Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
No bio...
User ID: 1864
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
2d ago
In the meantime may I ask your favour that, if you manage to connect some dots about me, you confine your guesses to DM?
I'm not going to guess; in your field I've probably only heard of the Siberian silver fox experiment, the NIMH rat utopia experiments, and...Jane Goodall?
The general problem with mutation load in small populations is very well and very widely understood, such that I'll be a bit surprised (but happy to help) if you'd just like to know more about it. But that's not the impression I'm getting. What would you like from me, specifically?
I'd rather just hear what you know, but fine. You're pushing a model whereby:
- Bad times make strong men, strong men make good times, good times make weak men, etc. Isn't this your overarching thesis? You have a large number of relatively common variants in your population floating around, and as soon as you relax purifying selection on the weak alleles, your model organism/people are suddenly 50-65% less 'whatever' even in the F1 generation. I'm not a population geneticist, but I don't see how that can be possible? You're telling me that if you relax all selection and let everyone breed (and you're also telling me that all your captured animals have this trait!) a single generation is enough to wreck what you're looking at?
This is like saying you can take a population of people in the 90th percentile for height, remove any kind of selection such that they all breed, and your F1 generation averages the 60th percentile. Regression to the mean is a thing, but I don't believe it can happen that quickly.
Calhoun's mouse utopia bred like gangbusters from 8 mice to 2200 without any kind of purifying selection. Shouldn't they have crashed in a generation or two?
-
Whatever behavior you're looking at (you're an animal psychologist, right?) has a significant environmental component, and living in captivity is deleterious. Plenty of animals fail to breed or exhibit other behaviors in captivity and this has nothing to do with 'catastrophic mutational load.'
-
Consanguinity/founder effects - I assume you're trapping these in a smallish area, and your starting population might be significantly related? It seems unlikely to be able to account for the early effects, maybe some of the future generations.
-
'Catastrophic mutational load.' The generational mutation rate is the same whether they're breeding in captivity or in the wild. In this context, you're almost certainly speaking about genetic variants rather than mutations which (at least in human genetics) have a stricter definition. It doesn't make much sense to say they have a 'catastrophic mutational load.' How do you define a wild type and a mutant when an allele is 70:30 in one area of the world, 30:70 in another, and there's no clear indication that it even has any kind of functional effect?
How do you think it works, genetically speaking? Concisely.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
2d ago
It's actually pretty difficult to keep a captive population from sliding into catastrophic mutation load.
Can you elaborate on what you mean by 'sliding into catastrophic mutation load?' What, specifically, do you think is going on (genetically speaking) when you run this experiment?
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
2d ago
I read 99.5% of the comments that get posted to the motte using the firehose view,
Wild. I never imagined anyone would use that feature to read 2,000 comments a week.
I get the feeling you enjoy our exchanges less than I do
You're a good guy. So is Whiningcoil; I imagine we could easily meet at a party and have a few drinks without incident. But two things drive me crazy, insofar as I let anything on the internet drive me crazy: blackpills and political violence.
Even setting that aside, you're like the friend who's a huge sports fan and is either constantly bitching when his team is in the dumpster or gloating and rubbing it in your face when he's winning the division title. Your specific ideology (and I don't mean Red Tribe ideology here) means that you're either constantly winning or losing an existential struggle, with all the attendant emotions.
Life's a lot easier when you can just kick back and watch the game with a few beers.
Blue Tribe dominance is now collapsing
I've already expressed my skepticism on this point.
we are sufficiently closer to base reality that we need propaganda a lot less, and our lack of the Progress narrative means we have less need to rule people and can ask less from those we do need to rule.
On the contrary, your lack of a progress narrative makes your message ultimately soulless. People don't want to believe that it's iphones and laissez-faire capitalism and poverty until the heat death of the universe. And they certainly don't want a retvrn to housewives and the cultural norms of the early 20th century let alone whatever era twitter has decided is best this week. If anything, malaise is from a lack of progress relative to the norms of the last century, and it's clear your movement doesn't have a widely palatable solution to that problem beyond grievance politics.
Guns, taxes and global weather patterns don't hinge on peoples' mentality, and so are less amenable to the core Social Justice strategies. Even trans impinges far more on the physical world, and it is these impingements that have resulted in resistance and, seemingly, downfall.
What? The bad guys, narratively speaking, are white nationalists/white suburban teen boy school shooters, and wealthy old white men oppressing the lower classes for the latter two. The Social Justice narratives write themselves.
I question whether you won hearts and minds, or generated a preference cascade through a massive social pressure campaign backed by threat of legal force.
Did abolition occur through social pressure campaigns, legal and actual military force? Desegregation? Pick any social change in history - the rise of Christianity, American independence, whatever you like - which of these were legitimate? And what criteria did you use to decide?
But the people who such a campaign can't flip don't cease to exist, and their arguments were never defeated, only suppressed. Lincoln had it that you destroy your enemy when you make him into your friend, and that's not a victory the LGBT movement ever achieved.
It seems ironic that you would accuse the gays of strongarming you into accepting their movement, then quote someone who literally waged a war to force acceptance of his.
Regardless, large numbers of people opposed to the gays were converted. There are plenty of gay conservatives, and they don't seem to suffer any major consequences for it. After abolition, slaveowners didn't disappear, and yet we've still arrived at a future where genuine supporters of slavery are vanishingly rare. Give it a couple generations.
My kids are going to get a few samples of the narrative I got, and then learn the actual history
They are fortunate, indeed, to learn Actual History.
I think shoving Christianity into the closet was bad for society in strictly material terms, because it unleashed much harm that Christianity might have helped to mitigate or restrain.
It's funny that you should frame it that way, when I raised in a much more secular area and the stereotype is that Americans are obnoxiously in-your-face Guns & God religious. And there is some of that, to a degree you likely don't notice and can't comprehend because you've been swimming in these waters from birth.
I note that many people on all sides express considerable nostalgia for the 90s, and even the 2000s; the point where we lost and were cast out is also pretty close to the point where things started taking a very serious turn for the bad, and not by my assessment alone.
They're also the years where we had just won the cold war, were the sole hyperpower in the world, ran a budget surplus with bonkers economic/technological growth and it also just happens to be the time of our childhood/adolescence. It's bread and circuses with a side of martial victory, not normies longing to spend two hours of their Sunday doing bible study.
This time, I'll ask: do you genuinely think my prediction was wrong, and that we are in fact moving away from large-scale violence? Do you genuinely believe the Culture War is winding down?
Yes, and no. I agreed with whichever post you wrote in the aftermath of the Charlie Kirk shooting that this event certainly moves us towards the brink and I denounce it. But no, I do not think we are close in any meaningful way.
The culture war, defined as people self-assorting into tribal groups and flinging shit (verbal and otherwise) at each other is eternal. To dream otherwise is to dream of Progress and Trying Something Different, but I'm not holding my breath. I do think the temperature is lower than the early 2020s when I would literally routinely watch proud boys and antifa beat each other with sticks in the streets. Do you genuinely think that tensions today are as high as they were in 2020 and 2021? Or 2016? Or what I imagine the 70s were like?
Whether we're in a trough, a peak or just about to keep chugging along for a while - I don't know.
If we can restore something like accountability to power, and if we can generate common knowledge of where we are and how we got here, it seems to me that many of our problems are solvable.
I wish you luck. But I'm pretty sure 'restore accountability to power' means 'my political opponents don't have power anymore' and 'generate common knowledge' means 'teach Actual History to other people's kids.' Not to mention people have been mouthing 'restore accountability to power' since at least the 2000s on reddit, if not the ancient Greeks.
Christianity is regaining a great deal of the cultural respect it lost over the last generation. It's regaining this respect not by playing "political hardball", but by having its predictions validated by subsequent events, and by maintaining its principles in contrast to the example of its opposition.
It might amuse you to hear that I've considered going to church recently, largely to try and surround my family with a functional social circle. It's a tough trade-off when I have such limited time to teach my children already.
That said, you're living in a bubble, my man. But then again, I suppose I am too.
A wager then - weekly church attendance isn't going to significantly increase in the next couple years (say, an increase of 20% or more - so if 30% of Americans attend church weekly, a boost of 6%). Me, living in a large blue city, will be 100% unaffected by political violence in the next year. By this, I mean I will not witness any shootings/melee/violence between two large gangs of Red/Blue tribers/insert your definition here, nor will anyone I know. There will be some nonzero number of school shootings/political assassinations/assaults on ICE at maybe a rate of 1 every 1-3 months? Were real money on the line, I'd dig up the actual numbers to get a background level over the last decade but I can't imagine it's much more frequent than that.
Feel free to make your own wagers.
When truth is truly on your side, no political hardball is necessary, only contrasting outcomes and the ability for people to choose freely.
lol. This is funny on so many levels, but maybe in the interests of brevity: we'll see whether people freely choose conservativism and Christianity and the Hallmark channel or whether they want to smoke weed, watch netflix and have premarital sex. And I say that while holding a dim view of at least smoking weed and watching television! Your idea of freely choosing is fiercely teaching your children 'Actual History' because you're terrified they'll internalize values and ideology from mainstream culture instead.
I'm not even making a value judgment one way or the other, but to say that the people will freely choose your way is both breathtakingly hubristic and seemingly ignorant of the last century of history.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
3d ago
I'm confused by the timing. 2015-2020 saw the Pittsburgh synagogue, Charleston church and El Paso walmart shootings despite conservatives being in power and the anti-Trump/nazi rhetoric being significantly more unhinged than it is today. 2020-2024, all I remember is the Tennessee trans school shooter despite the rhetoric against Fauci and plenty of other government officials being absolutely bonkers in right wing spaces (traitors, nooses, trials, you know the drill). 2025 has seen what, a half-dozen left wing events all at once? It doesn't seem to track with who's in power or how violent the rhetoric is.
I'd guess that during Trump I radicals of both stripes thought the majority of the country was on their side, whereas this time around, it certainly feels like the left is losing the normies. Shooting Kirk or ICE agents is retarded on both fronts, you're going to further alienate the normies and obviously not going to stop deportations.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
6d ago
Are you beetlejuice? Or do you, gattsuru and germ have some kind of discord group? I don't see how else you could find a 6 day old comment in a two week old thread, short of trolling my comment history or someone else doing so and reporting everything I write.
And as @gattsuru often notes, it worked. You won. Those you did not persuade, you shamed and abused and harassed into silence. "Protected Class" law formalized this for employment, the media and the Academy handled it everywhere else. As several Blue Commenters have straightforwardly stated it over the years, we lost, so it's our turn in the closet for a couple decades.
It's foolish to ignore the actual issue being discussed and chalk it all up to what you view as a propaganda apparatus, both because you're ignoring a half dozen other issues (gun control? trans people? climate change? Taxation and social welfare?) that failed to achieve anywhere near the same level of unity and because you're going to fail when you try to spin up your own propaganda apparatus.
How fortunate that this sort of political hardball had zero negative consequences of any kind.
...political hardball? Winning the hearts and minds of a significant majority of the population is not political hardball. You're so blinded by your obsession with realpolitik, so deeply steeped in the culture war and obsessed with small-minded zero sum games that you can't see anything beyond conflict and winning or losing. You can't even reflect on whether the change was a net benefit to the country, you're just bitter that 'your side lost.'
Is a more perfect union simply one where your side wins, and blue tribe is eradicated? And what comes after that? You'd just fracture into normiecons and groypers, neolibs and church fundamentalists and repeat the cycle. Your path is just one of endless conflict.
Tell me, then, your model of ethically influencing the electorate without playing 'political hardball.' Or are you so far gone as to think it's impossible?
You're sanewashing what he's saying into 'multiple perspectives are good.' He's free to teach his children whatever he wants, but I'm going to mock him for having the arrogance to think that he's teaching them Actual History.
More options
Context Copy link