Bombadil
2mo ago
It is generally easier to send people back to their country of origin when said country actually wants to take the people back. The issue with arab (pretty sure most of them are not African) refugees and illegal immigrants is that their country is unwilling to accept their citizens back at the airport. They are more than happy to get rid of them.
Bombadil
2mo ago
Could an open source model solve the problem of radioactive CW threads triggering a filter? After all, if the model is open source, would that not mean it is possible to fine tune it so that it fits with the spirit of themotte?
Bombadil
2mo ago
I think how best to do this depends a lot on the motivation. Why would we want to compete with Reddit in the first place? What does this space stand to gain from becoming a serious competitor to reddit?
Bombadil
2mo ago
This doesn't really sound like the problem is with education, but more that the mothers have zero time to do stuff outside their immediate duties. Given modern work hours and convenient household appliances, part of me wants to question that premise. But taken on its face, I would assume poorly educated mothers should face a similar problem where they want to their life to have meaning beyond kids and use whatever skillset they have to attain status, but just can't find the time and energy to do so. In other words, what you are pointing out is a problem with the overall structure of society, not women attaining skills and knowledge at higher education.
Otherwise, what is keeping the intellectual women from organizing book clubs, starting a podcast, or using their skillset to discuss the state of the world over a glass of wine?
Is it gaming as a hobby that is the problem, or is it gaming to the point where it consumes your life and responsibilities? The latter she can definitely get around just by meeting enough men. Even in STEM, far from everyone has that problem. The former is a lot more difficult given just how popular gaming is these days. While she can go to bars or clubs (lower odds of gamers as they tend to stay home), those are less than ideal for the purpose of looking for an actual relationship. Looking for them at part time jobs and active hobbies is the main other way I can imagine you would filter them out.
That said, if her problem is with gaming as a hobby, maybe she should reconsider her standards. If a man is responsible and takes care of the things he needs to do, then why is it so bad that he spends his downtime gaming? If you need a man who not only has his life well put together, but are also only interested in those whose hobbies are high status, then your dating pool quickly becomes very small.
Communists and the far left tend to believe that people need to be forced to do good things
My experience is the opposite. Communists (the real life activists that is) often have experience with retreats or even small communities in which the participants would organize labor between them, and each person would do their fair share of work. They assume that this could be transferred onto larger society if only the boundaries of class and money were to be removed.
The issue they keep running into is that this communal lifestyle doesn't scale to the size of a modern city. When you no longer know everyone, it is much harder to care about them. Once you stop caring about everyone, it becomes harder to care as much about your duties. Add to that the fear that other people are abusing your work ethic to make bank or live in luxury. You have no way of knowing if someone on disability actually deserves the money. In a small group, you know that resources are given fairly to everyone, because everyone knows each other. A larger system is much easier to cheat, people suspect each other more easily, and thus you end up needing some controls.
Bombadil
2mo ago
One might posit that it is not education in general that makes women not want children, but rather what specific lessons they are taught at institutions for higher learning. If I were a social scientist not worried about career suicide, I would look into whether there is a causative relationship between exposure to feminist ideology and not wanting a family. It would certainly make sense that an ideology whose prime thinkers take pride in criticizing motherhood, degrading men, and advising women to sleep around and postpone marriage would result in fewer marriages and children.
Bombadil
2mo ago
When were leftists the rebels? Haven't Universities and intellectuals have leaned left since the end of the cold war?
Bombadil
2mo ago
Mostly young people who are too concerned about their own circumstances to really care about other people's pronouns. They just want to live and let live, and only struggles with trans stuff insofar as the presentation of the trans person is clearly different from their claimed gender (admittedly happens more than you would think), or if the trans person somehow makes their life worse. Also older leftists, but their stance is obvious.
Bombadil
2mo ago
This sounds less like the purpose is to criticize Trump, and more that it is to drink some nice wine, talk about books, and discuss some (in their circle) noncontroversial politics. Just a nice night out for older, well-off leftist intellectuals really.
Bombadil
2mo ago
As the world is becoming increasingly fragmented and less globalized, we are currently witnessing the end of tech companies with world-spanning monopolies. It just doesn't make sense to give another country that much leverage over you. Instead, every major economic power will have their own OS provider, their own equivalent to word, their own email hosting service and so on.
Bombadil
2mo ago
This might be a matter of social circle. Most people I have met care way more about your presentation than your birth sex. If they get to know you as a woman and believe you are a woman, then the revelation that you are actually trans won't make them suddenly think of you as male. The only exception are anti-trans activists.
Bombadil
2mo ago
There tends to at least be some degree of pushback within those circles. Even amongst bodybuilders, being on steroids is not uncontroversial.
Bombadil
2mo ago
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.
Bombadil
2mo 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
2mo 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
2mo 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
2mo 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
2mo 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
2mo 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
2mo 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.
This option is good in theory, but in practice requires a good amount of self discipline. It is just so easy to prompt the AI in a way that straight up gives you the answer, then convince yourself that you were the one to think about it following the LLM's guidance. If you are mindful of the pitfalls it can work, but I am not sure I would trust the average person to do it properly.
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