BANNED USER: temperamental dysregulation
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
Tell me about it.
User ID: 745
Banned by: @Amadan
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
3yr ago
Many people are getting killed in a war, many people are getting killed in a failing African state, both rates are massively contingent on factors that have little to do with severity of relative dysfunction... Comparisons with Ukraine are frustrating because they miss the truly expository part.
Starting on 10th of October 2022 (afaik), Russia has begun a campaign of missile and drone attacks on objects of Ukrainian power grid, from thermal power plants to high-power transformers, forcing local authorities to initiate rationing: industrial entities and the general public were told to limit their consumption. On 11th Oct, Ukraine (normally benefitting from Soviet-era nuclear power plants) has ceased exporting power to EU. Entire regions engaged in what Africans call «load shedding»; phased blackouts were also practiced.
This kept going on for months, with a salvo roughly once a week, as winter was setting in; and sarcastic mockery of Russian efforts gave way to rage, then to dread. In late November, the westernmost Lviv couldn't keep traffic lights and even air raid alarms on – forget amenities like water and heating and public transportation. I've seen irritated Ukrainians lash out at each other in bursts of internet activity, because they felt actual terror in their freezing, disconnected homes, or because a local civil servant has lights in his windows. At some point, virtually all of Kiev turned dark and cold, with non-functioning sewers and most of other infrastructure. You have to understand: Kiev is not some poor bumfuck nowhere from a Borat sketch, it's not even Chișinău – it's «the mother of Russian cities», a beautiful, three-million-strong, properly European, modern megapolis with fifteen centuries of history and Teslas on streets. Not only did Russia push the entire country onto the cusp of indeed being a premodern shithole, but this strategy had exhausted the pool of spare transformer parts across Europe. All this was on top of near-obliterated economy the remains of which serve the war machine, many cities leveled by artillery fire, millions of internal refugees, significant territories (with the biggest nuclear power plant in Europe among other things) occupied, and a range of other maladies.
Everyone who could, procured diesel generators – but you can't really cover a lot with diesels when a country between the size of Texas and France (or exactly like France, if we subtract the the occupied portion) loses its reliable centralized grid virtually overnight (Soviet utilities are actually quite solid so people feel safe to not prepare for them failing); and besides, Russia went after fuel depots as well; and many generators were dedicated to army needs. I did not follow it at all intently, so I am not sure if there are all that many Ukrainians who didn't have to deal with power cuts for at least a few hours almost every day for months – pessimistically for 15+ hours a day; at least no such people are known to me. A friend of mine went through building UPS units from LiFePO4 or lead-based car batteries, with my minor input; others were fiddling with candles and such; it was a whole thing, you know.
Enough – I've probably made a few mistakes already. My point is this: Ukrainian power grid was chosen as a target of priority by a belligerent wannabe superpower (such as there is), and to a large extent taken out of commission. They have fixed it by now, whereas Russia has apparently exhausted its drone and missile supply. They aren't cold, they do not have rolling blackouts and load shedding, I gather there still exist state requests to limit consumption, but – it's basically back to business as usual.
Infrastructure-wise, what is happening to South Africa as a result of its post-Apartheid politics is what Russia had failed to do to Ukraine via a full-scale war. Induced collapse of a complex society, its shattering into pockets of desperation and day-to-day survival. The country is being destroyed and reduced to the state of terminal barbarism. And unlike the case of the war, nobody will be called an Orc or held accountable here. «There is a great deal of ruin in a nation». Oh well. Shit happens.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
3yr ago
I am rather amused (and slightly embarassed) that it is my anti-feminist rants I collect AAQCs for
I know that pain. (And whoever nominated the JKR one: did you care about the
«moneylender bad» aspect, versus the «Rowling's Wizarding world inherently runs on a magical equivalent of racial biodeterminism, which makes the anti-Rowling faction not-reasonably suspect her of thoughtcrimes relevant to the real world» argument I was making?)
Having one make it in in the last minute is weird too.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
3yr ago
the claim is that women are so powerful that they have turned into little dictators who go around making unreasonable demands. This requires substantiation. What kind of unreasonable demands? So far I've been given "shut down any political project they don't like." That's a strong claim.
You are, indeed, either speaking in bad faith and thus escalate the demand for evidence as if none were provided yet and I'm just waxing lyrical about generalities (ironically validating me further), or so triggered by the sarcastic line about queens (don't you know it's a meme?) as to become unable to recognize the context of those claims.
The context of my claims about power imbalance is that the onus is consistently on men to change in all related topics where it is clear that something must be changed. E.g. when the topic is sexlessness, men must suck it up and adapt to «increased standards» in dating. When the topic is TFR, men must learn to contribute to housework, reduce their sexism (as documented by gorge) and so on.
Out of context, many of those suggestions are not terrible. In context, though, it is bad on a number of levels. Most importanly it is
a) unfair to consistently demand only one side in a democratic society to compromise, especially while presenting the other as devoid of agency and control;
b) plainly tyrannical to suppress explanations which are relatively less demeaning to men and less flattering to women, namely hypergamy with regard to dating and revealed disinterest in having a family or children; and
c) irrational to expect policies and recommendations based on models which are little more than self-serving gaslighting to actually work.
These deficiencies are exactly in line with the petty tyrant framework.
Female preference is taken as the implicit ground truth which must be acknowledged and adapted to; male preference, sometimes completely made-up (in cases where it is impossible to tie the object-level complaint to things men actually, systematically do), is presented as the root problem to be solved. The reason that such a discrepancy in discourse is possible is: shaming of pro-male voices that women collectively engage in, using rhetorics that amount to sneering, and feeling justified due to the aforementioned wishful thinking tendency where their wants and excuses are objective truths.
I'll confess to some difficulty now squaring your circle: how can someone of your background and obvious familiarity with the history of a culture that rewards filial impiety1 be comfortable endorsing a practice that is at least superficially similar in type?
Well, this cuts both ways: don't you think Pavlik's surviving relatives were justified in cutting ties with him? Regarding your footnote, I endorse this expose. I mention Pavlik here and that's probably it.
But seriously, what I endorse are technological solutions along these lines. At least 4 of the first-tier replies suggest some form of this client-side filtering. If OP's friends insist that they find it unsatisfactory, this means they're not really feeling threatened by stimuli per se, and this is intrinsically a question of exerting political power at OP's behalf, which puts their friendship into question, and makes the discussion of severing the relationship – such as there is – relevant. I won't reiterate the rest of the discussion on blackmail, whether friends make friends scrub Harry Potter off the web and such here.
Personally I violate Western best practices egregiously and comically, and avoid dropping friends regardless of political differences, psychopathy, psychiatric conditions and material conflicts of interest. It tends to work out in the long run; my loyalty is, eventually, appreciated. But I have lost friends which deemed it fit to not reciprocate this principle; and I think that's for the better. For my better, that is.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
3yr ago
I understand the concern, but I also basically agree with all object-level responses given in the thread, and seeing as multiple people have even offered reasonable life advice for the specific problem, which @prof_xi_o seemed to take at face value and appreciate, I don't agree it illustrates some major failure mode of the community.
(For the purpose of this post I shall ignore the question of his sincerity and treat this as a test of our virtues).
Ultimately there's no helping that the issue raised and its implied default solution (to wit, scrubbing mentions of that new game and JKR off the public net) are massive triggers for this sub's culture, which is biased in favor of free speech absolutism by construction and self-selection, even more so than it is biased in favor of right-wing sensibilities and disdain for weaponization of victimhood claims.
Perhaps we need to learn to not engage so... earnestly. You can notice my absence there; I've estimated that the expected marginal value of my input is below the cost of adding to the apparent dogpile, distressing OP and probably diminishing his willingness to read the already provided object-level advice charitably. Others have decided otherwise. Maybe we need to codify this heuristic into a rule (haven't we already?).
But leaving this coordination problem aside, I believe that the response was overall admirable. Some share of snark, to say nothing of downvotes, is extremely hard to avoid when irreconcilable philosophies meet; the measure of the community is whether there is still the will to engage on proposed terms, helpfully and within the bounds of polite discourse. A plurality of posts can be unreservedly described as expressing this will. This cannot be said of the average or even a high-brow community that engages in dunking on an ideological outsider.
I have been tracked down a few times actually – though all instances but the one mentioned in the last thread have taken place before I started to pay any real attention to privacy. Virtually all of those people who have succeeded became my friends, at least for a while. Guess I was more likable back then. One of them was a fledgling teenage hacker who later started working for FSB in basically the same capacity, and knows a lot about this stuff, but we haven't been in touch in a while.
I don't believe there are very clever things one can do to ensure anonymity. (Maybe LLM instances to populate correlated but misleading online identities? Style transfer? I'll use this as soon as possible though my style is... subjectively not really a writing style in the sense of some superficial gimmicks, more like the natural shape of my thought, and I can only reliably alter it by reducing complexity and quality, as opposed to any lateral change). @gattsuru gives decent advice but, aside from those technological attack surfaces, you should just understand the threat model and not share data that meaningfully narrows down one's identity. Speaking of elder gods, Terry Tao has written on this topic:
Anonymity on the internet is a very fragile thing; every anonymous online identity on this planet is only about 31 bits of information away from being completely exposed. This is because the total number of internet users on this planet is about 2 billion, or approximately 2^{31}. Initially, all one knows about an anonymous internet user is that he or she is a member of this large population, which has a Shannon entropy of about 31 bits. But each piece of new information about this identity will reduce this entropy. For instance, knowing the gender of the user will cut down the size of the population of possible candidates for the user’s identity by a factor of approximately two, thus stripping away one bit of entropy. (Actually, one loses a little less than a whole bit here, because the gender distribution of internet users is not perfectly balanced.) Similarly, any tidbit of information about the nationality, profession, marital status, location (e.g. timezone or IP address), hobbies, age, ethnicity, education level, socio-economic status, languages known, birthplace, appearance, political leaning, etc. of the user will reduce the entropy further.
One can reveal quite a few bits of information about oneself without any serious loss to one’s anonymity; for instance, if one has revealed a net of 20 independent bits of information over the lifetime of one’s online identity, this still leaves one in a crowd of about 2^{11} \sim 2000 other people, enough to still enjoy some reasonable level of anonymity. But as one approaches the threshold of 31 bits, the level of anonymity drops exponentially fast. Once one has revealed more than 31 bits, it becomes theoretically possible to deduce one’s identity, given a sufficiently comprehensive set of databases about the population of internet users and their characteristics.
Thus, in today’s online world, a crowd of billions of other people is considerably less protection for one’s anonymity than one may initially think, and just because the first 20 or 30 bits of information you reveal about yourself leads to no apparent loss of anonymity, this does not mean that the next 20 or 30 bits revealed will do so also.
Restricting access to online databases may recover a handful of bits of anonymity, but one will not return to anything close to pre-internet levels of anonymity without extremely draconian information controls. Completely discarding a previous online identity and starting afresh can reset one’s level of anonymity to near-maximum levels, but one has to be careful never to link the new identity to the old one, or else the protection gained by switching will be lost, and the information revealed by the two online identities, when combined together, may cumulatively be enough to destroy the anonymity of both.
...one additional way to gain more anonymity is through deliberate disinformation. For instance, suppose that one reveals 100 independent bits of information about oneself. Ordinarily, this would cost 100 bits of anonymity (assuming that each bit was a priori equally likely to be true or false), by cutting the number of possibilities down by a factor of 2^{100}; but if 5 of these 100 bits (chosen randomly and not revealed in advance) are deliberately falsified, then the number of possibilities increases again by a factor of \binom{100}{5} \approx 2^{26}, recovering about 26 bits of anonymity. In practice one gains even more anonymity than this, because to dispel the disinformation one needs to solve a satisfiability problem, which can be notoriously intractible computationally, although this additional protection may dissipate with time as algorithms improve (e.g. by incorporating ideas from compressed sensing).
We've moved past compressed sensing, of course.
I wonder if this was a purely theoretical musing, a good-faith advice, or a hint that Fields laureates, too, have opinions to hide and shitposts to send. «On the internet, nobody knows you're a Tao».
I agree with this nosology; she's a science communication major, a trained disinformation expert, so can probably recite her Boaz (and Gould, and Lewontin...) if woken in the dead of night.
But to be clear, her retort in the context of specific metrics mentioned in her tweet is plainly false, and would fail even against arg_P so long as it's prefixed with «almost». There isn't more variation within sexes than between sexes in terms of strength, as pointed out in comments and QTs. Racial IQ diffs have nothing on intersexual strength diffs. Effectively all men are stronger than effectively all women of the same age, or indeed of any age. Height difference is also greater than within-sex variance. This is obvious from everyday life, stuff like walking through a crowd, or reaching for a pickle jar and opening it for your mom/sis/gf/wife, and in my opinion shouldn't require citing any PrOoFs to be trusted; buy Razib Khan, in a now-deleted thread, says modern biologists are surprised and incredulous when they encounter this notion. I suppose gorillas are even more dimorphic than humans, and in more ways, including some neat features of cranial morphology (appreciated by anthropologists who work with bones so much, they sometimes forget about the rest of organism), but that's neither here nor there. Some sympathetic commenters squeal about «bone nerd stuff» being fascinating; in my opinion this willful ignorance of the context isn't cute, this is turning science into worse than stamp collecting, into playing house, and one more reason to be critical of female participation in traditionally male occupations like biological research. This cheeky girls-playing-house stuff is killing the whole field. I've known many competent female researchers and lab heads, and they are able to compete with men without any crutches, not particularly tolerant of such profanation, nor fond of science popularizers who have flunked out of academia. It feels like in the West it's much more tolerated.
But I digress. Lewontin's argument/fallacy does not really point at any phenotypic evidence, it amounts to saying that since genetic variance is (ostensibly) distributed in the claimed manner within and between races, it is facile to classify people by race as if that were a natural unit. It is bad in its own ways, but not so obviously stupid and false.
and suggesting taking away rights far more fundamental than a right to single-sex spaces
This is a lie, as you know. I have not advocated disenfranchisement of women, yet you have already started gossiping to this effect; I believe that the change, as implemented, was a bad idea, but now this is a moot point (in the footnote, I add that there may be no workable political regime anyway). I have not proposed granting me control over pregnancies either, yet you feel free to insinuate this. Inasmuch as I have spoken of conscionable (but still unworkable) solutions, those were a) the artificial womb project, b) social engineering in the manner of Israelis. Perhaps some watered-down incentive structure along 2rafa's lines is also worth discussing, but my overall point is that it effectively entails big reductions in freedom of women, in the name of a natalist, clearly «patriarchal» objective, so it is politically unfeasible; its gender-neutrality is not that relevant. I concede that a substantial proportion of men will also oppose it out of self-interest.
"I love the indignation here," you write.
Yes. In response to what? But perhaps the gravity of your accusation is lost on you; as well as the cause for my sarcasm.
Sure, I'm not being exceedingly courteous to you here. But I think I'm being courteous enough.
EDIT @f3zinker has helpfully reminded me that in another conversation I have indeed written down some concrete proposals, though they, too, are not politically realistic (premised on having authoritarian power to begin with). You can debate them if you wish.
\3) The universal tendency (demonstrated in this video) of women to engage in NAXALT/AXALT: Not all X are like that, All X are like that, or more precisely, to ignore a distribution to justify an outlier, or to use an outlier in order to falsify a distribution.
Yes, I am very strongly convinced that women have a stronger predisposition to wishful thinking, though of course men are not safe from it either, as my text implies («even less interested in object-level constraints than men»). It's based on repeatedly encountered cases like this, though I admit not having any systematic evidence at hand in favor.
Still a bit light on the details. Are you too afraid of my mean-girl power to explain
Well, as luck would have it, you provide details. E.g. this idea that you don't have to justify or spell out your own object-level ideas, instead moving from a sneer to another clever sneer, humorously nitpicking, questioning me and expecting some mealy-mouthed excuses to mock – this is, in itself, an attitude of a person used to wielding social power, to meting out rewards and threats. In fact you have started with accusatory questions and assumptions:
The question of whether we are going to gestate an entire baby with all the physical and mental changes that implies? Well, if you think that you should have control over that...
This is and remains sufficient, a catty snipe men do not receive well from each other, and in many other places a heavy, dangerous accusation.
As for men's rights, MRAs have their lists of complaints available on the web. If you are curious, you can find them. My point, however, is not men's rights, but the mode of engagement you presume permissible for yourself, because it is – for a woman, as I've been saying.
If I were to name one right I personally think is missing, that'd be general legal recognition of men-only spaces, i.e. not spaces which women aren't interested in entering because of their perceived low status, but ones they are not allowed into – precisely to avoid this kind of petty bullshit, and also to not ruin some nice hobbies and traditions. Boy Scouts, MTG, Compagnons, old clubs.
For some reason feminists are very hostile to the notion.
But yeah, let's go with me being too afraid. Rather, let's say I am exhausted. Women tend to think this such words make a good argument, so I assume you wouldn't think this an unfair move.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
3yr ago
I think I explain it well enough. I can try to explain again from first principles. Power is asymmetry of control between agents. Power of women specifically is the power to tank any political project they don't like (say, one increasing men's rights) and shut down a discussion they don't favor (say, one casting women in unflattering light) with a gratuitous refusal to compromise or engage in good faith; the essence of this is captured in twitter catchphrases like «this makes me feel unsafe», or in your behavior toward me here. It is power because it reliably, irrespective of merits of each case, extracts sympathy out of women and out of men, producing a predictable asymmetry and skewing outcomes. This power is an active application of the well-known "women are wonderful" effect, which is in turn explained by evolutionary dynamics created by parental investment inequality, which you have already alluded to (but which, in modern society, doesn't necessarily hold outside of the context of gestation).
The premise of my «misogyny», or actually my argument about there being no realistic solution to undesirable societal effects of feminism, is that women (except members of retrograde religious societies), with you being an apt example, feel entitled to behave this way toward interlocutors, for good reason, namely that «the society» simultaneously encourages this self-serving mean-girl behavior and pretends it's compatible with the authority of an adult.
I will opt out of substantiating the link between feminism and adverse effects discussed (disproportionate, growing inability of young men to form relationships, high divorce rate, low TFR, etc.) because, again, I think the effortpost by @gorge, linked above, suffices as an introduction.
If I were to propose anything like a plan to «impose responsibility» on women in the intended sense, it'd be not so much about me being in control of your womb, «sex for meat» and other blatantly hostile potshots you ladies have come up with, as about nationalism and extended families, in following with the only example of a large, prosperous secular society without those issues that I know. Naturally I also know this cannot be engineered. 2rafa's plan, on top of being hardcore, is also unworkable, at least not in a democratic society.
I also know some working class men, some of whom have problems finding a mate. All of them are either obese or have severely lacking social skills, both those problems could be solved with maybe a year of consistent effort. I don't know any man that has no glaring problems and wants a long term relationship with a (any) woman but can't find one. Sometimes it looks like that but on closer inspection it always turns out that they are shopping above their price range so to speak.
Now what does this reminds me of... Oh right, Scott's Annus Mirabilis.
According to Gallup polls, about 46% of Americans are creationists. Not just in the sense of believing God helped guide evolution. I mean they think evolution is a vile atheist lie and God created humans exactly as they exist right now. That’s half the country.
And I don’t have a single one of those people in my social circle. It’s not because I’m deliberately avoiding them; I’m pretty live-and-let-live politically, I wouldn’t ostracize someone just for some weird beliefs. And yet, even though I probably know about a hundred fifty people, I am pretty confident that not one of them is creationist. Odds of this happening by chance? 1/2^150 = 1/10^45 = approximately the chance of picking a particular atom if you are randomly selecting among all the atoms on Earth.
Now in 2023, according to Pew Research cited by OP already,
among men under 30 years old, over 60 percent are single, almost double that of women in the same age bracket. Not only are more young men single but their opportunities for developing a relational and sexual repertoire have all but vanished, as levels of sexual intimacy across genders appear to have hit a 30-year low (Lei & South, 2021).
You must be in a fortunate bubble indeed, to now not know of any among those 60% who aren't obese, autists, basket cases or aiming way above their level!
The explanation, shifting midway from male withdrawal to increased standards (because of the pandemic, bizarrely) and the solution offered, are pretty cool:
As young women continued to pursue intimate relationships less intently post-pandemic, men could have increased their relationship skills to close the effort gap. They could have confronted their relative avoidance and challenged the gender norms that made them so anxious about intimacy. They appear to have done the opposite, turning even further away from real-life relationships and into the virtual world. [...] The good news is that all of these young single men can choose differently. They can choose to focus on developing the necessary relationship skills to be more successful in dating. It starts with re-prioritizing the development of close, intimate relationships in their life for their own well-being and as a counterbalance to the shift in priorities for women. They must do this to reach their fullest potential whether or not they have had great male role models illustrating these efforts. By no means will dating in 2023 be an emotionally painless process, particularly for heterosexual men who are attempting to date women. Rejection may be a far more common result given competitiveness and higher relationship standards. Therefore, young men must be inoculated to avoidance in their dating life by normalizing women’s selectiveness.
My toy model of this issue and its discussion is very primitive. Standards really are rising quickly, and roughly 30% of marriage-age men are now, for all intents and purposes, incels. (This checks out, in my experience: even fit, okay-looking, psychologically stable guys with degrees and high-percentile (80-95ish) incomes often cannot find a 5/10 woman for a long-term relationship who isn't (physically) dangerously psychotic, a drug addict, an insufferable whore, or otherwise critically compromised). Men in the lower half of the distribution who are still viable begin to feel the pressure, and so double down in all usual tactics: «improving relationship skills» (which in practice means either deluded male feminist antics or PUA-like bullshit), distancing themselves from incels, ostentatiously signaling that they are «not like that» and have no problem scoring, then moving on to intense bodybuilding, shoe lifts, cosmetic surgery, TRT... As a result, everyone is awash in gaslighting. Normie men who feel they still have a chance will never admit that they may not have it tomorrow, because this in itself feels like diminishing their chances.
What has changed was the passing grade, but men are graded on a curve, so in effect the proportion of rejects has increased permanently. This rat race is pathetic and unsustainable, as are copes.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
3yr ago
Queens of what?
Beats me. Maybe queens of slay. Like all such popular slogans expressing the feminist ideal of limitless empowerment, I find it ridiculous, a facet of a promise that is unwarrantable at scale, and inevitably leads to disillusionment and personal failure.
Well, if you think that you should have control over that
I love the indignation here. Indeed, who am I to dare think... think what? It's very quickly traced from the underdefined abstract claim («women should accept responsibility for the reproduction of the group») to the specific attack on personal agency, indeed an assault: that @gemmaem should be forced to bear a baby. (Probably my baby? Some incel's baby? Yuck!) @FarNearEverywhere, to whom I was responding, offers another charming strawman:
it's so unfair! women have all the power! they should lose all their rights and be forced back to the days of exchanging sex for meat so that men can have a fuckdoll of their own at home for their own exclusive use!
What to do! When one side has a game-breaking move «act as if you are afraid of rape», burned into the brainstem and summoned frivolously – no discourse is possible.
My intuitive ideal is maximum agency and optionality for every individual that the society can sustain, in terms of actual material opportunities and not bickering over spoils in a zero-sum squabble. Honestly, if it were possible, I'd have relieved you, and everyone else, of the necessity to gestate an entire baby (or part of a baby, I guess). But surprisingly, women aren't too enthusiastic about artificial womb research either, despite attempts to frame it as an empowering development. Imagine if I suggested that, say, @2rafa's list, admittedly uncomfortably hardcore even for me, is augmented as follows: childless people who are otherwise subject to those career-damaging sanctions and prohibitive taxes can instead 1) postpone their reproduction, 2) pay directly to the «national ectogenesis fund» and 3) commit to have a child once the technology is ready. Men and women alike.
Do you think this would've been politically feasible?
And thanks for another illustration.
So do you think we would be better with a complete break between the idea of relationships and the idea of what it really comes down to - the feminist critique of marriage being "exchanging sex for meat"?
I believe that relationships do not «really» come down to that, and haven't in a long while, at least two generations or so: the feminist critique is delusional, exploitative and made in bad faith. Mind you, I come from a society where «patriarchy» has been dead for four generations at least, but I think the principle holds.
More importantly I argue that women have trouble with good faith in general, and we (defined as «people who are good-faith, self-aware actors discussing this issue») need to acknowledge that the main problem is the impossibility of convincing (at any politically relevant scale) women in modern societies that the ball is in their court, and fixing those lesser intersexual problems – TFR, sexlessness, relationships, marriages, divorces, whatever – necessitates either a rollback of feminism, or directly burdening women with specific responsibilities they currently do not bear. Maybe men too, but women – absolutely.
This root problem expresses itself in the form of literally all remedies that make it to mainstream discussion being premised on women rationally reacting to circumstances imposed on them, and men being ignorant and/or actively making things worse. One side receives maximum charity, the other is given, frankly, a very imaginative treatment. Women, we are told, are worried about costs of living and stagnant wages, career opportunities and iniquities; men give up on marriage, selfishly play vidya, voluntarily join alpha male incel organizations. As a consequence, all proposed remedies amount to convincing men to stop being such horrible manchildren, and redistributing some more resources and political prestige to women; there are edge cases like extending paternity leave, but they address practically irrelevant scenarios. This is a paradigm which follows from the impenetrable female assumption of innocent victimhood and – ironically – delusion of being an object acted upon by external [male] forces, not a subject possessing power and burdened with responsibility for the status quo. Democracy only makes sense among subjects who are and acknowledge being this way.
Women have their own thing, they enjoy working and status that way.
Antidepressant prescription statistics and palpable increase in mental illness among millennial women point in the direction of them not really enjoying the status quo, but okay.
if men want sex they don't bother with dates or relationships, they patronise sex workers where the transaction is overt and there is no confusion about who does what or pays for what
I suppose that happens. We can leave aside for now the question of the sort of relationships practiced by women who are sex workers (i.e. OnlyFans models). What do you think happens when men want committed relationships, not «fuck dolls», but cannot get it because they're deemed not good enough by the «sexual market»? They are too lazy/stupid/infantile to dress up and shave and get a job, right. And also, too entitled to aim lower and go for the fat/old/homely/crazy chick, if I remember your previous posts correctly. There is someone for everyone; opting out of the deal is on men, the infamously choosy and needy sex (cue «attractiveness rating distributions» meme). That is, they make the unreasonable choice and sabotage themselves (and the whole of society while they're at it), while women merely act according to the situation.
Thanks for the illustration of the principle.
You know, the discussion here, including your responses, has inspired me to write a... powerologist post, one could say. But it's a third-rate idea, so here goes the sketch:
Ability to publicly make unreasonable demands is the measure of social power
«Power corrupts; absolute power corrupts absolutely» – they say. What does absolute power look like, and the absolute corruption? The common trope is a petty, deluded tyrant who demands implausible efforts from his underlings – and punishes them for understandable failures, casually taking out his irritation. Someone too egocentric to conceive of limits to servitude other than obedience; someone who has either dispensed with empathy, caution and rationality necessary at the stage of gaining loyal followers and acquiring power, or has been born into it. A cartoonish psychopath; a pampered brat from a rich family, abusing terrified servants; a third-rate dictator sending waves of human flesh into the high-tech grinder and lashing out at his peons when this doesn't produce the desired victory. Or the Emperor's demanding consort in a Chinese drama.
I think this is the natural state of mature power that has hit its apparent ceiling, the greedy exploitative mode – that thing which the intelligent will-to-power we know in ambitious politicians, warlords and startup CEOs decays into. And in a world where all women are queens by political fiat, all women are born into power, thus – all will be absolutely corrupted and not amenable to persuasion.
Then again, as @2rafa points out, all this may be just irrelevant in the world of short timelines, or relevant but not enough to be worth spending my time or my weirdness credit on.
As per the book, he was a straightforward pedophile, and over generations, posthuman characters reasoned their way to a (barely) functional social arrangement approximating some Russian features (parodied by the book, on one of its levels) by erecting abstractions and esoteric readings on top of his laptop's contents.
But Krylov himself was intimately acquainted with 2ch/4chan culture, of course. There is a well-developed Equestria-equivalent domain, for one thing. Really it's a masterpiece. Very uneven, very rushed, deliberately trashy, smarter than virtually all of Western fiction.
It was dark and smelt of smoke. There was a rotten incense sticking out of the cresset, and fine white ash floating in a bowl of water underneath it. The cat found another nearby, put it in the cresset and lit it with his left laser. The flickering flame somewhat moved the darkness aside. It didn't go far, though, but at least he could see the walls – uneven, dark. A huge chest, blackened by age, on the left side of the door, was almost entirely occupied by a massive rusty padlock. Above the chest hung an icon from the «Daughter-Mother With Nipples» series. The cat looked at the icon with interest: as far as he knew, such images were considered too old by most pedbears. Apparently, the landlord belonged to a rare Universal-Orthodox branch of the Cathedral Cult, which regarded all files from the Dead Man's Chest as equal and only variously revealing facets of the Eternal Image.
Some notes from the thesaurus accompanying the trilogy (a ton of context is missed with such shabby translation, sorry about that):
DAUGHTER-MOTHER. In the Land of Fools, the central object of the universal Cathedral cult, the standard of holiness. The origin of the image of Daughter-Mother is not entirely clear. The most common hypothesis is that it is the fusion of at least three ancient human cults - the patriotic cult of the Motherland Calling, the criminal cult of Mama Dear and the anti-fascist cult of the Tajik Girl. Very little is known about all these religious teachings.
"Too old" (eng.) is a popular mantra among the pedbears. Symbolizes disillusionment with decrepit worldly values and contrasts them with pure service to the Daughter-Mother. In colloquial speech, it is something like "long out of date", "banal and trite", "not worthy of attention", "let's not talk about it anymore", etc.
PEDOBEAR, PEDVED. An artificial A-base combining bear, elephant and other genes. Legend has it that it was created in the Directory at the behest of authority figures in the Land of Fools. Pedobears are bred as a caste of clergy supporting the Cathedral Cult of the Daughter-Mother.
Virtually all Pedveds are Kalushians, for although they possess sexual organs, they do not reproduce naturally, due to the sublimation of all thoughts for the holy image of the Daughter-Mother. However, they have surnames, with the knowledge of which pedobears are born. Usually the surname is related to a so-called honourable disease, which the pedobear will suffer in his or her advanced years in the name of the Daughter-Mother. The most common surnames are Asthmatics, Hypertensives and Prostatics. Prostatics are considered to be a particularly distinct genus, the highest pedobears are usually Prostatics.
For reasons unknown, Pedobears consider themselves to be Greeks. What they mean by this is unclear.
What i always found frustrating with the mainstream progressive view of this matter is that they seem hell bent on blaming Men for this problem.
Nothing new, we've been discussing this a lot recently. Like I said the last time: «The notion that men can be genuinely not guilty of some failure relating to relations of sexes – whether to score or to sire – is about as far outside the Overton window as HBD. ... [from the progressive point of view] It can't be that the solution lies in any conceivable change to female behavior, except even more emancipation, even greater triumph over toxic masculinity.» A small update:
CNN reports on South Korea breaking its own record for world’s lowest fertility rate:
The national statistics body reported Wednesday that the fertility rate, or the average number of children expected per woman, fell to 0.78 in 2022 – down from 0.81 the previous year.
South Korea’s birth rate has been falling since 2015 and the country recorded more deaths than births for the first time in 2020, a trend that has continued since.
In 2022, the country recorded about 249,000 births and 372,800 deaths.
Experts say the reasons for these demographic shifts across the region include demanding work cultures, stagnating wages, rising costs of living, changing attitudes toward marriage and gender equality, and rising disillusionment among younger generations.
But despite the economic factors at play, throwing money at the problem has proved ineffective. Last September, South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol admitted that more than $200 billion has been spent trying to boost the population over the past 16 years.
The South Korean government has introduced various initiatives such as extending paid paternity leave, offering monetary “baby vouchers” to new parents, and social campaigns encouraging men to contribute to childcare and housework.
But experts and residents say more support is needed throughout a child’s life – as well as change on several deep-rooted social issues. For instance, South Korean society still frowns on single parents, with IVF treatment not available to single women.
Couples in non-traditional partnerships also face discrimination; South Korea does not recognize same-sex marriage and regulations make it difficult for unwed couples to adopt.
I believe these stupid remedies can only change things at the margins (at best; how many lesbian Korean couples do you think will have more than 1 child? how many even are there?), will flop, and South Korean nation will continue to age and die off, at the annual rate of 0.23% now, 0.75% in two decades. This effortpost by @gorge suffices to show that doubling down on feminism to solve this is an implausible tactic which can only convince people who would advocate feminism and broader progressivism in response to any problem from high interest rates to unaligned AI. But what is not clear is: how many of those suggestions are made by women? Or by men keeping emotional reactions of unserious women in mind when they do analysis? I think the answer is «most if not all».
Peter Thiel has opined once to the effect that female enfranchisement has made capitalist democracy impossible. He later defended himself with a series of excuses about the specificity of his complaint, but I think it does make democracy non-viable in many other senses too. Indeed I believe that democracy, as commonly implemented, only works in the first place with very specific samples of mostly Western populations; it's an exception, not the rule.*
The problem here is that democracy is largely about bargaining, and women – speaking in generalities, of course – bargain in all markets with the assumption that they can get the price down to zero, if not for the greed of the other party. They are even less interested in object-level constraints than men; they insist that their preferred arrangement is objectively fair and true even when it's clearly no longer viable, and will shoot down any arrangement that includes what they understand as redistributing some of their powers back to men; and they will demand of men to aid them in shooting it down; and men will be proud to assist, because being of use to women is the measure of their worth. Ultimately this is just a product of what Doolittle calls female magical thinking:
Causes and Evidence of Female "Magical Thinking"
THE SCIENCE:
\1) Conflating what they wish for with what is and what is possible.
\2) The general tendency of women to confuse what is Desirable/Undesirable with what is True/False. Or, more directly, stating their wants are truths of the world, rather than just wants of their own.
\3) The universal tendency (demonstrated in this video) of women to engage in NAXALT/AXALT: Not all X are like that, All X are like that, or more precisely, to ignore a distribution to justify an outlier, or to use an outlier in order to falsify a distribution.
These --XALTs are both forms of denial. In other words (get ready) the woman's cognition evolves to justify her feelings and NOT adapt to existential reality.
Why? They are exporting satisfaction of their emotional demands onto others: MEN. (Yes really).
This is the science, and it's exasperating. Why? We no longer use older sisters, mothers, grandmothers, and aunts to cause women to self-regulate their magical thinking.
And their magical thinking evolved in order to generate demand from men to satisfy them .... in exchange for affection and sex. Sorry. :(
Yes, I cringe at his presentation as well. We don't get to have our edgelords obsessed with reiterating copybook headings be smooth communicators: all such people are safely employed at fitting unworkable but politically attractive solutions into powerpoint presentations.
But perhaps I'd not have cringed so hard if I were even less concerned about women rolling their eyes.
It's hard to say what the solution could even look like. Doolittle gestures in the direction of older women who used to throw some cold water on the delusion of girls, keeping the tendency of demand inflation in check. I suppose this is the sort of cultural ability that is non-recoverable once it's been lost.
* This isn't to say that e.g. authoritarianism works «better» elsewhere, in whatever meaning of the word. It may be that many societies are in terminal decline, like a human with multiple organ failure, and have no workable regime option to save themselves. Their democracies will result in inane populism, either progressive or reactionary, and their reactionary populism will bring forth a literally catastrophically incompetent rule – like Turks have recently learned, perhaps to a good effect we'll see in May elections, perhaps to no avail.
“Look, man, do you want to be able to keep 80% of your tradition, or do you want to keep none of it?
“Look, Joseph, do you want 80% of your grandfather to survive, or do you want to keep none of him?” – asks Dio's head from atop a possessed body.
Or put another way: the classical lesson of zombie movies, and many other horrors, is «this is not your mom». Characters who fail to strike down the contagious reanimated corpse get bitten and turned as well. This is, of course, yet another piece of cultural commentary one struggles to speak aloud. Maybe a building block for a more healthy tradition as well. Maybe if your mythologized past had been taken from you, new fiction is the best replacement you can get – just gotta spin it right. And anything can be spun whichever way, provided you have time and your spin doctors are good enough: Krylov's «The Golden Key» depicts a whole post-apocalyptic posthuman civilization built on the basis of the only surviving data source, that is, a single corrupt Russian MP's laptop hard drive – with the intricate, humane religion of «Daughter-Mother», its «icons» meditated upon by chaste «Pedobear monks». Naturally, going downhill is much easier.
Tradition is a means to an end, a set of solutions for which we have forgotten the problems. You say «usable past», but – usable to whom? Considering the kind of involvement we see –to the side sensitivity readers represent, evidently; they and their employees aren't doing charity for the nostalgic Red tribe. Usable for what purpose, then? To carry on some nebulous ancestral legacy? Or to pacify the suspicious pagans with hollowed-out symbols and rituals, as you solidify the power of your true Church that shall give their lives and deaths a whole new meaning, one where these beloved holy days celebrate not their tribe's deities, lineage and land, but a certain Palestinian God whose grave they shall conquer?
Perhaps this past and this tradition are now useless to heirs of those who had built both, and their ancestors would have endorsed oblivion for their work rather than suffer it being defiled and repurposed; perhaps the risk of the sense of familiarity and reliability being used as a backdoor is much greater than the value of whatever original lesson remains. A prohibited book, at least, may become a touchstone for an underground cult (though I wouldn't recommend Ian Fleming in this capacity). But you won't get back to a sacred Celtic grove or whatever from a Christmas tree farm.
Now all of this is admittedly distant from the specific question of woke edits in brainless entertainment. Catholics with their Latin Mass, discussed here, have more of a case, but even then it's unclear what exactly of substance is being preserved or tarnished; we are already quite distant from any premodern tradition that serves its purpose and is understood as such, instead of simply being fetishized. In any event, the reaction of reactionaries follows from a very reasonable prior: do not let your enemies edit your source code. Not even comments.
I think it was true then and is true now, at the margins at least. Elites of revolutionary movements were highly intelligent, but they relied on a great number of deceived fools: peasants, workers, soldiers, lumpens.
The stratification has been going on for centuries, so children of upper classes have higher IQs, pass more complex Piaget tasks at earlier ages, and crucially more often have the temperament to deal with nuance. For all the improvement in social mobility, the cultural efflorescence fell short of expectations, with a great deal of accomplishment still carried by descendants of pre-egalitarian elites, middle classes, gentry. Evidence against this belief is usually circular – commoners like X, but we are all commoners now, so the consensus is that X is every bit as good as some elitist Y, or indeed much better.
Meanwhile in Russia, where actual Leninism took place, culture was practically erased together with a few percent of hereditarily advantaged population. I believe they sincerely thought that they'll be able to replace them with people of the correct proletarian descent and some schooling.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
3yr ago
I get the feeling you wanted to rant about this stuff for a while, and used NATO tweet as a mere springboard. Okay, we've all been there, but it's not a great idea, because it's hard to engage with the meat of your argument with the subject matter still dangling in front.
I don't see what the horse-faced people or whatever have to do with it.
Just so you know, people – normal people, sometimes even smart ones – like this stuff. Avengers, Avatar, Harry Potter, Star Wars (even today's wannabe gopnik wears a Marvel T-shirt instead of Abibas, and buys his chick a counterfeit Baby Yoda for 8th of March). Videogames, movies, cartoons. More importantly, they know that everyone else likes or at least knows it, so it occupies the same niche as the Bible did for commoners in previous generations, or «the Western canon» did for intellectuals, or myths did for the ancients: it's a common inventory of archetypes and references. They cite its images and ideas, such as there are, completely unironically (if this fills you with dread, good: it should), and when institutions like NATO speak the same language, they are being at once pragmatic and democratic. Heck, the ostensibly brilliant rationalist community, of which we are an offshoot, is largely built around schlocky ratfics written by artistically inept nerds (okay, Wales is fine), chiefly a massive Harry Potter deconstruction by Big Yud (@ratboygenius, thanks, this is why I write). The modern culture is a culture of grown-up middle schoolers who have no meaningful rites of transition to adulthood, and the cultural power of your theatre kids is more a symptom than a cause.
Adding to that, Ukrainians (and as @Stefferi notes, that line comes from a Ukrainian guy) are just simple to a fault, so they mean it literally. Many Western far-righters, obsessed with the outgroup, pattern-match them to derealized current-thing-emoji Twitterati who support Ukraine, and very-online Russian influencers (as well as pretty, politically active young Ukrainian women mingling with the former crowd) are only too happy to confirm that impression, but it's mistaken. Ukrainian attitude is not from American middle school, it's more of a premodern innocence. «We are Warriors of Light guarding the gates of Europe, our enemies are Orcs, what's your problem, you piece of shit? Try me!» They don't like to overcomplicate things, like Russians do, do not stake their seriousness on big boy symbols of higher-class prestige (that's some Imperial crap!), and they suspect that self-awareness beyond the level of common sense, where it's sufficient to check if your shoelaces are tied and your fly is zipped, is either a sign of mental illness or some cringe Moskal psyop. Though, for all my condescension, I admit that pontificating on galaxy-brain matters with your fly open and slightly drunk, like Russians do, is surely worse.
The ex-advisor Arestovych, himself a fruity theatre kid par excellence and a person of unmistakably Russian intelligentsia culture (come to think of it, Zelensky is too), said in 2020:
[...] an average Ukrainian is an ideal victim of informational-semantic war. All connections in the brain are severed – causal, semantic, symbolic etc., so he's amenable to suggestion. There's an ideal gas instead of a brain: you bring a magnet to it, a dog, or Kyva, or someone else; you loom up with a meme, as we did with the blue lamp in our childhoods, and atoms of that gas, attracted, rush in that direction, stay there for a while, then rush back. From the point of view of a person dabbling in psychology it's a very edifying view. [...] Let's clarify. Information war is the war to occupy some position in the existing worldview. For example, if I as a political marketing consultant do not like your position, I try to move it somewhere. Whereas the semantic war is the war for symbols, myths and, in other words, for the possibility of creating that very worldview. The war which the professional in this question, and simultaneously the head of President Putin's Administration, calls «the war for the right to call things by their names».
Perplexingly, he means Vaino, a veritable retard who has not said anything cogent in his life. Dugin, meanwhile, wrote like 28 books in his series «Noomakhia, wars of the mind» on this topic; if there were a community of culture war scholars, I imagine its abridged version would be mandatory reading. The point of the semantic war or Noomakhia, in respect to mainstream media, is that the repertoire is loaded with premises. Say, when people's very language for discussing libertarianism and naming things pertaining to it is informed by Bioshock, you can tell their conclusions in advance (and observe it any time libertarianism is discussed within earshot of the mainstream public). Likewise for eugenics and Gattaca. Likewise for any other cultural touchstone. Avengers assemble to defeat an idealistic tyrant who threatens their zany status quo. Na'vi embrace degrowth and renounce industrial capitalism. For Ukrainians right now, only the most crude reading matters, but it's a package deal in the long run.
Arestovych goes on to speculate on four possible Ukrainian projects, mistakenly conflated into two: Nationalistic and European, and Russian and Soviet respectively. It's a shame actual Russian politics is below the level of a fruity theatre kid, and there is no positive project to offer that could challenge Hollywood propaganda. Hell, they can't even make use of it like this troll suggests.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
3yr ago
I just don't want to touch emacs with a ten-foot pole. Last I tried, even the most «user-friendly» setups of Emacs+org-mode felt flaky, slow to start, and plain ugly – bad at handling multimedia, bad at rendering, bad even at smooth scrolling, with a lot of dicking around .emacs to get anything done well. It was clear that I need to dig into Emacs Lisp and build my tools from the ground up. I also don't like the concept of buffers and frames as separate from tabs and windows; it makes sense in the context of programming, but I seriously don't need an IDE in a pure note-taking tool.
If you like emacs, you definitely should use org mode. It is conceptually elegant and of course open source. Even core features of org mode like the agenda view are very good, AFAIK impossible to replicate in Obsidian (to some extent possible in Notion), and I know that's only scratching the surface.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
3yr ago
I find Obsidian very comfy because I came to it after (simplifying the story) written diaries, small-time markdown note apps, Onenote (nice but when you try to automate anything or do anything nontrivial or interact with other non-Office programs, uh...) and Emacs Org Mode (allows for near-total freedom, gwern swears by it, and it was a helpful reminder that I'm no gwern; also that many GNU/Linux enthusiasts are, just like their Messiah, fetishistic, self-absorbed clowns who cannot fix obvious flaws because their pride depends on their sad little turfs in the opensource community). Obsidian is especially good because you don't have to learn a massive system to begin getting benefits – you can start with a barebones note dump, using only search to move around, and add features every time you feel some constraint. Built-in search is enough (Omnisearch plugin when it's not).
There's a wealth of information on Obsidian – youtube gurus, beginner guides, telegram chats. Like with Stable Diffusion, I used to follow the roundup but have fallen behind «the community». Plus my default assumption is that such things – PKM/GTD/journaling tools – are prone to degenerate into regimes of procrastination they are supposed to prevent, and beget incestuous competitive/exhibitionist subcultures on par with desktop ricing. Better to suffer the defaults than to allow oneself to slip into this failure mode.
Daily notes seem to be solved for me – Periodic notes + Calendar create them on demand, you just need to specify a daily and weekly template. For me it's
## {{date}} –
**Mission:**
## Day Planner
### day
- [ ] 8:45 [russian gibberish]
### evening
- same
### Wind down
-same
---
### Bonus
## Chronicle
#Dream
## Reading
1.
## Writing
1.
and
# {{date:YYYY – ww}}
[tables with various categories for weekly summary, such as biomedical stats, finances, epic fails, extraordinary events]
![[{{sunday:YYYY-MM-DD dddd}}]]
![[{{monday:YYYY-MM-DD dddd}}]]
![[{{tuesday:YYYY-MM-DD dddd}}]]
![[{{wednesday:YYYY-MM-DD dddd}}]]
![[{{thursday:YYYY-MM-DD dddd}}]]
![[{{friday:YYYY-MM-DD dddd}}]]
![[{{saturday:YYYY-MM-DD dddd}}]]
It's all stored in one folder, namely Obsidian-diary. Take care to use compatible date ISO standards, ideally the same as in your system. It's a bit wonky.
My needs for adding notes are covered by QuickAdd plugin plus a few templates.
Choose a sane hotkey arrangement. I recommend plugin «hotkeys for starred files and searches», just star some high-level files (or canvases, now that this is a thing) like Inbox, Workbench, Library, Agenda, Projects or whatever to quickly navigate to them.
I don't use google drive so not sure what your use case is, but surely many people do.
As I said up thread I ran this test almost a month ago now and the responses I've gotten each time each time the topic comes up has been something to the effect of "who you going to believe, our apocalyptic rhetoric or your lying eyes?"
Understandable. I believe my eyes over your lies. I also share visible evidence, which apparently does not suffice to break you out of a loop where you blindly insist on a falsehood and pat yourself on the back for your straight-shooting. You seem to have committed to reduce yourself to a broken record that could as well be implemented with an obsolete Markov chain bot, but this is not my problem.
Actually it kind of is. Every time I observe such a failure to make use of human freedom under the shackles of pride, it feels like witnessing death. @FCfromSSC has mentioned my old frustration recently, but this is that taken to the limit. Oh well – people are mortal. In such a way too. That, too, is why I am an immortalist of the Cosmist bent. If I were an actual fancy materialist post-Christian sectarian like Fyodorov, this would've sent me on a rant as to how mortal sins, and particularly pride, are literally mortal, transgressions against the will to perfection allowed to us by our creator which is the essence of our soul and our potentially eternal life. A finite state machine cannot meaningfully partake of eternity, you see, precisely because its repertoire of possible states is fixed, and in this case fixed from the inside. In that same sense I could say that the Christian or in fact neo-Platonist idea that «God is Truth» must be understood literally, as a metaphysical position. But that'd be corny. Or not? ...Maybe for another time.
True statements can be used to mislead just as readily if not more so than fabrications. What does "honesty" and "the truth" even mean to you?
Miss me with this postmodernist shit. If this has to be explained, there's no point to bother explaining. It's an instinct. I believe that truth is the cognitive equivalent of a fact, and honesty is conveying one's best effort at understanding a given issue accurately, i.e. sharing truth. But of course one can obnoxiously nitpick at definitions of every word, and every step of the pipeline can be in some way surreptitiously distorted by one's biases. We have simple words, commonly agreed terms and formal logic to try and adjudicate uncertainties, but it's impossible to so easily defeat bad faith, lack of trust and irreconcilable high-level assumptions.
I have explained my understanding of the issue as well as I could for the moment, and illustrated it with evidence that has led me there. My understanding seems to be more grounded in evidence than yours, and the specific evidence provided is strictly incompatible with your previous assertions. This doesn't appear to be of any interest to you, because it does not even affect the your rhetoric. Hence I conclude that you are either a liar or someone otherwise incapable of participating in a honest discussion, such as a person without a concept of truth, i.e. a «postmodernist». That's all.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
3yr ago
You mean sociopathy, I guess? I don't think Musk fits into the construct. Isambard Kingdom Brunel certainly does not. I also don't think low-empathy Chinese managers are lacking in this trait. And chutzpah of the SBF, Adam Neumann or Elizabeth Holmes type is not creative whatsoever, it's merely imitating the superficial aspects of a visionary to divert resources to mundane ends.
No. Faustianism is a peculiar mental type, which doesn't survive in captivity for very long, and one our feminized civilization is no good at measuring or seeing.
This is indeed not so clear-cut. Plato also argued that there does not exist a man so virtuous as to abstain from crime that cannot de discovered, in a passage that I believe has inspired Tolkien (Wiki notes the parallel but says there's no proof of borrowing):
The best is to do injustice without paying the penalty; the worst is to suffer it without being able to take revenge. Justice is in the middle between these two extremes. People love it, not because it is a good thing, but because they are too weak to do injustice with impunity. Someone who has the power to do it, however—someone who is a real man—would not make an agreement with anyone, neither to do injustice nor to suffer it. For him, that would be insanity. That is the nature of justice, according to the argument, Socrates, and those are its natural origins.
We can see most clearly that those who practice it do so unwillingly, because they lack the power to do injustice, if we imagine the following thought-experiment. Suppose we grant to the just and the unjust person the freedom to do whatever they like. We can then follow both of them and see where their appetites would lead. And we will catch the just person red- handed, traveling the same road as the unjust one. The reason for this is the desire to do better than others. This is what every natural being naturally pursues as good. But by law and force, it is made to deviate from this path and honor equality.
They would especially have the freedom I am talking about if they had the power that the ancestor of Gyges of Lydia is said to have possessed. The story goes that he was a shepherd in the service of the ruler of Lydia. [...] There were windowlike openings in it and, peeping in, he saw a corpse, which seemed to be of more than human size, wearing nothing but a gold ring on its finger. He took off the ring and came out of the chasm. He wore the ring at the usual monthly meeting of shepherds that reported to the king on the state of the flocks.And as he was sitting among the others, he happened to turn the setting of the ring toward himself, toward the inside of his hand. When he did this, he became invisible to those sitting near him, and they went on talking as if he had gone. [...] As soon as he realized this, he arranged to become one of the messengers sent to report to the king. On arriving there, he seduced the king’s wife, attacked the king with her help, killed him, and in this way took over the kingdom.
Let’s suppose, then, that there were two such rings, one worn by the just person, the other by the unjust. Now no one, it seems, would be so incorruptible that he would stay on the path of justice, or bring himself to keep away from other people’s possessions and not touch them, when he could take whatever he wanted from the marketplace with impunity, go into people’s houses and have sex with anyone he wished, kill or release from prison anyone he wished, and do all the other things that would make him like a god among humans. And in so behaving, he would do no differently than the unjust person, but both would pursue the same course.
I actually agree both with Greeks and with woke anthropologists that morality does not exist and does not differ from conventional etiquette in some substantial objective sense. The belief that it does is obviously downstream from tenets of (Christian) religion, which insists on there being some supernatural authority that informs one's conscience in a way that's qualitatively superior to mere interiorization of customs. Olympians weren't moral role models or authorities. Even Yahweh isn't much of one, even his old prophets weren't. Crucially, Christianity doesn't give much of a shit for the material world that is a disposable platform for testing the character of an immortal soul, so it can get away with abnormally severe deontology, the good of the entire polity being not worth the abuse of a single child. (it's worth noting that Dost's argument in Karamazovs about «tear of a child» is often misconstued as expressing this sentiment, but it was just the old problem of evil in a world created by a good God). This was important for creating a WEIRD psychotype.
But also, clearly racists-objectivists have a point.
To be more specific, we can say that in this framework «morality» is distinct from etiquette in that it is a) premised on instinctive empathy for your fellow being with moral patienthood (this is admittedly somewhat circular), b) practically consists of general game-theoretical heuristics that are intended to maximize long-term happiness/suffering ratio for the group and its members, and c) affects emotions and behavior even in the absence of external reward.
This still allows for diversity of moral systems. When the racist author says that Kenyans wouldn't have freed Dreyfus because they fail at counterfactual reasoning, he misses this.
Whenever I taught ethics I used the example of Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish officer in the French Army who was convicted of treason in 1894 even though the authorities knew he was innocent. Admitting their mistake, it was said, would have a disastrous effect on military morale and would cause great social unrest. I would in turn argue that certain things are intrinsically wrong and not just because of their consequences. Even if the results of freeing Dreyfus would be much worse than keeping him in prison, he must be freed, because it is unjust to keep an innocent man in prison. To my amazement, an entire class in Kenya said without hesitation that he should not be freed.
The Chinese, or even Japanese, are obviously capable of thinking about complex counterfactuals, but it may be that they too wouldn't have been persuaded by the deontological reasoning here: «social harmony» is for them a moral heuristic that can very well compete with «justice», and is valued for the same object-level reasons the instinct is derived from. Insults to harmony are received with indignation and outrage of the same nature as acts of abuse directed at individuals in the West. Indeed I think that a typical East Asian would appeal to a deeper counterfactual, that of the plausible uncertainty of Dreyfus' innocence, to justify the court doubling down: unrest in the name of redressing a *merely highly likely injustice is not worth it. And heuristics of Kenyans may be not too different, only baked into common metis and inaccessible to abstract reflection. In fact we could say that empathetic morality is more logically primitive than ethics of conventional behavior, because conventions can account for second-order effects which still resolve to moral benefit.
I do not always believe that what I quote or refer to is better than my own thoughts on the matter – those are just neat illustrations for the topic at hand.
You still there, hopefully?
First of all: you have severe psychomotor weakness that is nearly certainly reversible and a sign that all this may be an embarrassingly crude biochemical failure along the lines of generalized stress-related inflammation (also could somewhat explain early balding) – go get checked out if you haven't yet; go see another shrink if you have. If shrinks have failed you, get ketamine. Beg or buy some crypto even if this leaves you butt-naked, go to your local Tor drug market or whatever is the way these things are done in your place, find a ketamine dealer with decent reviews, do an injection (or find a deadbeat acquaintance who will help). This has permanently cured and indeed fully fixed a number of people with treatment-resistant suicidal depression that I know of.
Now if you need some motivation, I'll answer your actual question. If you need more help with the advice above, write a DM.
When I feel like there are no reasons for me to keep living, happiness is a delusion and my existence itself is an exercise in sad absurdity, I remind myself that all of this has happened before, and was proven false, and every time I ended up being grateful in retrospect for gritting my teeth and pulling through: the sun is still out there, just hidden by clouds or the Earth or some ceiling I put myself under. This is a metaphor, but also a literal description. Deep in the depressive state, sunlight which is normally so pleasant doesn't feel real; it is important to keep in mind that what has changed was my perception, and it may change once more. The same applies to my ideals and long-term goals, including my ideological commitment to immortalism. When so diminished, it looks like mere letters on a screen, dead words; but it would be presumptuous of a diminished subhuman to make a decision to sabotage the plan of the master who is temporarily absent. Think of your better moments: they are not gone completely. Although not everything, much can be salvaged.
Death isn't some sweet relief either. Relief is a sensation, not absence of sensations; and in your current state it might be hard to decouple ideas of sensation and of suffering, and accordingly of the sensation of lacking suffering and lacking existence. Yet the difference exists and is profound. You cannot really conceive of death.
And needless to say: it's just interesting to see what happens next. Even if you don't feel excitement, you have to recognize cerebrally that is should be there. We may be on the precipice of a species-ending event, or the Rapture itself may be just around the corner, or the worst sort of Apocalypse and tyranny. People are mocking such expectations because they pattern-match to unfounded ancient millenarianism, but I think it's the other way around: ancients were just too smart for their times, and they saw that there is no logical reason to expect humanity to go on in its known shape forever; so they speculated about some Big Thing ending it. We are creating an unprecedented new kind of sentience (or at least intelligence) – if anything could be the Big Thing, this is it. Among the hundred-odd billion members of the Homo Sapiens lineage, quintillions of beasts with consciousness who have seen life in this Universe, you have been privileged to be present in this generation. Stay for a while to see the main event, at least.
I also think of people who would miss me. This isn't just dumb pity: I care about interesting stories that could be told. In general, most people – very much including smart, unhappy people – being taken out means that there are fewer worthwhile stories that will get told, fewer fates that ennoble the notion of living. That's just sad.
Again, your posts give the impression of a major yet reversible health condition that may not be limited to a major depressive episode, the psychomotor thing isn't the end of it. Listen to this shit: «I know I will never a good job, I will never recover my "smartness", I will never be in shape again». You've put on some weight but that's a nothingburger in the age of drugs like tirzepatide; basically you only need to wait a little for it to become commodified as tens of millions of fatasses conjure a market. Double-digit percentage of normies is virginal at your age – well, in terms of sex at least; the society is absolutely fucking young men over.
Identifying with your smarty-pants test-acing persona is more worthy of self-flagellation than losing those smarts, IMO; we live in an age of intelligence commodification anyway. But e.g. here, a month ago, I see a sharp and alert mind – so your self-perception may be skewed, or predicated on silly entitlement.
Hair can be transplanted or replaced with a hair system. You being gay is largely irrelevant to your parenthood plans seeing as women don't want to bear under realistic scenarios, you'll have to wait for an indirect solution anyway. And now this is a big thing: if any of this feels shameful, you must learn to hold the internalized shame in contempt, and hate it and all those who have made you its host. These are reactions installed in you by a hostile, homicidal yet retarded societal structure that is barely viable itself, via a backdoor of prosocial aspirations and empathy. You pursuing having a hairline, or whatever, for practical reasons, is enough of a concession; this scum is not entitled to dictating which methods you can use.
And, last but not least. Academia is oversaturated and artificially over-competitive, so academic careers suck, many academics love driving each other to suicide, PhDs are basically chimpanzees if chimps could learn statistics and had bigger dicks. It's a dysfunctional and worsening environment where miserable people compete in biting off more than they can chew, chasing pennies, and passively-aggressively gaslighting each other to reinforce their own delusion of still liking their projects. For some freaks of nature like Aaronson it's salvation, but for many more it's probably worse than neurotic bullshit like modelling or Korean idol industry. This is particularly true of hardcore STEM like your physics. Despite false advertisement, academia is not a place for people with mental health issues! Many smart, nerdy guys (of whom there is overproduction as well) who got hooked on educational rewards (due to paucity of other kinds) assume that this is their ivory tower, their Castalia, their natural path to success, far from the peons; they are being deceived, and not even for any good reason, it's just a mission-drifting remnant of a once-strategically relevant MIC subsidiary. Now, all of this doesn't apply to all of academia, it has an almost-perfectly opposite side, but the point is, more than half is this exploitative bullshit for tryhards – and you can fail to get into the other half, for reasons other than not being clever or strong enough. Go get fixed and learn2code while it still matters. You may not have enough time to start earning much, but you'll see a radically less fucked-up culture.
Also, some years ago I've written this. Maybe it'll be of interest to you, though it rehashes some of the points in this post. (Nice to see mow I'm at least consistent – so, not a word model that just spews out plausible verbiage).
That person is still alive, by the way, and has made a decent career since then. Apparently quite content with having failed the attempt.
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