FtttG
User ID: 1175
I'm not "perturbed" by anything: it's simply that your assertion that everyone on the Motte works in Silicon Valley is extremely obviously erroneous.
I don't know if we've ever done a user survey here, but Scott does one of his readers every year, and only 58% of his readers live in the US, and less than 50% work in computer science-related fields. If you assume that there's a lot of overlap between the kinds of people who read Scott and the kinds of people who post here, I'd hazard a guess that at most forty per cent of Motte users work in Silicon Valley - quite a long ways from "all" or "a very strong correlation". I wouldn't be remotely surprised if the real figure was as low as twenty per cent, or ten.
TracingWoodgrains did a user survey back in the Reddit days and only two-thirds of posters lived in the US (I don't know how much the demographics have changed since the migration from Reddit).
I will admit that there are few types of fallacious argument I find more obnoxious than sneering Bulverism, especially when it's based on an untrue assertion.
FtttG
2hr ago
Sure. But "someone who is immersed in the rationalist milieu" and "someone who works in Silicon Valley" are not synonymous, as numerous commenters have taken great pains to explain to you.
FtttG
3hr ago
Every normal Christian in America has heard of the Mormon church.
FtttG
7hr ago
114k on my NaNoWriMo project. I would like to say that the end is in sight, but who knows. It actually feels like it's getting harder and harder the closer I get to the finish line. If I'd known that, when I'd finished my initial 50k words at the end of November, that would represent less than half of a first draft - I'm not sure I would have started in the first place.
FtttG
7hr ago
Never do they acknowledge that the addicts bear any blame
Wasn't that pretty much the entire point of that paragraph of my original post?
FtttG
14hr ago
Would I be right in saying Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Harry S. Truman were not personally responsible for the genocide of any ethnically distinct Native American tribes?
FtttG
15hr ago
You will find that people in mental health find the current paradigms on these matters to be extremely deleterious to human development and flourishing.
Just because the people who work in the industry think that these paradigms aren't conducive to human flourishing, doesn't mean the paradigms in question didn't ultimately arise within that industry. I'm sure there are Catholic priests who have misgivings about this or that component of Vatican doctrine, or people who work in the gambling industry who feel guilty about how they've been complicit in ruining so many lives.
Competent therapists will emphasize this early and often and actually do it.
Of course, but lots of therapists are incompetent and aren't weeded out quickly enough, if at all.
FtttG
17hr ago
Relevant: https://youtube.com/watch?v=isafYIg0o3c?si=Ag1feI3cQNjZ8ZQM
I don't know how good AI is at generating a video of a woman pissing into her own mouth but I'm sure it's only a matter of time.
Richard Hanania is constantly beating the drum about "low human capital" people believing in conspiracy theories, which seems like the most obvious example. Working-class Dale Gribble voters believing in the New World Order, UN black helicopters, microchips in Covid vaccines etc. are so common as to be a cliché; the rare elites who believe in conspiracies are "man bites dog" stories.
I, @FarNearEverywhere and @Tollund_Man4 are Irish and live in Ireland, the former two residing there and the latter in France. @self_made_human and @mrvanillasky are both Indian, with the former residing in the UK.
As for the claim that the only people who care about those topics are people who live in Silicon Valley: have you not noticed that the entire world has been talking about AI nonstop for the past two years? Have you not noticed what a hot-button issue the trans stuff is in every Western nation, to the point that Trump signed an executive order banning men from competing in women's sports, and the UK Supreme Court recently had to rule on the definition of the word "woman"? Indian caste dynamics are of profound import to the 1.5 billion people who live in India (even if only 1% of those people express an opinion about caste dynamics, that's still five times the population of Silicon Valley), never mind the diaspora. There's been a nationwide campaign of arson against Tesla because of the outsized power Musk wields (wielded?) as part of DOGE.
Of the items on your list, polyamory and Aella sound like the only ones to me which are uniquely Silicon Valley-coded.
FtttG
1d ago
I think this question came up before, and I suggested hard-line anti-abortion. It's easy for a wealthy conservative man to proclaim that no one should ever have an abortion, as by virtue of his wealth, he and his family are insulated from most of the "use cases" in which an abortion might be preferable to carrying a baby to term. Whereas a working-class woman who gets pregnant unexpectedly might find that carrying the baby to term is financially ruinous.
FtttG
1d ago
Well actually my point is that there are plenty of self-identified trans women who don't even put on a dress or try to speak in a more high-pitched voice.
FtttG
1d ago
The trans women you've met must pass a hell of a lot better than the ones I've met, or seen photos of.
FtttG
1d ago
Transsexuality (MtF, because hardly anyone actually cares about the other direction) directly emasculates one man
Vaginoplasties are only undertaken by a tiny minority of MtF people. The vast majority of MtF people have fully intact penises.
FtttG
1d ago
I'd even go so far as to say - if you're seeing a therapist in hopes of receiving validation, therapy is almost certainly going to make your life or the lives of people around you worse.
FtttG
1d ago
As of February last year he is still poly.
FtttG
1d ago
I still thought it was funny.
For clarity, I did think the AITA story was funny, and I was laughing at the absurdity of it throughout. It wasn't so much that it was bad as just a little out of place: it would have been perfectly fine as a self-contained story. Even if the protagonist's "love interest" had been someone other than Alison (e.g. Linda, one of the protagonists of Private Citizens would have been a better fit), I think it would have been stronger for it: "Pics" is such a depressingly down-to-earth, plausible series of events, it just strained credibility for me that its protagonist could then immediately wander into this over-the-top absurdist satire. Imagine a hypothetical episode of The Wire which crosses over with Twin Peaks and that was pretty much my reaction.
Unless you have some external sources for this
I follow him on Instagram. Granted that I might be falling for the parasociality trap, but in my view he really does seem to do the whole "ha ha I'm ever so lonely ha ha" gag a bit too often for it to be wholly insincere. I could be way off-base.
I expanded on this review a bit with the intention of submitting it to Scott's book review contest, only to find out he's not running it this year. Quoting from my expanded review:
Obviously Tulathimutte was worried that he didn’t go far enough [in attempting to distance himself from The Feminist], so he labours the point by making various edits to “The Feminist” from its original publication, in order to put further distance between himself and the character (a strategy which, as mentioned above, he more or less cops to in the book’s closing “rejection letter”). In its original incarnation, I believe the titular character was intended to be read as Thai-American, given the way his Tinder bio mentioned how much he enjoyed cooking Thai food (which he presumably learned in the course of his Thai upbringing). This meant that the story was just as much about the sexual frustrations of Asian-American men unsuccessfully pursuing white American women as it was about the incel/Nice Guy™ experience more broadly. But in Rejection, The Feminist has been retconned into being a white man named Craig, and his Tinder bio now states that he enjoys Thai food, rather than Thai cooking. Likewise the fact that the Tinder bio is stuffed with broad yuk-yuk jokes (to show off his feminist credentials, the character describes himself as “Abortion’s #1 fan”) which were absent from its original publication: these are meant to reassure the reader that we’re dealing with a caricature, not an uncomfortably believable character who could easily serve as a stand-in for Tulathimutte himself.
To put it another way: I can imagine “Trans women are women (duh)” and “All body types very welcome!” appearing in Tulathimutte’s own Tinder bio, even if meant insincerely. “Abortion’s #1 fan”? Not a chance – he’s not that socially inept and clueless.
...
I have not read Private Citizens, and I think I will.
I can hardly recommend it highly enough. When thinking of all the books I've read in the past five years, I think the only one I enjoyed more is possibly Never Let Me Go. Obviously it was bound to be a tough act to follow.
I readily admit that there are women out there who enjoy casual sex (I've met plenty of them, including a handful who weren't French) and I'm sure Holly Math Nerd's therapist was exaggerating for comic effect, but I nonetheless think "demisexual" probably describes the modal female experience a lot more accurately than the sex-positive feminist tabula rasa account.
I read Rejection a few months ago ("Pics" was, in my view, the strongest story in the collection) and posted a mini-review here. Curious to see if you agree with any of my points.
FtttG
1d ago
Agreed. The Little Friend was a massive disappointment. The Goldfinch had a very promising start, and the Las Vegas sequence almost achieved the dizzying heights of The Secret History, but she didn't manage to stick the landing.
I continue to wonder the extent to which this is the Bay Arean egregore poisoning a population for a phenomenon that would otherwise be known as "having close friends,"
I dunno, though. Everyone intuitively understands the concept of an emotional affair, and a lot of women (and probably a lot of men too) would see it as a betrayal if they found out that their spouse was sharing intensely intimate thoughts and feelings with another person of the opposite sex, even if their spouse hadn't yet fucked (or even kissed) the person. I don't know what Scott's love life is actually like, but to me it sounds like he has a wife and also a "harem" of other women with whom he has emotional affairs, achieving a degree of emotional intimacy greater than mere friendship, even if there's no fucking. I could be wrong, though: maybe what he calls his polycule is functionally indistinguishable from a dude who has a wife and a bunch of female friends, who treat him almost like their honorary "gay best friend".
That was more or less the conclusion of the link I shared in the paragraph about sex-positive feminism: that a lot of women experience regret after one-night stands. That doesn't necessarily mean they don't enjoy the experience in the moment. In contrast, most men seem not to regret one-night stands and presumably enjoy them in the moment too.
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