Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
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User ID: 863
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
2yr ago
Women consistently fail to date men in their same attractiveness percentile
I am not sure how to interpret this part. Is it a bad thing for women to date men in a different "attractiveness percentile?" Why?
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
2yr ago
He can't do anything to increase the number of marriageable women, can he?
Sure he can. He can change his standards. There's no, like, Law Of Nature that makes it impossible to marry women with the characteristics you describe in the first half of your post. Indeed, I imagine a large number of women in those categories (lesbians excepted) end up married to men at some point in their life. I don't understand why this complaint isn't isomorphic to a conventionally unattractive woman complaining about how she can't get a 6/6/6 man to settle down with her. If you have set your standards such that no one whom you would date would also date you, that seems like a you problem.
The average woman is pickier than ever while bringing fewer things 'to the table' for the male than ever.
A natural result of women's improved social and economic standing. As their alternative to being in a relationship improves some people are going to choose that option instead of forming a relationship they may otherwise have. When one's negotiating position is better, one can get a better deal.
It's also kind of amusing to me to complain about women's pickiness given the acknowledgement in this comment that your own criteria would exclude a large number of women from your marriage pool.
So there's a relatively small pool of marriageable woman who are what would be considered 'wife material', and every single male, from ages 18-50, is competing for this pool.
I think this overstates the degree of agreement on what constitutes "wife material" among men aged 18-50. I suspect many men in this group will end up happily married to women who don't fit your described criteria of "wife material."
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
2yr ago
I am not sure about "droves." There is (or, was) a strain of thought in red pill/manosphere type places that long term relationships with women are a suckers game because she'll just divorce you and take all your stuff and so its better to have a series of casual relationships than settle down and be taken advantage of. At the extreme end this culminated in Men Going Their Own Way who would definitely agree that video games and porn are better than interacting with women.
I am not sure about the prevalence of these beliefs but they're definitely out there.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
2yr ago
The social and the economic defy such simple modeling. What is the good life is socially mediated, if that conception includes kids I can't really say the woman is getting the worse deal, if it doesn't then it is a bad deal. Seeing as women can't really directly the compare the two experiences they need to rely on the stories society tells to inform them, and society does not seem to be trying very hard to sell parenthood.
Fair enough. What I mean to convey is the idea that our economic conditions to some extent determine which social narratives we find compelling. The idea is that ~everyone is presented with competing social narratives that explain their present (or future) life situation. What narratives we find compelling is, in part, a product of our actual experience. As the actual facts about individuals experience shift, so too do their decisions about what narratives are convincing explanations. Historically the nature of labor made it easy to accept the social narrative that regarded men as the productive worker and women as the child carer or homemaker. As economic conditions have shifted, so too have the narratives women (and men!) have found compelling.
The group that does this, or at least advertises they'd be willing to do this, is having significantly less children than the group that doesn't put any effort into advertising this.
I think this fact is due to other causal factors than this attitude, but fair enough.
And, frankly, the meme that men aren't pulling their weight in domestic tasks doesn't ring true to me at all, it seems like just an empty grievance from centuries past that only persists because of the women are wonderful effect.
Can you back up this "seems" with data? According to Gallup both men and women agree that women generally shoulder more of the burden with respect to domestic duties and child care.
Men seem to be pulling their weight and the domestic tasks besides the ones directly involved with caring for the baby take only a handful of hours a week to maintain.
I would know, I personally do nearly all of them each week while working from home just during calls.
I am a little confused. In another comment you say you are "working on" becoming a father, or pumping out babies. Do you currently have children? My impression (admittedly from my brother rather than personal experience) is that babies take much more than "a handful of hours a weeK" in care.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
2yr ago
The social is downstream of the economic. In the past there was little prospect of women being able to support themselves, and so they had an economic dependence on men. This economic dependence resulted in social memes that encouraged and promoted women being reliant on men by way of justification for the status quo. As women have become more economically independent social memes have proliferated that encourage that same independence. If men want to adapt they'll need to accept a more equitable division of the labor of maintaining a household and raising a child.
In the choice between a life where one has a 24/7/365 job (raising a child) and is entirely reliant on another person (housewife) vs an 8/5 job where one is the master of their own destiny it is no surprise many choose the latter.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
2yr ago
Distinguish two questions.
First, is statistical discrimination instrumentally useful? That is, can I use statistical discrimination to accomplish some goal? Does statistical information about demographic groups let me make predictions at a rate greater than chance? It seems to me, as you note, the answer is clearly yes. If I have some information that P(A|B) > P(A|C) I can use the distinction between B and C as a discriminator to predict A. How powerful or accurate those predictions will be, how much better than chance I can do, depends on the relative difference between P(A|B) and P(A|C).
Second, is statistical discrimination just? When I make judgements about an individual on the basis of demographic groups they belong to, am I doing something morally impermissible? I think statistical discrimination is hard to justify from the perspective of an individualist system of ethics. After all, it almost definitionally involves judging how individuals ought to be treated by actions that other members of their demographic groups have done, rather than anything they have done.
I suspect part of what motivates a rejection of the instrumental utility of statistical discrimination is a belief that instrumental utility would imply moral permissibility. I expect the reasoning (not necessarily consciously) proceeds something like:
1. If some piece of information has instrumental utility, then it is morally permissible to act on it.
2. It would be morally impermissible to act on certain kinds of statistical information.
3. Therefore that information must not have instrumental utility.
I think the better answer is to deny (1), that all information which is instrumentally useful is therefore morally permissible to act on.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
2yr ago
I don't agree. People do drag for lots of reasons, including non-sexual ones.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
2yr ago
No, but how is this related to my comment at all? Is a fully clothed person reading a childrens book pornographic?
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
2yr ago
This is interesting. My position is pretty close to what you describe but my perception about what leftists in general would support is reversed. Between this and the downthread conversation with @SSCReader I wonder if I'm the one who interacts with unrepresentative leftists.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
2yr ago
Sure, I know trans people with this perspective. That's why I said in my original reply I'd support them in transitioning as well. I'm curious, what fraction of the people who take the medication your friend does feel similarly, that it kills them, and what fraction are satisfied that the medication resolves their condition? I did not claim, and do not believe, that every single trans person would be ecstatic to take such a pill, merely that most quite a lot of them would be happy to.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
2yr ago
What is the evidence that most of them have munchausen's? I'm also a little unclear what it means for them to have munchhausen's in this context. Do they not actually have gender dysphoria? Are they not really distressed by their bodies?
And even if we go by the statements of trans people themselves, they want to be the opposite sex, through painful, expensive, difficult treatments. Not the same sex.
Given the small fraction of trans people who go through with both top and bottom surgeries this seems unlikely to me. Rather I think what most trans people want is to feel comfortable in their bodies and surgery is currently the option for effecting this change. I suspect most trans people would love to have a pill to fix their gender dysphoria.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
2yr ago
Frankly, I think if your prior is "most trans people would prefer to undergo difficult, painful, expensive surgery to achieve middling results rather than take a cheap one time pill to be comfortable in their bodies" your prior is being guided by a very vocal minority.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
2yr ago
What do you mean by "support this?" I would think it would be a good thing for such a pill to be available. I'd support anyone who wanted to take it (which I think would be quite a lot of people). I would oppose it being forced on people and support people who wanted to undergo a more traditional gender transition as an alternative.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
2yr ago
Then you believe a civilization that would extinct itself in one generation is on equal footing to one that wouldn't.
Sure. I do not think anything that causes a civilization to endure is made morally good by that fact. Moral goodness does not cash out in "causes civilization to continue."
If it indeed doesn't matter, it would not be worth it to develop and distribute this pill. All the subsequent pushing of the pill would of course not be happening until it's good that it is.
I am a little confused, you take it as a premise that the pill has already been developed. I am not particularly interested in developing a pill to convert straight people into gay people so my beliefs seem already consistent with believing it doesn't matter. I also am skeptical that leftists would be pushing anyone to take this who didn't want to.
It has to be pushed because to claim that gay and straight are equally good is to discredit pride and everything leftists have been saying and doing for 70 years.
I think this misunderstands the purpose of pride.
If gay is not better, why are we painting/waving the pride flag everywhere and explicitly preferring homosexuals in hiring decisions?
Pride is named the way it is explicitly as a response to the historical belief that being gay was something one ought to be ashamed of. Similarly we sometimes have preferences for gay people in hiring decisions for the same reasons we sometimes have them for African-Americans and women, because these groups have been historically discriminated against in those decisions. You identify this motivation in your own comment! It is not related to believing that being gay is better than being straight, it's a reaction against the idea that being gay is worse than being straight.
Why do kids need to attend drag queen story time?
Kids don't need to attend drag queen story time. I think it may even be wrong to force kids to attend one if they didn't want to. But it is also wrong to prevent all such events, even for those who want to attend them or put them on.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
2yr ago
In providing a deliberate choice, it forces one to answer the question of which lifestyle is better.
It forces each individual who has the option of taking the pill to make a decision about how they would rather be, but I am not sure I see how it forces some kind of cross-individual evaluation of which way to be is "better."
The most defensible formulation of this position is that sure, gay is worse than straight (i.e. any parent would choose the latter for their kids), but some are born gay and there is nothing that can be done.
I am not sure what "this position" being defended is. What if I do not believe that being gay is worse than being straight?
If we are now discussing whether or not someone should (or be allowed to) become gay by choice, leftists would be forced into saying that yes, a sterile existence is better than starting a family.
I think I am as leftist as anyone and it is not clear to me how my beliefs oblige me to answer the way you say. Could you elaborate?
As a rightist assuming that leftism always wants more members of its protected groups (gay is a protected group), the pill would be seen as important technology and marketed towards children through schools and hospitals the same way transgenderism is.
Do you have any evidence for this? As a leftist myself and someone who knows lots of leftists this does not seem like it would be the case to me.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
2yr ago
I think this gets pretty centrally at the question of what we want from AI (from an ethical perspective) and how to get it. Do we want an AI that behaves how humans would behave (or have behaved), or do we want an AI that behaves in a more ethically idealistic way from how humans would behave (or have behaved)? As long as we're training AI on actual human behavior we are going to get the former. Judging it by the standards of the latter just gets us "humans have not behaved in a way I consider ideal" which, like, obviously? And if we already know how the AI ought to behave, why do we need it at all?
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
2yr ago
How are the content scores generated? To my mind the obvious answer seems like some kind of classifier AI given the nature of the scores and the company in question. In which case the obvious explanation for bias in the output of the system is bias in the input. The AI classifier doesn't understand what "men" or "women" or "are" or "awful" or "hateful" mean in the way we do. Instead what it understands is that in its training set there were some number of statements of the form "women are awful" and some number of statements of the form "men are awful" and that a higher density of the former were rated as "hateful" than the latter. Say you're training an AI on two million messages to build this classifier for "hateful" messages. You give it one million messages of the form "women are awful" and one million messages of the form "men are awful." Of the former messages 700k (or 70%) are labelled "hateful" but only 100k (or 10%) of the latter are. Is your AI going to learn both messages are equally "hateful?" Definitely not. Should it? Well, maybe if we want it to classify like a human would. But how do you teach your AI that some of the correlations it finds in its training data are true and correct and some are false and wrong?
This is what people are talking about when they are concerned about bias in AI inputs leading to bias in AI outputs. AI is not a tool for finding unbiased results in biased data, it is a tool for finding statistical relationships in data that it may be hard or expensive for humans to find. AI does not, and cannot, tell you anything that was not already in its training set. This is why AI can be easily fooled by novel experiences.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
2yr ago
I think, based on this healthline article, that "calls of the abyss" are just a specific kind of intrusive thought. I've had several of the ones described in the article and the article explicitly links the "call" to intrusive thoughts. Both phenomena tend (in my case) to involve fleeting thoughts (lasting at most a few seconds) and involve behavior that would be highly destructive or harmful (to myself or others).
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
2yr ago
I'm someone (a man) who has definitely experienced the twin phenomena of (1) violent intrusive thoughts, including towards my loved ones, and (2) a general lowering of my impulse control in situations where I am stressed or distressed.
Now, (2) has (fortunately) never led me to actually acting out anything that occurs in (1) but I can imagine how it could if the stress or distress were severe enough.
To cohere with your model I think the kind of intrusive thoughts I and the TikTokers talk about would be part of that "perfect storm" of bad things. After all, to do evil things you have to have some idea of what those things are (which may include self harm) and how to do them.
From the lack-of-agency perspective I think it's common to describe people in heightened emotional states such that they aren't acting rationally as lacking in agency. Sometimes we even recognize this lack of agency in the law. For example killing someone may not be murder depending in part on the emotional state you were in when it occurred and what caused that emotional state.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
2yr ago
It assumes that if a john is calling 911 on their prostitute there is a reason and is soliciting what the reason is in this case.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
2yr ago
It seems to me that it is common, when one is asking questions about matters of fact, that one expects the answers one receives to be supportable by evidence. This seems to me like a reasonable expectation.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
2yr ago
If this is what hydroacetylene meant by "red triber" then I am confused by that part of their comment, since as far as I can tell no one in this thread (or anywhere?) has claimed DePape is a red triber by that definition. Rather, I took to be synonymous with the OP's discussion of DePape as a "right wing terrorist."
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
2yr ago
IIRC the evidence that DePape was a gay prostitute is non-negligible.
What is the evidence, then?
The evidence that he was currently working is basically circumstantial.
What is the evidence, then?
The evidence he was a red triber is nonexistent.
I am not sure I agree.
a. DEPAPE stated that he was going to hold Nancy hostage and talk to her. If Nancy were to tell DEPAPE the “truth,” he would let her go, and if she “lied,” he was going to break “her kneecaps.” DEPAPE was certain that Nancy would not have told the “truth.” In the course of the interview, DEPAPE articulated he viewed Nancy as the “leader of the pack” of lies told by the Democratic Party.
DEPAPE also later explained that by breaking Nancy’s kneecaps, she would then have to be wheeled into Congress, which would show other Members of Congress there were consequences to actions. DEPAPE also explained generally that he wanted to use Nancy to lure another individual to DEPAPE.
"I'm gonna break the kneecaps of the leader of the pack of lies told by the Democratic Party to show politicians that actions have consequences" seems pretty red-tribey to me.
I am skeptical there is empirical data to support the idea that this is an accurate description of reality.
That aside I'm not sure I see what the problem is. If the ten women would rather spend time dating one guy than dating different guys that seems fine? It's their lives. This description makes it sound like all the women who aren't eventually going to end up with the man they are dating are wronging the other men by not dating them but I don't think that's true.
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