stretch (I haven't actually seen much Trumpist rhetoric arguing that the Left is weak - degenerate and doomed in the long run, perhaps,but not weak right now)
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"contempt for the weak" feels more like outgroup slander as everyone in the US frame has some groups that they value and think the others don't value enough which to them amounts to contempt; probably Trumpists could equally paint "deplorables"/"learn to code"/"flyover states" rhetoric from the Left as contempt for the weak, and it would ring as inappropriate as whatever you are arguing (because I think Eco really intended it to mean contempt for the weak qua weakness: "if you are weak, you suck", not "you suck and you are weak")
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"selective populism" - are there instances of Trump suggesting that he represents the will of an abstract People, as opposed to just claiming that he represents the will of his followers and his followers are the better people? (This would cover a lot more political movements)
seem like a stretch. I would even argue that the points are about the same level of applicable to the Russian influence/Ukraine narrative - in particular there there is a lot of "too strong and too weak at once", healthy servings of disagreement-as-treason, obsession with plots and cult of action, and a gradual growth on the militarism axis now too.
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
3mo ago
Would it? Is that not just most cases of domestic terrorism?
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
3mo ago
· Edited 3mo ago
There are others around who are far more qualified to make the argument than I am, but my understanding is that the circumstance that Critical Theory is derivative of Marxism is beyond dispute. Wikipedia itself devotes a big section to it, and the introductory paragraph on its history already says,
Max Horkheimer first defined critical theory (German: kritische Theorie) in his 1937 essay "Traditional and Critical Theory", as a social theory oriented toward critiquing and changing society as a whole, in contrast to traditional theory oriented only toward understanding or explaining it. Wanting to distinguish critical theory as a radical, emancipatory form of Marxist philosophy (...)
I suppose that the assertion that is more likely to be disputed is that CT is a driving cultural phenomenon or could be described as the principal philosophical basis of US progressivism, for which it is much harder to show receipts. The only way I can see is to painstakingly show the provenance of defining features and tenets of it - value systems built around class/group interest and oppressor/oppressed dynamics, the fundamental rejection of positivism (lay definition, perhaps: the premise that something like a correct way of reasoning can be discovered and yield a "symbol-pushing" way of generating true statements that should be upheld regardless of human interests) and embracing of textual criticism (dismissal of a "text"'s content in favour of a meta-analysis of who stands to benefit from it being accepted and the motivations of those authoring and conveying it) as a tool to implement this rejection, emphasis on subjective experience, and faith-based anticipation of radical changes to society leading to an improvement of conditions.
One could also point at the high correlation between above-average engagement in the Social Justice movement and explicit self-identification as Marxist with all it entails (being concerned with economic oppressor-oppressed dynamics, anticipating a labor-based radical reorganisation of society resulting in utopia), which would be an unexpected phenomenon that warranted explanation if the two philosophies were not actually closely related.
Lastly, my personal experience as someone fairly deeply embedded in academia and acquainted with many Social Justice activists is that questioning any particular tenet of the movement on a philosophical level (like, "why is it actually desirable that black people get the same average salaries?" or "wasn't colonialism a net good?") will inevitably be answered with arguments from/concrete references to publications that explicitly situate themselves in the CT tradition. If the typical follower believes that SJ is fundamentally moral because its morality is asserted by a selection of activists and intellectuals they trust, those trusted assertions of morality are grounded in Critical Theory, and Critical Theory is grounded in Marxism, is it fair to assert that SJ is Marxist? My sense is yes, but there is obviously some nuance there.
I am actually with you insofar as I don't think that it is politically sensible or productive to apply the "Cultural Marxism" label as part of public discourse. This seems comparable to me to the erstwhile push to attack Muslims by saying things like "Allah is an Arabic moon god" - it may be true that Islam was shaped by the polytheistic soup of medieval Arabia, and this may even have great explanatory power regarding its culture and tenets, but in a modern context where most everyone is more familiar with Islam than with the medieval Arabic moon god you are trying to link it to, all it will achieve is making you look obsessive and schizophrenic as it suggests that your beef with Islam is just because you are the sort of person who would have a beef with the worship of a moon deity from 1500 years ago.
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
3mo ago
For a parallel that captures a lot of the nuance (and echoes another discussion that happened here a while back), do you think a committed atheist from out of state bristling under Mormon rule in Utah would be justified in lumping it in as "Christian supremacism"?
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
3mo ago
· Edited 3mo ago
Doesn't the Christianity-Judaism parallel work for that too?
"What on earth does some theory about God sacrificing his own son to himself to absolve all of humanity's sins have to do with the Jews being God's chosen people? How do you do that with 'culture' at all?"
Yet, "Judeo-Christian culture" is a term that is being used, predominantly by Christians. If the Imperial Romans had our version of the discourse and pagans actually spent time tweeting at Christians rather than trying to feed them to the lions as their control slipped, I can absolutely imagine that they would have called the Christians an offshoot of Jewish culture with the intention of associating them with pre-existing negative sentiment towards the rebellious colonial subjects, and the Christians in response to this would have done a public 180 on this (despite continued internal efforts to market themselves as the fulfillment of Jewish prophecy) and claimed it to be an insane conspiracy theory.
See this paper (randomly lifted from Google) and everything that it cites. I haven't personally experienced the Japanese workplace, but I have worked with and socialised with many Japanese people (and do not have a language barrier), and the core thesis essentially rings true. The role of the senior is fundamentally ceremonial, and any significant decisions affecting the group are always based on meticulous vibe-checking. A senior or authority who fails to vibe-check and just steamrolls their personal preference will find themselves sidelined in the most Mean Girls way imaginable, unless it's literally a doddering old (wo)man with a long social track record in which case they will be superficially humoured while the actual decisions are carefully made behind their back.
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