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IguanaBowtie


				

				

				

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joined 2022 September 07 21:27:23 UTC
				

				

				

				

				

				

					
				

				

				
				
				

				
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IguanaBowtie


								

								

								
								
								

								
							
					
 
				


				

				
				
				

				

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					joined 2022 September 07 21:27:23 UTC
				


				
					

					
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User ID: 946


					
					
					
				

			


					

						
					



		

	

 











			
			

			
			

			




	


		

			
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				Culture War Roundup for the week of January 30, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I'm reminded of a NYT piece from a few years back (about genetics, definitely wrongthink now) that small-print warned that big data and rigorous statistics were likely to turn up results that progressives wouldn't like very much.


Will be interesting to see how long the hands-in-ears-la-la-la-I-can't-hear-you strategy will remain viable.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of June 26, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
But 'society' doesn't get a say in who gets to go to Harvard. The school itself does, in partnership with its prospective students and their potential future employers. They all follow their local incentives




Students: go to the school that impresses the most employers, and at higher levels allows for the best networking opportunities, which in both cases is usually the highest status school that will have you (gaining some skills is a nice bonus)






Employers: hire students from the schools that filter for the cream of the crop (having them get a general education is a nice bonus)






School: keep your audience happy by being selective in admissions, scrubbing out fakers, and statusmaxxing in other ways to pull ahead of your competitors




If there were an Education Tsar (a real one) then maximizing social utility from the process might be a priority. As it is, we have an elaborate workaround to the fact that hiring based on IQ tests is illegal.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of January 2, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
On one hand, dropping a 5 year sentence to 4 years isn't earth-shattering. Judges have, and often use, greater discretion in sentencing based on whether they had a good morning thusfar.


On the other hand, "same crime, different punishment" will only be tolerated so far. Especially if, after several years, the indiginous incarceration level remains flat & indigenous crime rate rises. (as I would expect, mostly due to early release of serial offenders, with a small reduced deterrent effect)


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of May 29, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I do recall liberals being pretty upset by Ted 'the Zodiac' Cruz. And Rubio, and Christie, and the rest of the republican slate, even Jeb Bush. At first they were worried about Trump the least of all of them.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of December 19, 2022
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


backed by billions of dollars




This is actually concerning to me. Google's OpenAI and the like are happy to bow before the AI Safety crowd (the 'no racist chatbots' ones, not the 'no paperclip apocalypse' ones) so long as they can still make a gorillion dollars off the technology, and that means they really have no interest in allowing the existence of seedy AI applications like porn generators. That just brings bad PR to the whole field, for literally zero benefit. (Google isnt going to be entering the smut market anytime soon) Thus I worry that we're seeing the begginimgs of another unholy alliance between the progressive left & big money, nominally in the name of moral puritanism but with the real purpose of shoving the AI cat back in the SaaS bag.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				There is no such thing as 'ambition'
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
My working definition is that ambition is basically neuroticism plus competitiveness, with the former defined as something like 'inability to accept one's self and one's situation uncritically' and the latter as simply 'desire to win'. At the extremes the 2x2 would be




(Low neuroticism)(low competitiveness)- Laid-back people, contented housewives, 'it's not much but it's honest work'. Eg. The Dude.






(High neuroticism)(low competitiveness)- chronic anhedonics, complainers & worrywarts. Eg. Every Woody Allen character.






(Low neuroticism)(high competitiveness)-  Typical 'winners' who compete until satisfied & then relax. Eg. Chad Thundercock.






(Hugh neuroticism)(high competitiveness)-  People for whom every setback is a challenge & no victory is ever sufficient. Eg. Every conqueror, usurper, visionary and notably 'driven' person.




As a low/low, I kind of feel bad for highly ambitious people. Only a few of them actually get to be legends, most burn out or get crushed (being hypercompetitive doesn't neccessarily make you hypercompetent) and being highly neurotic doesn't sound like much fun even for the billionaires. But I can definitely appreciate the benefits of their existence, preferably far away from me.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of December 26, 2022
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I think Elon will have the last laugh. He's on the right side of Metcalfe's law, and from a certain viewpoint it's insane that Twitter was actually for sale at any price.


The ways he loses are


-successful swarm governance action cancels twitter entirely. This is very tough, especially in the absence of a dramatic scandal and/pr effective competitor. (Mastodon ain't it)


Or


-successful oldschool-conspiracy, eg advertiser blockade, getting Elon arrested or the company fined out of existence. This is very difficult, Elon is very rich & sufficiently connected/established that he will be quite hard to dislodge, Twitter can run on like 50 people.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of September 26, 2022
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I think the point of the whole thing is supposed to be something like 'fat black women doing overtly sexual stuff is high culture now, disapproving of & criticizing this is low-status'


Twerking especially is to be understood as a cultural phenomenon akin to (and aesthetically equal to) ballet or opera.


Seems woke to me.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of September 26, 2022
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I think a less controversial way of saying this would be "exit rights are fundamental to any sort of free society", then going on to argue that nationalism and nativism in one country damages exit rights in all the others - leaving a crappy situation is great, but doesnt help if every scrap of land is occupied & no-one will let you immigrate an anything like fair terms.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of June 19, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
And yet, letting American memes (and the prosperity that they seem to breed) naturally & nonviolently melting-pot away the newcomers' less endearing traits seems to have a pretty good track record. You still end up with a disproportionately immigrant underclass, but that's also part of the plan, isn't it? 'Immigrants get the job (that natives dont want to do) done?'


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of September 5, 2022
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


can I at least have my own awards convention




This is the rub, of course. The woke memeplex grows by entryism and as such treats gatekeeping as an attack. You'd be lucky to get an independent book review site that rates books on explicitly non-woke grounds, but I doubt even that is feasible. (if anyone knows of one, please let me know) Even if it managed to avoid DDOS and doxxing and deplatforming campaigns, you're still left with a userbase of three principled libertarians and a zillion witches.


I dont know how to solve this one, other than 'read books from before 2010' and 'wait for the culture to change again to something less specifically hostile to this one thing'.


Other than, possibly, having a The Motte book review club.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of May 8, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I mean, there is another option - take simple steps to anonymize yourself before intervening, and if things go wrong flee the scene. A motivated modern police force can absolutely catch you if they decide to pursue the case, but they have a lot of similarly sad cases on their plates. A single extra "mentally ill vagrant dies in a scuffle he likely started, suspect disappears" isn't going to attract undue law-enforcement resources, and it's going to be suppressed in the media rather than being shouted on the street corners. "Blue-voting city fails its most vulnerable, again" isn't a narrative that pays the bills like "Outgroup member murders innocent in broad daylight", and the boys in blue have even less motivation to track you down in the absence of public outcry.


The downsides I can think of are that if you do get caught you'll be punished more severely, and that certain anonymizing tactics might make you seem like the aggressor and be on the wrong side of further bystander intervention. For the former, I'm not familiar enough with US/NYC law to know how badly, but since it seems probable that Penny is going to jail for a long time, a few more years doesn't seem like a good tradeoff against something like a 90% chance of a clean getaway. For the latter - well, this seems to come up rarely enough that two separate people in a train car being willing to get their hands dirty seems unlikely, and a brawl between unrelated belligerents is less likely to inspire heroics than one-sided harassment.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of March 27, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
hoo boy, you aren't kidding


https://youtube.com/watch?v=EFECZcpCN64


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				The Most Beautiful game: How Supreme Commander Stole My Heart
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Haha, brings back memories of the game's predecessor, Total Annihilation, which was my jam throughout middle school, and which contained what is still my favorite piece of video game music. (by Jeremy Soule, who went on to score Skyrim. Whole OST is a banger.)


https://youtube.com/watch?v=YDySkTT4MDk


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 13, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Plan A


-astroturf a leftist movement objecting to immigration on egalitarian grounds (we treat immigrants like dirt! Immigration = slavery!) and oppose it as clumsily as possible. (Being exploited by us is a human right!)


-Make sure they get their goal: a massive set of payments that equalize opportunity for immigrants and existing nationals, say $500k towards education, housing etc per head, (mostly in services, negotiated with a new govt agency single-payer style) paid over a decade or so.


-This will be ruinously expensive at current immigation levels; immigration will have to be curtailed, on moral and practical grounds. ^_^ It has a second silver lining of enabling some extreme cream skimming.


-this will be paid for out of a new tax on individuals, which will be punishingly high but accepted as a moral neccessity


-with a loophole: expenditures on your own kids are deductable. A portion of family housing costs & food, plus 100% of accredited sports and activities, education, childcare, lost wages due to parental care (after passing a test showing you're competent to do so - more money for better results!), parental education, plus bonuses for hitting milestones like literacy and psychological good health, plus a big 'successful launch' bonus at age 18. Babies are just immigrants from heaven! :^)


Downside is lots of nanny-state intrusion into childrearing, but you're the conservative government & can bake in a bunch of universalism at the start.


Plan B


Start a big war. Nothing like material privation and a wartime economy to make babies happen.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of June 26, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
One hopes, but the ability of existing interests to simply fund them as propaganda organs means they'll probably persist quite a while past their natural expiry date, even if their readership drops away to basically nil.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of May 15, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I'm only loosely familar with commercial real estate lending (I did residential lending) but a major difference is that commercial lenders typically require market LTV maintenance whis means ~ margin calls. If your property tanks by 50% in current market value, your bank is going to call you & demand cash.


Now, they won't intentionally drive a performing loan account into bankruptcy. Banks are worse at liquidating siezed collateral than the original owner, and in any case really just want the loan payments. But if you have a generally solvent business, or you have lots of personal assets & gave personal guarantees (and most small businesses have to) they will absolutely make you shoulder the volatility risk and take your savings to pay down the loan to a % they are comfortable with. You can take the equity back out if & when the proprty appreciates again.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of June 19, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


I hoped to become closer to him, but he was always so distant. What was up with that?




This smacks of post-hoc rationization.




oh yeah, I bullied the shit out of that kid






in retrospect I was way out of line, and I'd likely earn some sort of social punishment even now if I were to be honest about it






luckily no-one is digging too deep here, just deflect with some noncommital BS and move on






(alternately, ego-defense mechanisms step in and the last two parts happen subconsciously)




				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of March 13, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I'm predicting a simple solution to this one: 'doll'-style sexworkers.  They cosplay as your waifu, your AI instructs them through an earpiece like a porno director, and your augmented reality equipment fills in the gaps as best as possible.(Soon to be fully arranged by your AI waifu herself, to avoid breaking immersion - you give her an allowance, she surprises you with 'date night'.)


No technological reason why we couldn't do this right now, especially with GPT4 already having built-in img2text. Whether social pressure is applied to stomp out this sort of thing is another matter, I think AI is going to disrupt gender politics more profoundly than birth control, & institutional feminism is very quickly going to come down on the anti-AI side.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of December 26, 2022
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I could argue that 'porn on sports hashtags' is probably failure mode 1, swarm actors deliberately trashing the joint. But I guess it's possible that this was always a problem and twitter's old mod team just handled it effectively.


In that case, failure mode 3 would be "old fashioned incompetence, making the service worse than existing incompetent competitors and squandering the absolutely massive advantage of 340 million active users."


This could happen! I'm no Musk fanboy, I think he mostly succeeds on having a good sense of when breaking the rules won't be punished. But Twitter was already wildly incompetent(1) & it dominated regardless, and despite the platform having much more powerful enemies now I think Elon probably won't screw it up as badly as would be neccessary, and nor would anyone with a modicum of business experience, regardless of their politics.


(1) one of my big takeaways from the Twitter Files has been the incredible disorganization of the company & ignorance of upper management towards major issues until it was alreasu a PR disaster.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of June 19, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
It's possible that the original point still stands even if nerds are a small minority of all rapists, if being raped by a nerd is percieved as much worse than being raped by a non-nerd.


I don't know how much this corresponds with reality, but there is definitely at least some extra 'yuck' factor associated with sexual violence when perpetrated by very-low value males.


Alternately, if 'tolerating male proximity' is a tradeoff between various social goods & risk of sexual violence, tolerating males who are low-risk but have low (or zero) social capital to trade can easily become a worse tradeoff than chumming around with high-risk high-reward men.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of January 9, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I'm not at all convinced that ethnic subgroups can maintain their heterogeneity through brute force IQ gaps.


-there is some evidence for assortative mating based on IQ, but there's also plenty of confounders. (college professors are likely to marry within their profession, but inevitably share much more than above-average cognitive ability)


    

  • if humans really have a 'your brain must be this big to ride' rule, intellectual accomplishment should be percieved as way sexier than it actually is, being a reliable proxy for IQ.
    • 



-in any case, it would be inadequate to maintain small minority groups of high IQ -  if your people are only 1% of the population, ten IQ points on average is going to slightly increase the fraction of (your group) in the pool of intellectually attractive potential partners, but you'll still be massively outnumbered & swiftly assimilated into the majority population without other forms of cultural protectionism.


-if we're at the point of invoking cultural awareness of 'comparatively large percentage of losers', there's no need to involve IQ gaps on top. It's not really controversial to note that cultures that last tend to include beliefs & practices that encourage conversion & expansion, and discourage apostasy and assimilation. This sort of cultural perception doesn't even need to be accurate! (It's not like medieval Christians were lining up to marry off their daughters at the local synagogue) It can function just fine as pure unsupported protectionism.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 13, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


Americans and Germans didn't dislike eachother that much.




I heard differently from my German-Canadian relatives who were a teenagers in WW2. But likely the Japanese kids got it worse.


But I was actually thinking after my reply about the persistence of certain liberal outgroup modes, notably the KKK and Nazis (who are kind of a super-KKK). Scott Alexander memorably pointed out that there's hardly any of either group left, those that managed to hang on being almost universally despised & marginalized, but you still hear about them all the time, and a certain kind of leftist always jumps at the chance to pattern match their foes with one or both of these two groups.


(Status: speculative, possibly uncharitible)


One possibility is: liberals just really hate racism, so the biggest baddest racists of the 20th century loom large in their imaginations. I'll grant this one to an extent, although not all instances of racism attract equal fervor. (especially when perpetrated by nonwhites).


I think the more interesting explanation is: at its roots, in its memetic DNA, modern liberalism is designed for fighting the outgroup that it was born to oppose. "This Machine Kills Nazis", everything else is incidental.They might hate racism, but not on first principles, not really; they hate racism because racism is what the KKK did, and they exist fight the KKK. The modern humans who make up the ideology don't have write access to it anymore, so in order to steer the Nazi-killing machine in the direction of the outgroup-du-jour they have to make it think they're Nazis.


In this context, ¬HBD being taken as gospel seems perfectly natural.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of October 24, 2022
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I had assumed that it was not inherently sexual to crossdress, but one day I asked my wife who is an avid fan of 'RuPaul's Drag Race' what percentage of the contestants were straight. The answer was... zero. Since then, there have been a handful of hetero transwomen, as far as I know all former gay men.


Does this make crossdressing sexual? Not directly. I can't think of any reason why a man wearing a dress is an innately sexual act when a woman wearing slacks is not. Maybe crossdressing is culturally contingent on (some) gay subculture membership, like effecting a lisp. But 100%, even of a sample size in the low three digits, seems to point in that direction.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of July 17, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Agreed, except to note that there's no need for aliens to be hiding in the Oort cloud - mobile and under the ocean somewhere would likely do just fine, along with a number of other close-to-home alternatives. And that the absence of observed radio signals can be explained as well by 'there are superior options for interstellar communication and aliens use those' as 'there are no aliens sending signals'.