FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
And every gimmick hungry yob
Digging gold from rock n roll
Grabs the mic to tell us
he'll die before he's sold
But I believe in this
And it's been tested by research
He who fucks nuns
Will later join the church
User ID: 195
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
5mo ago
...Have you never heard of Slavery? The Triangle Trade?
Human capital != creative intellectual ability
If the sentient insectoids could do warehouse work, there would be millions of them in the inland empire in a few years. That goes double for Victorians or Saudis.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
5mo ago
There's a certain primal appeal to fighting, absolutely, but I also feel like combat sports s&c is pretty unsophisticated or downright goofy compared to more specialized events because, well, perfectly optimized s&c isn't all that important relative to skills training.
Definitely, the skill training is a far bigger aspect of the sport, but if we're talking spherical cows here I think that given equal skill, optimizing for pure fitness MMA provides the best single-event test for general fitness, because it punishes any lack or specialization in a way that other sports don't. What you perceive as "goofy" is in my mind more like "optimized for achieving balance across multiple domains of fitness." The specialized marathon runner can use more "sophisticated" methods because he has absolutely no need to optimize for upper body strength. The rock climber has no need to worry about his legs and may actively seek to shrink them. The MMA fighter must balance everything, any lack can be exploited, while maintaining a precise weight.
More generally, it occurs to me that the word "fit" by its etymology and other meanings pretty strongly implies specificity--fit for something or other.
Sure, and that's an important consideration, Pogacar doesn't stay up at night upset about his upper body strength. But it's also obviously the case that optimizing fitness for a given activity A produces different levels of fitness for B and C; and in turn optimizing for B will produce different levels of A and B, and similarly for C to B and A. We can ask how good A practitioners are at B and C and vice versa, and call that a general level of fitness.
So hypothetically, let's say we can (for some reason) only recommend a single exercise goal to someone. A is pure cardio, training for a marathon. B is pure strength training, 1rm back squat. C is the 5 minute SFG I snatch test.
How would you describe the property of C: that it makes you better at B and A, relative to how much A makes you better at B and C or B makes you better at C and A? When you say you are suspicious of general fitness, are you saying such a property doesn't exist, that it's impossible to describe, or that it never matters to anyone? Because it does seem to me like such a property exists, that it is at least theoretically possible to describe (though easily goodhart'd by something like a Fran Time), and that it does matter to a lot of people, myself among them.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
5mo ago
There was a local case recently where a 15 year old runaway became a Qanon cause celebre, with the parents and the local whackadoodles accusing random local families of being child traffickers and having kidnapped her.
She turned up a few weeks later in the deep south with a 20 year old boyfriend.
Obsession with some kind of Pennsylvania Pizzagate distracted from any actual effort of finding her, to say nothing of the harm done to those accused in public of child trafficking.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
5mo ago
There's a lot of space between "Ending the relationship" and "Don't even mention it."
Lodging formal complaints, and making public that they are doing so to assuage public concern, can lead to Israel telling its government officials do not diddle kids.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
5mo ago
But definitely knock it off with this "We all know" attempted consensus-building.
There's something kind of funny to both accusing @SecureSignals of engaging in consensus building when he says we all know what he means, and saying that we all know what he means.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
5mo ago
It's sad that there's this misapprehension that girls are being kidnapped by abusers, when a huge number of runaway girls (something like 20%-40% in most studies) are fleeing sexual abuse in the home.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
5mo ago
Yes, but it hasn't come up overly often.
On the other hand, I quickly tire of and stop reading blogs that use AI generated art as illustrations every two paragraphs. Not out of some sense that it's harming artists, but just because I find it so ugly and stupid that I have trouble maintaining respect for a writer that clearly thought it looked good.
I think the hopper concept is a good way to approach the question of who is the fittest on a theoretical "neutral ground." Otherwise comparing across disciplines is all about home field advantage. Competitive high level CrossFit is a moderately interesting answer, though over time the moves have gotten more specialized and it's more about training for CrossFit than training for anything.
FWIW, the most interesting answer to "the fittest" in my mind is probably MMA competition, in that within a weight class the fighter is always operating at the frontier of trading off strength vs endurance while accounting for his opponent doing the same. Too much focus on maximum strength, you gas early if you don't finish your opponent early, like Shane Carwin taking on Brock Lesnar; but if your maximum strength level is too much lower than your opponent's he'll overpower you and finish you off before endurance ever comes into play, like Shane Carwin's opponents leading up to his title shot.
And I suppose part of the reason I find this balance compelling is because by high school I had to come to the conclusion I am an athletic mediocrity, I was never going to do anything good enough to be interesting in any particular field. So given that, I find it more personally satisfying to have good lifts and decent cardio, than to have slightly better mediocre lifts and no cardio or slightly better mediocre cardio and weak lifts.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
5mo ago
Reading Stranger I had two main thoughts:
-
I didn't realize how influential it was. Dune is largely the same thing with heavier/harder scifi, Star Wars is largely Dune, and a million things since Star Wars are ripoffs of Star Wars. But they all come back to Heinlein.
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It is definitely very 60s in its view of sexuality.
Look forward to hearing more of your thoughts on it!
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
5mo ago
Fair, I probably misinterpreted your post.
But still, I don't even know if that data said it isn't useful! If I published an article telling you that I ran the numbers, and the 40-1 bets on UFC fights hit 5% of the time, that would be a huge gambling tip telling you to bet on the longshots.
We're probably getting into definitional problems here, Gym Muscles vs Strength vs Performance vs Whatever. So let's zoom back out to a general vision of Fitness. This is where I cite back to the original Crossfit What is Fitness? Essay laying out the ten general physical skills. While I haven't done crossfit in the sense of belonging to a box or doing WoDs in a long time, I still think the theoretical logic of crossfit's first standard is the best vision of fitness:
They are cardiovascular/respiratory endurance, stamina, strength, flexibility, power, speed, coordination, agility, balance and accuracy. You are as fit as you are competent in each of these 10 skills. A regimen develops fitness to the extent that it improves each of these 10 skills.
Then you have the second standard:
Picture a hopper loaded with an infinite number of physical challenges, where no selective mechanism is operative, and being asked to perform feats randomly drawn from the hopper. This model suggests that your fitness can be measured by your capacity to perform well at these tasks in relation to other individuals. The implication here is that fitness requires an ability to perform well at all tasks, even unfamiliar tasks and tasks combined in infinitely varying combinations.
And the third:
There are three metabolic pathways that provide the energy for all human action. These “metabolic engines” are known as the phosphagen (or phosphocreatine) pathway, the glycolytic (or lactate) pathway and the oxidative (or aerobic) pathway. Total fitness, the fitness that CrossFit promotes and develops, requires competency and training in each of these three pathways or engines. Balancing the effects of these three pathways largely determines the how and why of the metabolic conditioning or “cardio” that we do at CrossFit.
Anyway, with that theoretical framework in place, the question becomes more clear. What we're looking at here is a second standard problem, the infinite hopper. If you take a ditch digger and have him compete at ditch digging, he's going to do better at it than a computer programmer who powerlifts.* And in turn, the powerlifter will do better than the ditch digger at the power lifts. But how will each of them do across a wide variety of tasks? Who can help me move a piano? Who will be the better linebacker in a football game? Who is better in a fight (fitness wise, leaving aside propensity to violence etc)? Who would you rather have in a platoon of soldiers? Who can run, or walk, ten miles on foot faster?
And the answer, to me personally, is straightforward: the strongest guys I know are all concrete contractors, but they also all powerlift. So I kind of reject the premise: lifters aren't exclusively people who don't labor and laborers aren't exclusively people who don't lift. And anyway, we've gotten afield talking about "gym strength" versus OP's "gym muscles;" when one is talking about muscles we're mostly talking about aesthetics.
*I'm operating under the assumption that each task will be better for training at itself, though this isn't necessarily true. There are many cases where the best way to train for a task is not to do the thing itself, either exclusively or predominantly.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
5mo ago
Despite the rush to integrate powerful new models, about 5% of AI pilot programs achieve rapid revenue acceleration; the vast majority stall, delivering little to no measurable impact on P&L.
If this study is trustworthy, the promise of AI appears to be less concrete and less imminent than many would hope or fear.
This seems like an extremely odd metric to support the argument that you are making.
At the very least, to use the 5% success rate to understand AI's revolutionary potential, we need to know what the average value unlocked in those 5% of successes is, and the average cost across the whole dataset. If the costs are minimal, and the returns are 100x costs for the successes, then even if only 5% succeed every single company should be making that bet.
On top of that, what's the timeline function? When were these programs launched? How long have they been going on? Are the older programs more successful than the the newer ones? If most of the 5% are over a year old, while most of the 95% are less than a year old, we might be judging unripe tomatoes here.
Then, add to that, there's value in having institutional knowledge and expertise about AI. By having employees who understand AI, even if the pilot program fail, they'll see opportunities to implement it in the future and understand how to integrate it into their workflow.
It just seems odd to declare AI dead based off this data.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
5mo ago
DOGE didn't ultimately succeed in shrinking the government, but it eliminated the security of government employment.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
5mo ago
I guess the play would be to release an actual AI generated version of the same picture, so that everything is confused as to what they're looking at and what was the original.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
5mo ago
A cult feels a lot like a "committed affectionate relationship" to people who are vulnerable to or already in a cult.
And, for that matter, a lot of cults have used assigning or controlling partnerships that are otherwise "normal" as a method of control. In our future cult of incels and femcels, zoomers incapable of forming relationships will submit to the will of the Master, who will assign them a fellow initiate as a partner, on pain of having the partner revoked if you misbehave. Which, after all, isn't that far from a normal religion anyway.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
5mo ago
I've recently finished:
On the Marble Cliffs by Ernst Junger. Continuing my journey through Junger, I enjoyed the book but felt like I didn't understand it as deeply as I should have, it just felt like Animal Farm to me. If anyone who knows more could link me an explainer I'd love it, I feel like there is a lot of depth I'm not hitting.
Coup d'Etat by Edward Luttwak. Deeply disappointing, I like Luttwak and this is positioned as his best and most fun work, it was mostly pretty banal advice and analysis. Not bad, just not earth shattering.It's presented as a handbook for how to launch a coup, and it does have interesting views on what is a coup versus a revolution etc. It's inherently a "fun" book as a practical manual, and an easy read. I got a later reprinting that contained some updating to talk about later incidents, I think that might have made the book weaker, if you want to read this I'd recommend trying to find the original version.
JFK Jr. An Intimate Oral Biography An oral history of JFK Jr's life, as told by his friends and those who knew him. My wife wanted to read it so we read it together. I have OPNIONS on JFK Jr. now, which I think I will share soon.
The Sun Also Rises: I love Hemingway, and finally got to this one. A brilliant examination of masculinity, while also being a really fun book. If you haven't read it, you should.
To Have and to Have Not: I was on a Hemingway kick, so I picked this up at our library's annual book sale. This one is...not a masterpiece. It's a fine enough little noir set in the Keys, but...it feels kinda flat compared to Hemingway's best works like For Whom the Bell Tolls or The Undefeated. The lead is a classic Hemingway Hero without any of the conflict or interest, and just kinda floats through. I'll also say that while I'm normally not offended by racism or language, especially where period accurate, this one kinda feels over the top. Blacks are only referred to as niggers, both in the abstract and to their faces, while chinese are chinks and to be betrayed and murdered for no apparent reason as a matter of course. IDK, just didn't hit for me.
Currently, I'm kind of in the middle of:
Band of Brothers I have a personal connection to the subject so I've always meant to read it, finally started it the other day while bored and motored through half of it...only to find that the libgen copy I had gotten was only half the book. oops. Gotta find a real copy now.
I'm planning to start Ride the Tiger by Julius Evola. I've been Evola-Curious, and this seemed like a good place to start. And then on the flip side I've been listening to a lot of Daryl Cooper and he talked so much about how evil Eldridge Cleaver was that I downloaded Soul on Ice just to see what all the fuss was about. I'm also looking to read more by Ernst Junger, after enjoying Storm of Steel and Marble Cliffs, if anyone has any other recommendations. I'm probably going to start Hemingways Over the River as I picked that up at the book sale as well. I remain in the middle of Infinite Jest as part of a book club with a friend of mine.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
5mo ago
Kilts become A Thing in at least some blue tribe cities by 2050. Sneered at by minorities and the red tribe.
I'll do you one better: Kilts become a thing in the Blue Tribe by 2030, and by 2050 the kilts that came into fashion in 2040 are Red coded, the ones like that are "Youth Pastor Kilts" and show that you are hopelessly out of date in NYC or whatever. There's a type of skinny jean today that I would have been scared to wear in seventh grade for fear of being called a faggot, and that when I see them today it's a lame real estate agent or something.
My predictions:
We're going to see a surge of neo-religious sex cults over the next ten to twenty years, as the friction between wanting sex and getting sex reaches levels possibly never before seen in human history, and both male and female adherents will be happy to turn their consent and loyalty over to some new Manson or Jim Jones in exchange for being given permission to just get laid.
Major legislation on electric bikes is going to become necessary in the United States, either at the state level becoming standard across most states or at the federal level. I'm noticing a huge surge in biking in my area, as electrical assist bikes make it easier to get up hills. At the beach I started seeing a ton of electric bikes though, and a few electric adult tricycles. People are going to get themselves hurt, and it's going to result in legislation.
The USMNT will continue to protest that the NEXT world cup cycle is "our year" through at least two more times that the US hosts the world cup before ever making the final four.
Washington DC will go into a near full death spiral as a city over the next decade-plus. It will be 2040 before anyone considers living there again.
In imitation of Ronald Reagan, within five years the US will take part in a Panama or Grenada type tomato-can war to prove something or other. It won't go as planned, first as tragedy second as farce.
An NFL team will be accused of using AI for major coaching decisions this season. It will never be exactly clear the extent to which AI was used, and the results will ultimately be mixed.
There's a reductio ad in either direction right?
On the one hand, replacing every American with a higher-IQ Chinese or Indian person might raise the GDP by 15%, but it's weird to say to say it would be good for "America."
On the other, admitting Jensen Huang to the country obviously benefits America, even if it dilutes the pool of Americans. 1/333000000 dilution, versus a roughly $500 estimated increase in GDP per capita.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
5mo ago
What do you think of "gym muscles"? Referring here to the idea that musculature bought in the gym is less effective than muscles bought by manual labor.
In day to day life, much like discourse around "forms of intelligence:" if someone tells me that they are strong but not with "gym muscles" then I know they aren't actually all that strong at all. Most discourse around "Gym Muscles" is pure cope, the person accused of having "gym muscles" is normally stronger than the accuser. A fat powerlifting champ mostly recognizes the bodybuilder curl-monkey as a fellow lifter and rarely needs to insult him, it's the newbie redditor #StrongLifts5x5 who wants to tear the other guy down to build himself up because he recognizes there isn't much to back up his own pride. ((Though, to be kind, the ego is so difficult to navigate in that early-intermediate level when one is dedicating all kinds of time to something that one is still factually bad at))
In the same way that when someone starts talking about "types of intelligence" I'm pretty sure they don't have any type of intelligence I'm interested in. If someone tells me they aren't "book smart" but they are "street smart" they typically aren't street smart either, at best they have some degree of low level native-guide knowledge that they value higher than it is. If someone tells me they don't test well, but they have great artistic intelligence, their creative output normally sucks. Etc.
Now, factually, at some level if you do all kinds of manual labor tasks you will be better relative to your muscle mass at all kinds of manual labor tasks than you will be at bench press, and if you bench press all the time you will better at bench press relative to your muscle mass than you will be at manual labor tasks. We perceive this as confusing because we think of labor as a "stupid" task, and sports and fitness as more intelligent tasks: anyone can use a shovel, but only some people can lift weights. When really using a shovel properly, hard, throughout a day, is a much more complicated physical task than the bench press is. Experience completing labor tasks will add to your ability in those tasks, no different from any athletic specialization.
So IDK, I'm a gym bro for life.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
5mo ago
Yeah, I like bookstores and libraries. I want to hang out in bookstores and libraries. I don't want to download new books, I want to browse and buy them in person.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
5mo ago
At some level though what OP is positing is equally mixed: libs believed that torture was bad, that it wasn't useful (delivered no usable Intel), and that even if it did it would still not be worth the compromise in morals. The degree to which the middle term is driven by motivated reasoning is the battleground.
Similarly, anti immigration folks claim immigration is net negative in every way, pro immigration folks tell me it's positive in every way. The degree to which motivated reasoning, or per op simple dishonesty, is present is the battleground.
I don't think the broad mass of conservatives are motivated purely by economic concerns. That isn't contradicted by somebody popping up and saying well actually me personally... And even you yourself admit that some of it is cultural for you, so once again we're in the battleground.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
5mo ago
Can you elaborate on this bit? I guess I can imagine being of a puritan mindset where I would want to suppress feelings of being attracted out of shame, or out of a strong moral view on female virtue, and therefore would prefer form-fitting clothing be kept away from me wherever possible. Is that where you're going with this, or something else?
I'm far from a Puritan, but there's a certain tenant who recently moved into a rental house we own. They have a teenage daughter, she's thing and reasonably good looking, and she dresses in ways that make me want to avoid standing too close to her. Gossamer thin tank tops worn without a bra, which barely cover her stomach, and shorts so short I'd be arrested for wearing them.
I'm not aroused by her in any way that's above normal or disturbs me, nor am I particularly ashamed by any feeling of arousal I might have. But in any conversation beyond a few minutes, I'm filled with a sense that I don't want to be seen talking to her. Perhaps this is an overactive superego, a feminist or Catholic panopticon living in my brain, but I don't want to be seen chatting with a girl who looks like that. I have an inner sense that the image of me talking to a teenage girl dressed like that is inappropriate, and I'd prefer not be near her.
She's perfectly pleasant, if essentially uninteresting, to talk to; but immediately after I tell her whatever it is I need to tell her I cut the conversation short if no one else is present and go about some other business until her parents arrive, even if I have to invent some pretext to be inspecting or doing something else. I simply don't want to be seen by anyone to be chatting with a teenage girl dressed in that way, call it an extension to the Pence Rule.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
5mo ago
Actually, many rural republicans I know do self identify as people who don't need to or just don't go to a doctor. But that's more a matter of stupidity in those cases.
At no point am I arguing that rural healthcare won't be harmed, I'm arguing that they don't think it will be.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
5mo ago
There's two separate questions in there.
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Are they in the Taker class?
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Do they perceive and identify themselves as being in the Taker class?
Broke trailer trash generally abhor trailer trash, which they perceive as their neighbors rather than themselves. "I'm poor because I have to support all these people on welfare," "I'm a hard-working man, if I could, and my disability payments would be higher if it weren't for all the immigrants we're supporting..." "I'm just a drinker, he does meth," "I only do a little meth I'm not an addict like that guy over there," "I wouldn't be on the meth if it weren't for trying to compete with illegal immigrants..." There's various degrees of magical thinking involved in excusing one's own temporary circumstances, such as "Rural areas really produce things while urban gdp is fake and gay" or "Once you throw the bums off welfare and the immigrants out, I'll make more money and I won't need Medicaid." I do not think many GOP voters perceive themselves as takers, even if they mathematically are.
I do not think a significant number of Republican voters believe that bad things (for them) will result from Trump's policies and are willing to suffer for them. You can tell because Trump doesn't talk that way, more or less ever. They think that the policies Trump is pursuing will result in the instant improvement of their lives.
The responsible mainstream media should be asking itself why Shaun King, Talcum X, Martin Luther Cream, is being handed the opportunity to break this story.
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