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Butlerian

Not robot-ist just don't like 'em

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joined 2022 October 11 15:37:12 UTC 

				
User ID: 1558


				
				
				

			

		

	














	


		


			



	

		

			

			

				

					

						

							
						

						

							
							

								
Butlerian


								

								

								
								
								

								
							
					
 
				


				
Not robot-ist just don't like 'em

				
				
				

				

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					joined 2022 October 11 15:37:12 UTC
				


				
					

					
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				Small-Scale Question Sunday for March 3, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
A close friend (Bob) is considering proposing to his girlfriend (Alice). Alice is an ex-prostitute. I am trying to talk him out of it.


By Bob's account (which I presume in turn is him parroting Alice's account), Alice's stint in the oldest profession was a regretted youthful indiscression perpetrated in her teens, for a couple of months. She wasn't groomed, she wasn't coerced, she wasn't doing what she had to do to feed her starving family: she was just horny and kinky and thought it would be hot. After it proved less hot than she anticipated, Alice got out of there and never did it again, and since had the 'normie' sex life of a 21st century young woman: (uncompensated) app hookups interspersed with long term monogamous relationships, most lately Bob.


My gut-level revulsion at the prospect of wife-ing a ho makes my effort to talk Bob out of it difficult, as my churning viscera limits my rhetorical strategy from being much more sophisticated than, in so many words, just yelling "CUCK CUCK CUCK" at him. Perhaps with a side of "If you're not part of the solution for deterring teen whorishness by making it's practitioners persona non grata in polite society, then that's how you get more teen whores".


I am wondering if the astute minds of The Motte can help me think up any more coherent arguments to deploy.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of October 16, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


Because it’s a man’s fault if women his own age refused to date him when he was younger?




Well... yes? The implication is (both from a broad feminist narrative and in this specific case) that if you can't get dates from women your own age, this is because they can see the red flags of your unsavoury character. The solution is therefore to Be Better and self-improve until women your own age DO want to date you. The solution is not to instead date inexperienced young things, these being the only things you can get, because their red flag detectors haven't grown in yet.


t. Man dating a woman 13 years younger than him right now.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of November 6, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Offering to euthenize veterans when they have the temerity to complain that their wheelchair ramp is taking a long time to install is not what I'd call "who's diseases are really bad".


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of May 1, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I did think Rishi reading "We give thanks to Jesus Christ our Lord, who is the son of God and etc. etc." was particularly farcical.


I guess it just feels like an extra notch in the subsumption of British particularism into the soup of globohomo when the Establishment doesn't respect the culture enough to even try to maintain the kayfabe. I mean, sure, I doubt Bojo's a sincere Christian at heart and him reading epistles would be rank hypocrisy, but even purely nominal Christianity is better than official Hinduism. With Rishi, you know it's just his mouth making sounds and the words are not believed. With Bojo, you'd merely strongly suspect it.


Much was made during the Trump years of "Why are you supporting this man who from his actions clearly doesn't give a shit about the white working class", and the answer was often "I can't get positive actions from any of the candidates, so I'll take the one that at least one pretends to care over the others who don't even bother with the pretense". Having a Hindu read homilies during the King's official pledge to protect the Christian spirit of Britain? That has to me the taste of a ceremony that didn't even pretend to care about the ancient mores of the sceptred isle.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of October 30, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


It seems the height of intellectual arrogance to think you can reliably predict which events currently in the news will never have any direct impact on your life in the future




Sounds like an isolated demand for rigour to me. Just because we don't have a 100% cast-iron lock on future prescience doesn't mean we can't make reasonable predictions. Adopting your attitude would make investing impossible, for example: the commodity might go down instead of up, just as the news might prove relevant rather than a nothingburger.


But being neither Muslim nor Jewish and having only one friend who's either, I struggle to think of a plausible conduit by which shenannegains in the holy land could ever become relevant to me.


And anyway, OP's complaint seemed not so much "this is irrelevant" as "this is pushing actually relevant stuff off the front page of the BBC", which I feel is a stronger argument. To almost everyone in Britain, this coverage is essentially bread and circuses: a bunch of flashy explosions which has the convenient by-product of distracting them from their real, non-News-Problems with fake (as in, fake relevance) News Problems.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of July 17, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
So all the graphs and quantitative data show there's no UK economic decline... and the response is that people write articles wondering how the economic decline has managed to hide itself from statistics?


Hear hoofbeats, think horses not zebras. Maybe there's just no economic decline? Hell, if we're trying to be rationalists, the decline's absence from the statistics means that DEFINITIONALLY there is no decline.


As many of the commenters on Scott's site speculate: one gets the feeling that "UK Economic Decline" is something that europhilic economists want to be able to talk about (and blame on Brexit), therefore they assume it exists as an article of faith and spend their time conjuring up epicyclic reasons for how those dastardly Tories managed to hide it from every single graph in the world by gaming the metrics.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of May 22, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


Generally I'm paranoid about approaching women, because I feel like maybe they think I'm a creep and they're just too polite to say so. My biggest concern isn't that they dislike me per se; it's that maybe I've hurt the woman without realizing it. I'm very sensitive about that.




The only cure for this is practice. Many years ago I almost threw up with anxiety before my first dating-app date. Now, women are disposable playthings to me and I have absolutely no concern for their feelings at all beyond the instrumental requirements to get them to sleep with me. At a point you come to regard each one as an entertaining brain-teaser (how do I need to rotate this Rubix cube to get it into my bedroom?) rather than as a person to whom the Golden Rule applies. This makes dating totally stress-free because you just don't care if you go down in flames.


TL;DR: There's nothing to make your first forays into the pitiless jungle psychologically easier, but each foray makes the next one easier.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of May 1, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


For me, it was fascinating to discover how males and females consider history, especially when the topic of "in which historical epoch would you like to live?" and every woman answer "now".




You mention a degree of incredulity at the homogeneity of this attitude, and I think that points to a specific insight. Other commenters have suggested that "2023" is indeed the right answer for everyone, men and women, because... there's more Marvel movies to consoom now, I guess, and only edgelords would disagree. And that may be true, but it misses the point that you always get some male edgelords who get autistic about DEUS VULTing with the Crusades or Smashing The Fash in 1917 Petrograd, and are willing to stick their neck out and say "Yes the spiritual interesting-ness of the times exceeds the appeal of being able to go see Ant Man: Quantumania". Even if it's poorly thought out; even if they're almost certainly, objectively wrong; they'll speak the words, publicly.


What I think you're seeing with women is probably not some deeper or more clear-sighted shared awareness of either the rising tide of technological progress nor the snowballing gynocentrism of society. What I think you're seeing with women is the greater conformism of their gender. They know that "Now" is the answer that all their friends will say, that you might get cancelled if you don't say... so that's what they say. They gain nothing from being an edgelord because (as has been rehashed on these pages and infinitum) women get points/mates/security just for existing. If you want anyone to notice you as a man, you must stand out from the crowd, and this is the biological basis for male edgelord-ism.


That the answer "2023" is plausibly correct in an objective sense is a coincidence. They say it because it's conformist, not because they have deeply considered the pros and cons of ACCELERATE


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 19, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


They reiterate that the end result of the research is WORLD CHANGING. I'm sure it's worth bajilions of dollars. So if it's that valuable, just tell people what you're working on and what it's worth.




As a practicing academic research scientist, perhaps I can shed some light on this. The short answer is that no-one believes you when you say your end results will be world-changing, so good luck getting funding for even so much as a dinky thermal element radiator.


Scientific funding bodies are staffed by a mixture of know-nothing bureaucrats and ex-scientists turned people managers, neither of whom have seen the business end of a revolutionary scientific discovery for decades at best. No practicing scientist gets any money unless they can present these grey beancounters with colourful diagrams of massaged "preliminary results" which purport to show that a revolutionary discovery is Just One More Grant Award away: and so, cursed by the incentives foist upon them, practicing scientists have to enter a rat race of hyperbole, the end result being that everyone is claiming to be revolutionary at once. This in turn makes the beancounter's incompetence a self-fulfilling prophecy: their inability to assign monies to measured, meritorious proposals means no-one bothers writing measured, meritorious proposals, and the process devolves into a competition about who can spam the most outlandish over-promises, shiny diagrams, and ESG buzzwords. Making skepticism about revolutionary claims retroactively correct.


So the fact that scientists on top of a world-changing discovery are forced to rely on warm mercury backwash from a mine because no funding body will give them $1000 for a space heater is... extremely plausible to me.


EDIT: The above probably constitutes sanewashing. For the record I think the even more plausible explanation is that lazy showrunners didn't give it any thought beyond Corpos Bad, Hard Scientists Bad. The plot device actually does make sense, but my opinion of the show is sufficiently low that I think them correct only by accident.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of June 5, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Even when TheMotte was on Reddit, I never used Reddit for anything other than... interacting with TheMotte (OK, OK, I lurked some porn subs too). So for someone with very little experience interacting with Reddit, can you explain to me how the proposed changes would actually be expected to affect the modal Reddit user?


Because I expect that the modal Reddit user doesn't even know what an API is, and certainly never previously paid for it. So messing with its price ain't gonna affect him or her.


The changes sound like a problem exclusively for nerds and corpos who like to data-harvest off of the backend; something which has no effect on the modal user AND no effect on the stereotypical powermod who's there to defend Cathedral talking points. With these two vital demographics' interests therefore apparently having no intersection with this change, they SHOULD be completely disinterested. Can anyone explain / speculate how it is, then, that the nerds and corpos have managed to rile them into rebellion?


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of May 15, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


By their revealed preferences, many (more like most) women rather enjoy being sex objects to the extent they can.




This sounds a bit isomorphic to "Men must want to wear a suit and tie and sit in a cubicle being a wagie for 8 hours a day, look how many of them do it!"


I work in my wagie cube grudgingly because I need the money. It is not beyond imagination that Instagram/TikTok/SnapChat thots have similar ulterior motives.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of May 8, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


and even if you think it's in pursuit of a pointless or harmful goal it is actual things being done and work produced.




The definition of a Bullshit Job, as per Graeber's original essay, is exactly as you describe: one in which the product is useless or harmful, not one where there is no work done at all.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of May 29, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


I'm not even calling for the establishment of a race of Ubermensch, I want everyone raised up to as close to equality as possible




Why?


Seriously, why do you think it should be some sort of teleological objective of mankind to have everyone calibrated to be of equal ability?


Even if these abilities are high, this is still some kind of Harrison Bergeron dystopian shit.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of January 22, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Not particularly easy to get through state legislatures, though. To actually pass an amendment it doesn't have to be popular with normies, it has to be popular with politicians.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of October 23, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


It's really not any worse than various progressive ideas that are currently being pushed by academia




Exactly. Someone who believes the Earth was created in 7 days, 6000 years ago is substantially less dangerous (and, indeed, I would argue is substantially less delusional) than someone who believes whitey's oppression of minorities is the source of disparate racial outcomes.


EDIT: Apparently the new speaker believes both, so, heh, touché.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of May 8, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


You're all fucked, some just about to be fucked before the others.




Aren't you Indian?


Don't you have a ridiculous civil service which people kill to get into because once you're there, some quirk of iron rice bowls and pork barrels and constituency building has basically made Indian civil service jobs a sinecure where you never have to do any work but also you can't be fired, and this situation has persisted for 70 years despite the grinding poverty of all other sections of the Indian economy, because it's politically impossible to untangle this snarl?


And you think people are going to lose their jobs... because new labour saving tools become available?


Most jobs don't exist to fulfil tasks. Most jobs exist to fulfil government kayfabe. That an AI can perform a task is therefore completely irrelevant to the question of who has a job.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of May 1, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


Russia has to spend blood and treasure to secure the rest of Ukraine. We just have to spend treasure to make their cost go up! And we’ve decided the exchange rate looks pretty good.




Who's "we", and what was the calculus? Because I have a strong suspicion that the "we" is just seething third-generation Russian emigrants still mad that great-grandpa was run off the shetl, lobbying and donating until the US's pay-for-play foreign policy let's them use America like a golem to smash their ancestral enemy.


I'm a citizen of the West and certainly no-one asked me about sending all my money to Kiev.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of October 16, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


have an internal party vote and then everyone is bound to vote for the winner on the floor of Congress or they get expelled from the party.




I was under the impression that this was a specific trait of Leninist parties, which might contain the answer as to why the US Republicans don't do it.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of May 8, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I love this comment as a glittering example of "Comes so close to noticing but then the crimestop kicks in"


To wit: don't you think it a little... suspicious... that the """reports from IRL""" that your news media pipes you from Ukraine, map so neatly into the tropes you've been fed for decades from your entertainment?


Does that not strike you as a little, err, improbable to be an organic occurrance?


(So no-one accuses me of not speaking plainly: I am forwarding this as circumstantial evidence that Western reporting from the Ukraine War is very, very contaminated by  Western attempts to narrative craft it into the pre-prepared slot in the Western psyche of "Just like my Indiana Jones movies".)


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of May 1, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


just a 1000 km away




This is a very... American diagnosis of the European psyche.


Europe is smaller, and more crowded than America. And psychologically, Europeans are used to implacable hatred of everyone in the next valley. So 1000km away to a European may as well be on the moon. It is as much "not worth worrying about" as 13000km is to an American. So as far as agenda-setting of national policies goes, Russia may as well be as distant and irrelevant to European countries as it is from the USA.


Estonia, maybe, has cause for concern. But the Western European nations who are gun-running to Kiev? They have zero legitimate interest in Ukraine, just like America.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of March 25, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


Is there anything to this post beyond sneering at a member of the outgroup?




This isn't sneering at a member of the outgroup, it's policing the crazies of the ingroup.


Do not forget themotte.org's heritage, we're an offshoot of an offshoot of an offshoot of LessWrong. EA is kind of our great-aunt in terms of Internet genealogy.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of July 17, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


forced post-Covid amnesia is that the media went all in on lockdownism and that's increasingly embarrassing




I came here to post "Normies stopped talking about it because the media stopped talking about it", so in that sense I agree entirely. Absent the daily orders of What Current Thing To Support being beamed into their devices 24/7, the Normie does not support it, and so when the media messaging stops, the Covid hawks vanish.


I'll also give a moderate agreement on your reasoning as to why the media stopped. Reminding people about Covid might remind them of a glaring example of how Big Government (and it's Cathedral tentacles in academia, NGOs, media, civil society, experts) fucked up.  Which is a line of thought they want to assiduously avoid planting in the proles' heads, so better to just memory-hole the whole experience.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of May 29, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Quite. The Mexicans in Mexico are the ones puppeteering the Mexicans in the USA: "Go to El Norte and send us some money" style. So yeah, they are invading the USA, in the same way that George Bush was invading Iraq - he isn't personally the boots on the ground, but the boots on the ground wouldn't have been there if he didn't direct them.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of May 29, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


Maybe this kind of stuff is needed because people like you deny the Holocaust and argue that Jews control our lives?




Does everyone in America really need to be right about something that happened on another continent 80 years ago?


I'm not saying the Holocaust didn't happen, I'm saying we shouldn't care whether it did or not; certainly not to the extent of making laws about it.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of May 22, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


It is a well-established fact that women are people. Treating people like objects is the essence of evil.




What's the greater evil: my psychopathy, or OP's incel-ism?


Overcoming social anxiety to be able to date is a good end. Does it really matter that one uses evil means when the evil means exist only in my subjective qualia, not in the objective outside world?