Goodguy
9hr ago
It is not actually obvious at all to the average intelligent person who might make a good Motte commenter but comes from a sheltered liberal or moderate-conservative background. The vast majority even of intelligent, generally well-informed people have never looked at the relevant statistics, and many of them have also been exposed enough to the "the racist law enforcement system is the reason for such statistics" theory that the bare statistics wouldn't even be enough by themselves.
- What do you want him to do, post FBI crime statistics for the millionth time?
It might be a good idea. It just takes a link (which @sleepyegg actually has in his post, maybe he added it after @netstack's comment). If posters assume familiarity with such things, newcomers might be bewildered and turned off. FBI crime statistics aren't like "the sun rises in the morning", which you can assume everyone other than insane people acknowledges. Vast numbers of people, including many intelligent ones, have absolutely no idea about the FBI crime statistics you are talking about. It's not that they've even been exposed to the information and rejected it. It's that they have absolutely no idea the information exists. It might not be good for the site to turn (even more) into an insular group of users who assume familiarity with controversial and relatively obscure information.
- Then enter the heritability debate with the gaslighters again?
Arguing against HBD doesn't make someone a gaslighter.
I've never been diagnosed, but if I am at all autistic, I am only very mildly autistic at most, I think. I was probably more autist-like when younger (when it comes to social awkwardness and issues with eye contact), but I grew out of it over time as I had more social experience.
I also suspect, while having no solid proof, that doing MDMA a few times in my 20s might have helped permanently make me a little bit less autistic. WARNING THOUGH: You cannot expect to do MDMA and become less autistic. It is a potentially dangerous drug and it can have very different effects on different people.
In any case, most of my social improvement had more to do with social experience than with drugs, I'm sure.
I've never had an unusual degree of sensory sensitivity compared to the average population. I don't have any significant issues with social interaction or reading people's facial expressions or subtext. I still have some minor issues with eye contact if I am feeling stressed out or overwhelmed, but I think that's probably pretty common with neurotypicals. Overall, I might actually be more socially adept and socially comfortable than the average person.
I do tend to get heavily into "nerdy" interests from time to time, but not in a compulsive way and not to the detriment of my general functioning, I think.
I tend to be uncomfortable with change, but for what it's worth I also don't particularly like rules and structure.
I do have some psychological issues, but they resemble things like anxiety and ADHD more than autism, or at least autism as I understand it.
Goodguy
2d ago
There is probably a correlation between high-functioning autism and ability to decouple, but you certainly don't need to be autistic to decouple.
Decoupling is just basic logical thinking. You don't have to be autistic to be able to be logical.
Goodguy
3d ago
I feel like "human resources" is even more honest. You have your coal resources, you have your electricity resources, you have your human resources...
Goodguy
3d ago
Well, I agree with you that it can be optimal in true crises. I guess the question is, what constitutes a crisis that is true enough.
Goodguy
3d ago
That doesn't mean that in those groups, the old killed themselves for the sake of their descendants.
Goodguy
3d ago
It is best for my Darwinian fitness to kill myself at age 65 for my grand children. If you do not agree, you will be replaced by those who do.
Yet human history shows no sign that groups where the old kill themselves for the sake of their descendants actually outcompete groups where the old don't.
Goodguy
3d ago
But, eg this past week, I saw some kerfuffle on the social medias involving zoomers complaining about boomers not understanding how hard it is, and when I looked into it, it was because some boomer said zoomers ought not spend $28 ordering lunch and even generated a realistic cheap plan to make their own sandwiches, and zoomers scoffed that that was basically concentration camp food. Every interaction of this type that I look into seems to play out like that, where basic financial responsibility and the most minor of suggested sacrifices is made out to be some huge ordeal.
I would be wary of taking these arguments on popular social media too seriously. All sides involved in them are incentivized by the attention economy and by their own emotions to present the maximalist, ridiculous versions of their positions and to treat the argument as a general rage-venting session instead of as an attempt to ascertain facts and jointly find solutions to problems. I think that offline, probably relatively rare is the zoomer who genuinely thinks that the idea making your own sandwich is some kind of horrific unreasonable oppression.
I don't think that woke is over. However, I do think that woke has been dealt serious body blows in the last few years and is much weaker than many people here thought it would be at this point.
It's not just that Trump won despite being widely considered both by wokes and non-wokes to represent a repudiation of wokism.
It's also that woke failed to censor the Internet. Non-wokes successfully created myriads of their own websites. Woke didn't even manage to destroy 4chan. Non-woke took over X. Race realism, actual racism, anti-immigration stances, and open misogyny are now common on mainstream social media. Even on Reddit a few non-woke positions can be seen: for example, being against mass immigration is common on /r/europe, even while the sub sticks to woke positions on all other major issues.
In addition to this, woke overreached on policing and affirmative action. It is now common to see Trump-hating Democratic Party voters on city subreddits support strong policing against street crime and vagrancy. City residents noticed the 2020 crime spike.
Even back in 2020, California Proposition 16, which would have made certain banned kinds of affirmative action legal, failed to pass. In San Francisco in 2021 a public backlash caused the school board to scrap a plan to rename a bunch of schools for woke reasons.
Woke also overreached on trans issues. Peak trans activism is over. Woke pronouns are starting to seem like a brief, now-dated fad. Still in use, but much less talked about these days, and they seem to be of a certain time period.
None of this is to say that woke has been defeated. It will probably rise again in some form, and relatively softer versions of woke continue to have strong influence in institutions. But woke has not overwhelmed the country like many feared, nor is it likely to do so even after Trump is gone.
To be fair, one of the reasons why woke is much weaker than many people here thought it would be at this point is precisely because many people all over the place who thought that it would become overwhelmingly powerful took action to try to stop it.
More popular than before, but still not that popular among Republicans. I think that the average Republican is at least not anti-Israel (and even some of the ones who dislike Israel hate Muslims even more), does not actually care about the size of government at all but just occasionally mouths words about wanting small government, and believes that Trump was not involved with anything bad having to do with Epstein.
Goodguy
7d ago
Recent events have peeled off some of Trump's Republican support, but generally speaking Republicans still love him. He bestrides the Republican party like a colossus.
Goodguy
7d ago
But most people who criticize Clav don't criticize him for trying to become better looking, they criticize him for encouraging men to do dangerous things like using a cocktail of powerful drugs to improve their looks and lower their social anxiety and to hit themselves in the face with a hammer (which is not actually particularly dangerous I think, since the hammer in question is more like a rubber mallet, but the critics don't know that because they don't bother to actually read a lot about looksmaxxing).
The majority of women's looksmaxxing attempts do not extend to the kind of dangerous practices that Clav encourages men to do. Even most cosmetic surgery, when done by actual doctors, might be less dangerous than Clav's drug habits, although of course all surgery carries some risk of severe injury.
Goodguy
7d ago
Yeah, people find it funny because they don't actually know much about Clavicular, so they don't realize that he doesn't claim to be the most attractive man in the world.
Goodguy
7d ago
You are absolutely right, and it's not even just in the right-wing media bubble. Telling men to get in shape, dress better, get a haircut, and develop better social skills is some of the most common mainstream dating advice for men. Leftists will generally give men the same advice. Another common bit of mainstream dating advice is to just treat women like human beings, which some people might think is "woke"... except if you interpret it correctly, it's actually not. Human beings have sexual desires, and treating women like human beings who have sexual desires is good advice. So is the advice to look better and develop better social skills.
I'm not sure that knocking out the power plants and oil refineries would affect Iran's ability to deter commercial ships from transiting the Strait of Hormuz or make the Iranian leadership more likely to make a deal.
Iran's drone and missile arsenal doesn't depend on the power plants and oil refineries. They might be able to keep the Strait closed to commercial shipping all the way until the midterms with their current remaining arsenal, unless the US launches a ground invasion.
The Iranian leadership likely sees this war as existential and views the idea of surrendering after getting their power plants and oil refineries knocked out as being the equivalent of putting themselves in Saddam Hussein or Muammar Gaddafi's position (killed by their own domestic political opponents after the West launched a military operation that allowed those political opponents to come to power). Even if they don't get killed after surrendering, they would probably get Maduroed, their lives as they knew them over. In any case, if they are not surrendering after being directly targeted for assassination, often successfully, I don't know why they would surrender after power plants and oil refineries get bombed.
Bombing their civilian infrastructure would weaken Iran long-term, but at the cost of a lot of bad PR for the US, a general reduction in the US' soft power in the world.
A ground invasion would work pretty swiftly and effectively, but Trump does not seem to have the will to do it for whatever reason.
Goodguy
8d ago
They do have perverse incentives. However, in certain contexts it might be possible for them to be profitable even if they do not act on the perverse incentives. For example, medical professionals make money despite, generally speaking, not acting on the perverse incentives that would make them more profitable if they did a somewhat worse job of treating patients. Or am I wrong about this, and medical professionals actually do pursue these perverse incentives more often than I think they do? In any case, of course in medicine there is strong government regulation trying to prevent people from acting on the perverse incentives, whereas in dating apps there is not.
I am, but I think that most women I've been with have been less promiscuous than me, or about equally promiscuous, so I'm not sure that my impression of female horniness has necessarily been formed by experiences with unusually promiscuous women.
That said, I guess that "less promiscuous than me" might possibly still be more promiscuous than the average woman. I've certainly spent a large fraction of my sexual energy among the kind of people who did not settle down in a long-term relationship at a young age.
Now that I think of it, it's also kind of hard to compare male and female promiscuity anyway. A man and a woman might have the same level of raw desire to fuck, yet fuck different quantities of other people due to other factors... it's easier for the average woman to find a willing sex partner quickly than it is for a man, but on the other hand, casual sexual adventuring is also physically more dangerous for her than it is for a man. Etc.
Goodguy
8d ago
There's something counter-productive about women going on dating apps, as needing to jump through hoops, filing forms and boxes and so on is a signal that a woman is not attractive enough to just have a knight in shiny armor show up for her.
Really, it's the same for a man. Attractive men (some combination of looks, personality, and social presence/status) don't need to put more than a cursory effort into getting women. They just show up to places and women make themselves available to them - maybe not every single time they go somewhere, but often enough that "meeting decent women who are willing to fuck" is a solved problem. Of course, meeting a woman that the attractive man would be willing to settle down with is a completely different issue.
So I think that if an attractive man is using a dating app, it's just for convenience.
Goodguy
8d ago
Are women actually less horny than men on average? I think I have about an average sex drive for a man, and while it's hard to remember clearly, I feel that at least half of the women I've fucked had a higher sex drive than me. They might have been more selective than the average man when it comes to deciding whom to fuck, but once they selected me (or any other man who passed the selection, I'm sure), they wanted to fuck a lot.
Of course, it's possible that my behavior and/or looks has been selecting for unusually horny women. Hard to say.
As for the gay couple example: I'm not actually sure that works as differently from straight couples as you might think. Sure, men like (or think they like) random acts of intercourse. But men also like sexual variety, indeed it's possible that most men are hard-wired to desire sexual variety whether they want to fuck women or they want to fuck men. What if Stevie suggests the quickie and, despite their marriage being happy in all other aspects, Fred thinks "Not again... I'm tired of fucking this guy"? Besides the issue of sexual variety, it's also likely that one of either Fred or Steve just naturally has a higher sex drive than the other, even though they are both men.
Goodguy
9d ago
This is in the US. That is interesting, I did not know that Europe might have more discussion of the topic coming from "ordinary people".
I don't think the theory of a civilization scale parasite is necessary. There is a simpler explanation: the vast majority of people simply don't see falling fertility rates as a problem. It's not that people would naturally see it as a problem but a memetic parasite is blinding them. It's that people generally don't see it as a problem unless something brings it to their attention. The vast majority of people have never have paid any attention to social-level fertility rates at all. People 1000 years ago had large numbers of kids because of very local and immediate factors: basically, the poor needed kids for labor and as a form of welfare in old age, the rich could afford to have a bunch of kids and then not work much to take care of them (servants could do it), contraception was primitive, women viewed having kids as more central to their identity than they do now, and so on. People were having many kids because of these immediate local factors, not out of a personal interest in their society's overall fertility. When you take people's basic disinterest in overall fertility rates and then remove the factors that previously kept fertility high, the fertility rate drops. The removal of the factors that had previously kept fertility rates high was not caused by some singular memetic parasite. It was caused by several separate things: technological change that reduced the importance of physical human labor, improvements in contraception, the feminist movement. Now of course, these things are related: the technological changes also helped to enable feminism to begin with, improvements in contraception were partly motivated by a feminist-leaning desire to help women, and so on. But to think of them all as being part of one social contagion is, I think, going too far. It overly compresses the actual complexity of the historical phenomena into one supposed dimension.
Now, one could certainly argue that there exists a widespread ideology that helps to make it harder for people to tackle the problem even once they begin to think of it as a problem. One can call it "leftism", or whatever. But even if one removed this ideology, that does not mean that people would automatically start to think of falling fertility rates as a problem. That's a separate thing. The "survival instinct" that you mention does not activate until and unless the problem becomes very visible. And we are not yet at that point. So falling fertility rates fall into the same class of problems as climate change: the vast majority of people do not have any sort of inherent tendency to pay attention to the problem. They only begin to pay attention to it either after individuals and groups put significant efforts, on a massive scale, into "raising awareness" of the problem, or after the problem has begun to create such obvious negative consequences that even the average person notices it.
Goodguy
9d ago
I think part of the reason is this: It's easy to imagine the supposed Russian threat. It is very unlikely that Sweden would fight Russia any time in the forseeable future, but pretty much anyone in Sweden over the age of 7 or so could imagine a war against Russia, and of course the idea of a war with Russia became much easier to imagine about 4 years ago than it had been before. Fertility rates, on the other hand, are something that only a small fraction of people think about. I don't think I have ever, in my entire life, heard anyone discuss fertility rates "in real life", outside the Internet. Personal fertility, sure, or the fertility of friends and family members. But not fertility rates. That's a topic the discussion of which is mostly confined to certain government circles and to certain usually right-leaning online spaces.
Goodguy
11d ago
To summarize my own viewpoint:
The existence of consciousness makes pure reductionist materialism/physicalism non-credible.
However, there is no good evidence for and no good argument in favor of any of the various conventional religions (Judaism, Christanity, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, or any of the others).
It is possible that the nature of consciousness is in principle beyond the reach of any sort of rational or scientific investigation. And I consider it almost certain that it is beyond the reach of any sort of rational or scientific investigation that would seek to reduce it to a purely material/physical explanation.
To the extent that I am spiritual, it is because I perceive this mystery. I am more or less comfortable with, and find beauty in, the mystery as a mystery. Not because I would not like to know the answer. I would love to know. But it is not clear that it is possible to know. The various answers that people have tried to give over the course of human history are all, as far as I can tell, not credible. The existence of the mystery, on the other hand, is real. We do not know the answer, but we do know that there is a mystery. And that in itself is spiritual.
Maybe you haven't been exposed to any decent anti-HBD arguments. Personally, I think there probably is a genetic component to racial differences in criminality. However, I think that pro-HBD people often overstate their case.
@2rafa's recent post about Irish Travelers is interesting when it comes to the explanatory power of HBD.
There are also many examples in history of savage, unintellectual people later becoming great intellectuals without, perhaps, the genetic stock changing much. If one used a time machine to observe the founding Indo-European-speaking stock circa 2000 BC, one would probably find it hard to imagine that 1500 years later they would have descendants like Thucydides and Euclid. If one observed the Germanic people around 0 AD, one would find it hard to imagine that their descendants would include many of the world's foremost scientists and mathematicians.
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