Bombadil
20d ago
I think the main risk is in advertising the lifestyle to others through success and streams. There seems to be a subculture where the ideal body is one you can only achieve through chemical modification, often without the aid of a doctor. Specifically people who don't qualify for gender dysphoria taking estrogen in order to appear more androgynous and attain the ideal femboy physique for longer. It bothers me that this kind of thing seems widely accepted within these spaces, and is not challenged by leftists outside them.
Bombadil
20d ago
So I'll admit I may have been too hasty in posting this, but I disagree that this guy is just a random streamer. For several years, he pulled in enough viewers to do collabs with various large streamers such as Mizkif and Belle delphine, his fan subreddit has almost 100k subscribers, and his posts are still on top of /r/egg_irl and /r/crossdressing, two very prominent trans related subs. He is one of the the biggest trans-focused content creators out there, and might be the most prominent trans-centric streamer that currently exists. Thus I find it reasonable to conclude that his is behavior somewhat representative of and condoned by online trans spaces which makes him relevant to the culture war.
Bombadil
21d ago
Interesting. I always thought people like Clavicular are bad because they teach their (often young and impressionable) viewers to lead a lifestyle that is fundamentally unhealthy whilst avoiding things that would actually be good for them. But you are stating that the reason why most people think he is bad is because he is being public about his desires for women, money, and status.
This is not something praised and encouraged by mainstream left online and offline, this is domain of real hardcore underground very very far from public acceptance.
If you go on trans related subreddits, endorsements of DIY transitioning in the form of purchasing and administering hormones on your own are not that hard to find. The justification being that anything is better than nothing, and access to care where the poster lives is too limited. DIY surgery is definitely a level beyond that though.
Bombadil
21d ago
Fair enough. He became quite big during covid, consistently pulling video views in the hundreds of thousands for years with what was really just clips from his stream. While his popularity has seemingly faded over the last three years or so, I would think this would be enough to justify some degree of mainstream appeal to him. At least amongst those on the internet.
I suppose I can rephrase it into the kind of problem you are hinting at.
First, let us establish that Pascal's wager attempts to religion literally. The point is that by not being a Christian you risk eternal damnation because biblical Hell might literally be real, while being a believer gets you into Heaven (even though neither appear in the bible). Since we are taking religious texts to be literally true, we can evaluate their credibility by how well they model the world. Any statement or prediction that turns out to be provably wrong is pretty damning for the religion in question and dramatically reduces the risk of it being real and something to worry about. For example, the Abrahamic religions all share a creation myth that is more or less debunked by evolution, a theory which itself has made many correct predictions about the world and has no good evidence against it.
Theoretically, for every religion with a defined doctrine, we can look at the following factors:
- Statements made about how the world and universe functions and how things came to be the way they are.
- Predictions and prophecies (the more concrete the better).
- Religious practices (prayer, meditation, fasting, etc.).
If statements or predictions turn out to be wrong, that is an indicator that the religion is not to be taken literally. If religious practices that are supposed to bring you benefit while you are alive actually don't do that, or even cause harm, then that is likewise a point against the religion.
Similarly, if statements and prophecies that were made before we had made the scientific advancements to verify them turn out to be correct, then that makes it more likely the religion is to be taken literally. You would need a way to rank the significance of each statement made to figure out how important it is for the religion, how hard it is to get correct, and to what extent belief in the religion caused the insight in order to find out how likely it is to make the religion real. For religious practices, I would divide them into three tiers from most to least significant:
- The practice results in supernatural/divine phenomena (miracles, levitation, etc.).
- The practice results in some previously unknown but demonstrably true insight about the world. Essentially a revelation of sorts.
- The practice results in broader health benefits. Think meditation serving as a treatment for physical or mental illnesses.
Generally, I would weight concrete statements higher than vague ones, and wrong statements should matter more than correct ones, as they show that at least part of the religion is wrong and not divine in nature. Meanwhile divine intervention is merely one of several causes for correct statements. The more falsifiable statements turn out to be correct, the greater the likelihood of predictions about the afterlife being real. The more vague and open to interpretation the text is, the less we can say about the afterlife.
This way, we can rank every religion from most believable to least. The most likely religion to be true is the one which has several concrete prophecies with defined timelines that turn out to be correct, alongside myths that accurately describe the world, and whose religious practices demonstrably bring their claimed benefits to believers. But to properly answer Pascals wager we need two more measures.
First is the consequence for being a non-believer. The worse non-believers are treated compared to believers, the more crucial it is that I am part of the religion in case it is real. This is the original premise after all. Second is whether the religion allows me to be part of multiple faiths. If the goal is to optimize my chances in case the afterlife is real, then I ideally want to be a devout member of as many faiths at possible, starting with those that are most likely to be true.
Does this make for a concrete problem? I tried to make my framework as clear as possible, but to actually do this you would have to go through and compare every religion on earth.
Bombadil
21d ago
Regarding looksmaxxing and body modifications, I would like to present a case of someone who does not indentify as a looksmaxxer, but nevertheless has made a career out of making sweeping, permanent modifications to his looks. Specifically, I would like to talk about f1nn5ter, a Youtuber and Twitch streamer who started out making Minecraft videos, but quickly transitioned (figuratively at first) into just-chatting light fetish content, eventually culminating in a femboy focused only fans account.
You see, f1nn5ter, was incredibly good at passing as a woman. He could do his makeup, put on fake breasts, and do his hair. Once he was done, especially in the right lighting, you would be hard pressed to tell the he was actually a man until you heard his voice. He quickly gained a following that absolutely loved this. A solid mixture of LGBT, trans-folk, people not quite sure if they were trans or not, and several who gained some amount of sexual pleasure from seeing him dress up as a woman and act all bratty and submissive on stream. It turned out that some of his fans were willing to pay a lot of money to keep him that way, and so the crossdressing became an increasingly permanent feature of the stream. Over time, the streamer became increasingly involved with trans advocacy, gained a trans girl(?)friend, started microdosing estrogen, and eventually fully transitioned (literally this time) to genderfluid(?), meaning that his/her/their pronouns are subject to change constantly.
Recently, F1nn took a step up by undergoing face feminization surgery. Essentially shaving off some of his bones in the face in order to appear more feminine. As a reminder, he already passed quite well. Here is a tweet he made 3 years ago (without the fake breasts), before officially starting hormones and transitioning.
The culture war angle is two-fold: First, it seems weird that people go so hard on clavicular when stuff like this is accepted (at least by the online left). Prior to transitioning, the guy experimented with estrogen with no guidance from a doctor just to try and look more androgynous. Now, he underwent surgery, risking complications and a long recovery period just to appear slightly more female. But this is apparently okay because trans. I am split on this. On the one hand, I think this promotes a dangerous lifestyle. A slippery slope of increasingly significant medical procedures just to make yourself look slightly closer to your ideal. Never accepting yourself as you are, always chasing perfection. He apparently considered straight up getting bones removed, although the surgeon talked him out of it for the time being. On the other hand, I think the transhumanist angle here is quite cool and that surgeries like this are a good thing if they dramatically improve your life.
My second issue is with the pronouns. Reading the subreddit, people don't just use his pronouns interchangeably. They use them interchangeably within the same sentences. "She uses he/him pronouns!" is an actual serious quote from there. While I find it impressive from a writing perspective (and interesting as a kind of performance art) that you can still sort of follow along if you know what they are doing, I think this is kind of insane. Like, a frequent talking point from trans activists is that the pronoun thing is easy. But once you start throwing nonbinaries, questioners, and genderfluids into the mix this stops being the case. Having three or more sets of pronouns that you swap between at your leisure and just expect others to adhere to strikes me as sadistic. A kind of dominance play in which you take pleasure in observing others put all their effort into following your rules.
Of course, F1nn is not a good trans representative, being a pornstar and all, but I do think he represents a good part of why the online trans communities seem so weird. This kind of rhetoric and advocacy is not exactly uncommon on the internet, and it is hard to look at it and not see some kind of social contagion or slippery slope when all people do is encourage it.
Bombadil
21d ago
I think the game theory suggests that living virtuously as a hedge is a good idea, but I am not sure I've ever seen anyone go down this rabbit hole (either in their personal life or from an abstract game theory perspective).
I would agree with respect to the current dominant religions. A peaceful Buddhist and a peaceful Christian seem very similar. Even the ancient Greek and roman stoics seemed to preach a way of life that is mostly congruent with modern ideals. But Christianity has many extreme denominations, and some religions in the past demanded human sacrifice.
Surely it's actually fairly easy to determine that some religions are made up by humans...
After a few generations it gets very muddy. Is wicca just something a charlatan made up in the 1800's? Many would disagree. Scientology has several members that are presumably true believers, and several cults have shown the ability to turn people from normies into true believers. So it is not as easy as it seems on the surface. In general, once a religion reaches a critical mass of people who believe in it, it becomes very difficult to dismiss out of hand.
Presumably, that means it's also impossible for you to assess the probability that atheism is true.
Well yes. But we can prove that many things are true which fly in the face of established religions. For example evolution goes against the Christian creation myth. The sun doesn't actually go to the underworld every night like the ancient Egyptians thought, the earth simply rotates away from it. As far as I can tell, you can repeat this for most religions.
So while I can't prove that atheism is true, I can find arguments that make established religions less likely to be true. If your religion makes claims that turn out to be demonstrably false, then that is fairly solid evidence against it. Even if that was not the case, Pascal's wager still doesn't work. It is not safer for me to subscribe to a religion than it is to be a nonbeliever, as not only are many religions mutually exclusive, several are much harsher to those religions they are directly opposed to than they are to people who simply don't believe.
Bombadil
21d ago
The issue with mutually exclusive religions is that if you pull P(A) and it doesn't pay out, actually it was another faith all along, then you face infinite suffering for being an infidel who foolishly worshipped Jesus as God. You are incentivized to believe in whatever religion has the greatest punishment for nonbelievers to minimize your downside. But then that incentivizes others to make up religions with increasingly worse punishments in the afterlife in order to force you to adhere to the demands of their faith.
It is just not sustainable as there is no way to distinguish between a religion that is made up by humans and one that is actually correct. Playing that game is hopeless from the start.
Bombadil
22d ago
The human brain is made up of very different materials than a datacenter. It is entirely possible that the physical structure of the brain is necessary to create intelligence, and that this structure requires materials which certain properties. Maybe a digital simulation will just always require orders of magnitude more data and power than the real, physical thing.
Even if you take Pascal's wager seriously, it is not actually very useful. There are multiple religions that each claim their god created the world, with most of them being mutually exclusive. Thus Pascal's wager works about as well as an argument for believing in the Christian God as it does for believing in Allah.
Regarding the atomic bomb, they did the math which showed that a chain reaction was impossible prior to the test. We have no such proof against the dangers of AI. The equivalent would be a paper that shows the theoretical limits of how intelligent LLM's can get, and thus prove that the line will stop going up before we reach the point of AGI.
Bombadil
22d ago
- If the hardware is just wrong, or we need some kind of unknown property (like a soul) that computers can't approximate then yeah, we are not getting AGI anytime soon.
- We are not starting from scratch. We can let our algorithms be inspired by what we see in.
- The idea that there is a ceiling to what LLM's can do and that we will hit a wall very soon is part of the bear case.
I think your points are good, and I am myself a bit of an AI sceptic. But I do see where the AI safety crowd is coming from. It may not be particularly likely that we get AGI in the near future. But the fact is that the possibility is there, and is significant enough that it currently cannot be dismissed out of hand. Thus it makes sense to halt development until we are certain that this research won't doom us all.
Bombadil
22d ago
Humans existing and being good at these problems shows that it is possible to create an intelligence that can solve these problems to at least the skill level of a highly intelligent and competent human, without needing impossibly huge training sets to do so. The question is if we can replicate this on a computer. The bull case is that this is just a question of finding the right algorithm, and once we do, we will achieve AGI.
Since current AI can clearly help researchers write code faster, it stands to reason that the better AI we have access to, the faster we can improve the algorithm, which leads to a loop where better models are developed faster and faster. Once the models start approaching human-level intelligence they will be able to iteratively improve themselves without researcher oversight. And like that, we have justified drawing lines on the graph.
Bombadil
22d ago
I did write that "teenage sexual relationships should be decriminalized" does not make you sound like a pedo. The issue is that the rest of the rhetoric seems to serve as an argument for why men who are old enough to have degrees and careers should be allowed to have sex with high school students. That last part is where the problem is. When the poster then doubles down and it turns out I was right and this is what they wanted to argue, the rest falls apart.
Generally, if you want to make an academic argument about sexual maturity you probably shouldn't sully it by then immediately using said argument to justify breaking societal taboos.
Bombadil
22d ago
Presumably, the supermarket chain has a proven business strategy and is already making lots of money. SpaceX might make a lot of money in the future but isn't yet. SpaceX doesn't actually own the sky yet, it just might in the future. I would expect the risk that SpaceX might never make significant money to result in a lower price.
Of course, I completely missed the ball on AI stocks, so maybe I am the one in the wrong here too.
Bombadil
22d ago
If you could buy SpaceX just for the space business without Grok, and the pricing was in the range of 100-200 billion, then the arguments for it being a good investment opportunity become much easier to swallow. In that case, you would still be paying like it is one of the biggest companies in the world, even though it is not currently earning enough for that to be the case, betting that the space capabilities would eventually make it grow into something worth a trillion or more. But at the current price, it seems like you are paying as if all their goals have already been accomplished or that it is guaranteed to happen in the future. That seems really risky to me.
Bombadil
22d ago
The issue from an investment perspective is that the valuation is largely driven by the AI portion of the operation. If I believe in the space part of SpaceX, but also believe Grok is a waste of money that is going to be outcompeted by Anthropic, Microsoft, and Google, then it is still reasonable for me to believe the company is overvalued. Take AI out of the equation, and the company loses 93% of its value based on the IPO (this part is covered around 11 minutes in).
So by buying SpaceX what you are really paying for is Grok. And thus arguments about the rocket business largely stops mattering as it is such a small part what the IPO price is based on.
Bombadil
23d ago
The Dems presumably have access to a good-sized professional network of lobby organizations, activists, and businesses. There are also many political positions that are much less visible to the public.
Since the rape accusations have not been proven, wouldn't the standard political play here be to have him resign, wait for things to die down, and then in a few months hire him at some cushy position outside of media spotlight?
If the stick is that his name will continue to be dragged through the gutter, then this seems like a pretty good deal to me.
Bombadil
27d ago
In a sense, increased representation is a primary goal. Having minorities be acknowledged and normalized through representation is pretty high up there in terms of importance on the progressive agenda. You can't fight for trans rights if most people don't even know the trans exist.
In practice, I would say it depends on the author. Some write specifically for, say, an LGBT audience and have positive representation as one of the main reasons for why the story exists in the first place. Others do it for the sake of realism. A New York with no black people just doesn't really make sense. Any modern story exploring urban environments, especially if you delve in to the soft, slightly hidden underbelly, is by necessity going to include some level of representation of minority groups as they make up a sizeable part of most large western cities.
It is not usually a sign that oppression has ceased. If you lean more activist as a writer, the point of forcing diversity is exactly the opposite: Opression is still there, but through your writing you give a voice to the marginalized. If there was truly no opression, no one would bat an eye at a trans woman because she would just be another person to the rest of society. The fact that this identity matters enough to write about, and that doing so can garner pushback, is itself proof that there is still a lot of work to be done.
I think the EU generally has been resting on its laurels. There was an assumption that the status quo which prevailed since the cold war would hold forever. That free trade in a rules based world is so profitable for everyone that there is no way anyone would want to jeopardize it with war. Eventually, other countries would see the light and follow suit. Once they did, they would be rewarded with free trade and be welcomed as an ally. It was okay to be dependent on the US for security and Russia for gas, as they would have too much to loose to abuse their leverage.
This assumption extended to immigration. Why would you move to a country only to ruin it? It makes no sense. Obviously, immigrants would assimilate to the local culture as the resulting standard of living is far superior to where they came from.
Under this worldview, providing foreign aid, outsourcing manufacturing to China, and accepting massive amounts of asylum seekers made sense. I don't think either the elites or a majority of the population really considered that things might get worse. The idea that people might take our resources only to turn against us, was just not a narrative that many people believed.
Bombadil
28d ago
Sure, but the reason for the low age of consent in Europe is generally not so that grown men with careers can have sex with high schoolers. It is to decriminalize sex between teenagers. The social convention for adults not to abuse this is quite strong, so it is pretty rare that it happens.
Yeah that is a fair point. By virtue of them generally not trying to expand their social circle and not being particularly interested in men, I don't get a lot of chances to meet that type. Just like many men find modern dating norms too toxic to bother with, it is entirely possible the same is true for a lot of women.
This group of people existing does not indicate an base instinct towards long term monogamous relationships in women though. At least, the instinct can't be very strong if ignoring it is that easy.
Bombadil
29d ago
What I quoted is the kind of thing people say when they are trying to push an agenda. Specifically the agenda that older men should be allowed to sexualise and have sexual relations with people under the age of 18. There is a clear taboo against this in modern society, and for good reason. So when someone starts to undermine this taboo through their arguments it is going to result in alarm bells.
Related is the "What is a woman?" question. Normally used to dunk on leftists, it can be used in a ship-of-Theseus sense. When have you undergone enough hormonal replacement, voice training, and surgeries to be more female than male?
I know the most hardcore anti-transers will say the only thing that matters is your birth sex. But as you said, the heuristic for most people is just "Does she appear female?" Which lends some credence to the Judith Butler theory that gender is primarily a performance and thus "Am I a man or a woman" is determined by the actor and the audience.
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