Goodguy
1d ago
The US participated in a massive campaign to lull Iran into thinking an attack was not going to happen immediately
I think that the campaign can't have been that massive, given that the US telegraphed the likelihood of something like this happening by starting to withdraw non-essential personnel from its Middle East embassies a few days ago.
Israel would have almost exactly the same national security interests and likely strategic patterns of behavior even if it had no element of racial-supremacist Abrahamic cult-myths, though. Its strategic behavior is much more driven by its status as a small country that is populated by an ethnic group with a recent history of being genocided and that has a powerful superpower friend than it is by Jewish ethno-supremacist sentiments or Abrahamic cult myths.
A similar train of thought, by the way, is also why I don't think Israel or the US have anything much to worry about if Iran develops nuclear weapons. Iran might be a theocratic state with a lot of political influence from true believers in Islam, but I think that the chance that, if it developed nuclear weapons, its leaders would launch a nuclear strike that would get themselves annihilated... is close to zero. Hence the idea that Israel must prevent Iran from building nuclear weapons no matter what strikes me as pretty silly if evaluated from a cold objective perspective (of course in practice, it's not surprising that emotions run high if another country rhetorically calls for your country's destruction and is trying to build nukes). Realistically speaking, if Iran develops nukes relations between the two countries will probably just follow the India-Pakistan model.
Why has the tech sector revolutionized work without dramatical increases in productivity
Is this true? Granted, it's hard to measure productivity. But US GDP per capita, adjusted for inflation, has increased by about 40% since the tech boom began in the mid-1990s.
I wonder what are some good metrics of productivity.
Goodguy
6d ago
Granted, I don't understand economics very well. That said, I doubt that the amount of government spending as a fraction of the total economy is going to decrease, barring a collapse of the United States. The US federal budget as a fraction of the US GDP has actually been rather constant since the 1950s, with a slight but not huge upward trend: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FYONGDA188S.
If we assume that government spending as a fraction of the economy is very unlikely to substantially decrease, which it probably will not since the political will for that simply does not exist on a large scale, then I figure that the government running a deficit is actually a good thing for me. Sure, they are spending a lot of money on stuff I do not want them to fund. But they are very unlikely to significantly reduce how much they spend, so for me at least having lower taxes seems beneficial, as opposed to having the government spend just as much money as now, but also fix the budget deficit by taxing me more.
This does not mean that we should stop trying to get the government to spend money on different things than it currently is. I'm just saying that, even if less government spending would be beneficial (a complex question), I don't see any realistic political pathway to making it happen.
What am I missing?
Goodguy
8d ago
No, if it was a staged fight there is no reason for Musk to use what in our society is the rhetoric equivalent of nuclear weapons, which is implying that Trump had sex with underage girls on Epstein's island. It would be easy to effectively stage a fight without going that far.
Also, there's Occam's razor. It seems more likely to me that these two guys, both of whom have a track record of being emotionally volatile, abrasive, and vindictive, actually did just get into a real spat, than that it is staged.
Musk also routinely drives traffic to various random X posts by posting one-liners like "Interesting" or "100%" in response to them. Which, while not any sort of heinous deceptiveness, nonetheless is clearly just a way to put his finger on the scales of what gets amplified without having to literally manipulate the algorithms. It's not the kind of action that a pure guileless engineering-minded person would take, I would think.
I also find it a bit hard to believe that Musk would get $300 billion without having some understanding of Machiavellians. In our society, pure brilliant engineer-types tend to max out at a net worth of a few tens of millions, don't they? To get more than that people generally need to have a lot of business acumen, and it's a bit hard for me to imagine having that level of business acumen without understanding how to deal with Machiavellians.
I do think that the overall notion of Musk as being more of an autist type and Trump more of a Machiavellian type seems correct to me, but I quibble with some of the details of Davon Eriksen's purported explanation.
Goodguy
15d ago
You are correct about my meaning. I probably should have made that more clear in my original comment.
Honest dating advice coaches aren't like "just improve yourself and then supermodels will jump on your cock every day", they're more like "improve yourself and you will be able to maximize whatever you're starting out with". It's not like the Internet dating advice space is just entirely made up of the sort of "bro just improve yourself and you'll start having to fend off supermodels all the time" material. There's plenty of that, but there is also more realistic stuff out there. Sure, there are many grifters out who promise unrealistic abilities, but there is also plenty of dating advice out there that actually works to maximize whatever basic gifts you started out with.
I don't know what serious actions could be taken about the issue on a wide-spread level other than sexual communism. But I myself do not desire sexual communism. Partly for a moral reason... I do not wish women to be coerced to have sex with people they would not otherwise want to have sex with. But also for non-moral reasons. I prefer to compete openly in the sexual marketplace and thus know from an ego perspective that whatever I am getting, I am getting due to my own qualities rather than because of some outside pressures. This is also why I have never had any interest in visiting prostitutes. Which is a funny two-sided thing. Because on the one hand it shows that I value sex for more than just sex, but then if I really dig down into it one of the main reasons why I don't want to visit prostitutes is just because it would be an ego decreaser. I just don't have a sex drive so high that I want to fuck no matter what... for me the satisfaction of having the other person want me is a key part of it, and while that might sound good abstractly, it actually might say more about my ego than about my morality.
In any case, I can't think of any political answer to the issue that wouldn't restrict women's liberties, and I'm not into restricting women's liberties. Most of why I'm not into it is because my morality, the rest is because of a sense that wanting to restrict women's sexual liberties as a man is loser-coded and the proper masculine thing to do is to let women do whatever they want and attract them anyway, not to try to restrict their sexual decisions.
There is something about the human psyche that makes it very difficult for many of us to actually emotionally come to terms with unfairness. We might understand the unfair nature of life perfectly well intellectually, yet not come to grips with it emotionally. We live in a world where some people are just born with vastly more wealth, and/or sex appeal, and/or intelligence, and/or health than others... there are things we can do to improve on our starting position, but there are no guarantees of success.
There is a tendency to develop compensatory psychological narratives, defense mechanisms... ideas like "in the afterlife god will judge us and I will be compensated for all of this unfairness", or "if I am a good boy I will be reincarnated in a higher caste", or "I swear in just two more weeks I'll launch the great people's revolution that overthrows the rich", or "women aren't attracted to me but they're a bunch of degenerate sluts anyway and I'm the real based sigma male, I don't really want those evil whores anyway".
Another common way of dealing with it is to give up on any hope of actually remedying the unfairness while emotionally latching on to more powerful groups through psychological identification mechanisms. One example of this is the depressed housewife who spends eight hours a day watching the lives of celebrities on TV so that she can emotionally exist in a virtual world in which she feels like she has some stake in their lives. Another is the nationalistic soldier who is willing to go fight and die for the interests of his country's elite class because he has become emotionally identified with the entire nation as if it was his family - even though, even if he wins the war and survives, he will become no richer for it.
I'm pretty sure that the vast majority of The Motte posters are well aware of the enormous variation in men's attractiveness to women. It's not like it's some secret knowledge that is only available in obscure corners of the dark web.
Goodguy
18d ago
makes sense that the revulsion is instinctual; from a biological standpoint women who intentionally seek out sex are malfunctioning since it's very risky for zero benefit.
Evolutionarily speaking there can be lot of benefit to a woman seeking out the best men instead of letting her genes' destiny just entirely depend on male decisions. This does not have to necessarily include seeking out actual sex with many men, but in practice the two will be correlated.
Goodguy
18d ago
Thinking of a lover being with another man in the present or the future distresses me. Thinking of a lover being with another man before I even met her does not affect me in the least bit.
Goodguy
18d ago
Your native community's sexual ethics do not surprise me, in the sense of me being surprised that they exist. When I say that I don't understand, I mean that, while I abstractly intellectually can mentally model the inner experience of men who are different from me in this way, I do not share their feelings. It is similar to how, I like broccoli and some people hate broccoli. I can mentally model not liking broccoli, but I don't really understand it from the perspective of my own tastes, all I can say is "oh well those people's tastes are different from mine".
I would never tell a man to settle for a girl, though, unless maybe he is desperate to have kids and is reaching the age where even a man has to just take the best out of whatever mother options are available or else go without progeny.
What I would tell him is that if he actually likes the girl, he shouldn't let the number of guys she has banged stop him. And if he just simply has a visceral repulsion to that idea, I'd say fine, then go find some other girl. But I would recommend that he examines his own feelings and tries to figure out whether this is a true repulsion, like just not being into fat people, for example, or whether this is just a temporary insecurity that goes away with more experience.
Instead of recommending to a man that he settle, I'd recommend that he either goes and finds more girls or that he becomes more comfortable with having no girls, since being alone is better than being in a bad relationship.
I wouldn't worry too much, abstractly, about whether her promiscuity made her less likely to stick with me, if she was making me happy in other ways and I didn't see any evidence that she was actually pursuing other guys. Especially given that, since it is extremely easy for an attractive woman to get laid, for a woman to only have had sex with 12 guys strikes me as almost closer to celibacy than to promiscuity. Any attractive woman could easily have sex with 1000 men if she for some reason wanted to.
As for thoughts and feelings for previous lovers, I would find it a bit weird if she didn't have any at all. If by thoughts and feelings you mean that she was still carrying a torch for them, pining over them, etc. then sure, I think that would be weird and I would not be into that at all. But I would find it strange and almost inhuman if she completely put them out of her mind as if they had never existed. I guess you probably mean the carrying a torch version, though.
How does a woman make it to her 30s without landing in a stable, committed relationship?
Well, it takes two to tango. Even assuming that the woman in question wants a stable, committed relationship, it's pretty easy for her to have a run of bad luck and end up dating one or more men for years each, but every time the guy turns out to be crazy, or there is some other incompatibility issue that is too much to overcome. Sure, sometimes it is more the woman's fault than the man's, but it's possible for even a well-intentioned and mentally stable woman who is seeking marriage and who puts effort into her relationships to just happen to spend years in relationships that turn out to go nowhere.
I think that men who are insecure (whether or rightly or wrongly) about their own sexual value on the market often fear and resent promiscuous women simply because the promiscuous woman is an extreme version of the already huge difference that these men feel between how easy it is for themselves to get laid and how easy it is for the average woman to get laid. Also, they fear the power differential in a relationship - they perceive that the woman could leave them at any moment and be fucking some other guy an hour later, meanwhile it might take them much longer to find a new sex partner. These fears are somewhat understandable, but become quite pathetic-looking when instead of being honestly acknowledged, they are instead wrapped up in some ideological cover such as religious LARPing, posting pictures of tradwives on social media, or performative misogyny meant to get likes from other men.
There are much healthier ways of dealing with this insecurity. For example: 1) maximizing one's own sexual value and game to the extent possible, 2) realizing that men and women have different kinds of advantages in the sexual marketplace and that it's not really a situation where women hold all the cards, 3) realizing that since women tend to not be as driven by constantly wanting to fuck hot new partners as men are, even a relatively promiscuous woman, if she actually is into you, is not necessarily going to ditch you to go bang some other guy who happened to wander by. And if she does, it's not the end of the world, there are plenty more women out there.
Very high status men don't need to feel any of this kind of insecurity to begin with. If a business mogul or rock star's hot partner leaves him, he can easily find a replacement an hour later, too. Very high status men generally don't spend their time chasing hot women, they spend their time fending off all the hot women who are throwing themselves at them. So these men just have much less psychological motivation to care about a woman's promiscuity than the average man does.
I understand your other criteria to various degrees, but I still don't understand why I'm supposed to care so much about the number of past sex partners. It is pretty much irrelevant to me when evaluating a potential long-term romantic partner unless maybe it is so ridiculously high that it indicates some kind of actual severe sex addiction. But that would be a number in the high 100s, probably. Actually, for me it would probably be more important that the woman had had at least one sex partner in the past, rather than that she had not had too many. I'm not sure that I would want to take on the risk of being a wife's first sex partner and thus having her views of me passed through a filter of inexperience.
Goodguy
21d ago
It's always hard to say who is irreversibly committed to an ideology and who isn't. Many religious people were atheists when younger. Many atheists were hardcore religious when younger. And it's easy to, for example, find conservatives who were hardcore communists earlier in life. David Horowitz is a famous example.
Goodguy
24d ago
I somewhat disagree. You're probably right in general. However, there is a strain of right-wing thought, and there has been for a long time, that isn't pro-life - it just thinks that life sucks and the desire to reproduce is a cheap joke that nature instilled in people, but also thinks that even despite all that, whatever decent things exist in life are more likely to be perpetuated by right-wing politics than left-wing politics. The stereotypical highly-online right-winger these days might be a trad "let's have 10 kids" type, but this is not the only type of right-wing thought.
I myself am not anti-life or a philosophical pessimist, but I have enjoyed and perhaps benefited from reading such strains of thought.
Ah, sorry. That's on me, then, for assuming that Ligotti was not a leftist based on a very shallow knowledge of him.
That said, I don't know if he is more of a leftist in the typical modern highly online sense of the word, or if he is a socialist in the same way that H.P. Lovecraft supported some flavors of socialism and supported FDR while having extremely right-wing social attitudes even by the standards of his era. Lovecraft favored a sort of technocratic socialism that would ensure his own kind of people a decent living while keeping out the people whom he found undesirable. Not surprising given that he spent much of his adult life in poverty during the Great Depression as a random kid from a broken-down family who probably felt himself to be an aristocrat at heart and had a viscerally racist reaction to pretty much everyone other than people whose stock was from North-West Europe.
But Ligotti is not Lovecraft, and I should not let their surface-level similarities make me assume things about Ligotti.
Goodguy
24d ago
I want to follow up on the earlier discussion about anti-natalism and natalism. I find it interesting that some people see anti-natalism as being a leftist phenomenon. I feel that this is true if you limit your understanding of leftism to stereotypical Redditors. However, historically speaking, philosophical pessimism, deep skepticism about the value of life, and doubt about the value of reproduction as anything other than an animal instinct are, I think, far from left-oriented. If you think about some of the most famous people who have held such views, such as Arthur Schopenhauer, H.P. Lovecraft, Thomas Ligotti, Michel Houellebecq... well, these are certainly not leftists by any common definition of leftist. And then there is Nietzsche who, even though in his writings he constantly insisted on the value of healthy virile life, did not leave any offspring even though, despite his various health problems, he probably would not have found it that hard to get married and have kids if he had really wanted to.
I do not think that being dubious of natalism is a right-wing phenomenon, but I also certainly do not think that it is inherently a left-wing phenomenon.
Thanks for this deep analysis, much of which I don't have the scientific background to understand. If I may ask, why would it take modern industrial chemistry to synthesize penicillin in useful quantities? I suppose that I have been wrong in thinking that it could be synthesized by pre-modern techniques?
Edit: I should also note that to me, a dabbler in mathematics, this survey of mathematical thought-trends and their impact on the history of mathematics is fascinating.
I wonder if there might actually still be, even in our modern world, some major intellectual insights that future generations, once those insights have appeared, will think of as relatively low-hanging fruit and wonder why it took so long for their ancestors to come up with them, and wonder why their ancestors did not come up with them given that they already had every necessary bit of knowledge to come up with them, and maybe only lacked some spark of genius.
Some examples from history:
- Calculus - You can teach this to any decently intelligent 17 year old kid nowadays, but, while there were some remarkably close predecessors to it in ancient Greece (the method of exhaustion), it was not formalized as a rigorous concept and method until about the 18th-19th centuries.
- Antibiotics - As far as I know, there is nothing about penicillin as an antibiotic agent that could not have hypothetically been developed and systematized 2000 years ago - this would not have required any modern technology. To be fair, there may have been ancient cultures that had an intricate knowledge of plant-derived drugs and so on that are at least relatively comparable... but to my knowledge, none of them developed something like modern antibiotics, which revolutionized the world and basically immediately did away with the whole literary genre of "lonesome poet dies at 30 from tuberculosis".
- Free markets - It seems at least plausible these days to many decently intelligent people that free-ish markets (too much freedom in markets has its own problems but...) serve as a good communicator of economic information, and that this can help relatively free market economic systems at least in some cases to outcompete central planning (there are many other factors involved of course, but this is one of them...). I'm not aware of anyone having had this kind of hypothesis until a few hundred years ago. But it's the kind of idea you can explain to a decently intelligent 17 year old kid nowadays, it's not something that requires mountains of highly specific knowledge to grasp.
- Natural selection - The idea that the combination of survival pressure and reproduction will over time cause better-adapted entities to out-reproduce worse-adapted entities is so logical that one can demonstrate the truth of it through pure mathematics. But as far as I know, it did not become a popular explanation for the evolution of living beings until about 170 years ago, even though people 2000 years ago were both familiar with so-called artificial selection (breeding of livestock and so on) and probably had the intellectual background to understand the concept of natural selection mathematically (people who were advanced enough mathematics thinkers to create something like Euclid's Elements certainly had the raw brain-power to model natural selection mathematically, if a certain spark of genius had struck them).
It makes me wonder what kinds of insights might be lying around these days, which future generations, if we do not discover them, might wonder what took us so long.
I don't see any reason to think that the India-Pakistan war earlier this year came anywhere close to a nuclear war.
More options
Context Copy link