JulianRota
1d ago
I know that that particular behavior (willingness to start conversations with very weakly connected people or total strangers) is very abnormal and most would consider it extroversion. However, most other people I know seem to be much further towards "extroversion" in other ways than I am, yet seem to me to be strangely unwilling to do that.
For example, most other people I know tend to have what I call more words than me. They seem to have much greater capability to extend conversations indefinitely, to just keep on talking and talking and talking. I was never very good at this. Usually any conversations I start tend to peter out fairly quickly unless the other person is actively interested in maintaining it and puts in effort towards that.
I also desire to spend substantial amounts of time basically quiet and alone, doing something like reading or watching movies and videos on the internet. Some other people I know seem to be much more active, constantly up and about doing things.
So then am I introverted or extroverted? How about all those other people I know with different combinations of traits? Beats me. That's why I find the whole thing not very useful, to the point of saying it basically doesn't exist, and might even be actively harmful in some cases. I think that what people normally think of as those traits are actually a cluster of dozens of personality characteristics that aren't necessarily related to each other at all, and several of them are closer to being skills that can be learned or moods and emotions that someone may feel more of or less of at any particular time for any number of reasons than fundamental traits that cannot be changed.
I cannot really know or claim to speak for what any particular person thinks and feels. But I do think that quite a few people who are self-proclaimed Introverts are actually just psyching themselves out. Perhaps when they were young, they did not yet know how to conduct themselves in social settings or had false beliefs about what other people were thinking of them. Perhaps they were convinced of an ideology that they were Introverts, that this was not a temporary feeling or mood or lack of a skill that can be learned, but instead made it part of their identity and chose to revel in it. What if it's not actually a fundamental unalterable trait? What if such a person decided to believe instead that they could learn how to socialize and how to at least sometimes get themselves into a mood to take pleasure from it? I say this not to condescend to you or any other particular person, but because it's exactly what I did myself.
Driving a car was initially pretty scary. But I learned to do it and got comfortable with it eventually. I certainly wasn't always any good at any sort of socialization. I'm far from perfect or any kind of expert at it even now, but I have managed to get somewhat better and more comfortable with it, at least sometimes.
JulianRota
2d ago
My model is more like, most people have a modest number of close friends (who may or may not be family). Everyone has widely varying levels of skill and inclination when it comes to starting and maintaining conversations with people and moving brief connections towards actual friendships.
Myself, I maintain maybe like a dozen or so pretty close friendships and another few dozen somewhat more distant friends who I know and see semi-regularly but don't actually get together with that often for various reasons. I am usually pretty good at going to a bar or party where I know nobody or only a couple of people and talking to a bunch of people. Most of the time, I forget about whoever I was talking to not too long after. Moving those brief conversations towards actual friendships is considerably harder, at least to me. Maybe some people are better at that part, I don't know. People I consider actual friends tend to come from situations where you tend to be around the same few people regularly without either side explicitly planning to get together with those specific people, like by being regulars at a bar or working together or being members of some kind of club or other regular group activity.
Perhaps that behavior looks to other people at that sort of event like what you've described as an extrovert. But they don't know that I actually only maintain those few dozen closer friendships with people I've known for years. I'm inclined to believe that most people we see acting like that are doing the same thing. So am I Introverted or Extroverted? I don't know, so I don't find the distinction very meaningful. Maybe those other people you see who appear to be doing that are just having a little fun their way and actually do have their own dozen or so really close friends.
So in my book, you're not actually Introverted, just normal.
JulianRota
2d ago
Maybe, but have you ever met any actual people who would meet those definitions?
I don't think I've ever met or known anyone who I know to be extroverted by that definition. Though to be fair, maybe it would be hard to know because by definition such a person would be very difficult to get to know well enough to know that they're actually doing that. But then who are the people who actually know for sure that someone they know is behaving like that?
I like theory-crafting as much as the next possibly vaguely autistic Mottizan, but I've also gotten somewhat self-conscious about the tendency to build imaginary castles that aren't demonstrated to correspond to actual people or real-world situations.
JulianRota
2d ago
I think it's accurate in that the words are generally used in a sense of declaring people to be at the extreme ends of the spectrum, when probably under 1% of the population is really that far in either direction. Words like "shy" and "gregarious" are in my opinion more useful as the way they are used seems to describe a moderate tendency more than an absolute or extreme case.
Maybe OP doesn't agree, but they described themselves as an Introvert and then described enjoying an activity that a person meeting the strict definition of an Introvert would not enjoy.
JulianRota
2d ago
I suspect that the whole Introvert/Extrovert thing basically doesn't exist. It seems to me that pretty much everyone wants to be social and around other people sometimes and quiet and alone at other times. There's some variation on exactly how much of each and at what intensity any person wants, but virtually nobody is at the extremes suggested by the Introvert/Extrovert framing.
There does seem to be more variation in desire to plan and organize events. Relatively few people seem to have the desire or inclination to create a plan, even a really simple and vague one like, let's all meet at a bar at roughly some particular time, and invite a bunch of people to it. But at least those relative few seem to be really into it, so it's good to have them around. Many others seem to be happy to show up to an event that somebody else organized, but have little interest in organizing things themselves.
JulianRota
22d ago
I'm still reading And The Band Played On. Probably want to hold more extended commentary until after I finish it, but I am pleasantly surprised so far that it's not at all a dunk against Reaganist budget thriftiness specifically. Nobody looks particularly good in this story, and it seems that the gay community itself and the Federal administrators behaved far more irresponsibly. It's definitely interesting to compare the reaction to the rabid panic associated with Covid-19.
JulianRota
22d ago
This seems more like a shallow dunk than an attempt to acknowledge the terrible job pretty much every Westernized government did at responsibly balancing the right of ordinary people to go about their lives versus the actual increased risk to the actually significantly more vulnerable population, rather than pandering to overblown fears stoked by social media culture and letting a bunch of low-information healthcare officials with no accountability to the actual population play tin-pot dictator.
I'd also like to know - many people have stoked fears about supposed healthcare "collapse", but did any healthcare systems anywhere actually do anything that could be described as collapse during the entire Covid era? Exactly what does a "collapse" look like, what are the real consequences of it? I mean things that actually happened, not somebody speculating about what could happen. I think this is a "The optimal amount of fraud is non-zero" thing - if no healthcare system anywhere actually "collapses", then we're being too restrictive and over-cautious, and we should ease up until there are a few.
JulianRota
28d ago
I've never been a real heavy voter, I write a lot more than I vote, and I don't write as much as some. I suppose I feel like I don't enjoy the process of considering "does this comment deserve an upvote or not, does it deserve it more or less than some other comment", and such things. I probably do less than a dozen votes a month I guess. I kind of suspect there's a lot of heavy voters who write little to nothing as well.
I tend to upvote things that really stand out enough to think, I'm glad somebody made that point. Sometimes I upvote things that I think got beat up too hard or aren't popular enough to get a lot of upvotes due to the actual position being argued being not that well liked here. I don't really downvote much, even if I'm disagreeing with somebody, unless what they're saying is really over the top low-quality, though that often gets modded too.
I'd more tend to leave judgement to the masses in any argument I'm in. That's whose sake I'm really arguing for anyways. Getting at least some votes either way is a nice sign that somebody is at least seeing the discussion. I tend more to just not continue if I think the discussion is too low-quality to bother and nobody is watching rather than throw a bunch of downvotes around. Or of course if we end up basically agreeing and it doesn't feel like there's more worth saying.
JulianRota
29d ago
They're probably voting for an expression of values and a meme-length description of what they want to do. Which is exactly what probably at least 90% of all voters on both sides of every election everywhere does. I don't think any of those Democrat voters could articulate exactly what Project 2025 is and why they think it's bad either.
I'd love it if the great majority of the voter base voted based on thoughtful consideration of actual policy positions, but it's just not realistic. If you want to win in any system resembling democracy, you're going to have to accept that there's more than a few idiots and nutcases on your side.
JulianRota
29d ago
It's not really aimed at the general public, but at the Republican Presidential candidates and the people who might make up their cabinet if they get elected. Nobody cares much about selling the general public on how it's totally super awesome. Only conservatives who are hardcore policy wonks would actually read it. There's probably not much to be gained from any Republican candidate for office talking about how it's great and they promise to do it all either.
The Liberal institutions picked up on it as something they can scare their base with. It's easy and in their interest to go wall-to-wall selling everyone on how it's totally super terrible and horrifying and every Republican definitely seriously wants to do it, regardless of how much truth there is to that. And so, the overall public perception is super bad.
JulianRota
30d ago
I'm not really seeing the AI side. Human cops are perfectly capable of being competent and decisive and appropriately escalating to violence when needed too. If they aren't, it's mostly due to their orders, their training, and the other factors that play into their incentives. Those were all created by politicians and can be removed by them too.
If we ever have AI robot cops, why wouldn't they be programmed by the exact same people who gave the existing police those orders? Why wouldn't they behave the exact same way, only even harder? All the current companies involved in LLMs have already done this in all of their public models. AI robots (presuming they ever actually exist) would probably capable of behaving exactly as they are ordered to an even greater extent than human cops. They might well be programmed to machine-gun a white professional with no criminal record for looking at them funny while completely ignoring a severely mentally ill black career criminal actively stabbing people.
JulianRota
30d ago
I don't think this has anything to do with AI. That robot is remote-controlled directly by a human who can see it. It's basically a fancy remote-control car. As was the one in the 2016 incident.
The sheet-covering technique would probably have been pretty effective against an actual AI robot. It wasn't because it's actually controlled by a human who can see it, so the robot's camera being unable to see anything is only a minor hindrance.
We can't currently build any AI that's nearly as smart as a human, even with datacenters full of computers. I don't think we're going to have an actual independent robot that's smarter than a potted plant anytime soon.
As sibling comment says, cheap drones are indeed concerning. Though AFAIK they're all also remotely-controlled with very minimal to no autonomy and nothing resembling intelligence. Drones are also pretty sharply limited in power budget and payload. The air is indeed somewhat more friendly to current or plausible future AI, but I'd think it would first come to high-dollar high-speed jet fighters. Air to air combat has remarkably fewer variables and more benefit from being able to pull high Gs, and those aircraft have much better payload and power budgets.
JulianRota
30d ago
Thanks, I'll check that thread out after I finish reading.
I'll caveat, as before, that some of Shilts' history is... somewhere between rumor and hearsay.
I did notice that kind of thing, both in this book and the last new non-fiction book I read, The Devil's Chessboard, which I also posted about. They're both non-fiction books that manage to be decently engaging. I think part of the price of that is the authors filling in and making up or embellishing a lot of details about what people said, thought, and were like. On the one hand, it helps draw more casual readers in, but on the other, how could anybody possibly know that for sure? What might a different observer with different opinions think about these people and their situations? You don't get that in this type of book. Maybe it qualifies for being a distinct genre? I'd like to think I'm decent at picking up that theme and not taking the impressions too seriously at least.
JulianRota
1mo ago
Started reading And The Band Played On, about the handling of the very beginning of the AIDS epidemic in the early 80s. Seems interesting so far, and I have at least some expectation of it going against some of the things I believed.
To pre-register what I currently believe, I think it was probably handled within about a standard deviation of about as well as it could reasonably be expected to have been, considering both the highly novel nature of the disease and the behavior of the victims, including being highly reluctant both to seek medical care and to cease high-risk behaviors like sharing needles to inject drugs and highly promiscuous gay sex. I am skeptical that any reluctance of authority figures to take it seriously due to the nature of the victims was a bigger factor than either of those. Considering that even now, ~45 years later, we still don't have a great handle on medical treatment, it's hard to see doing more sooner helping much. The only thing they could have semi-realistically done differently was to crack down much harder on those high-risk behaviors, which probably would have been pretty ugly and would have further outraged the affected community. So yeah, AIDS sucks and hindsight is 20/20, but give us a realistic alternative that the people involved could actually have done if you want to really convince me that we screwed it up.
JulianRota
1mo ago
Finished The Devil's Chessboard. My opinion about the main theme of the book is basically unchanged since my last post on it.
The last section of the book is all about the JFK assassination. The basic theme, according to the book, is that a ton of people around Lee Harvey Oswald and the Book Depository building had "links" or associations with the CIA, anti-Kennedy Republican activists, and anti-Castro activists and a bunch of weird stuff happened around Oswald himself, including being allowed to live in the Soviet Union for a number of years, and move back with a Russian wife, at the height of the Cold War, with basically a rubber-stamp level of scrutiny. Also supposedly the whole Warren report was a whitewash.
To all of this I say, well maybe, but this is a lot of smoke but not much fire. Okay, it seems pretty unlikely that Oswald just up and decided to shoot the President one day. But exactly who did what here, and why? There's no more information on that in here than I had before. And if it was an organized conspiracy by... some groups... exactly what did they hope to accomplish by doing this? Why did they actually pull off an assassination of Kennedy, but not any other American president? Did they just kind of decide that that was too far and not to do it again? Is it like part of the plan or something to be so vague and confusing about exactly what happened that nobody has any idea what to do?
JulianRota
1mo ago
Lately I've tended to think that your vote for President not mattering due to being in a solid Red or Blue state shouldn't make you actually not vote for President because, even though it doesn't actually matter legally, people do pay attention to the National Popular Vote. It can and probably does affect the extent to which a candidate feels they have a mandate from the people to perform bold actions and the extent to which individuals complain that somebody "didn't really win" because they didn't win the NPV.
And so, I will vote for Trump despite being in a deep blue district (Manhattan) that has no chance of him winning.
JulianRota
1mo ago
Short version: CWR is dead, yo.
I was a regular there as well as TheMotte on Reddit. Like it says on the tin, their weekly thread is the "Off-Topic and Low-Effort CW Thread". Mostly for rationalist-aligned or adjacent people who were firmly Red Team to post kind of Motte-ish stuff, but with substantially more low-effort ridicule of Blue Team. Fun place to let the hair down a bit, as they say, and talk a little trash without worrying about needing to coddle the other side. I do miss it a bit, but I also enjoy The Motte for what it is.
A decent number of the regulars moved on to a Matrix chat room. It's invite-only, you'll have to show post history that can convince the regulars that you'd fit in. I haven't posted there in a while; I have limited tolerance for chat rooms with people I don't actually hang out with in-person and drink with regularly. I don't know of anywhere you can find that kind of discussion on a public-ish threaded web forum now.
JulianRota
1mo ago
I started driving at about 15, the normal age for it in the US. IMO it still is much more tiring than the amount of time and the actual physical activity would suggest. I'm not really sure about improvement - it probably has somewhat, but the extra mental strain is still there.
I do still like to stop every few hours when driving longer distances. Partly from mental strain, partly from the physical part of stretching and moving around. Also for bathroom, snacks, food, gas, etc.
JulianRota
1mo ago
That's not how anybody in the world has ever behaved with nuclear weapons.
How do you know Israel made "back-channel threats" about nuclear strikes? If they actually had, why wouldn't Iran immediately go running to Russia for protection? If they went public with evidence of such a thing, international support for Israel's war effort would likely evaporate, including from the US. Nuclear powers as a rule basically never do that because it could easily set off a chain of events exactly like that.
Historically, rival states which both have nuclear weapons become extremely cautious about provoking each other. See India and Pakistan. In every such case, both nations become terrified of doing anything that could conceivably escalate to a nuclear exchange. No set of nations has ever dared see mutual possession of nuclear weapons as an excuse to attack each other harder.
JulianRota
1mo ago
I've tended to be skeptical of the idea, primarily because it's only protection against a very specific type of economic collapse. The kind where something has gone sufficiently seriously wrong with conventional fiat currency that it's dramatically lower value, but there are still sufficient goods available on the market to purchase from people who actually are willing to sell them, and those people are willing to accept precious metals in exchange for them. And have infrastructure to do so, including to weigh and value those metals and store them in such a way that they can't be easily stolen.
If I was going to hoard anything, I'd store primarily actually useful goods, such as non-perishable food, water filters, soap, medical supplies, tools, ammunition, fuel, etc. Those are extremely useful in any type of collapse or catastrophe. If it's one where people actually are exchanging precious metals, you will soon have all you could ever want when all of those people come to buy actually useful things from you with chunks of precious metal. Assuming you think the future is bright enough to actually accept such trades.
Cash is probably also more useful. In any of the much more plausible types of short-term disasters that have happened semi-recently, having at least a few thousand in cash lying around would likely prove very useful, because virtually everyone you might find selling things will be willing to accept it. Most of them probably wouldn't have much idea what to do with precious metals.
JulianRota
1mo ago
This is a very interesting and ominous development. I strongly doubt Durov will actually serve serious jail time. The interesting questions then are:
Exactly what concessions will France / the EU / whoever wring out of Durov and Telegram in exchange for his release?
What should we take from the fact that this level of lawfare has not yet been used (at least not visibly) against any of the other social networks or messaging platforms? Are they all cooperating sufficiently, despite claimed E2EE protections on some things? Do they have some other sort of leverage or protection? Or maybe the powers that be are just afraid of possible backlash, so they're going after Telegram first to see what they can get away with, and if it goes well, further action on other platforms may follow.
JulianRota
1mo ago
I've bought and sold several properties in multiple states and am friends with a few realtors. I've never heard of either happening.
JulianRota
1mo ago
How would having nuclear weapons allow them to fight Israel?
They could potentially nuke Israel, and then be nuked back in return by Israel, and very likely other nations, including anyone who considers themselves allied with Israel, or simply against the unprovoked offensive use of nuclear weapons by anyone.
That aside, they can already fire conventional missiles at Israel. They don't have the ability to carry out an offensive land invasion of Israel, and having a few nukes isn't going to change that.
JulianRota
1mo ago
Apparently I am in the minority in liking them.
To me, they symbolize rebelliousness and counterculture, which I do like. Unfortunately, it turns out that many who were "counterculture" in the pre-2000s were actually just Blue Team warriors who were upset that they weren't on top right then. Not very many have adapted to conservatism as the new counterculture in the post-2010s. Many continue to have the delusion that they aren't "really" on top yet. That's life in this era I guess.
It certainly could! But Sharp Knives and all that.
I think it's trivially obvious that many people believe false things about themselves, some of which are helpful and some harmful. If I think a belief I have about myself may be preventing me from doing things that would be good for my life, I think it's worth spending some effort to test if that belief is really true or not. If it does turn out to be true, then I've suffered some minor discomfort or something for the sake of proving to myself that it actually is true. If it turns out not to be true, then it's like I've unlocked a new power or something.
The same with ideologies to follow and things to identify as. One of the things I like about the Rationalist sphere of thinking is it provides the tools and thought patterns to recognize when what I'm thinking about following is an ideology rather than a fact. Ideologies were mostly created to make whoever created them famous or to connect a group of people together, not for my objective benefit. I am perfectly free to decide that an ideology is not to my benefit and reject it.
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