4doorsmorewhores
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User ID: 223
4doorsmorewhores
30m ago
The first spelling mistake (Cribbidge) fucked me up for a minute because I started second guessing if obvious-seeming answers were slightly misspelled as a trap (making it appear 6/10 are correct) until I realized they were just typos.
4doorsmorewhores
3d ago
How time flies, a few general thoughts:
I lean to the left of most of the users here posting on this issue, but I was and am willing to be persuaded. The first round of lockdown measures I was more forgiving, since the scientific and political information that leaders were dealing with was more or less novel. As things moved towards the next year I was less forgiving since we had a good model of what worked and what didn't. I don't know if anyone would find this relevant or care as I'm unlikely to post non-redacted proof but in the first few weeks of the pandemic period in the west:
- I had chats with friends where I made it clear that this was not as dangerous or risky as being portrayed
- Had chats with medical professional friends (mostly doctors and pharmacists) that their stance on masking is hilariously hypocritical and wrong, and that isolation mandates should be ignored because I personally have better judgment and understanding of data than the health minister, even though I'm just some guy
- Told friends in mixed company that surely China owes us economic reparations for causing this whole situation
Most of the leaders in charge during this time promptly lost their next election. I don't understand the grumpiness of comments here talking about a lack of public accountability. If the next solution up is jailing BoJo or Justin Trudeau or whomever then I would point to the actual notion of qualified immunity - passing bad policy isn't a jailable offense. Even Mr Trudeau's attacks against the trucker convoy in Ottawa were found to be wildly unconstitutional, his just desserts for that are resigning and having many of his policy choices reversed by the following administration.
People underrate by a lot how much of the decline of society in the first months was caused by a genuine fear of people who don't want to get sick. The biggest economic and social downtown first predated any government mandate - I feel this has largely been memoryholed. I've had discussions with users on this forum who think that the vast majority of travel reduction in the USA was due to law and not fear.
Even as such, I'm surprised how vitriolic and grumpy users here sound. I suspect this has more to do with the vibes you felt during the pandemic and not the specific levels of of government policy failure or misalignment. Admittedly I had tonsillitis for most of that february and march so the differences were not immediately noticeable to me, being bedridden. Afterwards I continued to do the same activities I did before, except now there were sometimes more people to do them with since their things had been cancelled. A few restaurant closures annoyed me greatly. Forced masking annoyed me the most if I force myself to remember the era, but I don't think about it at all normally, as if it had never happened.
There are a number of upsides that people are ignoring. Kick starting the WFH era has undoubtedly led to large quality of life increases for the people who use it, and cost savings for firms. Being able to get out of any obligation short to medium term, cancel any flight, and refund any ticket just by saying "I tested positive" was immensely useful.
I am surprised more people here don't complain about outcomes vis-a-vis the massive stimmy that permanently affected the shape of the economy. It makes it much harder to get a grasp (especially for laypeople) of inflation over the last few years. That is what is purely caused by extra money and what is caused by disrupted infrastructure and supply lines.
Kids were trending down before and after the lockdown at similar rates. Blame social media or their parents or iPads. I'm willing to be convinced that lockdowns had a (even larger than I am giving credit for - which is still large) negative effect on them, but if in 15 years we're blaming every bad thing about people born 1998 to 2016 on the 2020-2021 time period I'm going to be skeptical.
Consider how much of the bad stuff in your personal life you blame on the pandemic and how much of that is actually rational. I have all of the friends I had before it, had to go to a few delayed weddings a year late, did not have any major work or life changes, I flew on airplanes the same amount I have before an after (Although I had to cancel some). Negativity I perceive during this period is the same way I watch the news, it is very annoying and interesting conceptually but it's not like its my house getting bombed.
4doorsmorewhores
22d ago
I don't find this post's idea objectionable (I do find it boring), although it's clear you recently read Coming Apart by Charles Murray. But if you're going to write something that is so out of fashion (by this forum's user's standards I think) that it seems like it was written 8 years ago, or by someone very young (which I strongly suspect you are), I really think you need to work on your prose. The random asides, interrupting your own thoughts. The half-finished arguments, the many spelling and grammar mistakes made this a slog to get through. Other people have already eloquently explained why this issue at the social/macro level is more interesting than the trivial advice of "Be friendly, attractive, and rich to make dating easier."
4doorsmorewhores
1mo ago
It is unclear to me how the existence of LLMs creates or exacerbates this problem when,
a) the current amount of legal writing vastly exceeds the amount which will ever be appealed, and probably exceeds by one hundredfold the amount which will ever reach the Supreme Court
b) lawyers already have a tremendous amount of incentive to find and close/open gaps in arguments or decisions, and draft clever briefs
c) there is an upper limit to how clever or insightful a slurry of writing can be, given that it still has to be relatable to the people reading it (unless you're venturing far into Sapir-Whorf theory) and grounded in their ideas or principles. I am not skeptical that in (3/5/10/40) years a good LLM or similar machine will be able to, for example, take 20 terabytes of code or data and do brilliant and useful and efficient things to it - but I don't think there are 25 legitimate and continually-deepening modes of analyzing the effect the 1973 fisheries act has on some relevant constitutional or administrative law/principle that would require responses by the SC.
4doorsmorewhores
1mo ago
What is your Superbowl pick? I have Seattle by 6 and the under.
4doorsmorewhores
1mo ago
The declaration of certain issues like gay marriage or trans* or immigration as “Not about politics, just being a decent human”, and then following that up with “No political discussion” rules was honestly a brilliant(albeit extremely frustratingly, to me) way that many popular subreddits basically silenced all dissent.
4doorsmorewhores
2mo ago
My understanding is that in late 2025 there were some documents (court? state?) about the circumstances of the military's refusal and following trial that were unknown to outsiders until then.
4doorsmorewhores
2mo ago
A few things
a) I didn't draw a conclusion, I posted a better snippet and compared it to the other shooting (Which legally speaking, seems pretty cut and dry like the Kyle Rittenhouse self defense situation).
b) "Don't talk about it until you have sufficient information to reach a conclusion" at best thought-terminating and at worst bad faith. You could indefinitely not talk about anything you choose forever, I'm not going to listen to people who tell me to not to think about and discuss things.
c) New information could come to light 5 or 10 (or 500) years from now, take the recent example we found out of the Chinese officer who refused to march on the Tiananmen protestors in the 1980s. I'll discuss with what current information I have and continue to update it as I get more information.
4doorsmorewhores
2mo ago
Here's the other angle, it seems much more egregious
https://xcancel.com/anythingelsegg/status/2015130851764318288
4doorsmorewhores
2mo ago
what if Satan-Cthulhu was secretly feeding the ants the kind of information that we clearly see needs a conscious mind to extract from the universe, and also the ants could do some weird-ass quantum shit with radiation?
Have you read Children of Time?
4doorsmorewhores
2mo ago
conservatively dressed tradwife caricature spouting antifa talking points
Isn't that Ms. Rachel?
4doorsmorewhores
2mo ago
Having a hearty chuckle that the best video we can find on our humble rationalist forum is Asmongold.
4doorsmorewhores
2mo ago
Which SQL course are you doing?
4doorsmorewhores
2mo ago
Very true, owing to the fact that some major bone breaks like your hip and spine have extremely high mortality rates. That's why they're up in rank 3. If you were humiliated or ostracized in a severe way like job loss, divorce, family disruptiion 200 (or 40) times in a row you would probably kill yourself or at least spiral into an unrecoverable depression. In any case I don't think this scale works very well for "stacking debuffs", but 200 people giving you constant low-level (something that individually or a half dozen times wouldn't phase me or you at all) antagonism is what drives most teenagers to kill themselves I imagine.
4doorsmorewhores
2mo ago
Those are numbers, not stars, but your objection doesn't disprove anything I said. It's nearly a non-sequitur.
4doorsmorewhores
2mo ago
Your desire to reframe the issue in your favour suggests that I am more correct than you are comfortable with admitting (Beat up becomes violently assault, "Call a bitch" instead of "Verbal assault, harassed and bullied). These are roughly equivalent because they likely cause temporary harm quickly, and don't have much lasting effect, a quick "Smarten up" if you will.
Definitely. If you scale physical and mental harm either linearly or on some sort of curve, these are within 1 rank of eachother at the furthest (and I think roughly equivalent)
5: murdered
4: permanently maimed (legs amputated, blinded)
3: injury with long recovery (broken hip, ruptured tendon)
2: injury with short recovery (sprained wrist, strep throat)
1: painful injury with no loss of function (slapped very hard, wasp sting)
0: nothing
5: total pariah (exiled, stripped of all social status)
4: fired and shunned (harvey weinstein, permanently life and livelihood altering, sam bankman-fried)
3: humiliating disruption (acrimonious divorce, demoted and forced to change careers, star wars kid?)
2: mild in length or severity of mockery (that lawyer who couldnt turn off the cat-effect on his zoom trial, a local clergyman leaves his microphone on while he uses the toilet)
1: typical bullying (a schoolmate who calls you a fag every week, mean-spirited gossip)
0: nothing
both of these are clearly in the 1-2 zone at worst. Obviously the world is very large and people have different goals, social realities, pain tolerances etc. But I'm quite confident in my assessment. By a week or 2 your bruises from your beating will heal, and everyone will forgot about the party where you got called a fat-slut and ran out crying.
4doorsmorewhores
2mo ago
Yeah and it's OK that we recognize gendered solutions are appropriate. If a man in a social setting is being aggressively unpleasant you will threaten to hit him and then follow up on it, if a woman is doing the same you will call her an annoying bitch and that everyone thinks she's fat and ugly - it will inflict roughly equivalent damage.
4doorsmorewhores
2mo ago
An Iranian expat has told me recently (with regards to the Women's rights and other major protests), that suggesting these (albeit sometimes large) protests will lead to regime change is the same as if Chinese or Cuban state media portrayed the BLM or Occupy Wall Street protests as possibly toppling the US government. The state there is powerful and entrenched, aside he has no love for the regime and is an anti-Islamist.
I don't really want to tone police and maybe this fails the building consensus rule but for the love of god can we avoid writing "unalived" and "graped" like tiktok retards?
4doorsmorewhores
3mo ago
Merry Christmas Mottlers
4doorsmorewhores
4mo ago
Wow, $500,000 for TheMotte? Great work man.
4doorsmorewhores
4mo ago
My understanding of polling is that the bellwether effect here isn't that Dems won NYC and other urban areas, it's that you can track over time election margins to determine the relative change in how a party or candidate performs. People who follow these things closely seem to believe that these results are indicative of a bad environment for the GOP. I don't know of any obvious proof of fraud that I've seen, however there of course could be.
4doorsmorewhores
5mo ago
Pornography is a great example of my favourite question for politicians, "What is a real problem in society that you don't believe the government should do anything about?"
Satisfactory 294, but I got absolutely wrecked by the aesthetics section: https://i.imgur.com/565DOyw.png
Currently making my girlfriend do it to see if there's a difference as she likely knows all the fabric patterns and makeup brands.
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