IguanaBowtie
No bio...
User ID: 946
IguanaBowtie
10mo ago
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.
IguanaBowtie
8mo ago
Blue Ape together strong
IguanaBowtie
11mo ago
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.
IguanaBowtie
1yr ago
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.
IguanaBowtie
1yr ago
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.
IguanaBowtie
2mo ago
Jared and Ivanka shouldn't hold their breath, but the progressive left is far from safe. There aren't just two choices here, and the most likely outcome IMO is 'Zionist American Jews use their (non-unique but considerable) political influence to get the loudly antizionist faction expelled from the Dem coalition'.
Now, this is a harder proposition today than it was 20 years ago. It risks splitting the party along age lines, while Republicans laugh from the sidelines - but it doesn't guarantee electoral irrelevance like some worry. Plenty of democratic states have a split left and the far left is almost always the smaller group, has nowhere to go politically, and ends up as the mostly irrelevant junior partner. (here in Canada we have had a united right and split left for decades, the Libs just treat the NDP like their annoying kid brother and it mostly works) An increasingly large and motivated far left makes the proposition more dicey, but the far left's critical weakness has and continues to be lack of strategy - they depend a lot on 'being on the right side of history' carrying them across the finish line - so I expect them to continue to punch below their weight in internecine disputes.
IguanaBowtie
4mo ago
Add this one to the realignment pile. Twitch presumably unbanned the nipples due to progressive pressure. (SWERFism ist verboten) And then got BTFO by payment processors, who for reasons I don't fully understand are absolutely dedicated white knights of online prudishness, to such an extent that much of the payment for online porn has been delegated to the Romanian mafia.
IguanaBowtie
9mo ago
I don't really see it as a 'better minimum deal', just greater male variability plus society reacting reasonably to that reality. If by 'minimum deal' you mean something like 'average outcomes of the worst 10% by outcome' then yeah, men get a super raw deal. But the top 10% of men blow the top 10% of women out of the water (biggest thing driving the culture war bar none imo) and the average man is probably right about parity with the average woman, and possibly married to her.
IMO, the big factor that makes this notably worse for men is that the disutility of very bad outcomes greatly outweighs the utility of very good ones, at least at the individual level. While society probably derives greater benefits from great geniuses than it suffers harm from killers and predators, if I were to live at the 50th percentile of American outcomes and you presented me with a coin flip to move either to the 40th or 60th percentiles, I might consider it, but wouldnt go near any proposition involving a coin flip between the 10th and 90th percentiles, or worse, between the 1st and 99th percentiles. Evolutionary pressure forces men broadly to make that tradeoff, since 'maximizing evolutionary fitness' and 'maximizing individual utility' are only passing acquaintances. But, in modern society, with fairly high utility payoffs available from middling outcomes, the tradeoff seems like a really bad one.
IguanaBowtie
10mo ago
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.
IguanaBowtie
1yr ago
hoo boy, you aren't kidding
IguanaBowtie
1yr ago
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.)
IguanaBowtie
1yr ago
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.
IguanaBowtie
1yr ago
There are still some red-flavored entertainment products, and some do very well. The Fast & the Furious franchise jumps to mind, as does the new Top Gun.
They're all still made by blue-tribers, of course, which means that entertainment is either made to appeal to both tribes or just blue, never just red. (with a few exceptions that prove the rule, like The Terminal List)
IguanaBowtie
1yr ago
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.
IguanaBowtie
1yr ago
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.
IguanaBowtie
1yr ago
How do you go about telling someone "Im sorry, but it seems likely that your disorder/lifestyle/lived-experience is the result of a sociogenic contagion", aka 'you got meme'd on, son'. Seems like an awkward conversation.
And also, I suppose, would even a conclusively proof of sociogenic origin automatically devalue said disorder/etc? Society is pretty accustomed to giving religions at least a partial pass despite being a pretty clear case of memery. I'm also reminded of the pathogenic theory of homosexuality - so what if it's caused by a virus, if you're happy the way you are?
IguanaBowtie
1yr ago
I would just like to add a few thoughts:
Watermelon. Zaibatsu. Camraderie. Drum.
Hopefully this is at least modest evidence that my account isn't a chatbot.
Really not looking forward to endless 'prove you're not an AI' interactions in coming days...
IguanaBowtie
11mo ago
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.
IguanaBowtie
1yr ago
I've had some success with this trick even without upper-class signalling - just being tall-ish, not a visible minority, clean-cut and walking confidently is enough to pattern match with 'belongs here' about 90% of the time.
I'm not sure I would try this in Dubai, though. Risk of extrajudicial punishment if caught seems a bit high.
IguanaBowtie
1yr ago
My two theories:
-the fine arts are extremely Blue Tribe-coded, and as such any assault on their priviliges or status is presumptively a Red-Tribe action.(even when it's pretty clearly a Grey tribe thing)
-the fine arts are (more weakly) female-coded, and as such any assault on their priviliges or status is inherently anti-feminist.
Either way, 'this means war'.
IguanaBowtie
8mo ago
Without reading other comments: It's mostly just a snarl word like 'sheeple' that gets thrown at people with a high degree of social conformity, specifically conformity to the rules a tribe that the snarl-er doesn't particularly like. 'Our partisans are loyal and incorruptible, their partisans are brainwashed and radicalized', etc. If there's something useful to the term, its that some tribes and ideologies really do put outsized importance on loyalty and ideological purity, with cults being at the far end of the spectrum and generally recognized as a bad thing. But calling someone an NPC (or a cultist) only turns up the heat, which is seldom useful but particularly bad here as everyone's close-minded and defensive while participating in a flame war, which gives the actual zealots cover.
IguanaBowtie
10mo ago
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.
IguanaBowtie
10mo ago
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)
IguanaBowtie
10mo ago
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?'
I think the relevant pro-HBD point here is reversion to the mean; you really should care about what the 'pool' of people you're drawing from looks like, because you'll soon have a new generation that looks as much like them as the parents you cherry-picked.
I guess you can get around this if you're willing to make sterilization a condition of immigration, or deport that portion of the 2nd+ generations who fail to meet your standards, either way committing to perpetually top up your country's population by cream-skimming the developing world. (holy dysgenics, Batman!) But I think either would be generally considered far worse than just prioritizing high-performing immigrant groups along racial lines.
Also not a problem if you reject group intelligence differences, of course, which is the official and default stance.
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