Edawayac_Tosscount
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User ID: 3772
Edawayac_Tosscount
17d ago
I assent to everything you said, albeit without any of the prerequisite expertise to give me proper knowledge. In short, and I hope this does not do your piece a rhetorical disservice, I vibe with it.
I've dealt with the products of the current AI paradigm as a mere enthusiast, watching 4chan /g/ threads from about 2021 and onward, looking on with both excitement and disappointment as text and imagegen models, though both increasingly easy to deploy in reduced scope on consumer hardware and increasingly capable when developed and hosted by professionals, nonetheless retained epistemic and recollective issues that, while capable of being papered over with judicious use of the context window and ever-more training data processing power and storage, nonetheless gave me the impression that there was a fundamental kink in the underlying implementation of mainstream "AI" that would prevent that implementation from ever achieving the messianic (or demonic, or, at the very least, economic) hopes foisted onto it.
That said, I'm provisionally materialist, so barring me becoming convinced of the human soul I don't see why in principle software couldn't achieve incredible intelligence, either by your definition of it or in some more nebulous sense. I'm just thoroughly disappointed by the hopes piled onto (and consumer software & web services tainted by) the current "AI" bandwagon.
My gut reaction is that there are some things I will never compromise on, particularly being a stepfather, but on consideration my reasoning extends beyond mere prejudice to further self-doubt. My prima facie reasoning for not wanting to raise another man's child is that I've seen too many relationships of that sort (no, not just online, but among friends and acquaintances) devolve into volatile and ultimately catastrophic affairs for everyone involved, but with the bulk of legal censure & penalty falling onto the man, and so I believe that no amount of mutual compromise will make it worth my trouble when women are given legal advantages (again, not just online drek, but personally known), and they are also prone to leveraging those advantages on what externally appears to be a whim - presumably due in part to the fault of the men for their lack of assertiveness and charisma.
But it is this latter point that most concerns me, because it implies a lack of male assertiveness and charisma is a catalyst for dooming relationships. As I fall into that category, that would make any relationship an anvil over my head: I can't play the odds because I bring the disaster with me. Put another way, even if the catalyst for poor outcomes isn't "single mothers" but "the sort of man who shacks up with them," the outcomes are still poor, I have reason to suspect I share a lot in common with those unfortunate men, I have no interest of participating in those outcomes, and those outcomes would have increased odds of occurring regardless of who I shack up with, single mother or no.
In short, it creates the possibility that that sort of low-charisma, low-assertiveness man will have long-term problems with any relationship, and perhaps out of a prejudice against single mothers or perhaps out of circumstance, I've only noticed the problems with relationships involving them.
Some things aren't worth taking risks on, especially when the payoff is low, the risks are enormous, and my disposition is the catalyst for those risks, meaning I may as well go double-or-nothing hoping to both overcome my own issues and satisfy my desires, rather than compromise because of those issues, and still court disaster long-term regardless of the compromise.
As for overweight women, well, that is just prejudice. I'm in the USA. Our fat is a special kind of fat, and the fatter that fat gets the more viscerally I am repulsed by it. If a woman can't establish herself as capable of maintaining a healthy weight, I'm going to assume that she's just going to keep getting fatter over time - again, based on experience, the sorts of people I see either maintain a healthy weight or proceed to obesity. And I cannot overstate how repulsed I am by obesity, to the point that I struggle not to grimace when I see obese people in public. I nervously peruse NIH & CDC obesity & overweight projections and wistfully browse coffee table books full of pictures from when such was not commonplace.
Firstly, if we are limiting the discussion to the mentioned attributes, with the exception of age (a condition which on retrospect I suppose I only included because it tends to correlate with accumulation and accentuation of other mentioned issues), why is it unreasonable for me to set as conditions my own characteristics (not with children, not overweight/obese)? I refuse to compromise on what I also expect of myself, and if that destroys my odds, so be it. Whether this is "punishment for entitlement" or "punishment for having standards" is a good Russell Conjugation.
Secondly, if it is, as I believe, psychological issues which inhibit my rapport with the opposite sex, then a relationship with someone sufficiently "low value" to initially entertain my eccentricities and chronic self-esteem issues would likely end up going badly in the long run.
This does loop back around to a rejoinder which I have come to accept: it is also perfectly reasonable and fits with my experience that most women are similarly unwilling to compromise on certain severe psychological and self-esteem issues in men, and that's not a standard I'd expect anyone to spontaneously drop.
Not wrong! Honestly, on further consideration I even suppose that it's even a good heuristic to push people to struggle who plausibly are unfixable retards. Better to refuse emotional gratification to a few unfixables if it means you're on the safe side of ensuring people with decent odds who merely appear unfixable don't have peer permission to throw in the towel.
Are they just blindly lucky? Or do they persevere with some luck and effort - maybe a lot of luck - but mostly persistence?
I think that those are all people who are not socially and emotionally malformed via catastrophic deprivation of peer relations during childhood and teenage, and - thank you, COVID - early adult development, and all I hear from the rest of this response is that the only way to receive sympathy from people who share your approximate perspective is to take my society-mandated optimism and bang my head against a wall, no stopping allowed. I will admit that an example of Down's Syndrome was excessive: strictly speaking there is some nonzero hope given a considerable effort on my part, but this demand for effort gets crueler as the minimum effort gets greater and the odds get worse, and I'd put my odds low enough and the prerequisite effort for those odds high enough that that extreme example is, if not equal, then congruent.
Then again, of course that's what I'd hear, what I'd say.
But I want to jump out of my personal gripes, my uncharitability: whatever my dissatisfaction, your perspective is a good one to hold. Denying pity to people like me is a healthy social tool, as refusing emotional gratification to a few terminal sad sacks is preferable to letting someone with a decent chance at some (hopefully prosocial) goal give up prematurely. After all, for all you know I'm lying about my chances - either to you, or to myself.
those who can't are not perfectly decent, fit guys with good jobs and stable personalities who are being rejected by the entire female population because they are all alpha-widows, but because there is something wrong with these guys.
No, the game is not rigged against you.
From how I interpret your post, I assume you're trying to be charitable and not propose or imply that there's something "wrong" with (posters like) faceh so as to leave him with some hope, but I'd much prefer being told there is something wrong with me and that the game is rigged against me in the sense that I'm somehow inherently inept or dysgenic, than be told to
get in the game and stop making excuses
when platitudes of that sort have brought nothing but misery, humiliation, and further demolition of my self-esteem.
If I had Down's Syndrome, but had enough introspection to feel humiliation at my intellectual inability to pursue a serious college education, it would bring me no happiness to hear that I just need to "try harder" when what I'd really need is to be told that some things are beyond my abilities: then at least I'd be given my peer group's permission to come to terms with it. But for some reason, similar platitudes are reflexively dispensed in dating discourse regardless of the aptitudes of the people these platitudes are thrown at: "you are deeply awful and there's something very abnormal about you but also never give up, keep on trying to jump for that bone, you retarded little doggie" is - broadly speaking, referring to dating discourse as a whole - how absurd and cruel these juxtapositions sound to me, even if, in the more rigorous and careful context of your post, you are making a charitable distinction between faceh and the faceless guys you know that "something is wrong with."
Why can't people like me even be given the solace of hopelessness? I'm an aspie, my parents deprived me of peer socialization almost (they were blindsided by the internet, all the worse for me) entirely throughout my youth via isolationist homeschooling, my post high-school experiences were retarded by COVID lockdowns, and all my attempts at friendship crashed and burned because I'm a hollowed out pseudo-sociopathic social imitation machine (I still get to feel terrible about socially "lying" at people, so I wish I'd just been born a real sociopath who didn't care) who's never had a single positive response to "just being myself," so I'm well past the point of having normal relations with the opposite sex, and certainly not relations on the terms I'd have once looked for (not overweight, not a single mother, not a drug addict, not older than me, not prodigal). So at this point I really should give up hope and move on, which I try to do with public stoicism (really just another extension of habitual masking, so no biggie), but then I see all these platitudes thrown my way, and every time I do, for the briefest of moments I get just enough hope to torment myself with.
Discourse on "checking out" keeps mentioning prolific welfare, porn, entertainment, and nutrition as both the catalysts and trajectories for someone "giving up." I won't argue statistics - video hosts and imageboards are chock-full of pornography for a reason, entertainment is cheap, and it's easier than ever to satisfy caloric needs - but I do want to share my own experience of gaming the limbic system.
For reasons approximate to those given by Shirayuki I've stopped pursuing women, career improvements, a house, and the Red Queen Race that is modern "fitness," yet some blend of pride, risk avoidance, and personal satisfaction prevents me from jumping fully into decay.
My issues with dating I won't go into, other than that I'm as aspie; these issues have been hashed out again and again here and elsewhere, and from what I've seen of recent dating discourse on The Motte I suspect the topic has overstayed its welcome. That right there eliminates a lot of motivation for time- and resource-intensive preening behavior, and made it easier to "give up" in a lot of other areas.
I get what satisfaction I can working a rural office job that puts me in a position to assist people without a heavy regulatory burden on my actions or mannerisms, whereas anecdotes from friends lead me to believe that working for any larger organization, be it public or private, would entail onerous oversight of my task prioritization and my allowed range of expression - I've heard more than one horror story of a nearby city's municipal office HR enabling the usual suspects to crybully their way to dominance. I could make more of a difference with a developed career, but why would I put myself through all of that? Besides, I stand out more in a small office, I feel more valuable even if being a cog in a larger, more developed machine might be a greater net gain for the world.
Due to the aforementioned marginal value of cash below a certain tremendous threshold, I'm more interested in acquiring something approximating that tremendous amount than I am wont to burn money for social plumage: what good is owning a home if it means being broke when disaster strikes, or stressing over the postgraduate education and career investment necessary to obtain both the savings and the home? So instead I rent from my parents at a monthly rate below that of regional apartments but sufficient to ensure I am a net positive for their finances, and dump the rest into savings and investments.
I think I'm being narcissistic on a couple levels here: obviously, I'm writing this to justify myself: "sure, I'm a loser, but at least I'm not a gooner NEET! I make (token efforts to make) the world a better place!", but on a further level, it unnerves me to realize the prosocial impulses that prevent me from falling completely to parasitism and decay are nonetheless being gamed by myself to make myself feel good: I've learned that I gain satisfaction from helping people with their problems, and so I've positioned myself to solve lots of simple little problems despite my objective impact being minute. My drive for social acceptance can be somewhat satisfied by making myself useful in a small community with sufficiently low standards and human capital to make "successful" participation an easy bar to clear. However superficially prosocial my drives, I'm still just a machine fiddling with its own parameters.
And so it all spirals back to the problem of terminal values. I don't act because I have a purpose, I act as an animal with simple animal desires, molded by - well, currently I have some evolutionary just-so-stories popping into my head, but I won't pretend at knowledge by reciting them. Sure, my animal desires are wired so that I want to pursue "selfless" actions as well as "selfish" ones, but it's still a reward mechanism that I've gamed, and that exploitation makes it self-centered: "why bother" actually trying to improve the world, when I can game all my inputs to make it feel kind of like I'm improving the world? It isn't satisfying my need for a long-term purpose, when I'm alone at night or going on a long drive I'll ruminate on the fact that I'm sating myself on a hollow substitute, but for want of belief in said purpose I have no motivation left to pursue the full-bodied experience of "usefulness," or the will to sacrifice for a cause.
I'm still sympathetic to the pro-conspiracy responses' general conclusion ("something weird is going on"), but what confuses me is how some attempt to defend that conclusion.
If it was strictly a matter of saying, "yes, Rov_Scam has reduced the apparent probability of there being a conspiracy by undermining some folk narratives, but there are still discrepancies x, y, z which may still outweigh the anti-conspiracy evidence" then I wouldn't be aghast at it (as someone who has absorbed the Epstein death conspiracies through osmosis I'm still on the fence about the security camera issues but don't feel confident staking out a position) but some of the responses almost sound like a parody of conspiratorial reasoning, taking it as a given that Epstein was murdered and then discounting evidence against it per the anticipated conclusion.
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