EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
I know what you're here for. What's his bias? Politically I at least like to think of myself as a true moderate, maybe (in US context) slightly naturally right-leaning but currently politically left-leaning if I had to be more specific.
User ID: 1043
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
1mo ago
The funny thing I read recently was about how shipping is a mess because of Trump - first, a ton of big ships made trips to the EU, and now that there’s a pause in the China tariffs and US companies are stocking up, the ships are in the wrong spot. Basically a lot of reactionary decisions all around and because Trump’s mind is hard to read the logistic decisions at also unstable and sometimes “wrong”
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
1mo ago
It’s tough, but I don’t think RCTs are possible. Despite obviously how helpful they would be. They require you to randomize treatment, and not only is blinding difficult or impossible, at its core for an RCT to even occur you need parents and teen subjects BOTH who are willing to give up the choice entirely to chance! That is, if you’re assigned to a transition group or not, neither the parent nor child can have a veto, or it ruins makes random assignment useless. I don’t know anyone who would be comfortable doing that, do you?
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
1mo ago
Just because I was reminded by the comment in the main thread, do pierced septums, tongues, and gauges give anyone the major ick? Nose studs? Fine. Belly button piercings? A little wierd but fine. Any non-face tattoo? Fine. But hoooooly crap does anything more than a tiny septum piercing make me uncomfortable. Not just like, “oh that’s weird” but almost I find it physically repulsive that larger ones I find it hard to even look. Ear gauges also, anything bigger than a button. Tongue piercings in any size. Is this just a human “looks like that would hurt” reaction, or is there some other component maybe? Curious if others feel the same but are more/less vocal about it, or if it’s just a personal issue.
I was raised as conservative Christian (how conservative? Useless question, too relative) but in liberal Oregon, if relevant, so at least it’s not purely a lack of exposure thing.
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
1mo ago
Thanks!
A somewhat interesting Orson Scott Card (cowritten) book on a hypothetical civil war had some ideas (but is mostly just a thriller, notable for (major plot spoiler)
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
1mo ago
Reddit accounts are 1) worth money, technically but 2) are occasionally useful for when you need to post in a community that requires a higher reputation. So I'd keep it. For example, I've used /r/hardwareswap before, which seemed easier to me than doing eBay. If that's like what you're describing, where your name shows up in DM's, I don't see any reason to panic unless you're a major political figure or something.
I think it's more the case that psychology has strayed from some of the more helpful and direct aspects into softer and less effective techniques, that sound more short-term palatable and reasonable. I think CBT is a central case. Have you ever read the book that kick-started basically the whole movement? It's Feeling Good by David Burns. Actually, such an interesting book. The main thesis is that you should get in the ingrained habit of mentally "talking back" to yourself. Not necessarily belligerently, often compassionately, but still firmly. And without drugs. You can see where some of the modern therapy-talk comes from, but at the same time, it's almost unrecognizable! I should write a main post about it sometime.
He does things like having you write out a cost-benefit analysis for being angry. He writes out some extensive role-plays where one person aggressively challenges the other. He has you literally write down on paper thoughts and then deliberately re-phrase them, like a kind of self-brainwashing. Or, in other cases, to write down your predictions The emphasis is that theoretically, you get enough tools that you can go without therapy indefinitely. You should "get better" and not just "feel better" (I should note that the book's focus is most focused on depression and related symptoms, not trauma or anything like that). There's a nice little table at one point of 10 (really 11) specific "cognitive distortions" that are seen as the source of "many if not all of your depressed states" (page 42 on my copy, which I dug out of storage). They are: all or nothing thinking, overgeneralization, mental filters, disqualifying the positive, jumping to conclusions (mind reading and the fortune teller error), magnification/catastrophizing or minimization, emotional reasoning, should statements, labeling and mislabeling, and personalization. The underlying thesis is that if you are unhappy, it is because you have some maladaptive or frankly incorrect ideas in your head that are too extreme and don't match reality. By becoming a more rational observer of yourself, you can have realistic standards and cope better with extenuating circumstances. In this way, it's almost explicitly anti-narcissist. It also straight up rejects the notion that your emotions are a reliable guide. That is to say, emotions alone have a feedback loop with thoughts and do not exist purely independently. And one of your "demons" is the self-critic, to which you respond with talk-back, along with some evidence (putting pen to paper and even "testing" some of your assertions).
I'm leafing through this book again and it's so interesting that he actually has criticism of what were then practices of the time, that you still see now, despite CBT allegedly becoming the go-to method. There's this passage about how "emotional ventilation for its own sake is usually not enough", where he talks about a writer who "learned" from her prior therapist that she's perfectionist, that she picked up from her mother, and could never please her mother, and the therapist said to stop it, but she doesn't know how, mechanically, despite this knowledge. He goes on to criticize the industry for overfocusing on "ventilation of emotions and insight" and under-emphasizing actual tools and techniques. Anecdotally, I will also say that it was pretty rare across several therapists I myself went to for them to ever assign meaningful homework, much less follow up. Ironically, including the one who recommended the book, which therapist didn't even bother to take notes (and clearly didn't take them afterwards because he would rarely remember what we previously discussed). I thus wonder if it's not as much the exploration of feelings that's the problem so much as stopping halfway and stopping there, instead of viewing feeling-exploration as a means to an end.
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
1mo ago
I mean although this kind of violence is infamously contagious and prone to copy-cats, the optics here are pretty uniquely terrible. Not that it usually matters for terrorists that their actions frequently are counter-productive. The museum is already left-aligned in several ways (the website has a Native American land acknowledgement and an Equity and Justice statement about BIPOC people, hosts "LGBTJews" events, etc.), the man wasn't even Jewish he was a Christian although both were still Israeli embassy staff, and the couple was young and photogenic, famously about to get engaged within a week or two.
I don't see how this changes anything about partisan violence levels.
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
1mo ago
Isn’t this a solved problem in a more local sense? You just put a housing development off the main road with deliberately curved and winding streets which has the natural effect of slowing down car speeds and limiting through traffic as long as the entry points were sensibly chosen. No need to be a mid sized town, this can be dropped into bigger city outskirts.
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
1mo ago
If my (extremely amateur) experiences with images is any guide, then it’s extremely bad at permanecense (google tells me this is not a word but I feel like it is).
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
1mo ago
There would be a deep irony if the money making professors all bailed for China, thus having the opposite effect Trump intended
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
1mo ago
Not all the endowments can be taken at face value. It’s kind of like a university’s 401K, while it’s counted in net worth it’s not immediately accessible. Also the stock market being unusually good the last 20 years has caused some of them to grow more than expected, but that’s not something you can bank on indefinitely. Thus, the 15 billion being unable to entirely sustain current spending. Even Harvard it’s something similar.
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
1mo ago
I think another sign that something was seriously wrong at Columbia is that they run the Columbia Teacher’s College, the premier destination for teacher training — that is best known in recent years for being the exact ones who were flagrantly wrong on the Science of Reading stuff, ironically mistraining teachers. Great write up.
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
1mo ago
This article is a good top level summary. This post was unverified but the reasons seem to match other reporting that the most recent model is a massive sunk cost. The head and VP not only both resigned last month but also asked their names not to be put on the eventual release. “Most of the team” probably overstated sorry. I accidentally took out of context the still notable fact that 11 of 14 of the authors of a major paper on the fundamental AI research team at Meta have left since publication and formation in 2023. Either way, Meta is behind absolutely but everyone is slowing. IMO we need another theoretical leap, probably about implementing “memory”, to keep progress rolling.
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
1mo ago
The point about simple measurement is a good one. Standardization is not so standard in history! Famously even changing the definition of a bushel of grain led to revolts on France because it distorted the tax collection, weights and measures might even vary from town to town.
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
1mo ago
It’s true that robotics is getting renewed attention, but this seems to be more the result of increased investment rather than any foundational sea change in knowledge or theory. The fixation on a bipedal and human-ish one is also just that, a fixation, and still leads to some difficulty even moving around consistently - see for example the robot marathon and of course claims that the Tesla robots have been somewhat relying on human controllers last I heard. No new paradigms yet there.
There continues to be progress on the LLM front but this is actually, maybe contrary to the impression you are getting, slowing. I wouldn’t call it a plateau at all but there’s a real sense of struggle out there. Most of the focus in the last six months has been tool use of various kinds, rather than fundamental improvements, though there are some theoretical ideas kicking around that might prove fruitful. On the contrary the major research labs have started to see some diminishing returns. Meta notably can’t even catch fully up to the front players and most of the team quit in frustration. Anthropic has been stuck in a bit of a rut with 3.7 only a mixed improvement over 3.5 and in some ways a regression. OpenAI has had trouble getting the so-called “version 5” off the ground that’s an impressive enough improvement to deserve the name. Google is catching up and adding some neat things. Context windows are going up. “Agent” systems are being experimented with more. Video generation is showing some sparks of brilliance but the compute required is pretty steep. Deepfake video and voice, even real time stuff, is the biggest issue right now, more than any AGI crap.
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
1mo ago
Also it’s tasty but just… not as tasty as modern less healthy food. There’s a reason that as soon as Mediterranean people themselves get wealthy enough, they ditch.
I think that there's this ahistorical idea floating around about history that the norm is a massively unequal division of labor in one direction or another (either women are overworked and saddled with all sorts of extra stuff due to oppression, or they are locked away and unable to do meaningful work due to oppression), but I think part of this is largely an artifact of how history is largely written by some kind of "noble" class. For the vast majority of people in history, both men and women work very very hard at a wide variety of tasks, because frankly, life has been tough for humans for virtually all of recorded history. You can't afford to be idle, man or woman. There was, like, one weird period in American history in the decades after WW2 where prosperity was weirdly high, tech developments made a noticeable dent in work levels, and so work responsibilities along with labor demand got kind of out of whack. Along with bad history, this had a massive and outsized impact on how people think about division of labor, with some second wave feminist influence mixed in there too. So yes, sloppy thinking to put it bluntly, but also a real and understandable phenomenon. As just one example, the invention of the washing machine and even the vacuum had an absolutely massive impact on housework. I'm not exaggerating - there are only so many hours in the week, and all clothes then and now need to be washed so often; the washing machine alone saved they estimate like 8 or more hours per week, by itself. All this to say that while I wouldn't quite go so far as to call caring about housework division of labor a luxury belief, the fundamental calculus behind division of labor is in a historically weird spot in current-day developed nations even before you get into the belief systems involved.
I think there's a growing, albeit loose, awareness that's slowly spreading leftward that to a considerable extent, some of these "female burdens" are actually self-imposed rather than a systemic plot against them. I'd tentatively call it fifth-wave feminism, but I don't know if it would develop enough to earn the title. There would be a kind of interesting circular symmetry, though. I personally think it makes more sense to shift the waves a little earlier than they are traditionally defined, which defines the "4th wave" as distinct from the 3rd, starting maybe 2010? This is all US-specific:
-
Proto-feminism (1700s-1850): The sphere of influence of the woman expands within the home and traditional spaces, gaining greater influence over education and child-rearing, but also moral leadership
-
First Wave feminism (1850-1920): Suffrage and expanding political and legal rights as people, fuller participants across society, and increasing job access
-
Second Wave feminism (1943-1980): "women's liberation", sexual revolution, pushback against gender roles especially traditional ones, equal legal rights across the system
-
Third Wave feminism (1990-2010): push for full equality in more than name only, less sexism and harassment at all society levels, more individualistic expression, greater job access, and intersectionality with race
-
Fourth Wave feminism (2010-present): push for absolute parity in all fronts, more full integration of LGBTQ issues, focus on smaller but systemic oppressions, #MeToo, and consent.
-
Fifth Wave feminism (2030-45?): re-claiming of certain traditional feminist roles and preferences, more private and interpersonally oriented, praise of archetypes, and conscious rejection of parity goals
As to how that would affect men, hard to say. I am skeptical that outright men's rights movements would meaningfully develop, but there could be a traditionalist faction that grows alongside fifth-wave feminism. Think the growth of less politically active men-only clubs and associations as social media reaches epidemic/oversaturation levels and people look for a counter-movement. Like, both genders playing up their traditional strengths rather than trying to make up for their own weaknesses, which seems to be the fourth-wave attitude. I'd note that the fourth wave somewhat devalues gender entirely, ironically, partly due to the incorporation of nonbinary and trans stuff - and I think that's what might set the stage for a fifth wave that kind of echoes the proto-feminist Wave Zero.
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
1mo ago
The interesting thing going on right now IMO in high school history classes is we're starting to see them teach topics like the 80's, which is that awkward frontier where it's like, definitely starting to be established history in an important sense, but it's also still very impactful on current politics, so you theoretically still have to tread carefully. It seems like history classes in high school typically roll up to like a 20 to 30-year lagging window or so. APUSH for example technically covers "1980 to present" as a whole category, but in practice it usually starts petering out around the mid-2000's, with the last official topic being the Obama presidency, so about 10 years ago. But most history classes won't push that frontier as much.
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
1mo ago
I got a lot of pushback here, but I still think my standard of "anything over 50 years ago should be dropped" as a current-year topic still works pretty well, not ideologically obviously but as a more pragmatic principle that preserves at least some notion of evenhandedness. 50 years later, most everyone in power then is dead now, or dying, so it seems increasingly pointless to try and get reparations or impact current policy. For Israel, that means the Six Day War and Yom Kippur War both ought to be non-factors, but the Oslo Accords and first Lebanese conflict might still be fair game. For Ukraine, that would mean you can't hold Stalin against Russia, but you can look at some of the last decade of the USSR. For Turkey, that would mean a lot of the PKK conflicts are still relevant. Does that imply that an Armenian shouldn't feel ill-will towards Turkey still? No, that's understandable, I would more say that it implies that you can blame their upbringing or current education system for mis-educating people still, but that at the same time pursuing any kind of reparations would be a fool's errand.
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
1mo ago
Nah, Turkey's got that little bit to the NW of Istanbul that I think counts, so partial credit. I guess historically it's more a production of the "European Broadcasting Union" as a media co-op, but still, what sell-outs
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
1mo ago
Could it possibly be a misremembered version (or local variant) of Temiya, the Mute Prince? The overall story arc is there for sure, where the son pretends to be mute despite many many attempts to shock or persuade him out of it (not singing though), all in order to get out of being made king so he can do Buddha things instead. He eventually speaks after the king orders his death and he tries to fake his own death, and he successfully sheds the responsibility.
The other candidate I have for your consideration, more of a long shot but still fits the general pattern and with a sudden twist involving a chicken, is The Decapitated Chicken. A woman has 4 mute, unresponsive, almost insensate sons, who are only entertained by loud noises and bright lights, eventually neglected, and then finally a normal daughter is born who gets all the attention. Later, the sons witness a chicken beheaded and get fixated on the blood, and re-enact it by suddenly murdering the daughter, horror-style. It's not clear if this is truly a "fix" though.
Both seem like decent bets, considering how memories can be altered, misremembered, or conflated if it's been a really really long time. Or, could it have been more of a joke than a story? A children's book of some type? Dunno if I would have found it if so.
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
1mo ago
Ah, I see. You could call it selfless love, though, from Jesus' perspective? I guess I understand how you'd think from a judgement of God the Father's perspective that seems kind of messed up.
Answers obviously vary, but my own religion (LDS/Mormon) actually has a bit of a different view in that God obeys certain laws, and among them are that sinful people literally cannot enter heaven. In our setup, there was basically a big meeting before the Earth was created where everyone already existed, and God proposed a plan for human growth and development, including obtaining physical bodies and learning to overcome temptation. Jesus volunteered to overcome death and make it possible there, and we all also agreed to participate. Thus it's not all about sin directly, it's more about growth, and if you don't grow enough you don't quite go to hell either - you just go to a place where you feel most comfortable, with people of a similar level of purity and goodness together, and sinful-character people wouldn't feel comfortable in God's direct presence. That is to say as well, the Fall and its consequences wasn't a disaster, but a pre-planned opportunity to propel directional growth. I got off topic but in that perspective God is quite literally constrained to set it up this way rather than making a deliberate choice to torture his son to death. In fact, we move the "main event" to the garden of Gethsemane rather than the cross for much this same reason, emphasizing the elective nature of it while the cross is more about the victory over death (why the cross is not used, we view the resurrection as also more important than the crucifixion). Thus it's not purely legalistic, but rather a setup that allows mercy to assist with the innate natural spiritual consequences of bad/immoral choices, while also allowing for true moral agency to exist. Although the details can vary significantly, there are other evangelicals who believe something similar and more in line with what you describe, that sin literally requires punishment, so Jesus was performing a kind of legal act in assuming the sin. You're right that some related framings there indicate God defines what is good and bad, it's not independent, which might be more problematic in that context.
This isn't universal across Christianity, I should note: some sidestep the whole issue and never address if Jesus' suffering was actually necessary or view it as strictly inspirational, others don't think the cross was about guilt at all, but in fact was breaking the power of death as a kind of liberation (forgiveness is free more independently of Jesus), and still others think the cross was more about God identifying with humanity as an act of ultimate empathy (I think Eastern Orthodox is roughly those last two, though I'm sure our motte residents could tell you more).
What the above poster is claiming and what I think is more accurate is that rather than foreign students “taking spots” from domestic students, instead there is a synergistic effect where more-profitable foreign students essentially underwrite less-profitable domestic students. Like how health care takes profits from healthy people (and lucky people) to pay for poor people (and unlucky people). If you take away foreign money, you actually hurt domestic students! Universities will shrink their advanced degree programs due to funding shortfalls rather than expand access to domestic applicants. Making this an own-goal (at least in absolute numbers)
More options
Context Copy link