Ben___Garrison
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User ID: 373
Ben___Garrison
1yr ago
The media loves grand narratives. The 2016 election was close; a few % of voters switching in a few states would've been enough to flip it. In such a case you could expect to see narratives of equal intensity going in the opposite direction: how the Republican party had severely lost its way putting an obvious loser candidate like Trump on the ticket. Stuff like that. It's mostly clickbait.
Ben___Garrison
1yr ago
The decline of monogamous norms simply means both sexes returning to their baseline sexual imperatives. Men would prefer to have sex with lots of women, whereas women would prefer to lock down a man who is higher value than themselves. Women aren't really interested in having sex with tons of guys the way guys are interested in having sex with lots of women. The most polyamorous I'd expect an average woman to be is if they can't lock down a high value man, in which case they could bifurcate their sexual imperative by having one primary man as the provisioner and then occasionally having sex with high value men she doesn't have the market value to lock down.
This all has a toxic effect on society. Every successful society has brokered a compromise deal between the sexes where women give up their hypergamy in exchange for men giving up trying to have sex with lots of women. Neither side is entirely happy with monogamy since they both have to give something up, but it's a stable Schelling Point that limits frustration of the lower value members of each sex. Without it, you end up with hypergamous women all competing over the top 20% of men, with the other 80% of men fighting over scraps. This lowers the national birthrate, creates an epidemic of single mothers, and means men don't value the society they live in nearly as much if they don't have kids of their own. Bad times all around.
I'm using "high value" as a generic term for the wealthy, prominent, attractive, high status men that women want to be with. They're not necessarily "high value" in terms of contributing to society.
The only way out of this trap is to reduce female autonomy and make birth control suck more.
This isn't the only way to do this, we'd just need to reinstitute the compromise of traditional marriage where women give up their hypergamy and men don't try to have sex with tons of women. The compromise initially broke down at the same time that birth control became widespread, but I don't see a reason why we couldn't have traditional marriage and modern birth control at the same time. A much more important change was the ease of divorce, which correctly broke up bad/abusive marriages but which also meant people could freely leave marriages if they got "bored", which functionally reinstituted female hypergamy.
Ben___Garrison
1yr ago
Human utility is far more important to me and most people than animal utility is. It's also not like all farmed animals have terrible lives. Factory-farmed chickens essentially live in concentration camps and from what I've read pigs are in somewhat rough conditions, but cows seem pretty content. If you're that horrendously worried about the lifestyles of the animals you eat, then you should buy ethically farmed meat which has animals that almost certainly have net-positive utility across their lifetimes. Ethical considerations have never been a good reason to be vegetarian, they're just a reason to farm differently, if you care about the animals that much.
Ben___Garrison
1yr ago
Interesting point. Another example would be Russia, which has had severe fertility rate issues that it recently overcame a bit, but it seems like are going to become an issue again.
A counterpoint to this would be Israel, which is somewhat conservative but has seemed to surmount its fertility issues. Israel is a special case, though, of course.
Ben___Garrison
1yr ago
No. Biden isn't particularly woke by most metrics, he's more of an old-fashioned Democrat. He pays some lip service to the wokist side of the Ds, but there's a reason why they're upset with him.
Ben___Garrison
1yr ago
Absolutely this. Trump talked a good game but when it came to actually governing he operated like a disorganized generic Republican. There were some limited executive orders and some ineffectual actions like the Muslim ban, but as for major priorities he only really accomplished tax cuts for the rich and appointing SCOTUS justices who thus far have been more focused on abortion than stuff like Affirmative Action, free speech on social networks, etc.
Ben___Garrison
1yr ago
Adblockers just make people free riders. People who use them don't deserve any greater shaming then any other time people (or groups of people) engage in such behavior. Do you muster the same sort of outrage when major companies incorporate in countries like Ireland to evade US taxes despite growing and benefiting from the services the US provided?
Ben___Garrison
1yr ago
Its great to see progress towards more affordable housing. Its crazy how practically every major city in the US has artificially inflated housing prices due to excessive local regulations.
Ben___Garrison
1yr ago
There's a significant positional element to women's rankings of men, so breeding the top 20% of men 5x each will just result in many of those men falling to the bottom once again.
As for the rest of your post, skewing gender %s is a proposition I actually find intriguing. There's obviously some significant Chesterton's Fence issues with immediately going to a 5:1 ratio, but I think it would be an interesting experiment to start with like a 1.25:1 female:male ratio and see what happens.
Ben___Garrison
1yr ago
I don't necessarily think we need two parallel voting systems, because we'll probably just have the double downvoting issue as people have pointed out. However, I think leaving the current voting system as an agree/disagree is fine, but there should be an option to double upvote posts that are particularly high-quality. Basically, it's like a Quality Contribution nomination, but more visible and public. Having additional voting is fine, but the added one should only be for upvotes IMO, sort of like deltas in the CMV subreddit, except in this case for good posts instead of just ones that "change minds". Maybe (like deltas) there ought to be a slightly janky way of giving them so people don't distribute them like candy.
Ben___Garrison
1yr ago
I don't know a lot about philosophical academia, but it seems like it's going the same was as Sociology, which is a shame.
Ben___Garrison
1yr ago
Presumably, cheating can occur from having outside coaching during a match, either by having humans analyze your opponents' moves in real time, or by having a computer play the game for you.
Ben___Garrison
1yr ago
lose the benefit of the doubt.
This is dangerous, as it seems like a "guilty until proven innocent" sort of deal. Cheating in a low-stakes way is a far cry from the "social or moral transgressions" of cheating in a high stakes way. Should I be forced to undergo an in-depth audit from the IRS every year because I cheated at Monopoly when I was 12?
Ben___Garrison
1yr ago
2 questions:
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How do we flag a comment as a quality contribution? Back on Reddit we'd do that through the reporting system, but there's no clear way to do it on this site.
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What does the "block user" feature do? I remember that causing a lot of issues back on Reddit, and I'm kind of surprised to see return here.
In my experience how someone behaves in low-stakes scenarios is more illustrative of character than high-stakes
The extreme end of this line of thinking is that anyone who commits small infractions like driving 1mph over the speed limit is giving a clear indication that they're willing to commit the most serious crimes, like murder. Obviously this isn't true. The distance between previous crimes and the current allegations matter, e.g. if a person has a long history of violently attacking people to within an inch of their life, that would be clearly indicative that they're more likely to commit murder.
I'm not intimately familiar with the chess scene, Chess.com, or the current allegations, but from the brief stuff I've read it seems like cheating on Chess.com is fairly low-stakes. Perhaps it should raise peoples' priors on the likelihood of cheating in real tournaments slightly, but not much beyond that, and he certainly shouldn't "lose the benefit of the doubt" which is just a euphemism for "guilty until proven innocent".
For a non-chess example, remember that time Pewdiepie said the N word during a moment of clear frustration? Wokists and their allies in the media descended on him insinuating that anyone who would say it on stream like that was clearly a raging Neo Nazi in their private life, and such a person deserved to be cancelled. They didn't succeed, thankfully, but their actions should serve as a clear lesson to beware the slippery slope of deducing a person's entire moral compass from a few minor infractions.
Ben___Garrison
1yr ago
While reconstituting a robust middle class would be nice for a whole host of reasons and is worth pursuing, I don't think it would be particularly important for reinstituting traditional marriage. Traditional marriage had been around for most of Western society's lifespan even when there wasn't really a middle class, e.g. the medieval age.
Ben___Garrison
1yr ago
Mass mobilisation may have helped a few months back, but - in addition to its political difficulties - it's unclear whether this late into the war it will be sufficient to turn the tide
It still would, if Russia would do it. Everything points to this war becoming a grinding battle of attrition, so a few weeks or months of time horizon isn't super long. It's my opinion that Russia deciding to mobilize would be a game-changer; not enough to win instantly by any means, but more than enough to tip the strategic initiative back towards Russia in the medium term. Hopefully Russia just refuses to do that and sticks to its inadequate "shadow mobilization" that they've been using so far, but the Kharkov offensive has been really good evidence of why Russia should mobilize more broadly.
Ben___Garrison
1yr ago
Russian logistics were strained when they tried to rush Kiev at the beginning of the war, and they're presumably strained west of the Dnieper due to bridges having holes in them, but other than that the Russian logistics system seems to hold up reasonably well. It did well enough to transport thousands of artillery shells per day to pound the Ukrainians before HIMARS showed up and blunted their effectiveness. Furthermore, most of the analysis I've seen has said that Russia still has an equipment advantage while Ukraine has a manpower advantage. Russia needs bodies to plug holes like what happened at Kharkov, and to fill out their mechanized divisions (which was how it was supposed to work in the first place).
Ben___Garrison
1yr ago
Russian mobilization wouldn't do much in the short term and it'd do more damage economically and politically in the long term, but in the medium term it's still Russia's best option. The Russian army isn't a spent force by any means. Just look at their defense of Kherson, which has made the Ukrainians bleed severely without much to show for it.. Diplomatically, mobilization would up the ante and force the West to send even more money and weapons if they want to keep Ukraine in the fight. That's the best chance for Russia to break Western unity especially as gas shortages come to the fore in the winter.
I'm not saying any of this is guaranteed to happen nor would a mobilization guarantee Russia to "win" in any sense, but it's really their only option to stabilize things without using nukes. The Kharkov push has been a sizeable morale + propaganda win for Ukraine and has signaled to the West that the war can be won beyond a Korea-style stalemate, so there's no reason to stop supporting Ukraine. Russia needs to prevent things like this from happening again if it wants to achieve any of its objectives including breaking Western unity, otherwise it's going to just lose conventionally sometime in 2023 unless Ukraine makes a massive blunder somewhere.
Ben___Garrison
1yr ago
This is excessively conspiratorial. It amalgamates neoliberal conservatives with wokist liberals, brands that grouping "elites" who are in favor of "the regime", and attributes monolithically sinister motives to them. Neoliberal Republicans have always been more-or-less in favor of mass migration to drive down wages while they've merely paid lip-service to red tribe Republicans, and yeah they've never really cared about fixing immigration and have thus formed something of an alliance with wokist Ds, but it's an uneasy one at best. Wokists aren't super jazzed about obliterated wage growth, and the neoliberals don't actually care about wokist priorities either, they just want to get rich quick through the path of least resistance.
Ben___Garrison
1yr ago
So far, I've found it almost exactly the same as the Subreddit version. What's this "dynamism" you're talking about this site lacking?
Ben___Garrison
1yr ago
I assume Russia cuts a deal with the west.
No way. Not yet at least. Not while Putin's still in control.
I find further mobilization much more likely, either through more aggressive "shadow mobilization" as they've already done (if that can even be extended further), or limited conscription of the Russian population at large.
Ben___Garrison
1yr ago
wherein NATO forces commanded by Nato leadership are directly involved in a major offensive for the first time
There's 0 evidence of this, for the record.
Reddit is generally OK, I just wish it was more transparent about banning things. Then again, the opaque banning policy is probably by design to avoid accountability.
It's unfortunate that Reddit and Discord have swallowed up so much of the old-school forums that used to abound.
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