DiscourseMagnus
4d ago
You should be glad "woke" didn’t make that their thing; the pattern of the post-woke right suggests that the baby would have been thrown out with the bathwater as everything was made a partisan issue.
DiscourseMagnus
4d ago
Insofar as this is true, it's another compelling argument against the existence of the insanity defense.
DiscourseMagnus
5d ago
Again, it's not an issue of nerds vs. popular kids; it's nerds vs. other nerds. The most strident voices against techno-fascism are themselves "nerds" by any definition. Many are autistic, and will say so right in their Tumblr/Bluesky bios. (And when you meet them in person, you can tell it's true.) They have prickly mannerisms and are not exactly "people persons".
I do not find this narrative credible in the slightest. Sure, some of them are self-hating autistic nerds turned into pathetic thralls, but this is not the demographic that leads or defines them. Quite the opposite, in fact; insofar as they're led and defined by neurodivergents with prickly mannerisms, they're hypersocial psychopaths. Sometimes they feign autism as an elaborate gambit, as they feign many other conditions like Tourette's or DID. But this infamously does not look like the actual condition. They constantly engage in elaborate and deceptive social maneuvers to destroy their enemies by petty conspiracy, and they're quite good at it; they sometimes appear incompetent at it only because they're unstable enough to frequently run up against each other. They are the opposite of autistic, and the opposite of nerdy (which never really meant anything aside from being a cruder term for autism).
They're defined by worshiping status in the Hansonian sense, which of course requires perpetually lying about it and pretending it doesn't exist, anti-autistic taqiyya. They hate truth and the idea that anyone would ever believe in truth and not act as part of an evil collectivist hivemind. They salivate over the thought of eugenically eradicating autism, which is to say the propensity to not think and talk in consummate liar.
DiscourseMagnus
5d ago
I mean, it seems pretty obvious that it's because, despite all the political rhetoric to the contrary, the leftists don't hate them for being rich, they hate them for being nerds. Indeed, the leftists hate the less-rich employees at the companies a lot more than they hate the CEOs, because they're much nerdier than the CEOs. They hate random nerds in their everyday lives who are much poorer than them a lot more than they hate the CEOs, because those are also much nerdier than the CEOs. The existence of somewhat nerdy CEOs is just very flimsy cover.
DiscourseMagnus
7d ago
My model of Altman is much more pessimistic than yours; I think he has even worse delusions of grandeur than Amodei and is simply a sociopath who is happy to greatly increase the odds of AI doom in order to slightly increase his personal odds of winding up as an immortal singularitarian god king or feudal lord.
DiscourseMagnus
7d ago
Isn’t the classic Less-Wrongian one superpersuasion? They even paid more attention to it than IT security because they assumed the labs would be sane and airgap their shit.
DiscourseMagnus
11d ago
I think 4.8 was actually the most combative Opus. 5 is less of an improvement than I would have liked, but it was still like night and day when they released it.
DiscourseMagnus
11d ago
While Iran is obviously full of shit and their word is worth basically nothing, their continued existence as an enemy power would seem to be pretty strong evidence against the maximalist US claim that they're defeated, have no military power, have no leverage, etc.
DiscourseMagnus
14d ago
Hmm, that's an interesting point; I may have underestimated the involvement of HBD-type factors, the Hajnal line, etc, which I intellectually know are factors but don't tend to think about much. (The studies I was thinking of were modern, not historical, but I don't know off the top of my head the demographic makeup of the men studied.) But I conversely think you underestimate the impact of modern feminism. The age of consent memeplex clearly centers the idea of protecting young women from predation, at the expense of the male sex drive; that men who argue with it have freakish degenerate outlier desires is a subordinate claim its supporters make, and not something consistently sincerely believed. Sometimes they even say the opposite, that they are trying to avoid giving men social permission to do something that they already want to do and are looking for excuses for. Women have generally been the drivers of gender politics since at least suffrage.
I did initially assume greater hostility from you than was real, but not confidently; it was out of confusion towards what I still perceive as a strange meta-contrarian stance.
DiscourseMagnus
14d ago
Yes, that most men want me dead is rather the elephant in the room through this entire conversation. I don't think they would have in most times and places though. That's culture.
DiscourseMagnus
14d ago
Ah, it seems that we've both misunderstood each other. No, I'm not going off of one meme graph going around 4chan; this seems to me to be the compelling result of the research in general, especially accounting for the intensity of people's desire to suppress the information. Nor am I arguing that my personal tastes are average, just closer to average than is generally acknowledged. I don't think people secretly disagree with the law, either; average people clearly feel quite strongly about it. I think social pressure has led the average man to either be or pretend to be attracted to women much older than he otherwise would be across the board, a sort of sexual false consciousness. This sticks out wherever men stop noticing what they're doing; the average man's taste for paradoxical neoteny (the "reverse vampires" of the Sanilac article) is not, I think, so much a naturally-shaped superstimulus as Sanilac imagines as it is the actual taste creeping back in; one especially easy way to pursue the disjoint of features, after all, would simply be to look between the two ages. But that said, yes, I do think I lean younger than most men would if not culturally biased, and I am quite aware of the temptation of the typical mind fallacy here.
DiscourseMagnus
14d ago
I haven't looked too deeply into Clancy's psychology, but my default expectation is "hated the husband, indifferent to the kids except as symbols of him and ways to get at him". That's the usual psychology of men who kill their families, and women sometimes do it too.
DiscourseMagnus
14d ago
Most data I'm familiar with on female attractiveness shows a peak in the mid-teens, despite a strong social desirability bias to the contrary (which I think readily explains the minority of exceptions). Moreover the historic and current reasoning behind the age of consent is well-documented; you can just go out and look at what rhetoric is raised in its defense, who supports it and why. Your model, conversely, is completely alien to me; I'm not sure how one winds up imagining a world where men selected an age of consent based on what they find attractive.
DiscourseMagnus
14d ago
Most men are ephebophiles, some women oppose this out of naked self-interest, most women oppose it out of a tendency towards groupthink, women have extreme social leverage over men, and there's a baptists-and-bootleggers coalition between feminists in the muck of the groupthink and conservative parents who have no personal interest in finding a partner but do have an interest in marginally protecting their daughters' chastity.
DiscourseMagnus
14d ago
Your whole point seems to be "men clearly don't generally want this that much, or it would be legal". But even at this facile level of reasoning about how social norms and democracy work, women are in fact half of society and the electorate.
DiscourseMagnus
15d ago
Did you just forget that adult women also get a vote, or what?
DiscourseMagnus
15d ago
Thanks for drawing the connection to Hanania; that's exactly where my mind went immediately on reading the article.
DiscourseMagnus
15d ago
Have you not noticed the cited reasons for that change?
DiscourseMagnus
15d ago
Not in the slightest. Taboos are sticky.
DiscourseMagnus
15d ago
This is a lot more optimism about the extent to which society serves its typical members than I'm personally inclined towards.
DiscourseMagnus
15d ago
Between this, Decarlos Brown Jr, and Ronald Exantus, among others, I'm finding my basic distrust of insanity as a criminal defense pretty vindicated lately. It might be a real mitigating factor on some abstract moral-philosophical level, but there's no compelling argument for it, IMO, as a feature of our justice system. (And in Exantus's case, where it was basically a case of jury nullification, we also see the dangers of the idiot public even being exposed to the idea of the abstract moral-philosophical mitigation; it's also convincing me jury trials are, like democracy, not actually such a hot feature of enlightenment liberalism.)
DiscourseMagnus
15d ago
Yeah, one thing that's been heavy on my mind in this case has been the prospect of a NAMBLA-esque fringe radical feminist group emerging over the next few years, seeking to normalize maternal filicide years after birth by extension of much of the abortion logic, and causing a lot of trouble in the process.
DiscourseMagnus
15d ago
I was just contemplating the other day, with regards to this specific case, that it seems like a nightmarish parody of soft-on-crime rhetoric that many seem to believe that murder is a borderline victimless crime because it moves its primary victims beyond reach entirely.
DiscourseMagnus
15d ago
I find this article morally and politically appalling enough that I would think it would be a cause for reflection on whatever you appreciated about his prior takes.
While I don't think "unreasonable" is the right word for the existing standard, the resulting dynamic does seem kind of perverse, in that when someone starts one of these threads for a major news item, the responses are blatantly not actually responding to the OP, they're using it as a generic jumping-off point for discussion of the news item. Nor would it be particularly reasonable to expect them to respond to the OP; indeed, the design of these sorts of OPs is clearly optimized to meet some minimum standard for not setting off moderator action while functioning as a generic jumping-off point for discussion of the news item. It feels like a standard intended to discourage (but not prohibit) people from starting threads saying "let's talk about the latest big news item", rendered absurd by the overwhelming demand for such threads.
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