Crowstep
21hr ago
Literally nothing. I don't even have any notes in my wallet.
What are you keeping it for? In a situation where the electronic banking system goes down for a meaningful amount of time, I'd rather have food stockpiled than cash (although you can of course have both).
Crowstep
23hr ago
I personally pray for God to end wars at least once a week.
And God ignores your prayers, and the prayers of the billions of other Christians who have also prayed for this obviously good thing for centuries. Can you see how, to an outside observer, this might make it seem like you're not actually asking as if someone is listening? God looks down on, say, the mass murder of Christians by ISIS as part of his benevolent plan and doesn't intervene. But apparently he does intervene to help you meet your wife?
I believe that the existence of a supernatural universe (not a specific deity) is pretty obvious based on simple logic.
I also believe in the existence of the Christian God not through logic, but through the personal experiences of a person whom I know very well.
Would I be right to think that the latter came before the former? Because from my experience and reading, people turn to religion for emotional reasons, and then the apologetics come after to see off the logical doubts.
intelligent people who are religious do in fact believe that God exists, that he answers prayers, and that he intervenes in the world. It isn't just compartmentalization and going along with the culture in which one grew up.
My model of it leans less on people going along with what they were raised in (although the statistics show that conversions are basically a rounding error, religions grow through the cradle), and more through motivated reasoning. That's what I mean by compartmentalisation. Applying wildly different standards to God that to the ones you apply to everyday life. I don't think any religious person believes in God in the same way that they believe that things fall down when you drop them or that the sun rises in the morning. But motivated reasoning, applying different standards to religious beliefs than normal beliefs, and positive mood affiliation leads to 'belief in belief'.
Don't you find it a little odd that an organisation that is extremely sure about the existence of God, creation, the resurrection and about how the church is the only source for salvation suddenly starts admitting its own fallability on a topic that might offend modern audiences? I doubt the medieval church was so unsure about something so profoundly fundamental. It smells an awful lot like Mormons getting sudden revalations that e.g. polygamy is no longer okay or that African Americans are now allowed in the priesthood.
I'd also add a thought that comes to me when I read theological discussions, it's all just words, words, words. If hell was real in the same way that the earth's molten core is real, people would look for evidence, run tests and experiments, apply lessons learned from similar fields. There would be a real answer. Instead we get an understanding of existence that is based purely on written and spoken words, and people can come to basically any conclusion they want.
Crowstep
1d ago
Force them to turn back or have their boats tipped over
Turn backs worked extremely well for Australia. And I really doubt that the public would erupt into anger that these poor defenceless 25 year old men were getting sent back to the hellscape that is...France.
Also, the government did literally import Afghans in secret, in addition to letting them come across in small boats.
Crowstep
1d ago
It's not like new atheism won in the end
I would say it did. Sure, people don't spend much time arguing on the internet about the existence of God any more, but that's because atheism won so decisively there wasn't much left to argue against. Only about 5% of Americans attend church every week. In the UK, only about 1% of the population attends Church of England services weekly.
Crowstep
1d ago
There is a creator, and there is creation
And why did he change his mind?
By that I mean, for infinite (?) time God was there and there was no universe. Then he created the universe. But if God is perfect and there was no outside force acting on him (how could there be?) then what caused him to move from being content that there was no universe to desiring that there be a universe?
That intersection of a finite (maybe) universe and an infinite God always bothered me.
Crowstep
2d ago
Mitt Romney seems very American to my eyes, although that might just be the whole manicured politician get-up.
Crowstep
2d ago
Are you religious? If so, could you give any examples of why you think these things are true?
Because the median religious person certainly doesn't act as if their faith is true. People still get sad when their relatives die and are still scared of death themselves, even though they (supposedly) believe in heaven. They claim that God answers prayers but then don't ask for anything that couldn't happen in a Godless world (e.g. God ends all war and cures all disease tomorrow) because it might ruin the spell when it doesn't happen. Even the Pope himself suddenly turns into an agnostic on the topic of hell in spite of Catholic doctrine.
The model of religion as 'belief in belief' is much more consistent with what we see.
Crowstep
2d ago
The ubiquity of religion suggests that the instinct to religion is strongly embedded within the human psyche
Isn't that evidence against any particular religion's factual truth? If every human culture creates its own myths, it takes a tremendous amount of parochialism to say 'the thousands of other religions that human societies have created are all superstitions, but the particular religion that I was born into is in fact objectively true'.
I'm an atheist, albeit a protheistic (or really pro-Christian) atheist. Clearly, secular modernity isn't working, given how miserable and childless we all are. I'd love to believe in God.
At the same time, I genuinely struggle to understand intelligent people who do believe in God. I know intellectually it's compartmentalisation, but I can't put myself in that position. The world is so obviously not a supernatural one, prayer does nothing, there is no evidence of God exerting his will at either the small scale or the large one. The world as we all see it is completely compatible with the non-existence of God and so clearly not compatible with anything but the weakest form of Deism. And I'm tempted to agree with Penn Jillette's 'hardcore atheism', which is I don't believe in God, and I don't really believe that believers do either. That's why nobody ever prays for falsifiable things that an omnipotent God could do (e.g. all the Russian guns in Ukraine stop working) and instead prays for psychological stuff (please give me resilience to endure) or stuff that would happen in a Godless world (my chemo-treated cancer goes into remission).
The closest I ever come to religious feeling is either when I'm feeling especially grateful for my life, or when I consider the question 'why is there something instead of nothing?' which genuinely does boggle the mind. But neither leads me to conclude that a jingoistic, jealous Caananite war god manifested as a pacifist peasant and then killed himself in order to forgive humanity for committing the sins he designed us to commit and knew we were going to commit when he created us.
Crowstep
4d ago
can not own guns
Banning ownership of something for a certain group is very hard to do if that thing is abundant in society. Your suggestions seem to imply that 'not allowed a gun' = 'cannot get hold of a gun'.
Case in point, teenagers are not allowed to own or carry knives in the UK. This law is completely useless at stopping teenage stabbings, because literally every teenager can grab a paring knife from his parents' kitchen before he goes out (plus laws against possession aren't actually enforced).
By contrast, even hardened adult criminals in the UK rarely use handguns, because they are genuinely hard to get hold of. Because there are no legal reasons to anyone to own a handgun (even most police don't have them) there simply aren't many guns for criminals to use.
Crowstep
6d ago
I don’t understand how the idea that God is benevolent and all powerful became more popular than there being a malevolent or indifferent God out there.
Because nobody is going to turn up every Sunday to worship a God who hates them, or at best, doesn't care about them.
And the simplest solution to the problem of evil is that God doesn't exist. Suffering exists because the material universe is indifferent to it.
Crowstep
9d ago
Not a translation, so perhaps not what you're looking for, but I enjoyed the War Nerd's version.
Crowstep
10d ago
One thought experiment I’ve had is I think it would be very interesting if upper caste Indians found an island or maybe somewhere
The British Empire already ran this experiment to a lesser extent, recruiting Indians to work in other British colonies. It gave rise to groups like the Ugandan Asians. Indians are economically dominant minorities in all the African (Caribbean included) countries they inhabit.
Crowstep
10d ago
Indians aren't really an ethnic group. The caste system means that, in spite of living together for thousands of years, the different ethnicities in India are vastly different, genetically and phenotypically. The high-performing Indians you know are mostly from the upper castes.
Arab countries have pretty low IQs, although they could probably do better if they stopped marrying their cousins. Incest causes mental retardation. Christian Arabs are higher-IQ due to hundreds of years of selective pressure (the jizya meant that low-IQ Christians converted to Islam).
'Hispanic' isn't a particularly useful term. It can range from people who are 100% Spanish genetically, to Amerindians with no European ancestry whatsoever, to full-blooded Africans. Probably you're thinking of Mexican mestizos, who have lower IQs than Europeans, but not that much lower.
Of course, the people you're interacting with are massively confounded by selective migration. (Legal) migration to the US is very hard, so it selects for high-IQ people.
Crowstep
10d ago
From what I understand, paternity tests can and are used in the UK in child support/custody disputes. Men can also be ordered by the Child Maintenance Service to get one. A refusal to take a test (or, one assumes, a refusal by the mother to allow her child to take one) can be taken as evidence by family courts.
The whole 'the father is whoever the state says he is, evidence be damned' seems to be a piece of Napoleonic nonsense, not a European universal.
Crowstep
12d ago
Looking at the history of it, I believe BDSM as an edifice is some kind of ersatz replacement for roles that naturally exist in straight relationships but not outside of them, and which progressivism has been doing its best to stomp out.
Louise Perry, who I find it impossible not to quote when it comes to gender discourse, suggests that the increasing popularity of BDSM is from couples who crave the natural gender polarity you would see in most societies (from hunter gatherers up to 1950s suburbia) but which has been lost in the age of the email job.
I really don't think there's significantly more young men then women who want to marry youngish and have kids
Steven Shaw has a really good metaphor to explain why a late average marriage age reduces marriage (and therefore fertility) so much. He calls it the Vitality Curve.
Imagine a dancehall that has a dance on Friday night that all the town's young people go to. The dance starts at 8 and ends at 10, so everyone turns up on time, couple up and dance for a few hours, then they go home together as couples.
Now imagine the owner extends the times from 6 to midnight. Now, there are the same number of young people, but some will arrive earlier and some will arrive later. The potential couplings that would have happened don't happen, because Mr/Miss Right was there at the wrong time.
In the first case, the average age of first marriage is around 20, in the latter it's around 30. The problem is that two young people who may be suited to eachother don't marry because they meet at the wrong time. Maybe she wants to do another degree, maybe he'd rather focus on his career. Or yes, perhaps he wants to womanise and she wants to party. In either case, because the marriageable period is about 15 years long, there's no Schelling Point, and we get a coordination problem. The marriage-minded young men and women are finding it hard to meet eachother in the sea of 'I'm not looking for something serious' and 'I bet there's a better guy on the apps'.
Crowstep
16d ago
One side has to be correct - right?
I'm not sure this follows. Democracy is meant to represent the collective will of the people, not find the correct answer to a binary question.
If 60% of the country votes for the dog party and 40% for the cat party, our conclusion should be that 60% of state pet funding should go to dogs and 40% to cats, not that cat voters should be disenfranchised because they answered 'wrongly'.
Crowstep
16d ago
Ugly Aethelred wants sex but not marriage (yet), Handsome Leofric wants sex but not marriage (yet), so why shouldn't Eadgifu pick Leofric because at least he's better SMV?
That description assumes that all men are equally commitment-phobic, which is obviously not true. The men with more options are less likely to commit, holding the attractiveness of the woman constant. Previously norms and a lack of optionality restricted men and women in such a way that they were incentivised to couple up young or be left behind. Now that those restrictions are gone, we see women who are pathologically picky and men who want to sow their wild oats and that's why everyone hates the apps.
Of course, blaming 'men' or 'women' collectively is futile. Nobody had a meeting and decided this stuff. It's an emergent property of various technologies (the pill, smartphones) and various trends (urbanisation, liberalism, secularisation) interacting and acting on individuals who follow incentives and norms that they themselves didn't set.
Crowstep
16d ago
It's a coordination problem. While an individual woman can decide that she wants to e.g. get married before having sex, the guy she wants probably won't be willing to go with that, and so will find another girlfriend. If she's super hot she might be able to drive a harder bargain, but it would still probably entail going for a less eligible guy than she would otherwise be able to get (in which case 'pickiness' would work against her goals).
That's why (relative) sexual conservatism really only works within religious subcultures. In those groups, everyone is on the same page about what is expected.
Aria has a planned post called 'Dump early, dump often' which I expect would be her way around this conundrum.
Crowstep
17d ago
I found myself similarly disappointed. Although my impression was just that it was poorly made. In the same way that CGI or fight choreography from old films is just bad compared to modern films, Jaws felt sloppy and amateurish.
Honestly, I struggle to watch films made before the 1980-90s. Comedies tend not to age well for reasons of cultural change (with notable exceptions, e.g. the Python films or Airplane!) and dramas need to have a really compelling script to allow me to forgive the fact that filmmaking was just worse back then. Maybe part of it may be my ruined modern attention span, but I think filmmaking has genuinely improved. Compare the fight scenes in Enter the Dragon to Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon; or the battle scenes in Zulu to Saving Private Ryan. Incomparable.
Crowstep
17d ago
Depends if the women in question are reading Aria Shrecker? (They should be, she's great)
The best age of man to target is probably younger than you think. I think you should focus your attention on men in their mid twenties. In my poll, the average age of men in relationships was 31, two years older than the single men, but they met their wives/girlfriends at a median age of 25. I recommend any woman 27 and younger to aim for people in their mid twenties. They are probably not thinking about marriage yet but they will be after a couple of years. And they haven’t hit their peak sexual market value yet so you can buy a great guy at a discount.
Crowstep
17d ago
The importance of looks (not just physical but also fashion) and how one might improve that (whether man or woman)
From my experience, women are pretty happy talking about how men can improve their looks/fashion for dating. It's like a fun project. They probably don't like thinking about the same for women because it could bring out their own insecurities.
The usefulness of economic concepts such as SMV and the dating market
I think for the same reason. Acknowledging that there is a dating market may mean acknowledging that her selling price is lower than she'd like.
The biological clock for having kids (more apparent for women, but men also have degrading sperm quality with age)
Kinda the same as the first too, although perhaps with an element of judgement that she has made poor choices by waiting.
I assume you're having these conversations with unmarried or childless women? My experience has been that women who are secure in their romantic situations are much more willing to speak frankly about this stuff. Me and my wife talk about the biological clocks of women we know quite a lot.
I read somewhere that Stranger Things could only have been set in the 1980s, because the 'kids on bikes having an adventure' only works if the kids are allowed outside. The decline does seem to have happened a bit later than that, but the principle is correct.
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