EfficientSyllabus
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User ID: 827
EfficientSyllabus
1yr ago
More depinkification opportunity: the user profiles on mobile show the username in pink.
EfficientSyllabus
1yr ago
The next obvious culture war front has been opened by the Hungarian government. After importing the immigration, race, gender topics, they have to keep up with American CW discourse on abortion too. It's the hip new thing to discuss since the overturning of Roe. The state-of-the-art polarizing issue, proven to work in America.
Hungary enshrines 'fetal heartbeat' abortion law
Under the new law, doctors must also issue a report that records that the pregnant woman was presented "with the factor indicating the functioning of fetal vital functions in a clearly identifiable manner."
This has been a long time request by the far right Our Homeland Movement, but apparently such laws exist also in the US.
I don't care about abortion. I don't think Orban cares about it either. It's purely about sowing division and polarization. Orban is happy to push the exact buttons that will trigger the left, in a predictable way. But what's the point? I can see two things: an attempt at distraction from the exploding inflation and utility price hikes, in violation of their election promises, or it's about pandering to Republicans (see CPAC, Tucker Carlson) in hopes of not-sure-what, by doing things that are legible to Americans. It's not like Americans would understand the significance of the local CW stuff, so it has to be photogenic sexy up to date topics of the day for the American right to care.
I hope gun control/freedom won't be the next thing coming up. Because now almost all other American CW fronts have been imported.
EfficientSyllabus
1yr ago
I just checked a few threads and can't see such stuff on /r/hungary. Even for that sub, what you describe would be quite fringe .
EfficientSyllabus
1yr ago
Seven years ago there were a few months when it was indeed an important topic that hundreds of thousands of migrants wanted to pass through Hungary.
I can understand that it's an important topic in Western Europe, but in Hungary it's imported and larped.
EfficientSyllabus
1yr ago
It won't neatly map to a left/right divide, not the least because there's no single such divide. So while I can empathize with feelings of "hey, you are a leftist/rightist, this isn't what you should think about this issue!", ultimately this is not very interesting, other than showing that a binary categorization is insufficient.
The split here is between pro-tech optimists, believers in quantification, that problems of society are mainly technical etc. vs people who miss the "soul" of things.
Some leftist utopias are fully automated large scale standardized productions, but others are about local communities in opposition to capitalist exploitation (of environment and communities). The left is supposed to like disruption and new ways of solving things, except if it comes from capitalist exploitation. There's also a distinction between classical left and woke capital which is nowadays often confused with the left.
Some of the right is pro business and pro capitalist, pro-large scale production, but other parts are more religious and miss the soul of things, the traditions, like the fruit of skilled dignified hard human labour, prefer local things as opposed to multinational business output, out of patriotism and nationalism.
There are some otherwise unnatural pseudo-alliances around woke topics that may connect trads with libertarian transhumanists but things like the AI issue may be a point of collision.
My own attitude is similar to eg furniture. Sure, a skilled carpenter can make a fabulous bed frame with soul and all, and it's beautiful hard work that puts bread on the table from the sweat of the brow etc. But it's expensive and so IKEA has its place too.
Most of the pictures, illustrations and clip arts, stock images, filler crap don't need novel artistic expression. It's like lamenting the emergence of word processor software and how it displaces the fine artists that typographers and editors are, now that people can typeset their own docs. And I'm sure people said as much back in the 80s. It's the same but for drawing.
EfficientSyllabus
1yr ago
For sure and that's a good example. On the one hand Trust The Science, on the other hand science is a fake-objective old/dead white cishet male-biased colonial-legacy Western Eurocentric project that needs to be dismantled in favor of other ways of knowing like indigenous lived experience.
Similarly with big tech / big corporations. They are bd because white libertarian tech bros but also good in the sense that eg women should see it as their life goal to build a career in them.
It all depends on who feels like that they are inside and who feel outside. Academic leftists will defend the status/prestige of academic knowledge production if it's controlled by them. Similarly if big tech supports ideologically/politically motivated "fact checking", then big tech is good.
It's often not about aesthetics and principles of whether rational quantification and cold calculation and large scale factories are good or small-scale, holistic, emotionally-nice, human-level handmade stuff is good, just who feels in control, in terms of identity politics groups.
There are plenty of conservatives and far right people who don't want to "play God", do genetic engineering, AI, etc.
This really is an issue where you at least need the Red/Blue/Gray three-way distinction.
EfficientSyllabus
1yr ago
People are generally confused about these kinds of rights and only have a vague idea of "intellectual property rights" (which is considered by Richard Stallman as a deliberately misleading propaganda term in itself), based on FUD spread by music, movie, book, software etc publishers.
The term "intellectual property" blurs the lines between and masks the purpose behind different kinds of laws like copyright law, trademark law, patent law, trade secrets, the banning of industrial espionage etc. People don't understand even the basics, like ideas can't be copyrighted, only concrete expression, etc.
In this context an artist's style seems like just another natural intellectual property.
EfficientSyllabus
1yr ago
As an aside, SD can generate pictures of Mickey Mouse doing novel things, same with any Marvel characters and so on. If I'm not allowed to release a new cartoon of Mickey Mouse (or Batman) acting out a new story, are the SD authors allowed to release this model?
(This is a distinct topic from style.)
EfficientSyllabus
1yr ago
A longing for simpler times, when men were real men, women were real women who followed the feminine principle, when people knew their place in society, when a firm handshake got you a job, when people had jobs like shoemaker or blacksmith, not marketing manager, when you got your tomatoes and eggs from the local farmer, not a multinational supermarket, and he didn't use GMO or antibiotics. When churches were beautiful not brutalist, the music was beautiful and not loud and noisy, musicians played instruments, not laptops like Skrillex, artists knew their craft and didn't just didn't paint digitally, when people hand wrote their letters and had to pay close attention as there was no backspace on a sheet of paper. When we said hi to the cashier and didn't just use a self checkout etc.
This is the coherent aesthetic of longing for the old stable social order, the "natural" ways of doing things. Both gender bending and AI disrupt that type of good old way of things.
EfficientSyllabus
1yr ago
Photoshop does not contain anything specific to mickey mouse, I have to know what he looks like if I want to create a picture of him. Meanwhile, SD does know what mickey looks like, I don't have to know. Even a blind man who has no idea what the mouse looks like can create images of him because SD contains the info of what the character looks like.
I'd agree with you if I had to type in a full, detailed description of what mickey mouse looks like, color, shape etc, and SD knew how to draw him only afterwards.
SD pretty much contains a representation of mickey mouse in the model weights. I'm not allowed to release a textured 3d mesh of mickey mouse, even though the user first has to choose a viewing angle and a light source position etc in order to render a pic of mickey from that 3d asset. Similarly here with SD we don't have a 3d mesh, but have something that can be controlled in slightly differently but is still a representation. Just because the format is neural weights instead of explicit 3d assets, the situation is very similar. Else what do you say about neural encodings of distance fields from which the surface can be recovered? How about NeRFs?
EfficientSyllabus
1yr ago
In much the same way that my brain contains a representation of mickey mouse, yes.
Yes, but you can't release your brain. It's not an artefact or a tool. Humans and their minds have a very different standing under the law than inanimate objects and information-carrying media.
I have no idea what this means. Elaborate?
There are new ways of representing 3D scenes or 3D geometry using neural networks. They encode the properties of the 3D scene in neural network weights, and they can be used to create new images. But the representation has no notion of images, pixels, vertices, textures etc, it's all a bunch of "opaque" neural weights.
Here's one variant described: https://youtube.com/watch?v=T29O-MhYALw
The point is, law usually cares about intended use and how one interacts with the thing, not the implementation details. And nobody really knows how courts will treat these new methods. Laws were not made with the knowledge of such things, so interpretations of the wider goals will have to guide the court's work.
At this point, "incel" has become a new, fairly general insult. A socially acceptable replacement of calling someone "gay" in the old times. The literal meaning is different of course, but the underlying sting of the insult has a very similar source, namely that the person cannot fulfill the masculine role of seducing women and "obtaining" sex from them. When calling others "gay" (in the schoolyard sense) was not as taboo as today, it also referred to this: being passive, non-agentic, not being a go-getter.
Lame, loser etc. It doesn't mean "literally lives a zero-sex life involuntarily".
EfficientSyllabus
1yr ago
There are all kinds of models that are in-between the two: do the triceratops thing but you can manipulate the scene, swap out objects etc. And in some sense SD also "interpolates" between its source images, just in a very complex way.
EfficientSyllabus
1yr ago
Are all these studies only about explicitly asking people about these things? Because then you don't measure who has in-group bias but who says that they have it. Maybe whites overall have been told more over childhood an later life that being a good person requires not having racial biases and when filling out surveys people may (perhaps subconsciously) not describe themselves but instead their good-person-ideal, or what they know they should be. Self knowledge is hard.
I'd be more convinced by studies that somehow measure people's behavior in the real world (I don't know, hiring stats or something, as an example) instead of just asking questions on paper.
EfficientSyllabus
1yr ago
Maybe whites unconsciously or consciously feel more powerful and feel that they need more conscious high-brain-levels restraint on their animal instincts. A bit like how a strong large man needs to learn to control himself because he can inflict real damage, while a small woman lashing out is seen as harmless and maybe even endearing and cute/funny. Meaning, when non-whites do some in-group biased thing, whites may think it cannot have any consequence, it's just like a lion cub doing some cute roaring. But when whites get into that style of thinking it leads to very professionally and industrially-scientifically orchestrated and engineered genocide, like the Holocaust.
In other words it could be a paternalistic attitude. That a white person must know better or something, while non whites don't quite grasp it yet and anyways don't have the necessary power to do too much damage so just let them play.
Suggestion: you should fix the order of pinned threads as: current CW thread, current small/wellness/fun thread, others (like this bugs thread).
Currently the order looks random or based on the date, so sometimes the CW is first, sometimes second, and currently it's the third, which makes it easy to misclick.
EfficientSyllabus
1yr ago
High status respected people have to lead and these people will follow. Once the avocado toast people can be sure that being unworried about covid doesn't mean you're a Nazi or Qanon or anti-science guy, they will go along. At this point some are still very afraid of being seen as part of that "misinfo" cluster if they aren't worried about covid enough, the cluster that includes things like climate change denial, Russia stuff, etc. But once it's announced that The Science now actually says XYZ, they will accept it too. They are just taking a bit longer, like that Japanese soldier on that island who "fought" WWII even decades after it ended.
EfficientSyllabus
1yr ago
Yeah, but are there many such people who keep at it out of contrarianism? There have always been some germaphobes and neurotics and hypochondriacs etc.
But yes, I agree that most people have moved on. It was first Ukraine but by now it seems to be climate/sustainability (Greta style) again, flight shaming etc. Also tied to the energy crisis in Europe. There's less bandwidth available for boring old stuff like covid with these new things coming up.
EfficientSyllabus
1yr ago
My working theory on diets is that the default unconscious diet is so shit that the sheer fact that you do any diet will bring improvements because you pay attention to what you eat and you probably won't mindlessly eat the junkiest junk. The rest is window dressing to make it stick, by making it personal, important, moral, emotional, identity-forming, you-are-a-good-person-for-doing-this stuff.
This doesn't mean there are no biological differences between diets, but when a normal person picks up any diet, it will probably be an improvement. Just like there can be differences among the effectiveness of different exercises, aerobic, anaerobic, different workout programmes with flame wars between their fans, but all of them are an improvement over the default sedentary lifestyle.
Hungary officials warn education is becoming ‘too feminine’
(from a month ago, but not discussed yet, I think)
Hungary's State Audit Office wrote a 19-page (+appendices and references) report on gender and education in Hungary, that is, the gender ratio among teachers, university students, parents' and teachers' expectations of what traits (related to school performance) are feminine and masculine... that sort of things. But the main thing that ruffled people's feathers was something that's probably not so surprising to people of the Motte but is a no-go for the zeitgeist: that so many women having high education leads to issues in partner-finding and therefore it impacts fertility and having children. Concretely, that women try to partner up with men of equal or higher educational and professional level as themselves.
The report: "Pink education" phenomenon in Hungary?! Factors and socio-economic impacts of the overrepresentation of women with tertiary education (Unfortunately, it's only available in Hungarian) (Out of the five authors four are women, if it matters.)
Here is the "Conclusions" section from the beginning:
Hungary's Constitution states that women and men have equal rights. Under Article XI of the Fundamental Law, our country ensures the right to education by providing higher education for all, accessible to all on the basis of ability, and by providing financial support for those who pursue education, as defined by law. According to the National Curriculum, the main aim of learning is to develop the competences of pupils that enable them to apply knowledge creatively in different situations and to develop creative and logical thinking. The strategy for a change of gear in higher education states that 'even among the functions of higher education, which are so important, the promotion of social mobility should be emphasised'.
Between 2010 and 2021, more women than men entered higher education in Hungary each year, so that in the autumn semester of the 2022 academic year, the proportion of women among higher education students was 54.55%. The proportion of women among graduates was even higher, at around 60%, due to a higher drop-out rate among male students. In the 2020/2021 academic year, almost half of the students were enrolled in upper secondary schools, where female students were also statistically over-represented, at 55.4%. 58.1% of those admitted to higher education and almost 70% of those admitted to full-time education came from upper secondary schools. The shift in gender ratios may have been driven by the feminisation of the teaching profession. In 2021, 82% of the 96 000 teachers in Hungarian public education were women.
Research data show that the average intellectual ability of men and women does not differ, but that there are differences in the distribution of intelligence and in some sub-skills.
In our own research, we asked parents and teachers (a representative sample of 700) about their perceptions of the gender gap presented in the literature and the importance of different attributes/competences in education. The perceptions of the respondents, similar to the literature, showed a significant gender difference for all attributes. According to respondents, the most feminine qualities were emotional and social maturity; diligence; verbal fluency; manual dexterity; good oral and written expression; tolerance of monotony and precision and accuracy. In contrast, the most masculine qualities are technical and mechanical aptitude; risk-taking; liveliness, agility; spatial awareness; entrepreneurship and logic. The results show that respondents consider the qualities they perceive as more feminine to be more important in public education. One of the skills rated as least important in public education is technical and mechanical aptitude, along with innovativeness and entrepreneurship. It is also surprising that girlish qualities such as diligence, verbal skills and adaptability are considered by respondents to be more important than logic, without which it is difficult to imagine meaningful learning, lasting, useful knowledge and problem-solving. The qualities considered to be boyish, which are necessary for the sciences are considered less important by both parents and teachers.
Of the compulsory subjects, three are humanities (Hungarian language and literature, history, foreign language) and one is science (mathematics). In terms of social mobility and gender equality, this fact raises the risk that boys may suffer disadvantages in terms of secondary school leaving examinations and further higher education. It may be appropriate to consider equalising the humanities and science baccalaureate subjects, both in order to prepare them for everyday life and for the labour market. Boys are also significantly behind girls in terms of emotional and social maturity, which may be taken into account when determining the age at which children should be admitted to school.
The so-called "pink education" phenomenon has a number of economic and social consequences. To the extent that education favours feminine characteristics, it undermines social mobility and equal opportunities. A lower valuation of masculine qualities can cause mental and behavioural problems for male pupils, who are unable to display and develop their special talents optimally. The over-representation of women in higher education can also cause demographic problems, making it difficult to match young people of nearly equal qualifications. Creativity, innovation, entrepreneurship and technical and engineering skills are necessary for the optimal development of the economy, to alleviate labour market problems and to improve competitiveness and sustainability.
More emphasis should be placed in public education on the transfer and development of competences and skills to meet the changing needs of the labour market in the long term. An education strategy is needed that prepares young people, regardless of gender, for successful independent adult leadership and effective labour market participation. An important objective of national education policy could be to explore in more depth the causes and consequences of the phenomenon described above and to define measures in the light of the results.
After this they describe the percentages of female students and teachers in secondary and tertiary education and the surveys on what qualities are seen by parents and teachers as more feminine and also what qualities they think are important for school success, and they found that they overlap highly (ie feminine qualities are needed for school success).
The next interesting section is on the socio-economic consequences of the phenomenon (bold from the original).
Equality of opportunity between men and women is in the common interest of society. Women have an equal stake in ensuring that men do well, achieve and succeed. If the development and valuation of masculine, boyish qualities/competences is disadvantaged, there are many economic and social consequences.
The development of masculine qualities and competences at an inadequate level and to an inadequate extent is economically damaging and detrimental to the country's competitiveness. Creativity, innovation, entrepreneurial spirit, engineering acumen and a competitive, performance-oriented attitude are necessary for the optimal development of the Hungarian economy, the success of domestic enterprises, and the improvement of competitiveness and sustainability. These qualities are also needed in everyday life, as the young person growing up will be confronted with a frozen computer, a leaky tap or furniture that has been delivered flat packed and there is no one to solve these problems.
Labour demand data show that there is a serious shortage of labour, especially in technical and engineering fields. A report by the European Foundation for the Improvement of Living and Working Conditions (EUROFOUND, 2021) highlights that the lack of highly skilled labour is a major constraint on innovation in the Hungarian economy. Thanks to digital technology, jobs are becoming more flexible and complex. As a result, more and more employers are looking for workers who can manage complex information, think independently and creatively, and use resources efficiently. It is important that the qualities and skills needed to do this - such as logic, creativity, entrepreneurship and technical and technical aptitude - are also given an important role in public education.
If domestic education favours feminine qualities, and this causes women to be over-represented in higher education, this will significantly undermine social equality of opportunity and fairness. Failure to achieve equality of opportunity for boys and girls in education will affect social mobility and jeopardise the achievement of the education strategy.
(continues below)
The lower valuation of masculine qualities in education, and possibly their punishment, can lead to mental and behavioural problems for male pupils, who are unable to show and develop their special abilities to the full. This affects not only their behaviour, but also their diligence, which the research has identified as the most important attribute in education, clearly showing that boys are less diligent than girls. However, anyone who has observed a young boy practising 'decoupage' or taking something apart and putting it back together can see that boys (and men) can perform tasks, practise and solve problems with great concerted effort and intensity. In addition, the trait considered most feminine, as highlighted in the literature and in our own research, is emotional and social maturity, and the lack of this in boys can also affect boys' performance at school, their adaptability and their tolerance of monotony. If these factors were taken into account when setting the age of school entry, this in itself would have a significant impact on boys' equality of opportunity and achievement.
The significant over-representation of women in higher education also creates demographic problems, making it difficult to match young people of almost equal educational attainment. In addition, research (Szűcs, 1996) has shown that education also plays a role in women's choice of partner. While men often marry less educated women, women tend to marry men who are better educated than they are. According to KSH (2017), in 2010, the largest proportion of married couples were those in which both the bride and groom had tertiary education. Between 2010 and 2016, the share of tertiary educated couples among all couples entering marriage decreased, with the most significant change occurring among women with tertiary education, whose share fell from 40% to 35%. In general, couples with the same level of education are the most likely to marry, and their share increased between 2010 and 2016. Where there is a difference in the educational attainment of the married couples, the education level of the brides is mostly higher than that of the grooms. If this trend continues, a reversal of gender inequality in tertiary education could lead to a risk of fertility decline, as women are less likely to marry and thus less likely to have children. If recent trends continue, by 2025 there will be 1.8 women graduates for every man graduate in OECD countries, making it even more difficult to find a partner of the right status, cultural and educational background.
Now, again I don't think this is all too new in this space, but it's interesting what a flurry this obscure report caused even in the international media. It seems to have stepped right on a sensitive toe. The rebuttals aren't on a detailed level though:
In response, the Hungarian opposition lawmaker Endre Toth said on Facebook that talk of masculine and feminine qualities was “total scientific absurdity”. “It is time to remove your glasses from the last century,” he added.
And they immediately contextualize it with this sinister atmosphere:
Orbán has promoted a “conservative revolution” since returning to power in 2010, encouraging nativism and denigrating immigrants. He has also defended a controversial law banning LGBTQ content to minors.
In 2019, the Council of Europe’s human rights commissioner noted “backsliding in women’s rights and gender equality in Hungary” following a visit.
(I have criticized some of those LGBT-related political campaigns of the government myself, but these things can be kept separate.)
A right-wing journalist called attention to many distortions in these articles: Foreign Media Distorts State Audit Office’s Report.
Several international media outlets have published misleading summaries of the report, ignoring the data and explanations cited, and highlighting only certain conclusions out of context. The BBC wrote that “an increase in female graduates could make women less likely to marry and have children.” The BBC has also ignored the fact that it was not the authors or the ÁSZ who classified certain characteristics as feminine or masculine, but the literature cited and the parents and teachers interviewed by researchers.
The Telegraph puts it in an extremely misleading and simplistic way: “Hungary tells women: You won’t find husbands if you become smarter than men.”
Der Spiegel incorrectly wrote that the authority assumes that feminine skills are disproportionately favored in public education, but as mentioned above, this is just a hypothetical warning as the research showed that this is not the case.
According to La Repubblica, the authors of the report say that “if women spend too much time studying, they will not get married, have children, or contribute to the development of the nation.” No such conclusion is drawn in the report, nor is there any value judgment.
I think it's a good example of how even just touching these types of issues immediately triggers this mental blockage, like "crimestop" in Orwell's 1984. To even care about demography is adjacent to white supremacy, and to consider women's tendency to marry higher in status (hypergamy) is also just a non-starter and is seen equivalent to forcing them to stay in the kitchen.
EfficientSyllabus
1yr ago
It depends on how deeply you both are certain and convinced and how well-founded your beliefs are. Most people only very shallowly know politics, if you prod a little you very quickly find that they don't have solid reasons for believing things, there are many contradictions and inconsistencies and questions they have not though through ever. I definitely feel so myself when reading certain people here, and then some people I know are even more so.
So explicit politics is often pretty arbitrary. It depends on one's social circles and is a bit like religion: a protestant and a catholic can be in a good marriage if their confession is not a deep and central part of their life.
Whats more important are implicit political beliefs that may actually (consciously or not) be opposite to the explicitly proclaimed beliefs. Implicit beliefs and culture, like the practical rubber-meets-road understanding of gender roles, parenthood, what a relationship is and what it's supposed to be about, whether to have kids and if yes how to raise them.
These worldview aspects are important of you are looking for the mother of your future kids. But if you're just looking for a sex partner for a few months, then who cares? Then what matters is probably mostly sexual attraction, compatibility and whether any beliefs stop either party from having sex (very conservative, religious etc).
So I think explicit political beliefs can actually falsely make it seem like two people are so different, but if they broadly actually do and want similar things in life (eg value college education, see similar things as desirable for the future like where and how to live), then it can work. In such cases the politics is just a thin aesthetic preference.
But it's not always so. You may find someone who is a progressive climate doomer who refuses to have a car, despises you if you have one, is obsessed with zero waste, is vegan and doesn't tolerate you eating meat in your shared home. Then it will be hard to live together. It all depends on how much it impacts real life everyday decisions and how much he/she believes that it's not only about her/his choices but those choices must also be enthusiastically mirrored by you,or if they are more tolerant and chill and understand that their understanding of what's moral isn't complete and 100% right in every aspect.
EfficientSyllabus
1yr ago
This is just so over the top in your face that it's either Photoshop (ie this exchange didn't actually happen with a real woman), or the woman is really really stupid to not realize that it's a picture taken from the web, but even so she is more likely to have thought that the bio was a sort of black humor to go along with.
I feel like people who take this image as proof of anything regarding women is just very out of touch with reality.
EfficientSyllabus
1yr ago
It all depends on what we mean by politics. Sense 1 is the "soap opera", the sport, the thing on TV, ie you may disagree on which talking head you like when watching TV together. That's the trivial sense, where differences don't matter so much, and you can make do by just not watching the political soap opera together.
Sense 2 is politics as it applies to everyday decisions and behavior. But this would be better called a cultural clash, similar to people from different cultural/national backgrounds marrying,and having to negotiate a common way of life both can agree to. But such differences could also (perhaps more commonly) arise due to personality and temperamental differences.
The lines to the left of comments are still hot pink. Didn't you say you want to remove the pink stuff?
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