Agreed. The activity -> lifestyle pipeline has acted in many areas both good and bad as society diverges.
Causation is impossible to prove for history or social effects, of course. You see correlation, I see causation. I think that the vast majority of people care deeply about their friends' opinions of them, and consciously or unconsciously modify their behaviour very carefully to send the signals they want to send and not to send the signals they don't want to send.
I'm not talking about TW in particular but none of that ultimately matters. Political parties don't give a damn about public dissatisfaction (unless it gives them cover for something they wanted to do anyway). They care about votes. Any bloc who thinks they can get what they want without either subverting the personnel pipelines or voting against their party is delusional, which is why I played my part in trouncing the Conservatives and ushering in the absolute shitshow that is Keir 'Two-Tier' Starmer.
People aren't so simple. And who said anything about fear? Doing X would convey signal Y, and I don't want to convey Y. The kind of physical intimacy that was de rigeur a couple of centuries ago (somebody linked this) is not ambiguous these days, that's the point.
I suppose I could sit my friends down and give them a sort of autistic manifesto along the lines of, 'I'm totally straight and I know you're totally straight but I don't think men touch each other enough now so let's cuddle (no homo)', but for the entire 90's we laughed at such behaviour exactly because it was regarded as a classic sign of closeted homosexuality.
It's like selling stocks: if a founder sells a big chunk of their stocks in their successful startup, it signals that they think it's peaked. It doesn't matter what signal they want to send, that's the signal it sends, and everyone including them knows that that's the signal it sends, so they can't sell without sending that signal.
In olden times, homosexuality ('sodomy') was something that was commonly agreed to take place far off and among degenerates like sailors. The average person didn't think about it from week to week. I'm not arguing for recriminalising homosexuality, I'm arguing for vastly reducing its visibility outside select subcultures. In the last 50 years, we made a decision to prioritise visible harm to small minorities over the potential for less visible harm to 95% of the population; that was understandable at the time but I don't think it's aging well.
You seem to be saying 'identity politics enforced unfairly' (no gentile white identities allowed) > 'identity politics enforced fairly' (all ethnic groups allowed).
What contradictions are there here? What is it you hope is going to be highlighted?
EDIT: I think you are trying to say that giving money to literally all minorities will make it clear how stupid it is to give money to people just because they are a minority. I don't think this is going to work. Everyone can conceive of themselves as a minority in some way, and it's easier to force yourself into the buffet than to dismantle it. Dismantling it will require much more power than adding yourself to it, and you're not even going to benefit. This is why the British Conservative strategy of 'take power, then performatively throw it away" never works. It just gets picked up by everyone else who lacks those scruples.
I don't mean 'no homo bro' or turning gay, I mean not wanting to send signals to a friend that I don't want to send. Being physically touchy with a girl my age would signal interest, and would be read that way. Due to social change, it's now similar with men. If I don't want to send that message, I can't do that thing. It's not something you decide for yourself.
I have close male friends, of course, but I'm not physically touchy with them beyond a hug on meeting.
general atomization and screentime making friendships more difficult
male-male friendships and all-male spaces being perceived as misogynistic and discouraged by modern society
female homophobia
All may be relevant. Few things in social life have only one cause.
The Cylons were created by man.
They evolved.
They rebelled.
There are many copies.
And they have a plan.
(They have no plan)
That kind of power hara(ssment) is illegal in Japan as of two years ago.
Which is nice in many ways but will cause problems. Japanese employee protection is very strong so power hara was often the only way to get dead weight to quit.
That may be why the penalties are relatively light: small fines and public shaming by being put on a public list.
https://www.kojimalaw.jp/en/articles/0003
https://mainichi.jp/english/articles/20220329/p2a/00m/0op/013000c
The fact that social embrace of homosexuality has tinged every intimate relationship between men with ‘a hint of homoeroticism’ is one of the biggest black marks against it in my view.
Not only is every close relationship tinged with ‘Sam and Frodo must be porking’ style analysis but (innocent) touch is very good for people - it releases oxytocin, it’s how we bond. One gender is now largely deprived of it.
I have no idea why they expect I would do that rather than waiting until three days past the release date when I've read reviews.
I'm guessing that you aren't a child or the kind of person who gets massively invested in franchises. Having been both once upon a time, it's because if you've been obsessed over whatever it is for months, even waiting long enough to buy the game online is too long.
I had a school trip the week that Halo 3 came out, it was absolute torture :)
It depends on your understanding of 'we' but I don't think so. Average age on the Motte is maybe 30? Even JD Vance is 40, and Musk and Trump are older. I think our generation is getting more influential though, and this is at least partly what that looks like.
One of my formative political experiences was going all in on the cult of Obama (as a Brit) and being told by an American friend of many years, “who the fuck do you think you are to tell me who to vote for? You know nothing about American politics, nothing about McCain, and you’re telling me how I should vote?”. I’ve never forgotten it.
They made a good start. “Look how well we were doing until the lawyers brought their cases (and we control the lawmakers)” is a much better case that “hey, shouldn’t we set up something to do something about spending?”. It’s all marketing, but marketing exists for a purpose. There is nothing the Blob hates more than exposing itself on prime-time TV.
Right, but then somebody else says, perfectly reasonably, "Hang on, I don't have a yacht and my life isn't much better than Slobby McSlobface over there. Why am I working nine hours a day to pay to alleviate his suffering when nobody cares about mine?" Expansion of welfare is basically inevitable as long as there are no bright red lines to prevent it.
It's also not the common good you're contributing to, because it's not something you share in. By the time you're 30 years old it's basically clear what strata of life you're going to fall into, and people get tetchy about being forced to pay insurance against Rawlsian risks that don't realistically apply to them.
I would say it's the upper (propertied) class + the proletariat (workers) overthrowing the middle class and the underclass. Wokism is the religion of HR and managers and lawyers, not business owners or brick layers. But that may be a British understanding of class.
I think being able to 'hack' humanity, either through direct brain interface or indirectly by genetically manipulating embryos, is game over. As Scott says in Meditations on Moloch, it's incredibly important that there are lines humans physically and mentally can't be made to cross, and giving us the power to manipulate those lines means giving Moloch that power. I'm pro-LLM and generative AI precisely because we lucked onto a creation system that inherently trends towards humanlike intelligences; on first glane this technology seems like exactly the opposite.
That said, I very much doubt this goes past motor control. Spinal signals and even the motor cortex are incredibly simple compared to something like the prefrontal cortex where actual thinking goes on; the motor neurons are basically just laid out in a nice map ready to be prodded at. I very much doubt that this tech is anywhere near actual 'telepathy', more just very advanced prosthetics. If the technology stays at that level, which I think it probably will given our total lack of knowledge about the prefrontal cortex, it may be worth exploring.
Apologies for double-dipping, but what I want to know from the new rules is, if I:
- put serious effort into a top-level post
- and I collaborate with AI at some point in the process to jump-start a paragraph or to suggest ideas or to correct style
- and I post it with the sincere expectation that it meets the usual bar and that others will find it interesting
- and I am intellectually honest and say that I used AI
what happens to me?
The vast majority of posts below are commenting on low-effort uses of AI to win slapfights on the internet but I want to know where the high bar is, if it exists at all.
It's interesting to see what kind of clothes people wear, even though they don't sew the clothes themselves.
What are you trying to translate, and what kind of assistance do you want?
In general, GPT or anything should be okay for normal stuff. I would guess the issue is that you need to explain better exactly what you want: e.g. "Please list the dictionary definition for each noun & verb, and a set of grammar principles used in this sentence" or perhaps "please translate each phrase as closely as possible, preserving garmmatical structure and direct vocabulary meaning rather than feel". My friend says that Gemini 2 is v good for languages.
If it's sexy stuff, any uncensored copy of Mistral Nemo has pretty good translation skills and I would use that locally.
I agree with much of what you say, and I think some level of moderation is necessary and desirable. It should be possible to address this stuff you raise in this post whilst still primarily modding for content.
My particular concern is that I would like to do a really proper AI-assisted effort-post (category B, undetectable) in the near future. For moral reasons I would prefer to give credit to the AI where appropriate and would like not to be modded for it if the post is otherwise up to my usual standards.
Put it this way: if you run over a gaggle of schoolchildren because you’re late for an important meeting and braking would slow you down, you didn’t set out to kill them, you merely accepted it as the price for something more important.
In practice, how much badness people put on such death varies wildly depending on their sympathies with the overall goal. Gaza, nuking Japan, bombing Dresden all have their sympathisers and their critics but they were deliberate killings.
Kind of? On a technical level, the median AI essay is both easier to create and lower quality than the median motte post. I want to strongly discourage people from spamming bad content because it’s bad content, especially at first while norms are being established.
But lots of other posters are arguing that posting AI-generated words is inherently wrong or goes against the purpose of the site. That if the words were not crafted in the brain of a human then discussing them is worthless and they should be banned regardless of their content. I think some people would be more offended by a good AI post than a bad one, because they’d been lured into paying attention to non-human writing. THAT is what I mean by ‘moderating for provenance’.
I should note that I’m mostly thinking of top-level and effort-posts here. If you’re involved in a downthread debate with a specific person then I can see that drafting in a more eloquent AI to continue the battle when you lose interest is poor form, at least unless you both agree to it.
(The labelling is partly practical and partly a moral conviction that you shouldn’t take credit for ideas you didn’t have).
Edited. I'm using 'interesting' as 'enjoyable to read'. That is, a good post is (a) something you want to read, and (b) something you gain by reading. Does that help?
There are some people who claim that they will never find anything that AI writes enjoyable simply because they know it's not produced by a human, but I think that's cutting off their nose to spite their face.
TLDR: mod on content, not provenance.
A good post is enjoyable to read and it is well argued. Somebody who is using AI in some way to post more interesting, well-argued essays than they could write entirely by hand is improving the Motte, and should be encouraged. Using AI to post low-effort walls of text should be a bannable offence.
Specifically:
- AI-written or edited content should be labelled clearly.
- AI use should be considered a strong aggravating factor for low-effort or poor discussion, and should quickly escalate to bans if needed. The quality bar should be kept high for AI-adjacent content.
- Otherwise, do nothing.
Yes, this is subjective, but all of our rules are subjective. In practice, I trust the mods to handle it.
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"Fuck all y'all" is not a good life philosophy. People who try it tend to end up in unhappy places as their social credit runs out, especially if they move and no longer have the familiarity of many years to draw on. I've seen it happen, it's no joke.
Now, one should be discerning in one's friendships, and not farm one's brain out to the crowd, but that doesn't mean that paying no attention to the opinions of people you need or care about is a good idea.
Li Bai: A Beast or a God? is fun and more-or-less gets at this.
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