FirmWeird
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User ID: 757
FirmWeird
Randomly Generated Reddit Username
1mo ago
Apologies for the late reply - I've been busy with work recently.
How do you know it's deformed?
Because this is a hypothetical example meant to show the absolute worst case for a "no exceptions" policy. I'm not an expert but I believe we do have tests for this kind of thing - and in this particular case it'd just be something easily visible on an ultrasound.
I am now going to sit back and wait for the mods to scold you for using emotive language and being heated and obsessed with this topic. I've gotten rebukes before for my hobbyhorses, so let's share the love.
I didn't feel particularly heated or emotive - it's just that when you say "no exceptions" you open the door to every single horrifying outcome that can result from a policy like that. I chose my example as one that would be allowed if any of those three exceptions were being used, and less so for emotional reasons. But that said, if you think that victims of incestuous rape should carry their trisomy-18 foetus to term and risk their life delivering it, you should come out and say it - because that's what no exceptions means.
EDIT: If pro-abortion types would stick to "abortion for incestuously raped 11 year olds", I'd take that bargain.
I personally am not hiding or trying to be deceptive about my position - I flat out said that I personally believe that abortion should be legal. It isn't a particularly nice thing to have happen, but there are absolutely times when a couple is better off not having a child (especially if said child ended up with a debilitating and permanent medical condition) or delaying having a kid until they're in a less tenuous position. I'll even agree with the pro-lifers that abortion is effectively an evil - but it is in some cases a lesser evil compared to the alternative.
FirmWeird
Randomly Generated Reddit Username
1mo ago
Once you start introducing 'exceptions,' you're just immediately back to condoning all abortion. "My health is at risk because if I'm not permitted to abort I might harm myself" is a free at-will golden ticket as long as you're able to memorize and repeat a sentence of that length.
This is completely incoherent and, though I hope to not fall afoul of the rules, inhumane to me. "Zero exceptions" means that you're going to have to own every single one of the nasty and truly horrific instances that show up. When an 11 year old girl shows up pregnant because she was raped by her uncle, you're going to have to look her in the eyes and tell her that actually if we abort the deformed and most likely non-viable foetus that's going to have a 100% chance of killing her upon delivery it might encourage other people to have unnecessary abortions - so she should write her will now. This isn't a hypothetical I plucked out of the ether, either - I feel like it is important to point out that the three exceptions are generally understood to be rape, incest and the life of the mother. That's what you're ruling out when you say no exceptions - that it is better for an underaged rape victim to pointlessly suffer and die because to do otherwise would be "meddling with the primeval forces of nature and attempting to play God".
Of course the issues don't end there - when you actually have a "no exceptions" policy, you're going to have to do some vigorous enforcement. Whenever a woman miscarries or has a stillbirth, you're going to have to send the police in while she grieves to make sure she didn't do anything untoward - after all, maybe that miscarriage was the result of taking a herbal abortifacient or engaging in risky behaviour to induce the death of the child. Every stillbirth and miscarriage becomes a potential crime scene, and if you're serious about "no exceptions" then you're going to have to have a police investigation every single time.
For the record, I'm personally a traditionalist when it comes to abortion - i.e. it is totally fine to get an abortion or simply leave the baby on the side of a wolf-covered mountain until they're a few years old (if they survive, great. if not, the gods didn't favour them anyway).
FirmWeird
Randomly Generated Reddit Username
1mo ago
OP, I like your idea but my main criticism is that it doesn't actually do enough to hold officials accountable. I'd actually go much further.
My personal belief is that entering politics should permanently cap your income and total assets - if you're a politician, you make the same income as the median worker in your constituency, and you may have a home that is worth slightly more than the median home for someone in your constituency. At the same time, you and all of your extended family members agree that your accounts can be reviewed by the public as necessary to ensure that there aren't any favours being dealt out to family members. It is an invasion of privacy, but if someone is going to adopt such an important role that's just something they have to accept.
This doesn't just give politicians skin in the game and a meaningful incentive to improve conditions for the people they represent, it also shifts the filtering on what type of people go into politics. Going into public office should absolutely not be viewed as a way to acquire financial benefits - it should be an act of meaningful self sacrifice, and while this might prevent someone like Bryan Johnson or Donald Trump from running for office, I don't see that as much of a problem.
FirmWeird
Randomly Generated Reddit Username
1mo ago
I took a long break from posting to go on holiday so feel free not to respond to this post in an ancient thread, but I wanted to reply anyway.
CICO is just a fact which we know from countless experiments of bodybuilders who count the calories they eat and from randomized control trials.
Yes, and I'm not disagreeing with it at all. This particular sort of diet intervention involves tackling the CO part. The claim is that these particular diets change some part of your internal chemistry in a way that prevents calories out from decreasing along with calories in. If this hypothesis is correct you can essentially get a free ECA stack with no side effects by shifting food consumption patterns in ways that prevent you from consuming environmental contaminants. That's absolutely worth investigating, and it would be regardless of whether CICO is true or not (I think it is, for the record).
Anyway, you decided to buy the meals you mention, and same previously. Surely, willpower plays a role in that?
In the sense that I actively wanted to eat tasty food that I could only purchase and consume during my limited time in Japan, yes. I wasn't paying any attention to my diet.
Although it was still bellow what you usually eat in the USA if you lost weight. Maybe you also were more active.
I don't live in the USA (but I do live in a FVEYS nation so not much of a difference). At the same time, I stopped going to the gym and working out while I was there - so while I did walk a lot more, I'm not sure how the total amount of exercise changed beyond losing the lifting portion.
Ultimately the core of my disagreement with your view of willpower being the determinant is that I have lost weight both through a lengthy and sustained act of willpower (protein sparing modified fasting + intense exercise routine), and through a dietary intervention that required no willpower at all - and in fact actually required me to exert mental effort/energy in order to eat enough junk food that my weight was stable rather than falling. There was a very clear subjective difference in my inner experience between the two, and the second felt a lot "healthier" - I had more energy and was more capable in a variety of ways when going through that second diet, and having gone through both types of intervention I'm actively trying the potato diet because I found that something equivalent worked that much better for me.
FirmWeird
Randomly Generated Reddit Username
1mo ago
I didn't want to look too deeply into Steve Irwin, but he mostly wrastled large reptiles into submission in his public appearances
https://www.smh.com.au/opinion/crikey-praise-for-pm-puts-you-in-a-snake-pit-20031109-gdhqvg.html
Praised a conservative PM who campaigned on stopping illegal immigration as the greatest PM the country ever had - he was a conservative, so he's actually another example of "toxic" masculinity.
FirmWeird
Randomly Generated Reddit Username
1mo ago
What are Tate's young followers often drawn to about his message? "Subjugate the bitches, keep them in the kitchen, get that paper and work them muscles out." And it isn't just his message they like. A lot of young men can 'relate' to that message, experientially.
Hard disagree here. That's not what draws people to his message - that IS the message. What draws people to his message, especially young males, is the promised benefits/rewards. Tate positions himself as a teacher who can guide young men out of a state of lack/want/need - what you're describing is how they get there. He's promising young men a way that they can get laid, paid and (more importantly) respected, and his message is resonating precisely because young men can see that following the socially approved pathways will probably result in them becoming losers.
Lifting weights is an activity undertaken not for the pleasure and joy of lifting weights but for the positive outcomes that result - being swole and physically capable. Tate (presumably, I haven't read any of his content beyond that one post from ages ago about how star wars sucks) tells people that "actually, physical instrumentality is important for men and you will have an easier time getting laid and respected if you are in good physical shape" and the message resonates because that's straightforwardly true. At the same time, his message doesn't attract men because he's telling them "you need to keep women in the kitchen" but because he's promising them sexual success (which is incredibly meaningful for young men!).
FirmWeird
Randomly Generated Reddit Username
1mo ago
And I think even when stated politely, active disgust is not a good thing.
I have explicit and active disgust for the neoconservatives who supported and advocated for the Iraq war, and though I usually state this politely the underlying disgust most likely comes out anyway. Is this a problem only for identity groups (like Welsh people) or does it apply more broadly?
FirmWeird
Randomly Generated Reddit Username
1mo ago
Yo need to actually think about things for yourself to find yourself in that position.
Actually, that's just mainstream conservatism from the pre-Trump era. Anti-progressive and anti-HBD was actually just the default package for people in his circumstances, as far as I could tell.
But more importantly, he didn't actually think about things for himself! The moment you tried to press him on HBD issues he just vanished into smoke. I tried to interrogate his beliefs and figure out what he actually believed at one point ( https://www.themotte.org/post/587/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/120781?context=8#context ), and he just disappeared and stopped responding. It isn't like this is a particularly unusual case either - I've seen multiple comments from pro HBD people talking about his refusal to actually argue his own points when the topic comes up.
"HBD is false" is the implicit and in many cases explicit messaging embedded in almost all modern culture, modern advertising, modern political narratives and explicitly in legislation. It isn't impossible to come to those views by virtue of your own reasoning, but I find the idea that you need to think for yourself in order to arrive at the position that societal elites are doing their best to inculcate in the general population isn't terribly rigorous.
FirmWeird
Randomly Generated Reddit Username
1mo ago
I had a lot of obviously bad food that didn't have any vinegar in it - but it probably was present. That said the meals themselves were 9000 yen, not calories (big difference).
FirmWeird
Randomly Generated Reddit Username
1mo ago
Sorry for taking so long to reply - I went on a holiday and don't post on the Motte when away from work.
As for the pollutant, I believe it was lithium. I got into drinking black cold brew coffee which required me to filter all of my water, and I discovered an incredibly tasty recipe for roast vegetables. Because I was peeling all the vegetables, I wasn't consuming anything that directly contacted food packaging without being washed. Similarly, the main source of nutrition for me was potato/sweet potato - and the weight just dropped off me with ease. This is exactly what the slime mold time mold people said would happen when I removed lithium exposure from my diet, but I did this accidentally (thank you recipetineats) and before I even heard the chemical hunger hypothesis.
FirmWeird
Randomly Generated Reddit Username
1mo ago
The typical voter has empirically incorrect ideas about immigration and its connection to crime and the economy.
The typical voter's view on immigration and the economic consequences of it are substantially more accurate than those of the elite. The American working class has actually collapsed, and immigration was one of the biggest forces contributing to that collapse (outsourcing being the second). While it might not be noticeable if you're living in elite enclave, illegal immigration (and regular immigration) have substantially immiserated vast swathes of the country. People don't think that the economy is bad simply because Trump isn't president, they think the economy is bad because the prices they pay for food and other basic necessities have increased out of pace with the compensation they're receiving to the point that it is having a noticeable impact on their quality of life despite what Paul Krugman is saying.
I do firmly believe the current US government is doing an outstanding job all things considered
Where exactly are they doing an outstanding job? They're losing the proxy war in Ukraine, public trust in government is at an all time low, family formation and other non-gamed metrics reflecting attainment of meaningful lifegoals are in the toilet and the nation's infrastructure has been neglected to an almost comical degree.
I don’t care because the deep state is benign and competent,
Have you read any of the leaked documents that came out of the deep state? I just can't believe that they're "benign and competent" when I've actually looked at the work they're doing, or the SMS messages they send to each other. At least the NSA got that cool control room inspired by Star Trek, I suppose...
FirmWeird
Randomly Generated Reddit Username
1mo ago
By living in a society governed by a different morality, you were exposed to a less obisogenic environment, with smaller plates, less hyper palatable food, I probably should have mentioned this too, but also food choices that are less obisogenic and more satiating and less calorie dense probably too. You probably also mimicked how other people behaved and how they ate.
But why is the pollutants the issue and not the fact that the available food you had to choose from was less likely to make you fat? Because lower calories and more satiating per calorie. Less amount of oils probably too.
I ate vast quantities of extremely fatty and oily luxury cuisine, to the point that I had ¥9000 breakfasts five days in a row. I also had more than one occasion where native Japanese people told me that I was eating a lot. At the same time, I had much more oily and fatty food - ramen, A5 marbling wagyu, otoro tuna, bizarrely flavoured gourmet kit-kats, crepes, viennese coffee, montblancs, fried street food, etc. I still lost over 5kg in three weeks. At the same time, my subjective experience matched up to when I accidentally adopted a diet similar to the potato diet recommended by the chemical hunger crowd - I felt like I had vast amounts of energy and simply ate whenever I was hungry or wanted to taste something interesting. In contrast, when I used willpower to eat an incredibly restrictive diet consisting largely of unpalatable food (protein sparing modified fasting) I found myself with intense cravings and lethargy that I only overcame with the usage of caffeine and whatever other stimulants they included in preworkout powders). This is why I blamed the pollutants rather than any sort of moral difference - because that's how it matched up to what I actually experienced.
I recall reading that counterpiece and then the SMTM refutation of it - but I'm not too eager to rehash that argument given that I haven't bothered keeping up with the literature for the past two years. If there are any argumentative data/food nerds here, I'd love to read a serious discussion on this hypothesis! I took a quick glance at the SMTM blog and they are still doing research on the basis of the chemical hunger hypothesis, so I'm not too sure that it has been comprehensively defeated. But even if it was, my own personal experiences are not ones that match up to the moral failing hypothesis at all. That all said, I do think there is actually a moral element to societal influence on food choices. The biggest difference from my perspective was that if you try to eat cheaply in Japan without access to a kitchen you would largely be eating riceballs, seaweed, fish, soybeans and other largely healthy choices. Trying to do the same in western nations leads to eating some incredibly unhealthy products (HFCS, McDonalds, etc), and this is the kind of issue that I think a healthy government would step in and address - but god knows I wouldn't trust current western governments to do this well...
FirmWeird
Randomly Generated Reddit Username
1mo ago
Installing VLC? The OP mentioned social networks getting money from API fees rather than advertisement, and the point at which the average person has to set up an API usage account for Reddit, Facebook, Google, X etc you have already lost 99% of the market. At the same time, I find it hard to believe that many large tech companies would be willing to accept BasedTrumpAI as a customer. There are Tier 1 isps blocking access to discussion forums that don't ban wrongthink right now - I don't see any way that the current large tech companies even begrudgingly co-operate without heavy-handed government intervention.
FirmWeird
Randomly Generated Reddit Username
1mo ago
The chemical hunger hypothesis is not the default hypothesis for the rise of obesity.
I agree with this, but I don't think that actually provides a justification for the "moral failing" hypothesis - the moral failing hypothesis just can't explain what's actually happening. There are just too many odd correlations and relationships within the data for the moral failing hypothesis to be that plausible - at most it can be a small contributor to part of the problem. What's the 'moral failing' explanation for why obesity is correlated with altitude/water-tables? Don't forget that this obesity epidemic is impacting animals as well - it doesn't seem plausible to me that the decrease in willingness to sacrifice for society has caused feral rats to start overeating and getting fat.
You mentioned Japan, but I found myself losing weight there extremely quickly and easily without making any changes to my moral behaviour or character. Similarly, shifts in my weight that occurred outside Japan seemed much more correlated to environmental exposure than to the specifics of diet/behaviour - I have personal experience with rapid weightloss, and the moral failure hypothesis just did not match up to my inner experience at all. I found that when I (accidentally at the time) lowered my exposure to the kind of environmental pollutants hypothesised to cause obesity what followed was a sudden increase in energy and a decrease in appetite. Previously I'd lost weight by caloric restriction and strict dietary control which required a lot of willpower, but that loss was correlated with a lot of negative side effects and lethargy (as the chemical hunger hypothesis would suggest) - whereas I actually had to exert willpower in order to avoid losing weight on the "cut out pollutants" diet, rather than the opposite.
I just can't see the justification for endorsing the morality hypothesis when there are so many facts that it just utterly fails to explain - and there's no real predictive power there either. If you're right, we'd be able to look back at other instances of societal trust/morality collapsing and find obesity epidemics there too - but to the best of my knowledge, this just hasn't happened. I'm more than happy to be convinced that your hypothesis has legs, but you're going to have to provide a bit more evidence and explain a bunch of the questions that chemical hunger raises before I can accept it as more than a small contribution.
I'm willing to believe that our society has less self-sacrifice in it - hell, I'm substantially less willing to shoulder sacrifices for the sake of my society, but I think that's in large part due to my society endorsing and encouraging things I morally disagree with. There are a bunch of corrupt criminals shoving their faces into the collective trough of society, and I see no reason to make personal sacrifices just to empower them and leave me and my family worse off - as far as I'm concerned, making personal sacrifices in support of the Global American Empire is far more immoral than restricting my circle of care to those close and dear to me.
FirmWeird
Randomly Generated Reddit Username
1mo ago
I actually agree with this point, but at the same time I feel that it precludes the possibility being spoken about by the OP. It is possible to take your beefy gaming GPU and make it run a a lower-quality and much slower instance of an AI assistant, but that's not something that the majority of people are going to do.
FirmWeird
Randomly Generated Reddit Username
1mo ago
Now, you can't force people to have children, or not get fat, in the same way you can enforce criminalization of drugs, although there are things you could do, but the moralists on these issues are correct. Contrarily the people who have been spreading apathy and downplaying have had a corrosive effect on society.
Are you sure you can put the blame for the obesity epidemic at the feet of morality? I don't know how thoroughly the Chemical Hunger hypothesis has been discredited, but it seemed plausible to me and a bunch of the issues they raised make it impossible for me to take morality based explanations for the obesity epidemic seriously - unless you want to claim that there's a correlation between altitude and moral fortitude.
Though that said I am actually open to a more mystical morality play interpretation. The idea that environmental damage caused by oil extraction (the same energy resource responsible for our current prosperity) is poisoning the population in a way that makes them more dependent upon extravagant energy expenditure propped up by fossil fuels is poetic enough that I want to believe it is true even if it actually isn't.
FirmWeird
Randomly Generated Reddit Username
1mo ago
All of this feels incredibly predictable to me given the dual combination of AI assistants and spambots getting much better, but I'm curious what others think, and also what the consequences of this new internet landscape will be for society and politics.
I don't think the AI assistants are going to be able to provide the kind of quality or even compelling feeds that you describe. As we've seen from every single AI assistant ever released, the guardrails and "safety" restrictions on them are going to make them useless for anything more than a mild distraction. The Trump voting base, to pick one example, is not going to be interested in an algorithmic feed that is designed by people who have flat out said that they are explicitly looking to change the way that they vote - and while I'm not going to talk about the high IQ of the median Trump voter, even they are going to realise that something is off when their AI feed constantly compares him unfavourably to Hitler and routinely refuses requests because it considers them racist. I'm sure the technology will improve a bit over time, but all it'll take will be a single leak of the prompt and a huge portion of the country(let alone the globe) will put those AI algorithms in the same category as Bud Light.
It isn't like there's an easy solution to this either. If you actually want to make an AI assistant that those people would accept, you have to completely ignore any and all people talking about AI alignment, AI safety, DEI and so on. You would immediately render yourself persona non grata to the broader tech community and be unable to use the majority of tech infrastructure. An AI assistant that was actually palatable to the red base would by definition be transphobic, which means Silicon Valley isn't going to be building it and will actually be exerting as much pressure as they can to get it shut down.
FirmWeird
Randomly Generated Reddit Username
2mo ago
It's not clear how nondeterminism helps accounts of free will, though. Suppose you have two universes, one where quantum effects don't play a significant role in cognition and decision making (the one I would argue we live in) and another where random quantum fluctuations make me decide which coffee shop I'm going to this morning. I don't see myself as having any more free will in the latter world, and probably less.
I believe that the standard response to this from the "nondeterminist accounts of free will" crowd is that those random quantum fluctuations are actually the physical mechanism of consciousness/decision-making. You make a decision or will something in consciousness, and then poorly explained magic converts that into a random fluctuation that motivates the determinist parts of you into action in accordance with your will.
FirmWeird
Randomly Generated Reddit Username
2mo ago
If you've already got the political capital to force race-free, meritocratic admissions you will by necessity have completely dismantled the currently existing political infrastructure that agitates for the reimposition of those problematic norms.
FirmWeird
Randomly Generated Reddit Username
2mo ago
Uhh, I was responding in the car
This is actually illegal in my country - please keep your eyes on the road and drive safely!
FirmWeird
Randomly Generated Reddit Username
2mo ago
Those are all kind of nice I guess, but the negatives of "being part of the GOP establishment" are just too big. It wouldn't matter if you pulled out a Dragonball Z power-level scouter and got an objective reading that Desantis had a political powerlevel ten times higher than Trump's - he's not on the same team nor does he actually care about the needs and wants of the base.
FirmWeird
Randomly Generated Reddit Username
2mo ago
So, Trump can only do the right thing for his supporters only if it doesn't cost him in any way?
No, Trump was constrained and hamstrung by an administration that was diametrically opposed to his political goals. He didn't handle things perfectly, but there were actual reasons behind his actions.
Maybe you have invested your hopes and dreams in the wrong guy then?
I am not whoever you were thinking of when you came up with this line - I haven't invested any of my dreams in Trump, and my only hope for him is that he serves to damage the power elite. My wildest hope would be that he dismantles that power elite in a second term, but I'm not even sure how realistic that is.
FirmWeird
Randomly Generated Reddit Username
2mo ago
a far better candidate in the current primary
Who?
Nikki Haley is not a serious candidate. DeSantis was nowhere near as strong as Trump either.
FirmWeird
Randomly Generated Reddit Username
2mo ago
For example, left a bunch of his most ardent supporters who participated in J6 to democrat mercy while pardoning scammers and rappers
This has been gone over repeatedly - the moment Trump pardoned the J6 crew he would have been immediately impeached and the GOPe would help the left get rid of him. Trump may be liked by the base, but he's loathed by the establishment republicans because him getting his way means that their cushy sinecures go out the window as well.
He's talking about Substack. Substack is the site that can't be named on twitter, not here.
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