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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
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User ID: 355
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
3mo ago
People's value functions are based on envy/their relative position. A lot of people would be objectively happier being upper middle class in 1925 than lower middle class in 2025 despite the latter being materially a lot better off, happier living poor in a poor neighbourhood over living average in a rich neighbourhood, and happier earning $50k under a CEO earning $60k than earning $60k under a CEO earning $80m.
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
3mo ago
Where the feelings of aggression come in is he has a very intense stare, and I really do feel a sense of "this is an angry person looking at me with aggression" when he looks into the camera. This is a startlingly aggressive gaze for a youtuber to be making into the inanimate object of a camera. And the shadow that his ballcap casts onto his face doesn't really help.
Interestingly, at least this particular freeze frame does not actually register as particularly aggressive to me - I just read it as something like "triumphant expectation", like he thinks he just made a winning point in an argument and is waiting for me to concede.
I come from red country; the conservative men I know don't give off "aggressive, uncoordinated," vibes, but rather "more coordinated and chill than average."
To be clear, I didn't posit it as a general trait of conservatives; rather, it seems to me to be something that conservatives now appreciate in their influencers/thought leaders/talking heads.
For an example that separates the traits I am talking about from "working class markers" (as @OliveTapenade suggested), I got the same sense of unexpected aggression from the handful of Jordan Peterson clips I have watched. My feeling there was that he perpetually talked with a tension that sounded like a professional middle class father who was five seconds away from slapping his son so hard that he would fly across the room.
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
3mo ago
By contrast I find the generic left-wing affect to be... one of two, it's either an affected sense of superiority (the I-can't-believe-I-have-to-explain-this-to-you style), or it's a kind of fragility? I don't know how to describe it, but if the right-winger feels like they're about to start screaming, the left-winger feels like they're about to start crying. There's a kind of insecurity. In my experience the superior, smug style is more common among men, and the fragile, desperate style is more common among women.
Does this apply just to left-wing politics youtubers, or to any "generically left-wing" (~anyone who does not register as having the aggressive affect to me)? (What about, say, this prolific tech reviewer, or these two default left-wingers talking to each other about vaguely politics-adjacent things?) Do you have any examples that you would consider typical?
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
3mo ago
· Edited 3mo ago
I think that what you are saying might be an orthogonal aspect of the modern left-right distinction, though? The Soviets, the Chinese and the revolutionary French all had no issues with "justice, prompt, severe, inflexible". In the scenarios we are talking about, the putative violence on either side is metaphorical, anyway - the Right "tortures" left-wingers with "facts and logic" or hanging-transsexual animated GIFs, while the Left "executes" right-wingers by summary bans and damnatio memoriae.
Even with the death penalty (for criminals, not heretics), I do also see some tendency towards being attached to the aspect where there is no quick timeline and the subject is kept in the dark whether they will be spending a day or a decade on death row. Admittedly the "free helicopter rides" meme does put more of a dent in my theory, though.
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
3mo ago
Bluesky is apparently imploding
One tangential thing this video made me realise again is how curiously the culture of the right and the left is drifting apart even in more subtle ways now. This is the nth time I notice that a seemingly quite popular right-wing youtuber talks in a way that is just viscerally offputting for me (socialised Blue even if reasonably heretical, as evidenced by my presence on here). There's something that registers as blank aggression in the manner of speech - it's the tone of voice that I expect to hear if I pass through a US small-town downtown on a Friday night and a drunk manual labourer stumbles backwards into me, thinks in his drunken stupor that I shoved him and scopes me out for a fight. I can't see myself relaxing and leaving this running in the background, the way I could with a mainstream generic TV announcer voice youtuber. The n-1st time, incidentally, was Lunduke, a right-wing open source youtuber beloved of the Algorithm. Clearly this is not about content, as especially with Lunduke he mostly says things I agree with on topics that are close to my heart.
As a right-wing listener of this sort of narration, how does it feel to you? Do you actually not get the same "this person is on the brink of engaging in physical violence" feeling from it, or is it agreeable because you figure that it is a topic where wanting to become violent is the right and natural reaction, or is it something closer to "the violent vibes are the marker of a particular culture, and that culture is good and precious" (how I figure soypilled left-wingers cope with gangsta rap)?
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
3mo ago
· Edited 3mo ago
It does seem to me like you are on to something here. At least in the US context, "torture bad people until they become good" seems to be more of a right-wing solution, and "execute bad people in the town square and spit on their corpse" to be more of a left-wing one. Perhaps this is just of an outgrowth of individualism vs. collectivism - an (individualist) right-winger would feel that evil must be defeated within every individual, while a (collectivist) left-winger would be more concerned with the evil of groups and think that "reforming" individuals is a waste of time and effort when they are better used as a teaching piece.
(Seemingly relevant anecdata I can't slot into this theory: the concern of Puritan witch hunters with making their marks repent as they were tortured to death; Orwell's fantasy communists being obsessed with the same on a longer timescale, even as their real models didn't actually seem to be so concerned)
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
3mo ago
· Edited 3mo ago
I shared the sense of other posters that he was arguing to inflame/grandstand rather than to either explain or understand, which often presages a dramatic departure and certainly indicates people have "checked out" of the community (as they are no longer willing to exercise the thankless self-discipline it asks for for its sake).
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
3mo ago
· Edited 3mo ago
Better than anything I could write, but I assume you are posting it to this vile den of low agreeableness for a reason. So, some personal pet peeves which in my opinion detracted from it:
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the cast consisting of [generic Anglo name], [generic Anglo name] and a bunch of {REDACTED}s. Names should tell a story; omissions should also tell a story. If this is an internal government brief, why were the other names redacted? I can't suspend disbelief hard enough to remove the feeling that it is "I struggled hard enough to come up with two names that sound like good scifi thriller protagonists and can't be bothered to come up with more". (This is an endemic disease in SCPs - "redactions" following a pattern of "author couldn't be bothered to come up with something that will hold up here" + "some more sprinkled randomly for effect")
- In the real world, perhaps the field linguist would be Croatian, and the archaeologist come with three or four first names and a surname suggesting Norman British stock (because who else majors in these sorts of subjects with zero economic value and a distinct smell of pink ink on a musty map anymore?).
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"Dr. Markham". Seems to also be lifted from the memetic public domain's ideas of how scientists talk to each other (which is actually based on the ways of (notoriously face-obsessed) hospital doctors, who tend to be the only people with a doctorate normies ever encounter).
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More generally, due to the above and more (e.g. dramatic paragraph breaks), my theory-of-mind sense only ever tells me that I am reading the words of an author who wants to tell me a scifi thriller, not the words of a scientist who has to write a concluding report for internal government consumption on a worldview-shattering discovery.
Imagine yourself in the shoes of your characters when writing, not in the shoes of other authors who successfully wrote the sort of story you want to write. Familiarise yourself with what they should sound like: classified US government reports, faculty lists, scientific papers and emails all exist on the internet.
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
3mo ago
A more complete account of (1) may look like: the price of farm labor will climb high enough, and American living standards will sink low enough, that Americans will do it.
Not everything can be automated, and as farming labour gets more expensive, Americans (who buy things downstream from farms) will need more money and hence higher wages to sustain the same lifestyle.
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
3mo ago
From what I've seen of US school lunches, you don't even need the power of mainstream media for that.
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
3mo ago
· Edited 3mo ago
It's unfortunate that it seems like you have chosen to flame out, but taking your argument at face value - are you arguing for something to the effect of "A (enforcing the FSA) is immoral, and B (preventing federal agents from enforcing it) was an appropriate reaction to it; therefore if C (enforcing immigration restrictions) is immoral, then B is likewise an appropriate reaction to it"? In that case, setting A=9/11, B=the commando raid on Osama's compound, C=illegal immigration, under the reasonable assumption that the majority of US citizens agree that A and C are immoral and B was an appropriate reaction to A, are you arguing for commando raids to kill all illegal immigrants (and/or even those involved in planning their immigration)?
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
3mo ago
I distinctly remember posters here telling me how great she is.
Receipts please. This really does not mesh with my memory of the period; are you sure it was not just one stray poster somewhere leaving an outsize memory because you found what they said so outrageous?
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
3mo ago
Right, well, but can you define Christianity by similarity of vibes? By some standards Silicon Valley Buddhists are more similar to US Protestants than the latter are to Eastern or Oriental Orthodox Christians. Your "American Protestant would know what to do" standard also holds - I fully assume the US Protestant would be less lost at an American Yoga retreat than during Ethiopian Tewahedo Orthodox liturgy.
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
3mo ago
· Edited 3mo ago
It always seemed to me like the most obviously divergent thing about Mormonism from typical old-world Christianity is the notion of Exaltation/what is pop-culturally glossed as "you will get to be the Jesus of your own planet one day". One thing all Abrahamic religions are reliably united in is a social cosmology in which all humans are equal (perhaps some negligibly more equal than others) and subordinate to a singleton God, with the pervasive vibe of ongoing subordination (and the attendant bliss of your life and fate being in the hand of another) being the single most important aspect of the believer's experience. The Mormon view, from that reference point, feels almost comically hubristic, making it seem reasonable for the haughty and ambitious to think of the subordinate life as a gauntlet to pass through to earn the master's privileges. Yes, it sucks being Jesus's gofer bitch now, but up with it for a bit longer - think of how one day you'll get to lord it over your own Spirit Children.
Now, I'm only Christian in terms of upbringing/background, but it is easier for me to accept some quirky nontrinitarians as Christian than people who think that there is no category distinction between Jesus/God and themselves (except insofar as they are lower on the career escalator).
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
3mo ago
As with teetotaler drug dealers, gay fashion designers or eunuch harem overseers, it can be advantageous to be immune to the temptations of your own supply.
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
3mo ago
This seems beside the point given that we are seemingly not talking about a case where a "foreign Olympian" was invited to the position because no qualified citizen was available. Rather, the employers either (charitably) thought he was in fact a qualified citizen, or (less charitably) thought that he should be considered one.
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
3mo ago
The ones you get as a student prominently say something like "valid for work only with DHS authorization" on them, though.
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
3mo ago
No, because they are heavily confounded in both directions. The people who choose to remain in such communities against the backdrop of modernity are bound to be ones that are relatively happy to do so, and the sight of modern living is bound to induce some jealousy. It would in many ways be like trying to make inferences about cavemen from the San Francisco homeless.
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
3mo ago
The problem you get with an argument that goes that far back to claim that actually people were already unhappy and things were bad is that in order to actually make your case to RETVRN to something, you now need to make the argument that things were better and people were happier before that.
You've just implicitly accused a lot of people of being naive and unable to see the unhappiness and rot in the Boomers' generation. Granting this for the sake of argument, would this not be a strong argument that it is surprisingly easy to be naive in this way about a relatively distant time? Accepting that, would any ideas that you may have about things being better once upon the time, before the boomers with their individualism, television and love marriages came along, not be subject to the same concern, turned back at yourself? How sure can you (and we) be of any impression that the Victorians or Edwardians were happy, when we just saw so many people erroneously believing that the Boomers were? Given that we know even less about those generations, they are more strange to us and have left behind fewer records, misunderstanding their lives would be even easier. At some point you might just wind up believing a nonstandard version of the noble-savage trope that involves your ancestors.
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
3mo ago
Even apart from diagnosis, it always seemed self-evident to me that many instances of what is grouped under "autism" are a case of too much of something that makes people successful in the modern environment (focus, monomania, non-response to standard (hyper)stimuli).
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
4mo ago
I for my part would certainly appreciate such a post.
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
4mo ago
I would love to talk about theory, but I'm not sure interesting discussions of theory are available. The overwhelming amount of theory has always been apologetics - start with a desired bottom line, derived from vibes which were absorbed from or imposed by the environment, and reason backwards until a good theory that just so happens to prove the bottom line (or, "surprisingly", more of the bottom line than anyone dared to ask for before) is formed. I don't see how this could be avoided structurally - unlike scientific theories, philosophical theories have no ground truth to answer to, so there is no competitive advantage forward reasoning conveys. Even so, this could be fine for a discussion environment, as even if no individual theory-builder ever changed their mind due to theoretising, a number of theory-builders with diverse bottom lines could compete over theory-consumers on the elegance of their apologetics, and even on the aesthetic appeal of the bottom line that they already were living. However, this requires an actually diverse set of people willing to theoretise; and neither society at large, nor this forum in particular, has done anything to rein in the forces that compel people to just assimilate to one or another existing bottom line rather than hold onto their idiosyncrasies alone and weather hostility from all. As a result, the only innovation in theory we would be getting is different contortions reaching either a conclusion that we need between 1 and 50 Comrade Trumps, or 1 and 50 Comrade Hitlers, or maybe very rarely between 1 and 50 Comrade Mills.
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
4mo ago
· Edited 4mo ago
Superfluous university services etc. that I strongly suspect are mostly demanded by native students. I almost never saw the sort of full-paying Chinese MA students we are presumably talking about use the Disabilities Office, array of mental health and well-being counselors, glitzy sporting facilities or even useless subjects (as they generally come in to get CS and engineering degrees rather than Africana Studies).
You might entertain some hope that the whole system will collapse without their money or native students will be less likely to study useless things if it gets even more expensive, but something something the system staying irrational for longer than you stay solvent. I think ballooning college costs in the US would drive down the birthrate/make reproduction more dysgenic (as more parents decide that they couldn't afford to send a(nother) kid to college and the status drop for themselves and the putative kid is unconscionable if they don't, plus higher college debts delaying ability to settle down) sooner than they would actually drive down college enrollment.
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
4mo ago
What would be the criteria to be "like Kirk"? A figure who is seen as inspirational by many members of the base and a dangerous populist agitator by most in the opposite party, not in elected office but close to part of the upper brass, and involved in fundraising? I'm not sure who would meet these criteria on the Dem side, maybe some BLM leader?
Germany and Japan both feel like they would qualify.
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