JhanicManifold
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User ID: 135
JhanicManifold
9mo ago
So, I went to see Barbie despite knowing that I would hate it, my mom really wanted to go see it and she feels weird going to the theatre alone, so I went with her. I did, in fact, hate it. It's a film full of politics and eyeroll moments, Ben Shapiro's review of it is essentially right. Yet, I did get something out of it, it showed me the difference between the archetypal story that appeals to males and the female equivalent, and how much just hitting that archetypal story is enough to make a movie enjoyable for either men or women.
The plot of the basic male story is "Man is weak. Man works hard with clear goal. Man becomes strong". I think men feel this basic archetypal story much more strongly than women, so that even an otherwise horrible story can be entertaining if it hits that particular chord well enough, if the man is weak enough at the beginning, or the work especially hard. I'm not exactly clear what the equivalent story is for women, but it's something like "Woman thinks she's not good enough, but she needs to realise that she is already perfect". And the Barbie movie really hits on that note, which is why I think women (including my mom) seemed to enjoy it.
You can really see the mutual blindness men and women have with respect to each other in this domain. Throughout the movie, Ken is basically subservient to Barbie, defining himself only in the relation to her, and the big emotional payoff at the end is supposed to be that Ken "finds himself", saying "I am Ken!". But this whole "finding yourself" business is a fundamentally feminine instinct, the male instinct is to decide who you want to be and then work hard towards that, building yourself up. The movie's female authors and director are completely blind to this difference, and essentially write every character with female motivations.
JhanicManifold
10mo ago
I have to say that I really, really want all this UFO stuff to be true, mostly because this implies that there's an "adult in the neighborhood" who won't let a super-intelligence be created, it would imply that we'd have to share the cosmic endowment with aliens, but I'll take the certainty of getting a thousand bucks over the impossibility a billion.
However, If the US has had alien technology for decades and kept it a secret, this implies that the US has essentially sacrificed unbelievable amounts of economic and technological growth for the sake of... what, exactly? Preventing itself from having asymmetric warfare capabilities?! Isn't asymmetric warfare the entire goal of the US military? The rationale for maintaining this unbelievable level of secrecy for 8 decades, through democrat and republican presidents, through wars and economic crises, just doesn't seem that strong to me.
So therefore, barring actual physical evidence, it seems that the US intelligence apparatus is trying to make us believe that alien tech exists, and I have no clue why. This is obviously a fairly complicated operation given all the high-level people who keep coming forward, but I can't see what is to be gained here. So overall, my impression at the whole UFO phenomenon is massive confusion, I can't come up with a single coherent model of the world which makes sense of everything I'm seeing.
JhanicManifold
8mo ago
I genuinely cannot imagine preferring a lifetime of pill popping to just riding a bike.
As someone currently using semaglutide, and having lost 40 lbs with it after around 10 years of trying to lose the weight, you are severely underestimating the variance in the willpower required for people to lose weight. Of-fucking-course the healthiest choice is to never have been fat in the first place, just like it's better to never start smoking cigarettes, but once you're addicted and fat, it makes no sense at all to insist on trying (and failing) to do it without help. Semaglutide helps you make better choices and dig yourself out of the hole, sure, it might not be healthy by itself (just like nicotine patches), but it sure as shit is healthier than having a 45lb plate strapped to your back all the time.
I'm continuing to lose weight from semaglutide (down 25lbs so far in about 3 months), these past few weeks at a rate of 2lbs/week. I'm also working out 6 times a week doing high-volume bodybuilding style training in order to preserve every shred of muscle I've built over the past 10 years of intermittently working out, and of course eating very high amounts of protein.
I'm still roughly 22 or 23 percent body fat, so not shredded by any means, but beneath the fat I have about 165lbs of lean body mass at a height of 5'9.5, and the large body frame that caused me so much anguish as a teenager is starting to play in my favour because it turns out that my shoulders are wide as fuck (21inches across from shoulder to shoulder measured on a wall, and 53inch shoulders circumference, and it turns out that girls like wide shoulders the way guys like tits?) ... so the overall figure is starting to come together, and the face has slimmed down too. Overall I look ok and muscular in clothes, but kind of unimpressive naked.
I have noticed... changes... to the way I'm perceived socially. Lots of furtive glances when I pass by (and some direct staring), lots of girls staring at my chest when I talk to them, a lot more inexplicable hair-playing and lip-licking, groups of high-school girls giggling when I pass by (which caused me a fucking spike of anxiety when it first happened, high-school-girl-giggling was not associated with anything good the last time it happened to me). I notice that people seemingly want to integrate me into conversations significantly more than before, I've noticed a subtle shift in energy when there's a casual group discussion.
It's also kind of fun to see new people I meet kind of be perplexed after talking to me for the first time. Bear in mind that my fundamental personality is that of a physics nerd (though now I do machine learning), that was the archetype that crystallised inside me during my adolescence, and getting muscles and a bit leaner has done nothing to that aspect of me. But this means that people kind of get visibly perplexed when I ask good questions during ML poster sessions, and when I don't fit their idea of a dumb muscle-bound jock. So far this has mostly amused me, we'll see how It'll get as I get even leaner.
As I get leaner the changes accelerate, every 5lbs decrease has produced more changes of this sort than the last. Overall this has been a strangely emotional experience, I'm basically in the process of fulfilling the dream of my 14-year-old self, and I don't really see any obstacle that could prevent me from getting to 12% body fat in a few more months.
I'll write a much longer top-level post with pictures and everything once this is all over.
JhanicManifold
6mo ago
Money won't solve this. The EU tried building water pipes in Gaza and the pipes just ended up being repurposed as homemade missiles. You can't solve this by sending money to someone who cares more about killing you than they care about making a good life for themselves.
I had my first two olympic wrestling classes this monday and tuesday, and it quickly became obvious to me that this was the sport I was born for, I immediately loved it. Wrestling-only gyms for adults are really rare, given that basically everyone who becomes good at it starts out in high-school (or earlier) and continues on to college, but I was lucky to find one that offered classes. This is the first sport that truly resonated with me on an instinctual level, even more so than weight-lifting. Winning a contest of literal physical dominance against another dude feels waaay better than winning at any other sport that I can remember playing in school.
The class was generally structured in 3 phases: warmup, then technique drills where you pair up and take turns practising a few techniques the instructor shows you, and then sparring at something close to 100% effort, trying to get another person to fall on their back.
I was surprised on 2 fronts, first, being physically bigger and stronger is an unbelievable advantage. I knew that already, of course, but the sheer magnitude of it surprised me. I'm 206lbs, 5'10 at 22% body fat, and I was sparring with a new guy of the same height, but 160lbs, and the difference was truly unbelievable, it was essentially trivial for me to overpower him. Physical clashes between adult males are so rare in daily life that I just hadn't really realised at a visceral level how much difference weight and muscles make, but it's truly enormous.
The second surprise was the effectiveness of technique against people who don't know it. One guy weighed 150lbs, but had been taking wrestling classes for a few years, and I was powerless against him. Though he did tell me that he needed to have perfect technique in order to take me down, anything less than perfection and my strength can effectively play defence.
This morning I've counted 5 bruises and 3 scratches on my body, my ribs hurt, my neck is sore, and both my shoulders muscles are painful, but I've never been this happy about any other sport.
JhanicManifold
6mo ago
Doing tren just for the hell of it would be profoundly stupid, it would shut off your own test production, make you (even more?) depressed, possibly turn you gay, irritable, frustrated for no reasons whatsoever, possibly give you life-altering acne, hair loss, increased fluid retention in the face, and then of course there is the systemic organ damage that it would cause. Literally the only positive effect would be that you'd have increased muscle growth, but from what I've gathered of your comments you haven't exactly optimised protein intake, sleep and workouts, so you have plenty of low-hanging gains to be had.
JhanicManifold
9mo ago
This would heavily penalize the True Nerds, the sort who win math Olympiads, build particle accelerators in garages and hack the NSA at 15. By and large these nerds don't give a flying fuck about writing ability when they're that young (I know I certainly didn't), they don't even really try to play the game of maximizing admissions probability by volunteering or something, their life is entirely consumed by their passion and they just kind of hope that colleges will make a place for them. So under your system geniuses would no longer go to Harvard.
JhanicManifold
10mo ago
Eh, I just don't read the threads that don't interest me or where I can easily predict the responses. I've had periods without reading the motte, but then a world event would happen, and again and again TheMotte was the only place I could find to discuss it in an intelligent manner.
We've become like Harvard, almost none of the value is in the content provided, it's rather in the pre-selection mechanism for who ends up here.
JhanicManifold
9mo ago
The Manhattan Project scenes are pretty good, the best part is seeing all the characters from your college physics textbook show up for their contractually mandated appearance
I wanted so much more of that. I honestly couldn't give less of a shit about Oppenheimer's communist orientation, I wanted an actual history of the manhattan project, and I wanted all my childhood physics heroes to actually be portrayed in the film, but all I got was some guy putting marbles in a jar as a metaphor for the enrichment process. I went to see it with my mom who had no background physics knowledge, and she was left hopelessly confused about almost everything (which I guess is normal for a Nolan film). We left an hour before the end.
JhanicManifold
10mo ago
It's not clear to me either, and it wouldn't be clear to the occupants too, but life and death situations don't tend to make you more reasonable and level-headed, killing the CEO is the "we must do something, and this is something" option here.
JhanicManifold
11mo ago
I just make sure to always buy loads of pairs of identical socks, and I replace them all at the same time, so I don't have to worry about that shit.
JhanicManifold
11mo ago
I’m 150 pounds, and with the recommended RDA of 0.8 g/kg body weight for protein intake a day
The recommended RDA is way, way too low if you want to maximise muscle gain and minimise muscle loss on a calorie deficit, same for the 1.6g/kg for athletes. The real number is more like 2.4g/kg of lean body mass. It's true that protein "completeness" is not that big of a deal, since it's pretty easy to get all amino acids with a few different vegetables. What is, however, hard to do on a vegan diet is eat a high-protein, low-calorie diet, which is what you'd want to be able to do if you're planning on losing weight and either maintaining or building muscle at the same time. All vegan foods that contain protein either contain even more fat, or even more carbs. You can get your protein needs from vegan stuff, but you'll need to eat a shit ton of calories to do so. On the other hand, my 2300 cal/day non-vegan diet gives me 190g of protein without that much effort.
JhanicManifold
4mo ago
defeat Where I Really Tried
I think this is the crux of it, I notice the same aversion to Really Trying in myself. If you win without really trying, then it doesn't feel good because that means that your achievement was well below your means, you might as well feel good about putting on your socks in the morning. And if you lose without really trying, it doesn't feel that bad because you can still imagine yourself winning if you really tried.
This is all an ego-protection mechanism. If you're like me, then you started conceptualizing yourself as "smart" somewhere in adolescence, and from that moment on you started trying to avoid any experience that would imply not being worthy of that label. I think the key to enjoying competition is letting go of this fixed mindset that thinks every True Loss is evidence that you permanently suck, instead of just being evidence that you temporarily suck.
As for actual practical advice, I think it's hard to practice Really Trying on the big, long-term stuff. You need a hobby you care about with a really short time-to-feedback. I started Jiu-Jitsu a few months ago, and I think it's perfect for this. The prospect of actually getting chocked out in a match of physical dominance against another man really brings out the competitive part of me, in a way that no other sport I've ever tried managed to do. Though as a woman Jiu-Jitsu might not be ideal for this unless you find a gym with a decent number of other women, against whom you actually have a chance of winning.
JhanicManifold
10mo ago
My god, can you imagine the drama inside that tiny ship over the past days? I think I'd bet at 90% that the CEO is already long dead, killed by the 4 others in order to save oxygen. Two of the people are a father-son duo, and in a power struggle they might have killed the others too, knowing that they can only trust family. I really hope they find that thing so we get to know what actually happened.
JhanicManifold
11mo ago
** per kg of lean body mass, so at 20% body fat this would be around 1.92g/kg, which is a bit closer to the 1.8g/kg number
JhanicManifold
11mo ago
Yeah, the only thing that's preventing me from getting laid a lot right now is my own internal sense of perfectionism and fairly high standards (both for myself and the girl).
There's also a strange sort of muted anger towards women that I have to work through. I don't feel like I've changed internally at all, I'm the absolute exact same person as I was 40lbs ago (I lost 15lbs before starting semaglutide), and it feels like losing the fat shouldn't make such a big difference in a fair world. Of course this is naive of me, and I'd absolutely treat an obese girl differently from a slim one, but the black pill is still hard to swallow...
arccos is gonna give you too sharp a result near the equator (i.e. predict that the last few degrees as you get closer matter the most). What you want is just cos(latitude/90 * pi/2).
edit: the way you visualise this is by holding a square piece of paper in front of you, and tilting it until you're looking at it edge-wise. The "visual area" of the piece of paper in your field-of-view is what will give you the proportionality factor.
JhanicManifold
6mo ago
Doesn't Hamas put bases under hospitals specifically because of this? The two options are either to never bomb hospitals and hence to accept Hamas as the leader in-perpetuity of the region, or to give every available warning to the population to evacuate and then bomb the terrorist base...
JhanicManifold
7mo ago
look on the bright side, she's gonna go through the same thing when you ignore her in a year after you've gotten jacked as fuck from the motivation this rejection brought you. (speaking from personal experience)
JhanicManifold
11mo ago
Nah his current risk model is more like "AI discovers fundamental new principles of science, and exploits phenomena we don't know about to kill everyone", that's what the "send an air-conditioner blueprint to the past" example he keeps talking about is meant to illustrate. The nanotech/biotech distinction doesn't seem especially sharp or important to me, it's just different ways of getting at fine-grained control of very small things.
And in the typical FOOM scenario (which is admittedly probably unlikely), you might get an AI that can do like 100 years of intellectual work of an entire civilization made of Geniuses every single second, at which point it seems like it could solve nanotech trivially.
JhanicManifold
11mo ago
I haven't had much luck at making gpt-4 come up with genuinely novel ideas for the fields I'm interesting in (Machine Learning, Deep Learning, Reinforcement Learning), the most it can do is serve as a sort of litterature review, where I describe an idea I have, ask it if it exists, and if it does to link me the papers. Sometimes it hallucinates papers that don't exist in this way because it thinks that generating positive answers is more useful than negative ones, but I've gotten real value out of this procedure a few times, where it spit out fairly obscure results that I would've never found on my own.
Ah, in my case it was extreme fat loss, yeah, I didn't really gain muscle, just revealed what was there. People who haven't seen me in a while tell me I got jacked out of a misunderstanding of where muscle comes from.
JhanicManifold
9mo ago
I'm not sure what you mean by that, does Emily Ratajkowski's SMV really depend on her parents and social status? I guess maybe I'd find her a bit less attractive if I knew she had a deep Appalachian accent or something, but I truly don't give a single fuck about her social status, she could be an outcast with no friends for all I care, and it wouldn't matter a bit.
"Any man who must say, 'I am the king' is no true king"
There is no way to not appear weak when complaining that the mother of your child went clubbing with Usher, the war was already lost when that dude decided to make someone like Keke the mother of his child. This sort of thing can only be enforced through the cultivation of respect, never becoming explicit, otherwise it's like your boss explicitly demanding you call him "sir", or a PhD reminding you to call him "doctor". Just unbelievably cringy and weak. Your gf/wife is just supposed to know, without you telling her, that sending nude photos to other dudes is a big no-no. If she doesn't understand that automatically, there's no fixing her without sacrificing significant amounts of your own authority and generally ruining the relationship.
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