Harlequin5942
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User ID: 1062
I think it's possibly a factor, I don't think that it's the dominant factor.
GDP per capita in Sub-Saharan Africa varies from the $400s (Somalia, Sierra Leone, the Central African Republic etc.) to $6500-9000 (Gabon, Equatorial Guinea, South Africa, and Botswana). That's higher than some European countries (Albania, Azerbaijan, Armenia). Let's rule out Gabon and Equatorial Guinea as examples of GDP being misleading, since their actual "development" in any normal sense is pathetic. Let's also exclude South Africa as only recently an African-governed society. That still leaves Botswana as a huge outlier. Botswana is (a) overwhelmingly African and (b) its most important resource is diamonds, which is very badly correlated with development elsewhere. So a lot of the variance between Africa and the poorer parts of Europe can be explained by other factors - including Botswana's relatively good economic, political, and social policies.
Africa is a basket case, but so was China until recently, despite high IQs. Additionally, the European or East Asian genetics for IQs have presumably not undergone any massive transformations in the past 500 years, but the discontinuity in the rate economic development with all of previous economic history is huge.
At most, a genetic tendency to high IQ would be comparable to a natural resource. That can be good! For example, Norway has been able to turn its oil into extreme economic development. Venezuela has not. Countries with very limited natural resources have done well. Botswana has done well with a low IQ level by global standards, though IIRC Botswana's IQ is rising relative to the rest of Sub-Saharan Africa due to the better childhood nutrition that comes with development.
I don't know of good evidence that the full awfulness of Sub-Saharan African development needs to be explained by IQ, rather than historical factors (it's hard to imagine Liberia ever being a great comparative success when you know its history) or policy factors (Africa had the misfortune to become independent in the heyday of socialism, dirigism, and Cold War power politics that led even the democratic countries to support dictators).
Harlequin5942
2yr ago
very few men engage in hard physical labour as their primary source of income, no one bats an eyelid at a woman drinking beer or wearing jeans, women pursuing careers in STEM are generally encouraged to do so by their peers and mentors, it's not seen as embarrassing if a man knows how to bake (or a woman doesn't).
But these are all examples of historical gender norms (though I doubt there was ever a physical labour-income norm for men) not contemporary norms.
Harlequin5942
1yr ago
Russia is not going to dominate Europe, force of arms or otherwise.
It's in the process of conquering the second largest country in Europe and would have succeeded if Trump had been president.
It's not so much that Russia is stronger than Europe, it's that it's crazier. Someone willing to fight can dominate a room full of equally strong people who aren't.
Harlequin5942
2yr ago
Why not get the government to throw some cash at massive infrastructure and public works projects? We could take a page out of the 1930s New Deal playbook and create a boatload of jobs in all sorts of industries. I've rarely seen anyone discuss this, but it may be necessary as it was during the Great Depression.
Government intervention may not be necessary. If there's a big surplus of new capital due to AI efficiency, that means that there is more to invest in things that AI can't do right now, like manual labour. Or the government could use additional corporation tax revenue from AI productivity to cut social security contributions, which would lower the cost of employing humans.
The main government intervention would be the gastric by-pass surgeries required to get many Americans fit enough to do manual labour, but personally, there are only a handful of white-collar jobs that I have enjoyed more than manual labour. Not that the WORK was more enjoyable - most work is not "passionate", contrary to what bullshit cover letter say these days - but it was easier to turn my brain off and have mental energy in the evenings to play games, spend time with friends, or read.
"She went on olden-day sailing ships with Joseph Conrad. She went to Africa with Ernest Hemingway and to India with Rudyard Kipling."
This passage is modified to:
"She went to nineteenth century estates with Jane Austen. She went to Africa with Ernest Hemingway and California with John Steinbeck."
The sorts of thinkers that a child should be reading - in the revised editions, at least, where Elizabeth Bennet is an engineer ("Better than Brunel, they say!") Jane Bennet is a badass lawyer, and Georgiana Darcy is Black. Jane is rewritten to have more sass, while Elizabeth is rewritten to stop being so mean. Mr. Darcy is rewritten to be a better role model for men: modest, empathetic, and socially competent. The story is about how Elizabeth and Jane can have Pride, while Mr. Darcy enjoys lessons from them about the importance of not having Prejudice.
The Oakleys are a queer collective of artists who are travelling to California to escape the prejudice of dumb rednecks. Ernest Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea will be the Wise Latinx Woman and the Sea and of course she successfully brings the fish back in the end, because women can be just as good fisher-persons as men and other genders.
Harlequin5942
2yr ago
But why would that happen?
Harlequin5942
2yr ago
I have spent a lot of my time in neckbeard libertarian circles, so I have heard a lot about cryptocurrencies in the past 10 years.
I made an early decision that I would not touch them with a bargepole for the foreseeable future. No subsequent event has made me regret that decision.
I like my investments like my taste in paintings: safe, traditional, and matched to my low time preference.
Harlequin5942
1yr ago
I'm not stretching the meaning of 'bargaining' here at all.
You don't think it's stretching "at all" to extend it to interactions with no agreement on sufficient conditions for the exchange, articulated negotiations, or legal enforcement? And from a political or commercial context to a romantic one?
It doesn't change the fact that most men have to learn that just being themselves isn't good enough. They need something more. Which is where the entire self improvement become masculine and worthy crap comes from.
But I totally agree with your first two sentences and I don't know what the third one means. My complaint is that thinking of "You have to work hard to gain the romantic approval of others" as "bargaining" is trying to generate a specific emotional response by including the former in the latter category (which, sure, you can do with the right defintions) where the archetypal form of similar bargaining would be e.g. prostitution or arranged marriages.
Kind of. She's leveraging what she already has.
She's amplifying it, granted. But that doesn't make it bargaining.
To help elucidate a bit, a part of the frustration monetarily successful women have described in media is that they want to be able to bargain for a better man than their looks could command but can't since a lot of men don't care about their money. I.e. their money has no bargaining power over the men they want. So they write articles about how men are intimidated by successful middle aged women or whatever.
Why put it in terms of "bargaining power", rather than "men are largely indifferent to money in a partner, at least for deciding whether to have sex with them"?
(Maybe it also extends to whether they consider women to be marriage-material, but the evidence I have seen is about women's sexual success. And some of that has been dubious e.g. relative frequency of simultaneous partners, but that presupposes that a sexually attractive woman is more likely to have multiple simultaneous partners, something I don't know to be true. Sleeping around seems to require attractiveness on the part of men, but desperation is a sufficient condition for even unattractive women.)
Harlequin5942
2yr ago
He implemented some reforms, but the overall situation was still awful in 2016-2017: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_Argentina#Data
Also, the inflation target was raised by 5%: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/28D
Harlequin5942
2yr ago
Art only has to inspire emotions in people.
Is that true?
If we could inspire the same emotions by taking the relevant pills, would art be redundant?
Harlequin5942
2yr ago
Also dont have sex with any woman who you have "power" over in your department.
I would just say "woman in your department", for the reasons you suggest later: PMC people in the US seem to strongly frown on workplace relationships. It's quite a contrast with European academia, which in my experience feels like a badly written porn film half the time.
Harlequin5942
2yr ago
I think there are some trends that might help conservatives in areas like Hollywood. China is increasingly important for making a profit with films, games etc. The Chinese government insists on Family Friendly entertainment, while comic book hero-style stories are what Chinese audiences apparently likes from the West.
One precedent is 80s action movies. Home video, plus a Hollywood system that had grown sceptical of indulging "genius" New Hollywood directors after flops like Heaven's Gate, led to the production of a lot of conservative-leaning action films. Think Cobra, Rambo, Red Dawn, Conan the Barbarian, Red Heat, Death Wish etc. etc. Even Aliens has a heroine who is appealing to both conservatives and liberals: the warrior mother is a figure in conservative iconography that goes back centuries; her violence stems from protective maternal instincts that conservatives laud, and she confronts men only insofar as they are weak. Similar women are a stock figure of Western culture, at least in Northern Europe: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catherine_Douglas
There's also e.g. the Rocky films from that period, which are some of the best examples I know of traditional working-class American conservative values: nobody owes you anything, work hard, respect your elders, family comes first, don't forget where you came from, stand up for yourself etc. These values are popular among high-orderliness people in pretty much every culture, including China.
Of course, as some people here have already noted, the problems for conservative culture production seem to be more supply-side than demand-side. However, I think that 80s action has lessons here as well. Stallone wasn't consistently a big star until the 80s: Rocky and Rocky II were exceptions in a career of failure and disappointment. Ahnold, Dolph, Church Norris, etc. came from outside the standard Hollywood system. Charles Bronson was a salty veteran and Michael Winner (the Death Wish director) was a sleazy Limey:
https://youtube.com/watch?v=efl5pFTFnBU
So a conservative director looking to make an action movie should try to make something Chinese friendly and go outside the box for the star, e.g. a wrestler, MMA fighter, or boxer as the lead.
If you're arguing that "contemporary" gender norms are far more open to the point that androgyny (or something approximating it) is the rule rather than the exception, then that's literally the exact point I was arguing in the article.
No, the evidence you cite is just as consistent with a change in gender norms. That doesn't mean that gender norms aren't still present and clear to people.
Huh? Surely you accept that, for most of human history, the overwhelming majority of men earned their income through physical labour (e.g. coal mining, carpentry, assorted agricultural activities, tree felling etc.).
Right, but was it a norm, let alone a gendered norm? If you look at great admired male figures in most of human history, like Achilles, Jesus, Odysseus, Gilgamesh, Heracles, Caesar, King Arthur, Alexander, Buddha, Confucius, Socrates... They are distinguished mainly by just about everything except earning an income through physical labour. Fighting? Yes. Doing something physical in an adventure? Yes. Working down a mine or fixing a wheel? Hardly something for great men to do.
Among intellectuals Aristotle thought that men doing physical labour belonged with women and children in the political hirearchy: not fit for citizenship. The normative life for Aristotle was that of a leisured aristocrat, not some proletarian or peasant. Physical labour could be used to keep oneself fit and virile, or monastic labour to get closer to God, or to get out of some sticky situation (see Heracles) but it wasn't something that you were supposed to do to earn a living of all things!
"Diminishing marginal utility" is a misonomer. Economists tend to assume that the marginal utility of everything is diminishing, relative to previous units. (Heroin and the like may be exceptions.) The issue is the marginal utility of money vs. other things. In modern utility theory, money has no marginal utility as such; it only has marginal utility relative to an alternative. And utility is typically defined by modern theorists in terms of relative preference, rather than a psychological state of pleasure etc.
If there is a diminishing marginal utility of money, then why do so many poor people buy lottery tickets and otherwise gamble in games with negative expected value?
Moreover, low socio-economic status is associated with high GE [gambling expenditures] (Davidson et al., 2016; Salonen et al., 2018a). To date, a limited number of studies have investigated the relationship between GE and receipt of social security benefits (Worthington 2001; MacDonald et al., 2004). A Canadian survey showed that households with income support were less likely to gamble. With the exception of one jurisdiction, households that received income support spend a lower proportion of their income on gambling. (MacDonald et al., 2004.)
Studies conducted in different countries have shown that although high income groups spend more on gambling, lower income groups contribute proportionally more (Beckert & Lutter 2009; Canale et al., 2016; CastrΓ©n et al., 2018; Roukka & Salonen 2020).
Assume that people gamble for the pleasure of taking risks. If there is diminishing marginal utility of money, why would the marginal value of money relative to this pleasure be low for poorer people?
Also, don't middle class and richer people save a higher proportion of their incomes than poorer people? Do they value maintaining their period-to-period monetary assets, relative to their incomes, more than poorer people?
Also, diminishing marginal utility on average is also very different from it being universal. Otherwise, why would many very rich people still work similar hours to poorer people? You can postulate that the former enjoy work, but that's ad hoc, as it doesn't explain why they would prefer paid labour.
I'm not saying that there is increasing marginal utility of money. I'm saying that it is really isn't obvious that money has diminishing marginal utility, even on average.
Harlequin5942
1yr ago
You need to consider demand for relocation as well as supply in the analysis. The expected gain in 1500 AD from moving from e.g. West Africa to Europe, given the risks and the relative differences in quality of life, were pretty small compared to the expected gain from moving in 2024. It wasn't like Europeans were fighting off hoards of African immigrants. And in 1900, what would the average African villager going to do in places where they don't speak the language, don't have much marketable skills, don't have immunity to local diseases, and don't have a welfare state to use?
In the Imperialist period, the transfer was the other way: hordes of European economic migrants swarming to the Americas and Africa.
In the UK, a lot of the black immigration was driven by things like African nurses coming over for work after 1945, during a period of labour shortages in the UK.
I would say that the key factors were (a) the Great Divergence in economic prosperity between the West and the Rest, due to the rise liberal capitalism in the former; (b) differences in population growth, and (c) better information transfer, so that even poor Africans could know that the poor in the West enjoyed a better standard of living.
Restrictions on immigration, with a few exceptions (like the White Australia policy) were less important than the above factors, I think.
Harlequin5942
1yr ago
I'm definitely not a fan of the Divine Command Theory, but I think you're being unfair here. Why not posit a difference in degree of disobedience? Surely murdering someone is more disobedient than committing adultery in your heart.
What's more disobedient about it? Both are breaking God's commandments.
On Matthew 22, the key term here is magos (μΡγαΟ) which is used in the New Testament to mean largest or highest in rank, just as "greatest" is ambiguous in English. One clever thing about the commandment Jesus gives is that it is both largest in scope (every violation of every other commandment is an instance of it) and rank. If humans truly had complete faith and love for God, then they would neither commit adultery in their hearts, nor murder.
Note I'm not saying that this is common sense, but just a natural implication of an unranked DCT.
I think the better question is why you'd give your own interpretation of Divine Command Theory any time at all, given the many times in the Bible when it's explicitly contradicted.
Oh, that's just teasing! Don't be so coquettish, show the goods.
Harlequin5942
1yr ago
You mean, why can't children and animals consent to acts they lack the mental capacity to understand?
Before you ask, no, I don't think that retarded adults with childlike levels of understanding of sex can consent to sex. Nor do I think that children can consent to e.g. "have parts of their body hacked off, and keep it all secret from their parents!" So neither of the reductios you have mentioned so far are worrying for me, but as I've indicated, I'm probably not the type of person you were addressing above, which was why I was curious as to whether you were addressing me when you used "you" or you were using it in some hypothetical/indirect sense/whatever.
There's also the problem that 50-50 is not actually a neutral probability, if you're a coherent Bayesian and you don't have an ultra-simple sample space. For example, if I think that the probability of each possible bloxor being greeblic is 50%, then I am committed to thinking that the probability that 70/100 bloxors being greeblic is 0.004%. So my "neutral" prior commits me to extremely strong confidence that the distribution of greeblic among those 100 bloxors is not 70!
If I set my prior for each bloxor being greeblic to 69.5%, then it is approximately neutral with respect to 70/100 bloxors being greeblic. But now I'm obviously far from neutral with respect to any individual bloxor being greeblic.
This is one of the limitations of Bayesianism as a formalism: it can model neutral belief with respect to any individual partition of the sample space, but not all partitions of the sample space. So, Scott is just wrong and frankly hasn't understood the mathematics, given his statement "If you have total uncertainty about a statement (βare bloxors greeblic?β), you should assign it a probability of 50%," since this norm implies incoherence, but coherence is a fundamental Bayesian norm.
Put briefly, what Scott is saying requires that you reject Bayesian epistemology/decision theory. I haven't read the whole post yet, but I would be surprised if he realised that.
This isn't an adult forum (or a mature one - we're thoroughly immature, much of the time) but basically just dating Ukrainian women in various parts of Europe, where I work. Unlike other Eastern European women I've known, who were thoroughly Twitterized culturally, the Russian, Romanian, and Ukrainian women I have known (intimately or casually, with a sadly small sample of the former) have been anti-abortion, trad or moderately trad about gender roles, racially insensitive (including towards other Eastern Europeans, e.g. gypsies and Albanians) and softly anti-Semitic. Often Christian in a vague, spiritual way, e.g. sexually liberated and suspicious of clergy, and just as into Asian mumbo-jumbo as Christian mumbo-jumbo.
Personally I liked them because they were forthright, insensitive, and really, really liked debating, which are the top personality traits in a woman for me. I happily date both conservative and progressive women with such personalities, as long as they don't mind me speaking my mind and they don't hide their own opinions. And, while Eastern European women often drink too much, they are also very often good at not eating too much, and I like tall/slim women.
Harlequin5942
2yr ago
Is this a matter of interest in things vs. interest in people?
Anecdotally, I have dated several women in tech, and all of them were in UX development. Obviously, that's not completely representative, but my impression is that women in tech are either interested in people or using coding as a means to an end (like a good income) whereas my male friends in tech are much more thing-orientated and interested in e.g. coding as a puzzle game (as well as setting me up with hot/smart women in tech, for which I'm grateful!).
Harlequin5942
2yr ago
Is someone not a cannibal if they only eat human flesh once a year?
Harlequin5942
2yr ago
Humans are in control everywhere.
We exaggerate our control, especially our ability to act with predictable effects. I mean, if there's one thing that I hope people take away from covid, it's that nature can still bite us hard. Even if you think that covid was a big deal as a medical problem, it could have been a lot worse, and a fortiori it could have been much much worse if you think that it wasn't such a big deal. See also climate change, where (a) there is a lot of natural variation and (b) even the part that is due to human action is barely modifiable by human design due to political reasons and lagged effects.
We impact ecosystems. Our control of them is limited, unreliable, and extremely unrobust.
Harlequin5942
1yr ago
I have unfortunately observed a steady supply of young boys eager to pimp themselves out for rich sugar daddies flush with money and drugs, and none of my male friends who were active on grindr as teens show any regrets in their adult life.
AFAIK, this was common among gay men back in the days when it was illegal. John Maynard Keynes, for example, had a thing for very young men/older boys. I think the hope was that this would go away if homosexuality was normalised.
Harlequin5942
1yr ago
I think affluent African parents are more relaxed about their kids marrying white than many Asian (especially South Asian) and Arab/North African parents, possibly for cultural and religious (they're usually Christian) reasons.
And because parents, like women, tend to be hypergamous, and a white son-in-law is higher status than an Asian/Arab/Indian/etc. son-in-law.
This is starting to sound like the noncentral fallacy, and perhaps a particularly bad version of it. "I can stretch the meaning of X to include Y, therefore I can extend judgements about central cases of X to Y" is not a good argument.
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/yCWPkLi8wJvewPbEp/the-noncentral-fallacy-the-worst-argument-in-the-world
Is a woman wearing makeup to attract men "bargaining" too?
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